See See by Ceci

In this episode of See See by Ceci, Paul Thagard, one of the most influential thinkers at the crossroads of philosophy, psychology, and artificial intelligence, takes us on a journey through the architecture of thought, emotion, and coherence that defines the human mind. A distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, recipient of the Killam and Molson Prizes, and author of eighteen books, Thagard has spent decades asking the hardest questions about intelligence: what it is, where it comes from, and whether machines will ever truly share it with us. His pioneering theory of explanatory coherence reimagines the brain not as a logic machine but as a coherence engine, a system that makes sense of the world by satisfying countless constraints simultaneously, weaving perception, reasoning, and emotion into a single fabric. In this wide-ranging conversation, Thagard reflects on the difference between intelligence and consciousness; on the devastating role of social media in the spread of misinformation; on the power of analogy as a tool of creativity, from Darwin's theory of natural selection to the everyday act of reading a stranger's gesture. And on why computers, despite their cognitive capacities, remain fundamentally psychopathic. "They are highly intelligent," he says, "but they lack empathy and are therefore incapable of caring." That incapacity sits at the heart of the episode's most urgent theme: the alarming rise of human-AI relationships, and what we risk losing when we mistake imitation for intimacy. Drawing on his recent book Dreams, Jokes, and Songs: How Brains Build Consciousness and the forthcoming AI Boom or Doom?, Thagard offers a remarkably clear-eyed view of minds both human and artificial, one that is at once scientifically rigorous and deeply humane. This is an episode about the mind as a coherence engine: hot and cold, rational and emotional, individual and social. About how neurons firing together can produce something as extraordinary as humor, as mysterious as dreams, and as dangerous as political delusion. And about the light, and the peril, that lies ahead as human and artificial intelligence continue to converge.

What happens when a photographer trades the vast clarity of Mediterranean ruins for the darkness of a prehistoric cave?
In this episode of See See by Ceci, visionary Italian artist Domingo Milella takes us on a journey that spans forty thousand years and the full depth of the human spirit.
Milella first made his name with luminous large-format photographs of ancient landscapes, the coast of Puglia, the ruins of Petra, the pyramids of Egypt, images of extraordinary stillness that invited the viewer to slow down and breathe. Yet beneath the surface of that early success, a quiet crisis was gathering. In the summer of 2014, at the age of thirty-three, his carefully constructed world collapsed. He retreated to a forgotten village on the Ionian Sea, carrying only two things: his large-format camera and a copy of Moby Dick. Both remained untouched, the camera locked in a cupboard, the book unopened on the nightstand.
What followed was a passage through despair and into transformation. Through therapy and the slow archaeology of the self, Milella found his way to the prehistoric caves. There, in total darkness, surrounded by ochre symbols and handprints inscribed tens of thousands of years ago, something shifted. The camera obscura he carried into those narrow tunnels became a mirror of the cave itself: both dark chambers in which images are born from minerals, water and light.
In this rich and deeply personal conversation, Milella reflects on darkness as a space of safety and revelation rather than fear; on the intimate connection between memory, the body and the imagination; on the silent pressure of the digital age and its relentless flood of images; and on the nameless, collective authorship that links a teenager’s graffiti in a city alleyway to a Paleolithic painter working by torchlight four hours from the sun. What emerges is a meditation on time that refuses to move in one direction, where a feverish child navigating the folds of a bedsheet, an artist kneeling with a mammoth-format camera in a narrow tunnel, and an unknown hand pressing ochre against stone forty thousand years ago are all part of the same gesture.
This is an episode about caves: geological, photographic and interior. About the courage it takes to descend into one’s own depths. And about the treasure that waits there: not answers, but the oldest and most enduring questions of what it means to be human.

What happens when a photographer trades the vast clarity of Mediterranean ruins for the darkness of a prehistoric cave?
In this episode of See See by Ceci, visionary Italian artist Domingo Milella takes us on a journey that spans forty thousand years and the full depth of the human spirit.
Milella first made his name with luminous large-format photographs of ancient landscapes, the coast of Puglia, the ruins of Petra, the pyramids of Egypt, images of extraordinary stillness that invited the viewer to slow down and breathe. Yet beneath the surface of that early success, a quiet crisis was gathering. In the summer of 2014, at the age of thirty-three, his carefully constructed world collapsed. He retreated to a forgotten village on the Ionian Sea, carrying only two things: his large-format camera and a copy of Moby Dick. Both remained untouched, the camera locked in a cupboard, the book unopened on the nightstand.
What followed was a passage through despair and into transformation. Through therapy and the slow archaeology of the self, Milella found his way to the prehistoric caves. There, in total darkness, surrounded by ochre symbols and handprints inscribed tens of thousands of years ago, something shifted. The camera obscura he carried into those narrow tunnels became a mirror of the cave itself: both dark chambers in which images are born from minerals, water and light.
In this rich and deeply personal conversation, Milella reflects on darkness as a space of safety and revelation rather than fear; on the intimate connection between memory, the body and the imagination; on the silent pressure of the digital age and its relentless flood of images; and on the nameless, collective authorship that links a teenager’s graffiti in a city alleyway to a Paleolithic painter working by torchlight four hours from the sun. What emerges is a meditation on time that refuses to move in one direction, where a feverish child navigating the folds of a bedsheet, an artist kneeling with a mammoth-format camera in a narrow tunnel, and an unknown hand pressing ochre against stone forty thousand years ago are all part of the same gesture.
This is an episode about caves: geological, photographic and interior. About the courage it takes to descend into one’s own depths. And about the treasure that waits there: not answers, but the oldest and most enduring questions of what it means to be human.

Let yourself be drawn into the world of one of the most prolific, shape- shifting presences in 21st century music. Vijay Iyer is a Grammy-nominated composer, pianist, bandleader, and the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts at Harvard University. He is a MacArthur Fellow, described by The New York Times as “a social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway.”

In a profound conversation, Vijay Iyer takes us on a journey of discovery, into what embodied cognition truly means and where music begins. He invites us to explore the extraordinary phenomenon of synchrony: how musicians lock into pulse together, and how an entire audience can exhale as one at the close of a performance.

Iyer speaks of live music as a form of ritual, a collective agreement to step out of everyday life and into something else, together. He also reflects with great warmth on his collaborations with artists such as the drummer Tyshawn Sorey and the legendary trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, describing the deep listening, humility, and compassion that make their music possible. He opens our eyes to think deeply about jazz, “not as style of music but an act of freedom.” Music, he insists, should truly be listened to as a human action, asking ourselves who made it, where they were, and how they found each other.

This episode is a powerful and loving reminder that music is, first and foremost, a live, shared, visceral, mutually embodied experience, and that within it lies the recognition of a deep longing we carry always: to come back to the experience of that timeless space where two souls meet in the act of listening.

In this episode of See See by Ceci, we journey hundreds of thousands of years into the past, to the flickering firelight and painted depths of Ice Age caves.

What did it mean to live embedded in the landscape, wearing it “like a big cape”? How did the mastery of fire reshape not only our bodies but our minds? And what can we learn from the haunting images left deep within caves—some meant to be seen, others engraved in darkness, never intended for any eye but the spirit world?
From the earliest trace of aesthetic awareness, a pebble that looked like a face, carried home, to dots, stencils, animals, geometric forms and so much more, we explore how symbolic culture emerged not from necessity but from play, imagination, and the suspension of ordinary reality. We consider how caves themselves became spaces of meditation and transformation, how music and birdsong may have shaped early consciousness, and what these first leaps into abstraction reveal about the origins of art, religion, and the human mind itself.

In conversation with Paul Bahn one of the world’s leading authorities on prehistoric rock art, Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and author of over one hundred publications including the award-winning Images of the Ice Age, and Elle Clifford, psychologist and researcher specializing in Ice Age life whose work on cave art and mythological worlds illuminates the social and psychological dimensions of our earliest ancestors. Co-hosted by acclaimed Italian landscape photographer Domingo Milella, this episode invites us to stand face to face with those who came before, and to see ourselves reflected in the first marks they left behind.