Thought Collectives & Sharing Space
with Tim Adalin
Maps, Masks, and Voicecraft: on fractal spaces & what it means to communicate
Oct 27, 2025
#74 with Tim Adalin and Andrea Hiott
This is an intense conversation about the invisible patterns that shape how we communicate. What we often discuss in this project as ‘holding paradox’ might also be expressed as ‘sharing paradox’, creating or noticing a shared vocabulary beyond the one we assume, easing into what allows us to hold different positions without being opponents.
It’s about noticing the subtle codes that make us feel like insiders or outsiders in any given conversation or situation and noticing those together so we feel (and are) less alone.
One thing about Love & Philosophy is that it brings together thought collectives (people who share ideas that guide their work and life) that do not always feel comfortable in one another’s regularities. Scientists might find some of these conversations too esoteric; artists might find some of them too rational. It’s a grand experiment, which is why your voice matters. We need everyone to help us understand how to better communicate across these thought collectives, and to do this together with care.
This idea of the thought collective comes from a philosopher named Ludwig Fleck. In coining that term, he meant it mostly in terms of groups of scientists and how science progresses, but lately those ideas are helpful for understanding how philosophical circles and groups that share certain patterns of thought have become so important in so much of the world in ways that are more explicit and fractal than we’ve been able to notice before.
Through podcasts and new sorts of social media and group chats and so on, there are now groups of people bonded in deep thinking about ideas in ways that are having major consequences. People gather and come to share not just ideas, but entire frameworks for making sense of the world. These collectives are often virtual, but they are also embodied, habitual, and atmospheric.
Whatever way we are coming together, are we doing it in a way that is caring and healthy? Are we able to hold and share the space at the places where these feel dissonant? Because that is where we will find our fullest shared potential; that is where we are rich together in our multiplicity and where we overlap portals in the shared adjacent possible.
Erich Fromm: once wrote that: Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
This conversation with Tim Adalin, founder of Voicecraft, explores these dynamics. It may even be some sort of practice (or praxis) in this sharing of paradox, or of being present to the comfort and discomforts of entering or listening to conversations beyond what feels normal. Though every conversation on L&P seems to feel a bit like that for someone.
Tim is trained in philosophy and dedicated to understanding what it means to cultivate voice—not just as speech or expression, but as our fundamental capacity to participate in the world, to affirm our presence, to create meaning together.
Right now, as we’re all navigating an explosion of new thought collectives forming through podcasts, YouTube channels, online communities, and social media platforms, his work feels so relevant because he comes at it with such an earnest desire to really understand the world and the people he is speaking with.
Holding and Sharing Space
One of the frames through which you can enter this conversation is to dance between the ideas of ‘holding’ and ‘sharing’ and how this might relate to the ways you feel when you are in conversation in your own life in different ways, whether in personal, professional or public contexts. Do you feel like you are holding the space or the space is being held, or are you sharing it? There is no one sort of feeling that is right. Sometimes we hold and sometimes we are held and sometimes we share. But there is something powerful in realizing the different qualities of this.
Holding space implies a kind of container where someone creates and maintains boundaries, manages energy, keeps things from falling apart. It’s essential work, certainly. But who gets to do that holding? What are the limits of the holder? And what happens when the structure itself needs help?
Sharing space, Tim suggests, involves a different kind of risk. It means genuinely welcoming the participation that might unmake and remake the grounds we’re standing on. It requires “skin in the game”—a willingness to be transformed by the encounter rather than simply managing it. This isn’t about abandoning structure or leadership, but about recognizing that the most generative relationships emerge when we’re willing to transgress our own boundaries, to enter unmapped territory together, but to also be clear about what we stand for and what is meaningful from our trajectory.
Authenticity
Andrea and Tim also wrestle with one of the central tensions of our moment and one we hear lots of people dealing with who comment on this show, and that’s how to show up authentically in an age of personal branding, algorithmic attention, and increasingly sophisticated mimicry. What if making money was easy and awesome and oriented towards what is meaningful rather than what gets attention ‘no matter what’?
This ends up being a question about what we’re actually building when we engage in public communication. Are we cultivating genuine relationships and understanding with the places we put our support, attention and money? Or are we just performing a version of authenticity calculated to generate the right kind of attention because we were told that is what makes the most money, which ends up putting us in some sort of numbing loop?
With recent advances in LLMs (large language models) and all the ways we can now create text and videos that have been built from all that has been created before them, we seem to be desperate for authenticity, even as its gotten harder to spot.
And yet, perhaps this very confusion contains the seeds of a breakthrough. Maybe the uncanny accuracy of large language models is actually teaching us something crucial: we are not our language (as Andrea Hiott says here). We are not our representations. We are not even our language-based thoughts. The fact that an AI can flawlessly reproduce our linguistic patterns without being ‘us’ reveals the gap between expression and presence, between what we say and the living source from which we speak. This feels like an urgent understanding.
Thought Collectives and Cookies
This is where Fleck’s concept of thought collectives becomes particularly useful. We’re not just exchanging information when we communicate; we’re actually participating in shared patterns of attention, value, and meaning-making. Those have been ‘allowed’ but could also be blocked or unallowed if we notice them or develop ways to notice them collectively. These patterns are like cookies in a web browser, quietly shaping what we notice and how we respond, creating pathways that become more entrenched with each repetition.
Which cookies are we allowing? Which thought collectives are we feeding with our attention, our energy, our participation that we may not have chosen or even know we are participating in? And those we have chosen, are they built on what is generative or are they built on taking other ‘opponents’ down? Because meaning is in the generative.
Tim’s project is exists as space that shares this question by creating spaces where people can develop the capacity to recognize these patterns and engage with them more consciously. To be present and talk and explore and notice what arises and how it got there. Not by escaping into some imagined neutral space, but by developing what we might call “craft”—the skillful, embodied practice of attending to the quality of our relating together as we are doing it. (Another Voicecraft conversation with Tim, Andrea and two other Voicecraft participants also delves into this here if you are interested.)
This isn’t about achieving some perfect clarity or consistency. We all wear different masks in different contexts, and that’s not inherently inauthentic. The question is whether there’s an integrity running through these different presentations, a “permeating self” that’s energizing and orienting our various roles and expressions.
Can we play with the masks we wear while staying attuned to what’s underneath?
There’s a kind of presence, after all, that is fundamentally unable to fall into mimicry and manipulation. This ‘inner technology’ of being ourselves isn’t something we need to invent; it’s more like a capacity we need to remember and cultivate and allow for ourselves in spaces of care.
Maybe that is what Tim means here as “an inherent gift of humanity”, that is, our ability to meet each other in genuine second-person encounters like this, to sense the difference between performance and presence, to recognize when someone is actually there with us versus when they’re going through the motions, and to let people be as rational or far out as they need to be to realize where they are here and now.
That’s also what comes through here when Andrea and Tim discuss participating in what Tim describes as “long periods of silence with others in the gestating and the creative opening”. These are moments when the usual social scripts fall away and something more fundamental can emerge (though one has to be careful not to overdo it).
It’s not too comfortable. It’s not about feeling at ease, at least not at first. It’s about developing the capacity to stay present when the ground becomes uncertain, to trust that meaning can arise from the space between everyone rather than from any single person’s predetermined plan.
“Why am I doing anything at all?” Tim asks at one point. “I cannot not be in relationship with love and the cultivation of its momentary forms in the world.”
Love is what is shared, and it often takes discomfort to notice and feel it.
This isn’t love as sentiment or feeling, but love as a fundamental orientation or what philosopher Forrest Landry calls “that which enables choice.” It’s about creating conditions where genuine possibility can emerge, where people can actually become rather than just perform who they’re supposed to be. And critically, it requires what Tim and Andrea talk about through “loving transformation”, which is the capacity to both hold and let go, to provide structure while remaining open to being remade by what emerges. That’s often what Andrea calls holding paradox, but maybe sharing paradox is an even better way to consider it.
Listen to the full conversation here or on your podcast app to hear Tim and Andrea explore these themes in much greater depth, including discussions of masks and maps, the challenges of building authentic communities in an age of personal branding, the surprising lessons of large language models, and what it means to speak from integrity in a world that often rewards the opposite.