Havana Cafe Sessions Podcast

This week we're continuing our discussion of the films Ex Machina and Her, and adding on insights from the TV series Westworld and Humans, looking more closely at the question of Consciousness & Free Will.

What makes us human? Is it consciousness? Is it our emotional complexity? Is it merely our physical body? Sometimes the only way to see through our biases in perception is to consider an alternative...an opposite.  This week we are discussing our big question in the context of two great films — Ex Machina & Her.

This week Clay and Sarah reach for their cups of coffee and contemplate how and why we might rediscover the wild.

This week we use Burroughs’s famous quote “language is a virus from outer space” to contemplate language as instinct, technology or virus.

In this episode, we revisit the original idea of hedonism as ancient Greek philosophy that argued that pleasure and happiness are the primary or most important intrinsic goods and the aim of human life.  

When the very things that once excited us now feel boring and repetitive...  When we’ve achieved our big goal but now feel as if we are stagnating and wanting more... When we’ve mastered a set of skills and feel a new call to adventure and change... It’s time to ‘level up’. This week Clay and Sarah discuss what it means to ‘level up’ in life.

Hooray. We've made it to episode 100.  For this episode, we reached out to you, our listeners, to find out what their ultimate questions are.

Obstacles, difficulties, things “not going according to plan” are an inevitable part of life. But how we respond to these so-called obstacles is what defines us. This week Clay and Sarah explore the idea of obstacles as the pathway to growth and new opportunities.

Within the “consensual hallucination of cyberspace” which we call the internet, a creative explosion is taking place.  We have access to an immense range of audio-visual arts, stories, poetry, music...and new combinations of these.  And the internet has also made it possible for us to create art in new ways and then share it with, literally, the WORLD.   This week Clay and Sarah consider the multitude of ways cyberspace has transformed creativity as well as our ideas about what it means to be ‘an artist’.

This week Clay and Sarah discuss the concept of self-mastery.

Many of us feel a sense that there is more to Life than meets the eye.  Perhaps we call it God. Perhaps we consider it a Force that pervades all life.  Perhaps we don't even bother to name it. But at times we feel a yearning to know it, to experience its vast spaciousness.  This is the realm of Mysticism — the search to experience union with the Divine. This week Clay and Sarah discuss what Mysticism can tell us about the human search for the Divine.

In an age when we share so many personal experiences on social media, when data about what we buy and who we communicate with is stored, when we willing carrying a tracking device in the form of our smart phones everywhere we go... we should ask ourselves a very important question. Is privacy dead? This week Clay and Sarah discuss the issue of privacy.

How much do you sleep? What time of the day are you most awake?  These are questions of our circadian rhythms, our natural biological clocks...you know the ones we try to side-step with caffeine, electric lights and our super-human work ethic? This week, Clay and Sarah discuss sleep, day-time cycles of alertness and how we experience our natural bio-clocks.

If our attitude largely determines our reality...do we owe it to ourselves to strive for happiness?  And if our mood and demeanour impact others... do we owe it to the people we love to try to be happy? This week, Clay and Sarah ponder to what extent happiness is a moral obligation.

This week, Clay and Sarah discuss the experience of ‘Seeking’, interrogate the idea of Ego and wonder what we are actually looking for...

In a world in which we are all connected and even our smallest action can impact another person, how might we understand the limits of personal freedom?

A social contract refers to a common understanding among a group of people on acceptable ways of behaving. It is a way of theorising how and why we have laws, codes of conduct, and social norms. Yet what we believe about our essential human nature has a direct influence on how we imagine our social contract. This week Clay and Sarah discuss Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau as they envisaged the social contract.

This week Clay and Sarah debate the usefulness as well as the problems of Utopian thinking and ask whether we need visions of Utopia.

In this episode, we explore Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences.

Have you ever thought about an old friend you haven’t seen in years and then bumped into them shortly after? Have you ever known something you couldn’t have known — that someone in your family had been hurt or had died? Have you ever been recommended the same book by several different people that came at just the right time to answer a big life question? We call these events Coincidences.  But Carl Jung called them something else...examples of Synchronicity, and the result of the Interconnectedness of Things. This week Clay and Sarah discuss Synchronicity, our interconnection and how this impacts our lives.