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When technology gets byzantine, when the heady early years of cybernetic mysticism give way and our software engineers become the new priests of the Catholic institutions of Big Tech, maybe we can learn a thing or two from a Byzantine Catholic who’s made Responsible Technology their life. This week’s guest is just that person. Benjamin Olsen is the Head of Windows Responsible AI & Data Compliance at Microsoft, where he also pioneered their first AI & Ethics education programs. He’s also an advisor for AI and Faith and has worked as co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Responsible Learning & Education program and member of their Responsible Development and Deployment of Technology steering committee; the former Responsible Innovation Lead at Meta; and a part of the IEEE’s working group on Responsible AI. His online courses in Analytics, Data Science, and Responsible Technology have been taken by millions of students in more than 120 countries.
But it’s his writing at the intersection of religion, spirituality, technology, and human flourishing that caught my eye. I met Ben through Andrew Dunn of the School of Wise Innovation, where I was on the faculty for a course on Embodied Ethics in The Age of AI with Josh Schrei, and was immediately taken by the clarity and heart he brings to places I have always guessed were, frankly, soulless. Speaking with him gave me hope that maybe all this hype is actually the evidence of earnest and concerted effort — in some corners, anyway — to do the future right and not just big. I hope that you enjoy your conversation.
Links
“The Inner Life of Responsible Innovation” by Benjamin Olsen
“Monsters and Moderation in Respsonbile AI” by Benjamin Olsen
“Super-responsible AI” by Benjamin Olsen
“Mission Impossible: Perfectly Responsible AI” by Benjamin OlsenLearn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The Loop
Browse my reading list and support local booksellers
Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord server
Join the private Future Fossils Facebook group
Hire me for consulting or advisory work
Chapters
0:00:00 – Teaser Quote
0:01:34 – Episode Intro
0:03:58 – Introducing Benjamin Olsen
0:08:20 – Toward Omni-considerate Corporate Ethics
0:17:18 – Practicing Super-responsibility
0:27:32 – Between The Scylla of Censorship and The Charybdis of Underblocking
0:36:26 – Doing The Lord’s Work inside The Leviathan
0:43:09 – Consent between Company & Customer
0:54:07 – How Do We Exercise Agency Within Social Constraints?
0:58:10 – Who Does Benjamin Recommend?
1:00:21 – Closing Remarks
Mentions
* Yolanda Gil
* Kevin Kelly
* Martin Luther King Jr.
* Henry David Thoreau
* William Gibson
* Stafford Beer
* James P. Carse
* Hans Moravec
* Father Walker Ciszek
* Catherine Dougherty
* Larry Muhlstein
* Danny Go
* Timothy Morton
* Carl Jung
* Amber Case
* Michael Zargham
* Chip and Dan Heath
* Bayazid Bastami
* Shannon Valor
* Dan Zigmund
* Zvika Krieger
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe -
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When, suddenly, the barrier between “imagination” and “reality” evaporates as our familiar notions of here/there, now/then, in/out, and other/self twist up into a ball of non-Euclidean spaghetti, whom better to help steer the course through these “turbulent philosophical waters” than Richard Doyle, aka “M0b1ius”, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor at Penn State Center for Humanities and Information in the College of Liberal Arts?
After his postdoctoral research at MIT in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Doyle wrote The Wetwares Trilogy, a sequence of books on the history of information biology that reached its climax with one of my favorite reads of all time, Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of the Noosphere. He is also the author of The Genesis of Now: Self Experiments with the Bible & the End of Religion and Into The Stillness: Dialogues on Awakening Beyond Thought (with Gary Weber), and has taught courses on “aliens, Philip K. Dick, nanotechnology, rebellion itself, ecstasy, Sanskrit rhetorical traditions, Burroughs, basic argumentation, The Non Dual Bible, and everything in between.”
I discovered Doyle through his appearances on my first favorite podcast, Erik Davis’ Expanding Mind, and in the thirteen years since he has shown up for me time and time again as mentor, friend, and inspiration. And since this project is, ostensibly, a way of training my own language model to reflect the wisdom of my friends and colleagues, I can think of no one else I’d rather prime the batch. It is my great privilege and honor to be able to have him as the first guest in this series, as a way of of helping set the tone for everything that is to come…
Links
Richard Doyle’s faculty web page and publicationsLearn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The Loop
Browse my reading list and support local booksellers
Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord server
Join the private Future Fossils Facebook group
Hire me for consulting or advisory work
Chapters
0:00:00 – Teaser
0:03:36 – Episode Intro
0:12:44 – Introducing Richard Doyle
0:29:33 – The Ego as Inflammation
0:33:58 – Practicing Care in The Planet-Wide Makerspace
0:48:30 – Digital Connection vs. Embodied Connection
0:55:46 – Psychedelics as Training Wheels for Transhumanism
1:02:43 – “Storytelling” Isn’t A Professional Service (??)
1:05:25 – Techniques for Reclaiming Attention & Finding Peace
1:15:22 – Meditation as “The Halting Problem”
1:17:30 – Beyond The Limits of Science
1:22:17 – AI-Enabled Extraction vs. AI-Enabled Abundance
1:38:40 – Closing Remarks
Reflections
Much of tech ethics discourse concerns itself with whether humans are “in the loop” or “out of the loop” — whether people get to call the shots. But there is always more than one loop. Most of the things our fleshy bodies do are local decisions made before we ever become conscious of them, if we ever do…and yet evolution clearly found some value in reflection, self-awareness, reflex inhibition, and the will that quiets maladaptive impulse. Widening our frame to see the way that humans are always-already intertwingled with our ecosystems, we can see ourselves as made of interference patterns between nested feedback loops — as focal points of conscious agency dependent on and acting in a massive, endlessly surprising web of automatic processes. For as long as we’ve been people we have never really “called the shots” but rather cultivated our response-ability within a cosmos made of entities whose otherness and mystery remained persistently opaque…and ritualized ways to live amidst this mystery in full recognition of the unity from which we cannot isolate ourselves.
And this is only one of indefinitely many valid ways to understand the human. Like the telescope and microscope before them, language models reveal fresh perspectives on familiar landscapes. We do not need to leave our solar system to find “strange new worlds” awaiting us in places as familiar as our own minds and bodies. While most of the conversation lately seems to be about the power these new maps confer and whether it can be distributed more evenly, AI provides a new set of affordances for mystics for the transformation of our consciousness that can dissolve our wicked problems in a higher logical order. “What can I do?” becomes “Who am I?” and yields endlessly evolving and kaleidoscopic answers that provoke ongoing inquiry. To see the ways in which we are, as individuals, not just “connected” but precipitate as aggregates, in fields of constellated data, prompts a figure-ground reversal in which selves no longer hold their primacy as ground truth of our being, but show up last as we make inferences and draw stories from unbroken and inseparable experience.
Something fundamental changes when we shift to seeing “human” and “non-human” as two stable patterns of recursive self-perception emerging from a single fabric of unfolding possibility: we find the opportunity to question what we’re trying to achieve, to notice the ungrounded and conditional reality of narrative, to operate on our own “source code” and adjust our goals accordingly.
If we can find the curiosity to ask ourselves if our fears and inadequacies really help us live the lives we want, we can follow it upstream to where each moment offers fresh, distinctive landscapes in which to explore and play and learn. In doing so, we rediscover vast and potent creativity. Instead of asking whether we can do more, we can ask “What do we want to do, and why is that desire substantiated?”
This kind of meaning-making isn’t just a luxury but an essential aspect of all efforts to survive and to succeed. The best way to get unstuck is to orient ourselves and take a different tack. We all know something isn’t working. It’s time to ask if, maybe, this is due to “user error” and the answer doesn’t lie in new technologies, but in the simplest and most ancient truths available. We cannot control the world because we are the world — and, this entails a sense of radical responsibility to play our way into more well-adapted stories, models of the world we hold with humor and humility as they carve channels in the space of shared attention that coordinate us into futures good and true and beautiful.
In other words, the magical technologies inspiring so much religious fear and fervor are both Towers of Babel and fingers pointing to the Moon. They are weird, unprecedented, and sublime — and they are business as usual on Planet Earth, where we have always come awake in medias res amidst unfathomable changes and unknowable intelligence. Recognizing this, we gain access to deep continuity and the place from which we can, at last, engage the question of “What Now?” with discipline and limber rigor suitable to the profound complexity we face.
Digital technologies are psychedelic. We’ve been on a bad trip. It’s time for us wiggle out, dream better, and allow a more capacious, plural, and harmonious humanity to take the oars together in whatever novel wonders may arise — to neither “give way to astonishment” nor let our fears steer us into the rocks. Humans On The Loop is an investigation of how awesome it could be, right now, to fully give in to the paradox, and notice how its knots untie in hyperspace, and revisit all our looming crises with more presence, grace, and understanding — and more lucid (dare I say, productive?) questions.
One of those questions is how to apply the lessons of the living generations of psychonauts and psychedelic therapists to the vertiginous information and attention vortices in which we now found ourselves swirling. Maps of the World Wide Web look very much like brain scans of the amped-up functional connectivity between ordinarily inhibited brain regions in a psilocybin tripper. When the walls come down — when every node has edges with each other node, and average path length drops to one — how do we prioritize? What paths do we decide to cut through the emergent “intertwingularity”? Which apparitions do we honor, and which do we ignore? (And how?) Some familiar tropes that we might use to guide us: “test your drugs”, “get grounded”, “set and setting”, “integration counseling”…
Mentions
Generated by NotebookLM. Please let me know if you notice any errors or omissions!
* Richard Doyle
* Michael Garfield
* Gary Weber
* Shankara
* Trey Conner
* Nora Pandoro
* Erik Davis
* Joshua DiCaglio
* John Perry Barlow
* Naomi Most
* Nate Hagens
* Daniel Schmachtenberger
* Tyson Yunkaporta
* Martin Luther King Jr.
* Mahatma Gandhi
* John Von Neumann
* Subhash Kak
* Iain McGilchrist
* Timothy Morton
* Stuart Kauffman
* Dean Radin
* Brian Josephson
* Monica Gagliano
* Christoph Koch
* Gregory Bateson
* Elon Musk
* Robert Rosen
* H.P. Lovecraft
* Philip K. Dick
* Herbert Simon
* Douglas Rushkoff
* Sri Aurobindo
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✨ About This Episode
“The best academic lecture/slam poetry/sermon/magical invocation/attunement and invitation to engage I’ve experienced in a long while.”– Daniel Lindenbarger
Next week, after nearly nine years of development, this show grows up to become Humans On The Loop, a transdisciplinary exploration of agency in the age of automation. For long-time listeners of Future Fossils, not much will really change — philosophical investigations in the key of psychedelic futurism, voyages into the edges of what is and can be known, and boldly curious riffs on the immeasurable value of storytelling and imagination have always characterized this show. Many of the episodes I’ve shared in this last year especially were, effectively, preparations for this latest chapter and play as large a part in my ongoing journey to synthesize and translate everything I’ve learned from years of independent scholarship and institutional work in esteemed tech, science, and culture orgs…
But we are no longer waiting for a weird future to arrive. We’re living in it, and shaping it with every act and utterance. So in this “final” episode of Future Fossils before I we bring all of these investigations into the domain of practical applied inquiry, it felt right to ramp from FF to HOTL by sharing my talk and discussion for Stephen Reid’s recent online course on Technological Metamodernism. This was a talk that left me feeling very full of hope for what’s to come, in which I trace the constellations that connect some of my biggest inspirations, and outline the social transformations I see underway.
This is a rapid and dynamic condensation of the big patterns I’ve noticed in the course of over 500 hours of recorded public dialogue and a lively primer on why I’m focusing on the attention and imagination as the two big forces that will continue to shape our lives in the worlds that come after modernity.
It is also just the beginning.
Thank you for being part of this adventure.
✨ Support & Participate
• Become a patron on Substack (my preference) or Patreon(15% off annual memberships until 12/21/24 with the code 15OFF12)• Make a tax-deductible donation to Humans On The Loop• Original paintings available as thank-you gifts for large donors• Hire me as an hourly consultant or advisor on retainer• Buy (most of) the books we discuss from Bookshop.org• Join the Future Fossils Facebook group• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils Discord servers• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP and outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP• Read “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’”, my story mentioned in this episode.
✨ Chapters
Chapter 1: Reflections & Announcements (0:00:00)Chapter 2: Co-Evolution with AI and the Limits of Control (0:12:49)Chapter 3: Poetry as the Beginning and End of Scientific Knowledge (0:18:06)Chapter 4: The American Replacement of Nature and the Power of Narrative (0:24:05)Chapter 5: The End of “Reality” & The Beginning of Metamodern Nuance (28:58)Chapter 6: Q&A: Myths, Egregores, and Metamodern Technology vs. Wetiko & Moloch (0:34:52)Chapter 7: Q&A: Chaos Magic & Other Strategies for Navigating Complexity (45:59)Chapter 8: Q&A: Musings on Symbiogenesis & Selfhood (0:50:18)Chapter 9: Q&A: How Do We Legitimize These Approaches? (0:55:42)Chapter 10: Q&A: Why Am I Devoting Myself to Wise Innovation Inquiry? (0:61:01)Chapter 11: Thanks & Closing (0:63:22)
✨ Mentioned Individuals
A mostly-complete list generated by Notebook LM and edited by Michael Garfield.
* William Irwin Thompson - Historian, poet, and author of The American Replacement of Nature, which argues that American culture is future-oriented. (See Future Fossils 42 & 43.)
* Evan “Skytree” Snyder - Electronic music producer, roboticist, and co-founder of Future Fossils who departed after ten episodes. (See Future Fossils 1-10, 53, 174, and 207.)
* Stephen Reid - Founder of the Dandelion online learning program and The Psychedelic Society; host of a course on “Technological Metamodernism” in which Garfield presented this talk. (See Future Fossils 226.)
* Ken Wilber - Author of numerous books on “AQAL” Integral Theory. (See Michael’s 2008 interview with him on Integral Art.)
* Friedrich Hölderlin - German poet who famously said, "Poetry is the beginning and the end of all scientific knowledge.”
* George Lakoff and Mark Johnson - Authors of Metaphors We Live By, which explores the role of embodied metaphor in shaping thought.
* John Vervaeke - Philosopher who, along with others, uses the term “transjective” to describe the interconnected nature of subject and object.
* Sean Esbjörn-Hargens - Integral theorist who taught Garfield at JFK University. (See Future Fossils 60, 113, and 150.)
* Nathalie Depraz, Francisco Varela, and Pierre Vermersch - Embodied mind theorists and authors of On Becoming Aware, a book about phenomenology.
* Kevin Kelly - Techno-optimist Silicon Valley futurist and author on “the expansion of ignorance” in relation to scientific discovery. (See Future Fossils 128, 165, and 203.)
* Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and David Bohm - Paradigm-challenging physicists mentioned who, by science to its limits, developed mystical insights.
* Timothy Morton - Philosopher who coined the term “hyperobjects” to refer to entities so vast and complex they defy traditional understanding. (See Future Fossils 223.)
* Caleb Scharf - Astrobiologist, author of The Ascent of Information, in which he coins the term “The Dataome” to refer to the planet-scale body of information that constrains human behavior.
* Iain McGilchrist - Psychiatrist and author of The Master and His Emissary, known for his work on the divided brain and the importance of right-brained thinking.
* Eric Wargo - Anthropologist and science writer who suggests that dreams are precognitive and the brain binds time as a four-dimensional object. (See Future Fossils 117, 171, and 231.)
* Regina Rini - Philosopher at York University who coined the term “epistemic backstop of consensus” to describe what photography gave society and what, later, deepfakes have eroded.
* Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky - Philosophers and authors who explored the implications of the loss of a universal moral order grounded in religion.
* Duncan Barford - An author and figure associated with chaos magic.
* Lynn Margulis - Evolutionary biologist known for her work on symbiogenesis and the importance of cooperation in evolution.
* Primavera De Filippi - Co-author of Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code with Aaron Wright and technology theorist who theorized the "Collaboration Monster."
* Joshua Schrei - Ritualist and host of The Emerald Podcast who produced episodes on Guardians and Protectors and on the role of The Seer. (See Future Fossils 219.)
* Hunter S. Thompson - American journalist and author known for his gonzo journalism and the quote, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
* Tim Adalin - Host of the VoiceCraft podcast, on which Garfield discussed complex systems perspectives on pathologies in organizational development. (See Future Fossils 227.)
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe -
Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts
✨ Support & Participate
• Become a patron on Substack (my preference) or Patreon (15% off annual memberships until 12/21 with the code 15OFF12)• Make a tax-deductible donation to Humans On The Loop• Original paintings available as thank-you gifts for large donors• Hire me as an hourly consultant or advisor on retainer• Buy the books we discuss from Bookshop.org• Join the Future Fossils Facebook group• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils Discord servers• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP and outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP, coda “You Don’t Have To Move → 8:33” from The Age of Reunion
✨ About This Episode
In this penultimate episode of Future Fossils before we transform into Humans On The Loop, I bring two of my favorite guests and comrades in the so-called “Weirdosphere” back for their first-ever conversation together — and it’s a real banger! Probably the most inspired and provocative conversation I’ve ever had on the nature of time and human creativity.
Joining me for this trialogue are Eric Wargo, author of From Nowhere: Artists, Writers, and the Precognitive Imagination (previously on FF episodes 117 and 171), and J.F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in The Age of Artifice and co-host (with Phil Ford) of Weird Studies podcast (previously on FF episodes 18, 71, 126, and 214).
Our discussion centers on the concept of precognition — the ability to perceive future events — as the mechanism of all human creative activity. Both Eric and J.F. argue that art, like shamanistic practices, acts as a means of accessing and expressing precognitive experiences, often manifesting as seemingly coincidental events or uncanny correspondences between art and reality.
We talk about the role of trauma and dissociation in stimulating creative breakthroughs — why there seems to be a direct biological and psychological link between suffering, displacement, and the discovery of radical new insights and modes of being. Can we create without destroying, or are rupture and connection one thing?
We also examine how emerging media through the ages have shaped our experience of time. Starting with the earliest Paleolithic artifacts and the role of cave art in facilitating or encoding ecstatic experience, we trace the evolution of art through to how the development “the cut” in modern cinema led to new ideas of causality. Each new medium provides novel ways of thinking about leaps across space and time, and their study offers new points of entry into a unifying philosophy of rupture and discontinuity.
Lastly, we explore some of my own most potent and disquieting precognitive experiences in light of Eric’s argument that the UFO phenomenon may actually be the braided precognitive experiences of future human beings and symbiotic artificial intelligences — a thesis that sheds new light on everything from the lives and work of Philip K. Dick, Jacques Vallée, Carl Jung, Andrei Tarkovsky, to The Book of Ezekiel.
Where we’re going, we won’t need roads…
Speaking of art, UFOs, psychedelic experience, and time machines, here’s the standalone music video for the song we discuss in this episode that was inspired by my UFO (or were they time machine) experiences in 2007. I threw it back in as a coda to the episode but in case you want to view it in its original resolution and in the context of the entire album, here you go. The “8:33” section starts around 3:58:
✨ Chapters
Chapter 1: Introduction (0:00:00)
Chapter 2: Precognitive Imagination in the Arts (0:08:57)
Chapter 3: The Personal is Precognitive (0:13:34)
Chapter 4: The Cut and the Leap (0:22:15)
Chapter 5: The Brain as a Fast-Forwarder (0:30:38)
Chapter 6: Campfires, TVs, and Flickering Consciousness (0:38:57)
Chapter 7: The Trauma of Truth (0:48:04)
Chapter 8: Prophecy and The Trash Stratum (0:54:33)
Chapter 9: UFOs as Time Machines, The Disappointment of Destiny (1:14:39)
Chapter 10: Closing and News on Upcoming Releases (1:20:28)
✨ Other Mentions
An inexhaustive list of people, places, and key works mentioned in this episode.
* Morgan Robertson: Author of a novel that is believed to have predicted the sinking of the Titanic.
* Hunter S. Thompson: Author and journalist.
* William Shakespeare: Playwright who wrote Macbeth.
* Comte de Lautréamont: A French poet who talked about "the cut" in his work.
* Jean Epstein: Author of the book on the philosophy of cinema, The Intelligence of a Machine.
* Carl Jung: Psychoanalyst who developed the concept of synchronicity.
* Sergei Eisenstein: Filmmaker, and film theorist.
* Gilles Deleuze: Philosopher who argued that “difference is more fundamental than identity.”
* Cy Twombly: Artist whose work is discussed by Eric Wargo.
* Andrei Tarkovsky: Filmmaker who wrote a diary entry quoted in From Nowhere.
* Philip K. Dick: Science fiction author whose experiences with precognition and synchronicity are discussed in From Nowhere.
* Jacques Vallée: Scientist and ufologist, author of a book about the UFO phenomena called Passport to Magonia.
* Diana Pasulka: Academic who studies the UFO phenomenon.
* Johnjoe McFadden: Scientist who works on quantum biology.
* Henri Bergson: Philosopher known for his work on time and consciousness, is quoted as saying “the universe is a machine for the making of gods.”
* Octavia E. Butler: Science fiction author.
* Harlan Ellison: Science fiction author.
* James Cameron: Filmmaker who directed The Terminator.
* Max Simon Ehrlich: Screenwriter who wrote the Star Trek episode The Apple.
* Megan Phipps: Guest on the Future Fossils podcast (episode 214).
* Michelangelo: Guest on the Future Fossils podcast who discussed Paisley Ontology and precognition with Michael Garfield.
* Björk: Musician, whose song "Modern Things" is mentioned.
* Greg Bishop: UFO historian.
* Terence McKenna: Ethnobotanist and writer who coined the term "immanentize the eschaton.".
* Phil Ford: Co-host of the Weird Studies podcast.
* Richard Wagner: Composer who was arrested in 1837.
* Zozobra: a hundred-year-old effigy burn in Santa Fe, NM.
* Esalen Institute: the center of the Human Potential movement, in Big Sur, CA.
* The Fort-Da Game: A game observed by Sigmund Freud in which a child throws a toy away and then retrieves it, demonstrating an understanding of object permanence.
* The Third Man Factor: A phenomenon experienced by explorers and mountain climbers in extreme survival situations, involving the feeling of a presence accompanying them.
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This week I talk with Jamie Curcio to ask, whom do we serve? Who gives us power, and to whom do we give ours? Where does that power come from? To whom do we sell our stories?
We explore the world behind the world, linking Jamie’s writing and game world-building in the domain he calls myth punk, and the equally Eldritch complex systems wicked problem of climate action.
Studying that link, we can trace the outlines of emergent 21st Century religions — the reinterpretation of axial traditions suited to the digital era, the metamodern revival of land-based animistic traditions, and even weirder novel forms that arise at the end of one world and the effloresence of many others.
✨ Jamie's Links
Fallen Cycle Podcastmodernmythology.net“Investing In The Unknown”“The Cascade” Part 1, 2, 3Tales From When I Had A Face: B&W EditionTales From When I Had A Face info page
✨ Offer Support + Join The Scene
• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Make a tax-deductible donation to Humans On The Loop• Invite me to work with you as an hourly consultant or advisor on retainer• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils Discord servers• Join the Future Fossils Facebook group• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Tip me with @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP
✨ Chapters
1. Jamie's Background (0:05:46)2. Embracing the Unknown and the Role of Artifice (0:11:14) 3. Prometheus, Intentional Mystery, and the Nature of Agency (0:16:21)4. Introducing the Fallen Cycle and its Mythological Framework (0:21:57)5. Exploring Thematic Elements: Gods, Myths, and Consumerism (0:27:32)6. Climate Change, Hyperobjects, and Societal Inertia (0:33:36)7. Festivals, Dionysus, and the Value of Liminal Spaces (0:40:26)8. AI as a Creative Tool and Collaborator (0:46:05)9. Mythology, Role-Playing, and Enacting Change (0:52:16)10. Engaging with Jamie's Work and Final Thoughts (0:56:03)
✨ Other Mentions
FF 195 — A.I. Art: An Emergency Panel with Julian Picaza, Evo Heyning, Micah Daigle, Jamie Curcio, & Topher SipesA Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Manuel DeLandaJoseph CampbellFriedrich NietzscheArthur SchopenhauerBuddhismWestern EsotericismEvolving Media NetworkWeird Studies Podcast (with Jamie, with Michael)Tom MorganGilles Deleuze“The Soldier and The Hunchback” by Aleister CrowleyPrometheus (Movie)Alien Romulus (Movie)Eric WargoJohn KeatsUnweaving The Rainbow by Richard DawkinsFF 53 — A Very Xeno Christmas with Evan SnyderStephen BatchelorSamurai Jack (TV show)Fern Gully (Movie)Jitterbug Perfume by Tom RobbinsAmerican Gods by Neil GaimanSandman by Neil GaimanJosh SchreiHell by Timothy MortonThe Book of ExodusThe Demon-Haunted World by Carl SaganCyndi CoonDavid Bowie
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This week on Future Fossils I welcome back Sara Phinn Huntley (help her fight cancer!), a multimedia artist, writer, and researcher who has spent the last two decades exploring the intersection of psychedelics, technology, and philosophy.
An intrepid psychonaut and cartographer of hyperspace, her current focus involves using VR to represent visual/spatial imagination in real-time. Using a multidisciplinary approach, she documents and maps the states revealed by dimethyltriptamime and other psychedelics, cargo culting higher dimensional artifacts through the intersection of chaos mathematics, Islamic geometry, and 3D diagrammatic performance capture.
Her work has been published by the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies and featured in Diana Reed Slattery's Xenolinguistics. She is the art director for The Illustrated Field to the DMT Entities with David Jay Brown (forthcoming at Inner Traditions, 2025).
✨ Offer Support + Join The Scene
• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Make a tax-deductible donation to Humans On The Loop• Invite me to work with you as an hourly consultant or advisor on retainer• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils Discord servers• Join the Future Fossils Facebook group• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Tip me with @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP
✨ Main Points + Big Ideas
* The Entanglement of Language and Being: DMT entities reveal a profound connection between language and the construction of reality, echoing themes found in esoteric traditions and the emergence of AI.
* The Cartography of Hyperspace: The book serves as a guide to the vast and uncharted territory of DMT experiences, highlighting the challenge of classifying subjective encounters and the potential for mapping a multidimensional reality.
* The Reproducibility Problem and the Power of Big Data: While acknowledging the inherent challenges of studying subjective experiences, we point to the potential of emerging technologies like AI, blockchain, and large-scale data analysis to offer new insights.
* Embodied Bias and the Nature of Evolution: The nonlinear and multidimensional nature of DMT experiences challenges our understanding of time, evolution, and even anatomy, prompting a re-evaluation of our assumptions about reality.
* Attention as a Currency: We emphasize the importance of attention in navigating both the DMT space and the rapidly evolving technological landscape, posing critical questions about who or what deserves our focus.
* The Question of Human Survival: The episode ends by urging humanity to confront its self-destructive tendencies and leverage its collective wisdom to navigate the challenges and opportunities of the future.
✨ Chapters
Chapter 1: Sara's Psychedelic Journey and the Genesis of the DMT Entities Field Guide (00:00:00 - 00:10:00)
* Sara's fascination with DMT from a young age.
* Her exploration of DMT through various artistic media, including performance art and xenolinguistics.
* The inception of The Illustrated Field Guide to DMT Entities book, inspired by classic field guides to nature.
* The decision to leverage AI in the book's creation due to the vastness of the subject matter.
Chapter 2: Language, Being, and the AI Oracle (00:10:00 - 00:20:00)
* The role of language in shaping and interpreting DMT entities, drawing parallels to esoteric traditions like the concept of the Logos.
* Sara's process of interacting with AI, describing it as "talking to it" to curate the visual representations of DMT entities.
* The blurring of categories and the subjective nature of interpreting the raw data of DMT experiences.
* The challenge of reconciling diverse and often conflicting perceptions of the same entities.
* Language as a compression tool for expressing ineffable experiences.
* The increasing relevance of AI in understanding consciousness, particularly with future advancements in brain modeling.
Chapter 3: Navigating Ontological Shock and the Nature of DMT Entities (00:20:00 - 00:30:00)
* The challenge of reconciling DMT experiences with our "meat space" understanding of reality.
* Sara's personal experience of gaining knowledge through DMT, challenging James Kent's view on the limitations of such knowledge.
* The neurological basis for some common DMT hallucinations and its implications for understanding the experience.
* The interplay of cultural and personal projections in shaping DMT entity encounters.
* Exploring the possibility of psychedelics as a way to interact with a simulated reality.
* The existence of phenomena that defy current scientific understanding, pointing to the need for open-mindedness.
Chapter 4: The Cartography of Hyperspace and the Specter of Evolution (00:30:00 - 00:40:00)
* The possibility of DMT entity encounters revealing more about the observer than about independent beings.
* The existence of consistent archetypes across different DMT experiences and their overlap with other paranormal phenomena.
* The intriguing connection between DMT entities and cross-cultural mythological figures.
* Examining the role of genetic lineage and the intergenerational transmission of unusual experiences.
* The book as a tool for intellectual curiosity, humility, and exploring the vastness of hyperspace.
* The influence of culture in shaping our perceptions of both traditional and modern entities.
* Sara's personal stance on the reality of DMT entities - acknowledging their potential existence while remaining open to other interpretations.
Chapter 5: The Machine in the Ghost: Folklore, AI, and the Urge to Classify (00:40:00 - 00:50:00)
* The blurring lines between insectoid and mechanical entities in both folklore and modern UAP narratives.
* The impact of technology and the idea of a simulated reality on our perception of entities.
* Sara's view on the potential taxonomic shift in our understanding of entities due to technological advancements.
* Exploring the limits of AI in understanding consciousness and the potential for using it as a tool for self-reflection.
* The challenge and importance of maintaining a sense of awe and wonder amidst scientific inquiry.
Chapter 6: The Problem of Reproducibility and the Potential of Big Data (00:50:00 - 01:00:00)
* Acknowledging the inherent limitations of scientific inquiry into subjective experiences.
* The promise of machine learning and big data in identifying patterns and correlations across diverse DMT experiences.
* The potential for reconstructing visual fields from brain data to gain further insights into the DMT experience.
* The potential for utilizing blockchain technology, quadratic voting, and other advanced tools to address researcher bias and context in large-scale data collection.
Chapter 7: Embodied Bias and the Non-Linearity of Time (01:00:00 - 01:10:00)
* The idea of anatomy as an encoded representation of environmental features and its implications for understanding non-human entities.
* Challenging the linear concept of time and evolution in light of the multidimensional experiences offered by DMT.
* The vastness and complexity of "meat space" reality and its potential to hold hidden dimensions and Easter eggs.
* The potential for AI and advanced computation to unlock deeper understanding of reality in conjunction with psychedelic exploration.
Chapter 8: Sara's Breakthrough Experience and the Reverence for Mystery (01:10:00 - 01:20:00)
* A detailed description of the experience, including encountering cloaked entities, a 12-dimensional brain diagnostic tool, and a neurosurgeon-like being.
* The intensity and reality-shattering nature of the experience, surpassing previous encounters with DMT entities.
* Sara's decision to take a break from psychedelics after this experience.
* The importance of reverence and respect when engaging with the DMT space and its mysteries.
* The continuing potential for breakthroughs and the limitlessness of the DMT rabbit hole.
Chapter 9: Attention, AI, and the Question of Human Survival (01:20:00 - 01:30:00)
* The book as a shared tapestry of experiences, honoring the work of other artists and researchers.
* The importance of acknowledging both shared archetypes and individual variations in DMT experiences.
* The potential for AI to evolve beyond human comprehension and the need for humans to adapt.
* The question of AI's attention span and its potential implications for human-AI interaction.
* The need for humanity to overcome its self-destructive tendencies in order to harness the potential of technology and navigate the future.
* Sara's personal mission to inspire progress and wonder through her art.
✨ Mentions
* David Jay Brown - Author of The Illustrated Field Guide to DMT Entities
* Diana Reed Slattery - Author of Xenolinguistics
* Ralph Abraham - Chaos theoretician at UCSC who taught Sara about wallpaper groups
* James Kent - Author of Alien Information Theory
* Aldous Huxley - Author of the essay "Heaven and Hell"
* K. Allado-McDowell - Co-director of Google’s Artists and Machine Learning program
* Roland Fischer - Experimental researcher and pharmacologist
* Iain McGilchrist - Psychiatrist and author of The Master and His Emissary
* William Irwin Thompson - Historian and poet-philosopher
* The Tea Faerie - Psychonaut and harm reduction expert
* Terence McKenna - Known for his ideas on the Logos and the psychedelic experience
* Andrés Gomez Emilsson - Director of Qualia Research Institute focusing on the mathematics of psychedelic experiences
* Chris Bledsoe - Known for his family's experiences with entities in a waking state
* Stuart Davis - Host of "Aliens and Artists" and known for his encounters with mantis beings
* Graham Hancock - Author who encountered "big-brained robots" during a psychedelic experience
* Adam Aronovich - Curator of Healing From Healing
* Rodney Ascher - Director of the documentary "A Glitch in the Matrix"
* Ian McGilchrist - Author and researcher who studies hemispheric specialization in the brain
* René Descartes - Philosopher known for his mind-body dualism and views on animals
* Helané Wahbeh - Researcher at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, discussed the reproducibility problem in science
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This week we speak to multidisciplinary independent researcher William Sarill, whose life has traced a high-dimensional curve through biochemistry, art restoration, physics, and esotericism (and I’m stopping the list here but it goes on). Bill is one of the only people I know who has the scientific chops to understand and explain how to possibly unify thermodynamics with general relativity AND has gone swimming into the deep end of The Weird for long enough to develop an appreciation for its paradoxical profundities. He can also boast personal friendships with two of the greatest (and somewhat diametrically opposed) science fiction authors ever: Phil Dick and Isaac Asimov.
In this conversation we start by exploring some of his discoveries and insights as an intuition-guided laboratory biomedical researcher and follow the river upstream into his synthesis of emerging theoretical frameworks that might make sense of PKD’s legendary VALIS experiences — the encounter with high strangeness that drove him to write The Exegesis, over a million words of effort to explain the deep structure of time and reality. It’s time for new ways to think about time! Enjoy…
✨ Support This Work
• Buy my brain for hourly consulting or advisory work on retainer• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP
✨ Go Deeper
Bill's Academia.edu pageBill's talk at the PKD Film FestivalBill's profile for the Palo Alto Longevity PrizeBill's story on Facebook about his biochemistry researchBill in the FF Facebook group re: Simulation Theory, re: The Zero-Point Field, re: everything he's done that no one else has, re: how PKD predicted ChatGPT"If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others" by PKDThe Wyrd of the Early Earth: Cellular Pre-sense in the Primordial Soup by Eric WargoMy first and second interviews with William Irwin ThompsonMy lecture on biology, time, and myth from Oregon Eclipse Gathering 2017"I understand Philip K. Dick" by Terence McKennaWeird Studies on PKD and "The Trash Stratum" Part 1 & Part 2Weird Studies with Joshua Ramey on divination in scienceSparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People by Robert & Michele Root-BernsteinDiscovering by Robert Root-Bernstein
“How geometry expresses the Second Law of Thermodynamics” by Chris Jeynes”Testing the Conjecture That Quantum Processes Create Conscious Experience” by Neven et al.
✨ Mentions
Philip K. Dick, Bruce Damer, Iain McGilchrist, Eric Wargo, Stu Kauffman, Michael Persinger, Alfred North Whitehead, Terence McKenna, Karl Friedrich, Mike Parker, Chris Jeynes, David Wolpert, Ivo Dinov, Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, Erwin Schroedinger, Kaluza & Klein, Richard Feynman, Euclid, Hermann Minkowski, James Clerk Maxwell, The I Ching, St. Augustine, Stephen Hawking, Jim Hartle, Alexander Vilenkin, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Timothy Morton, Futurama, The Wachowski Siblings, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Leonard Euler, Paramahansa Yogananda, Alfred Korbzybski, Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, Claude Shannon, Ludwig Boltzmann, Carl Jung, Danny Jones, Mark Newman, Michael Lachmann, Cristopher Moore, Jessica Flack, Robert Root Bernstein, Louis Pasteur, Alexander Fleming, Ruth Bernstein, Andres Gomez Emilsson, Diane Musho Hamilton
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe -
This week on Future Fossils, I meet with the wonderful Tim Adalin of Voicecraft. Watch us get to know each other a little bit better on a swapcast (his edit here) that throws a long loop around the world. Tim is precisely the kind of thoughtful investigator I love to encounter in conversation. Enjoy!
✨ Support This Work
• Buy my brain for hourly consulting or advisory work on retainer• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP
✨ Takeaways
* Wise innovation requires reconnecting with the purpose and mission of organizations and cultivating a field that allows for the ripening of ideas and contributions.
* The tension between exploration and exploitation is a key consideration in navigating large networks and organizations.
* Play, creativity, and the integration of holistic, playful, and noisy approaches are essential for innovation and problem-solving.
* Deep and authentic relationships are crucial for effective communication and understanding in a world of information overload.
* The need for wisdom to keep pace with technology is a pressing challenge in the modern world. Innovation is a crossroads between the need for integration and the obsession with novelty and productivity.
* Different types of innovation are needed, and movement in one dimension is not equivalent to movement in another.
* The erosion of values and the loss of context can occur when organizations prioritize innovation and novelty.
* A tripartite regulatory structure, consisting of industry, art/culture/academia, and government, is necessary to prevent the exploitation of power asymmetries.
* Small-scale governance processes and the importance of care and balance in innovation are key to a more sustainable and wise approach.
✨ Mentions
Alison Gopnik, Iain McGilchrist, Brian Arthur, Bruce Alderman, Andrew Dunn, Turquoise Sound, John Vervaeke, Naomi Klein, Erik Davis, Kevin Kelly, Mitch Mignano, Rimma Boshernitsan, Geoffrey West, Brian Enquist, Jim Brown, Elisa Mora, Chris Kempes, Manfred Laubichler, Annalee Newitz, Venkatesh Rao, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Nate Hagens, Yanis Varoufakis, Ferananda Ibarra, Josh Field, Michel Bauwens, John Pepper, Kevin Kelly, Gregory Landua, Sam Bowles, Wendy Carlin, Kevin Clark, Stuart Kauffman, Jordan Hall, William Irwin Thompson, Henry Andrews
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe -
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✨ About This Episode
How can we design virtuous technologies while acknowledging the complexity and unintended consequences of technological innovation?
How can we foster curiosity, playfulness, and wonder in a world increasingly dominated by anxiety and technological determinism?
This week on Future Fossils (as a teaser for the kind of conversations I am having for my upcoming spin-off Humans On The Loop), I meet with Stockholm-based transdisciplinary technologist, facilitator, complexity researcher, founder of The Psychedelic Society, and once upon a time the youngest-ever board member of Greenpeace UK, Stephen Reid to discuss the importance of taking a more values-driven approach to technology development. Stephen and I agree that it’s crucial to consider the potential consequences of technological advancements and to promote a more thoughtful approach to innovation…but for the sake of playing with tension, he places more of an emphasis on our capacity for axiological design whereas I feel more of a need to point out that the rapid evolution of technology can outpace our ability to predict its consequences, troubling efforts to design an enduringly sustainable future. One thing we agree on, and model in this episode, is the value of deeper conversations about the role of technology in society…and how to integrate their transformative potentials.
PS — I’m guest lecturing for Stephen’s upcoming four-week course on Technological Metamodernism soon, along with Alexander Beiner and Hanzi Freinacht and Ellie Hain and Rufus Pollock. We'll engage critically with ideas like Daniel Schmachtenberger's axiological design and Vitalik Buterin's d/acc. As usual I'm probably the odd duck in this lineup, going hard on epistemic humility and the injunction of digital media to effect a transformation of the modern self-authoring ego into networked, permeable, transjective sub-agencies arising spontaneously and fluidly from fundamentally noncomputable interactions of rapid information flows... Anyway, the point is we'd love to have you join us and sink your teeth into these discussions! I absolutely promise to bring up voting cyborg ecotopes. Big thanks to Stephen for inviting me to play!
PPS — Here is another really good, very different conversation between me and Stephen and Alistair Langer on Alistair’s show Catalyzing Radical Systems Change.
(Editorial Correction: It was Mike Tyson, not Muhammad Ali, who said "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.")
✨ Support This Work
• Hire me as a consultant or advisor• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Help me find backers for Humans On The Loop• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Join the conversation in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils Discord servers• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP
• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal
✨ Chapters
(0:00:00-0:10:29) Stephen's Background and Interests in Technology and Metamodernism (0:10:29-0:18:03) Navigating the Complex Relationship Between Technology and Human Values (0:18:03-0:25:18) The Limits of Axiological Design and the Importance of Community Oversight (0:25:18-0:34:29) Defining and Defending Axiological Design (0:34:29-0:45:03) Exploring Alternative Governance Structures: Guilds and Rites of Passage (0:45:03-0:56:36) Vitalik Buterin's "Defensive Decentralized Accelerationism" (0:56:36-1:06:04) Integrating Humor and Recognizing Irony in the Technosphere(1:06:04-1:12:17) Recovering Awe, Curiosity, and Playfulness in a Tech-Saturated World (1:12:17- 1:12:56) Finding Lightness in the Face of Existential Questions (1:12:56-1:13:28) Exploring The Future and A Call to Action
✨ Mentions
Iain McGilchrist, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Hanzi Freinacht, Josh Schrei, Ken Wilber, Vitalik Buterin, Bayo Akomolafe, Cory Doctorow, Nora Bateson, Dave Snowden, W. Brian Arthur, J. F. Martel, Stafford Beer, Rene Descartes, Bill Plotkin, Joe Edelman, Ellie Hain, Douglas Rushkoff, Robert Kegan, Aldous Huxley, Andrés Gomez Emilsson
✨ Select Related Episodes (also available as a Spotify playlist)
223 - Timothy Morton, 220 - Austin Wade-Smith219 - Joshua Schrei217 - Gregory Landua and Speaker John Ash214 - Megan Phipps, JF Martel, Phil Ford213 - Amber Case, Michael Zargham212 - Geoffrey West, Manfred Laubichler187 - Kevin Welch, David Hensley178 - Chris Ryan176 - Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, Sam Gandy174 - Evan Snyder172 - Tyson Yunkaporta166 - Anna Riedl165 - Kevin Kelly163 - Toby Kiers, Brandon Quittem141 - Nora Bateson122 - Magenta Ceiba109 - Bruce Damer094 - Mark Nelson086 - Onyx Ashanti080 - George Dvorsky076 - Technology as Psychedelic Parenting066 - John Danaher060 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens056 - Sophia Rokhlin051 - Daniel Schmachtenberger050 - Ayana Young042 - William Irwin Thompson017 - Tibet Sprague
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe -
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✨ About This Episode
If you’re wondering why this episode came later than I promised, well…look no further than the text and subtext of this very rich discussion: it ain’t easy being a scholar when your kids keep banging down the door. This week I speak with professional organizer, single mother, and badass independent public intellectual (in no specific order) Alyssa Allegretti (Website | Substack | Facebook) about making one’s way in the Wild West of the digital realm as someone balancing the seemingly-opposed responsibilities of parenthood and philosophy.
Herein we discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital age, particularly for those navigating non-traditional career paths, parenthood, and the search for authentic connection.
This conversation touches on the themes of invisible labor, particularly the often-unrecognized contributions of women and caregivers; the limitations of traditional institutions in recognizing and supporting diverse voices and lifestyles; and the importance of finding the sacred in the mundane aspects of daily life. We also grapple with the complexities of online communities, acknowledging both their potential for fostering connection and their tendency to amplify social divisions and reward performative behavior. Ultimately, my riffs with Alyssa underscore the importance of personal responsibility, self-awareness, and strong relationships in navigating the ever-evolving liminal zones of our metamorphic century.
Enjoy, and thanks for listening!
✨ Support This Work
• Buy my brain for hourly consulting or advisory work on retainer• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP
✨ Episode Breakdown (Provided by NotebookLM)
Chapter 1: Introductions and Invisible Labor (0:00:00-0:10:01)
Alyssa’s Background: Alyssa discusses her experience as a “Facebook Intellectual” and the limitations of traditional paths to intellectual and creative pursuits for women, particularly mothers.
Sacred Domesticity: Alyssa introduces her work, which focuses on “sacred domesticity,” viewing housekeeping and homemaking as a microcosm of larger social issues and a valuable space for personal growth.
Alyssa’s Work: Alyssa details her work as a professional organizer and house cleaner, emphasizing its therapeutic aspects, particularly for women and those struggling with executive functioning.
Chapter 2: Marginalized Voices and the Liminal Web (0:10:01-0:20:00)
Michael's Story: Michael shares his personal journey to becoming an independent scholar and the challenges of navigating financial instability while pursuing non-traditional intellectual work.
Value of Marginalized Perspectives: Both speakers acknowledge the unique insights offered by individuals outside traditional academic and professional structures.
The Liminal Web and Gender Imbalance: Alyssa recounts her experience with a perceived gender imbalance in online intellectual communities, using the “liminal web” as an example.
Chapter 3: Work-Life Integration and Alternative Spaces (0:20:00 - 0:30:00)
Motherhood and Intellectual Pursuits: Alyssa describes the difficulties of pursuing a career in intellectual fields as a young, single mother. She highlights the inherent unfriendliness of these spaces to parents and those with marginalized identities.
Alternative Solutions: Alyssa argues that viable solutions for work-life integration are emerging in female and queer-dominated spaces, like the coaching industry, that prioritize alternative education and self-employment.
Critique of Traditional Institutions: Alyssa critiques the inaccessibility of traditional academic institutions for individuals facing socioeconomic barriers, neurodiversity, and past trauma.
Chapter 4: The Sacred in the Mundane (0:30:00-0:40:00)
Domestic Realm and Personal Growth: Alyssa discusses the importance of recognizing the domestic realm as a legitimate space for personal growth and mental health support, regardless of gender.
Blurring Boundaries: Alyssa highlights her efforts to integrate her work life and home life, finding inspiration in the mundane aspects of parenting and domesticity.
Seeking Community and Authenticity: Alyssa expresses her grief over the separation between the “best parts of life” and her children. She desires more inclusive and accepting spaces where individuals can be their full selves.
Chapter 5: Intergenerational Knowledge and Societal Fragmentation (0:40:00 - 0:50:00)
Invisible Labor and Gender Roles: Alyssa and Michael discuss the concept of invisible labor, particularly within the context of traditional gender roles. They acknowledge the complexities and nuances of labor distribution in modern families.353637
Reconciling Parenthood and Personal Pursuits: Alyssa shares her personal approach to balancing her writing with the demands of motherhood, emphasizing the importance of presence and self-awareness.
The Loss of Intergenerational Transmission: Michael laments the fragmentation of families and the loss of intergenerational knowledge transfer due to the separation of work and family life.
Chapter 6: The Planetary Layer and Rethinking Community(0:50:00-1:00:00)
Online Communities as Extensions of Family: Michael discusses his transition away from generic online communities towards local groups, emphasizing the importance of grounded, real-world connections.
The Unhealthy Influence of Globalist Thinking: Michael critiques the tendency of globalist thinking to prioritize abstract ideals over the needs of individuals and communities.
The Trad Wife Phenomenon and the Moralization of Domesticity: Alyssa and Michael discuss the rise of the “trad wife” phenomenon and the dangers of romanticizing and commodifying domestic life.
Chapter 7: Embracing Imperfection and Domestic Liberation (1:00:00-1:10:00)
Domestic Liberation: Alyssa challenges listeners to envision “domestic liberation,” reclaiming home life from external pressures and embracing its inherent value.
Finding Inspiration in Imperfection: Alyssa acknowledges the limitations and imperfections inherent in both online and offline communities, advocating for a more compassionate and accepting approach to social change.
The Power of Difference: Alyssa believes that true social progress relies on acknowledging, accepting, and integrating differences, rather than striving for unattainable ideals.
Chapter 8: Vulnerability, Transparency, and Digital Identity (1:10:00-1:20:00)
The Paradox of Online Domesticity: The speakers discuss the paradoxical nature of online platforms like YouTube, where individuals are encouraged to commodify their family lives for financial gain.
Counter-Narratives and Authenticity: Alyssa highlights emerging counter-narratives in the online domesticity sphere that challenge the romanticized and idealized portrayals of home life.
Transparency as a Tool for Healing: Alyssa shares her personal experience with using online platforms to challenge societal expectations and de-stigmatize taboo subjects.
Chapter 9: Navigating the Digital Age with Children(1:20:00-1:30:00)
The Impact of Technology on Parenting: Michael and Alyssa discuss the challenges of navigating technology's influence on family life, particularly the potential dangers of online exposure for children.
Teaching Digital Literacy and Boundaries: Alyssa highlights the importance of teaching children digital literacy, helping them understand the complexities of online spaces, and setting healthy boundaries.
Modeling Self-Awareness and Responsibility: Alyssa emphasizes the need for parents to model self-awareness and responsibility in their own online interactions, demonstrating healthy ways to engage with digital spaces.
Chapter 10: Personal Responsibility and the Limits of Accountability (1:30:00-1:42:49)
The Burden of Being the “Reasonable Adult”: Michael and Alyssa discuss the emotional labor involved in maintaining composure and promoting healthy discourse in online spaces, particularly given the lack of external validation for such efforts.
Redefining Accountability in Relationships: Alyssa advocates for a shift from externally imposed accountability to personal responsibility, emphasizing the importance of surrounding oneself with individuals who prioritize self-awareness and growth.
Finding Sustainable Ways to Connect: Alyssa emphasizes the importance of strong friendships and chosen families in navigating the complexities of modern life and creating a more sustainable future.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe -
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✨ About This Episode
This week on Future Fossils we speak with Helané Wahbeh (LinkedIn), Director of Research at The Institute of Noetic Sciences, adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at Oregon Health & Science University, and author of over ninety peer-reviewed publications as well as the book The Science of Channeling. Our main course: a recent review in Frontiers of Psychology entitled, “What if consciousness is not an emergent property of the brain? Observational and empirical challenges to materialistic models”.
In this conversation we take a thirty-thousand foot view of the history and future of the science of consciousness, the socioeconomic impediments to unflinching consciousness research, and the overwhelming weight of transcultural experience that make this such a promising domain for fundamental investigation.
Enjoy, and thanks for listening!
✨ Support This Work
• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP
✨ Related Episodes
Dig into an extensive back catalog of consciousness-research-flavored episodes (psi phenomena, non-ordinary states, psychedelic neuroscience, oracular praxes, time and consciousness, etc.) at the Future Fossils Consciousness Research Spotify playlist or through the following Substack links:
03 Tony Vigorito05 Mitch Schultz20 Joanna Harcourt-Smith27 Niles Heckman and Rak Razam30 Becca Tarnas37 The Ungoogleable Michaelangelo45 Kerri Welch57 Conner Habib and Mitch Mignano58 Shane Mauss69 Tim Freke78 Archan Nair88 Dennis McKenna99 Erik Davis100 The Teafaerie103 Tricia Eastman112 Mitsuaki Chi113 Sean Esbjörn-Hargens117 Eric Wargo119 Jeremy Johnson124 Norman Katz125A Stuart Kauffman (patrons only)126 Phil Ford and J.F. Martel127 Cory Allen131 Jessica Nielson and Link Swanson132 Erik Davis150 Sean Esbjörn-Hargens156 Stuart Davis170 The Ungoogleable Michaelangelo171 Eric Wargo176 Sophie Strand and Richard Doyle and Sam Gandy179 Scout Wiley 186 Solo: A Manifesto for Weird Science218 Neil Theise222 Andrés Goméz Emilsson
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe -
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✨ About This Episode
The world is getting hotter, faster, stranger, and scarier every year. Species disappear each day, life-critical diversity replaced with media, consumer goods, capital, and trash. And yet…what do any of us feel inspired to do about it? Why has humankind thus far failed to wield its religions as an instrument for biospheric action? Reading the above probably generated more distress than motivation. Might Western civilization actually be better off reclaiming what the modern world felt it didn’t need — namely, the sacred? What if Christianity has ALWAYS at its core held teachings meant to stir up riotous love — the kind that gets us off our asses striving joyously to serve the living world we are?
Endlessly subversive author and Rice University Professor Timothy Morton (Twitter | Substack | Patreon | YouTube | Instagram) thinks so — and their new book Hell: In Search of A Christian Ecology argues eloquently for a weird and wonderful postmodern nondual Christianity in which we give up trying to run the place and realign ourselves with Life. Hell is a rousing and reviving work I underlined extensively, and our discussion traces and retraces Tim’s characteristically good-lurid and good-florid, stark-but-dreamy, mystically mundane, paradox-rich writing. We soar into romantic numinosity and dwell in body horrors, throw curtains open to pure light and celebrate the stains we can’t erase. Trigger warnings plenty, here — but one of them is that in the high-brow, low-brow oscillations you might find yourself awakened to the nature of your being-as-the-God-shaped-hole-in-everything.
I’ll let them introduce what is easily one of the most potent episodes this show has ever published:
“A wonderful three-dimensional podcast. Like, I can't thank you enough for wanting to go all the way around the mulberry bush and then into the mulberry bush and then outside the mulberry bush, then pulverize the mulberry bush into powder, send it around a particle accelerator, and watch the diffusion cloud chamber patterns as you compose another symphony using fractal geometry. I just love this.”
If that’s the kind of conversation you enjoy, then buckle up. Tim knows precisely the poetic mind-keys with which we can find The Garden in the flames of Hell itself, and Heaven in the sinful body of the Technocene.
Over the next two hours, we round the bases on a Greatest Hits of all my favorite topics, all of which appear in some sublime form in Tim’s wonderful new book. And we perform embroidery and exegesis of this anthem to raves and William Blake and AI and facing childhood trauma on the way to saving the biosphere from one of its own most deliciously sinful experiments (namely, civilization), we cover a kaleidoscopic swirl of topics such as:
• Making climate action (and America) cool again• Nonduality, convergent evolution, and the sacred as the feeling of biology• When teleology goes bad, then redeems itself through pluralism• Flipped gnosticism and dispensing with master/slave thinking• What deals with the devil teach us about how to wisely wield AI• “The Black Goo” as a science fiction trope and how it relates to…• How to make the best of living in Hell, aka social media• The Peacock Angel Melek Taus and having sympathy for the devil• Failure as comedy, sin as a blessing, thinking as a kind of failure mode• Evolution as a Christic promise of possibility better futures, and yet…• Why we shouldn’t use “emergentism” to solve “the meaning crisis”
We also pay dues to a totally prodigious list of inspirations.
As per our custom, those of you supporting the show have subsidized the extra time it takes for me to organize a thorough bibliography with links to the books, papers, films, TV shows, podcast episodes, and historical figures mentioned therein.
Thank you for listening and for your contributions!
✨ Support This Work
• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP
✨ Books & Articles
Hell: In Search of A Christian Ecologyby Timothy Morton
Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after The End of The Worldby Timothy Morton
Subscendenceby Timothy Morton
Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of The Noosphereby Richard Doyle
A Beginner’s Guide To Constructing The Universeby Michael S. Schneider
The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selectionby Charles Darwin
Liquid Modernityby Zygmunt Bauman
Hallucination Is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Modelsby Ziwei Xu, Sanjay Jain, Mohan Kankanhalli
Unweaving The Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and The Appetite for Wonderby Richard Dawkins
Simplification, Innateness, and the Absorption of Meaning from Context: How Novelty Arises from Gradual Network Evolutionby Adi Livnat
The Cloud of Unknowing by Anonymous
The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Usby Nicholas Carr
Present Shock: When Everything Happens Nowby Doug Rushkoff
At Home In The Universe: The Search for The Laws of Self-Organization and Complexityby Stuart Kauffman
Complexity and The Emergence of Physical Propertiesby Miguel Fuentes
The Return of the Black Madonna: A Sign of Our Times or How the Black Madonna Is Shaking Us Up for the Twenty-First Centuryby Matthew Fox
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissanceby Matthew Fox
Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Actionby J.F. Martel
✨ Podcast Episodes
SolPurpose Conversations 2 - Richard Doyle on The Cloud of Unknowing75 - David Krakauer on Thinking Interplanetary with The Santa Fe Institute132 - Erik Davis on Perturbations in the Reality Field174 - Evan Snyder on Sound Design for A Robotic Built Wilderness186 - A Manifesto for Weird Science194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The TechnosphereWeird Studies 101 - Our Fear of the Dark: On Tanizaki's 'In Praise of Shadows'
✨ Movies & TV Shows
AlienWestworldBlade RunnerHellraiserFriendsCurb Your EnthusiasmThe SimpsonsPrometheusThe ShiningAlien ResurrectionInterstellarThe Wizard of Oz
✨ Other People
William BlakeCarl Hayden Smith Jeffrey KripalKurt GödelGeorg CantorAlfred North WhiteheadBertrand RussellGerald Manley HopkinsKarl MarxSlavoj ŽižekGregory BatesonGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelPhilip K. DickE.F. SchumacherAnna HollandPhoebe PlummerFrancisco VarelaHumberto MaturanaJacques DerridaJohn MiltonJulian of NorwichDilgo Khyentse RinpocheJón GnarrChögyam Trungpa RinpocheMurray Gell-Mann
✨ Objects Of Note
QAnonGoogle GlassThe Sex PistolsCambridge Analytica
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Now also on YouTube!
In this episode we’re joined by Andrés Goméz Emilsson, President and Director of Research at the Qualia Research Institute (QRI), with whom we go deep on their computational approach to probe the mysteries of consciousness and the psychedelic experience — and thereby, perhaps, make the world a substantially happier place. Join us for an adventurous dialogue at the intersections of phenomenology, spirituality, and mathematics…with stops along the way to ask about the neurobiological construction of time’s arrow(s), the geometry of DMT space, and the ethical challenges of creating conscious computers. It’s a trip…!
00:00:00 Intro, Thanks, and News00:11:18 Dialogue Starts00:14:15 The Origins of Qualia Research Institute00:17:37 The Importance of Consciousness Research00:22:18 Phenomenology and Symmetry00:47:38 The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT00:54:12 Avoiding Dissonance in Psychedelic States00:56:09 Complexity, Music, and Cognitive Processing00:57:22 Future Shock and Technological Overwhelm01:04:28 Pharmacological Adaptations to Technology01:08:39 Temporal Perception and Psychedelics
✨ Support This Work:
• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon.• Help me pitch my next big projects Humans On The Loop & Jurassic Worlding.• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Server, the Future Fossils Server, and Future Fossils FB Group.• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Buy the music on Bandcamp — this episode features “You Don’t Have To Move” off The Age of Reunion & “Sonnet A” off Double-Edged Sword.• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org reading list.• Browse original paintings and prints or commission new work.
✨ Related Episodes:
212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West176 - Richard Doyle128, 165, 203 - Kevin Kelly99, 132, 140 - Erik Davis131 - Jessica Nielson & Link Swanson42, 43 - William Irwin Thompson111, 199 - Android Jones14, 52, 161 - Michael Philip57, 140, 153 - Mitch Mignano60, 113, 150 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens
✨ Mentioned:
QRI Research LineagesAndrés’ Noonautics Advisory Board BioThe Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences: Symmetries, Sheets, and Saddled ScenesThe Pseudo-Time ArrowNon-Ordinary States of Consciousness Contest: Psychedelic Cryptography (Innovate)Digital Sentience Requires Solving the Boundary ProblemQualia Mastery (Guided Meditations, Part 1 & 2)Principia Qualia by Michael Edward JohnsonThe Psychedelic Transhumanists: A Virtual Round Table Between Legends Living & Dead by Michael GarfieldOne Half A Manifesto by Jaron LanierJürgen Schmidhuber’s HomepageThe Peripheral (TV series adapting William Gibson)Toward A New Evolutionary Paradigm 1.0 by Michael GarfieldAn ‘Integrated Mess of Music Lovers’ in Science by Michael Garfield for SFIWestworld (TV series adaptation)
Sean McGowanMike JohnsonDavid PearceAndrew GallimoreJim O’ShaughnessyJulio TononiKarl FristonRobin Carhart-HarrisIlya PrigogineJaron LanierSteven LeharRupert SheldrakeWilliam GibsonJürgen SchmidhuberAlain GorielyDarren ZhuHugh EverettSean CarrollIsaac NewtonStephen WolframChris LangtonJames C. ScottH. P. LovecraftNoonautics
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“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.”– Terence McKenna
This week I meet our guest Tom Morgan (LinkedIn, Twitter) in mid-leap as we both make giant bids to meet our destiny and better serve the world. Tom Morgan, who calls himself a “curiosity sherpa” and writes the superb blog What’s Important, worked for years in finance while he grew increasingly compelled by transcendental mysteries. His blog reflects a rare appreciation for the edges of our knowledge and his reputation is for getting high-performing businesspeople to ask deeper questions. In this conversation we discuss complexity and higher intelligences, the heroic metamyth, the alchemy of money, love as an organizing principle in transrational cognition, and holding other people through their personal encounters with the so-called “meaning crisis.”
If this discussion does it for you, look below to find scores more potentially life-changing (certainly mind-altering) talks and essays we discussed therein…
✨ Support The Good Work
• Learn about my new project on wisdom and technology, Humans On The Loop!• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon.• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Server, the Future Fossils Server, and Future Fossils FB Group!• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Buy the music on Bandcamp! This episode features “Olympus Mons” off the Martian Arts & “Tin Heart” off Double-Edged Sword.• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers.• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work.• Read my pitch for Jurassic Worlding, my next book on the future of evolution!
✨ Mentioned Media
Looking Over The Edge – Tom Morgan
For The Person Who Has Everything – Tom Morgan
Adventure Capital: An Interview with Jim O'Shaughnessy – Tom Morgan
Heresies of The Heart – Tom Morgan
The Great Betrayal – Tom Morgan
Tom’s recent five-minute talk at the Sohn Investment Conference
Toward A New Evolutionary Paradigm 1.0 – Michael at SFI in 2019
Intimations Of A New Worldview – Brett Andersen
The Master and His Emissary – Iain McGilchrist
Cognition All The Way Down – Michael Levin and Daniel Dennett at Aeon Magazine
Animism Is Normative Consciousness – Josh Schrei on The Emerald Podcast
The Passion of The Western Mind – Richard Tarnas
Tech Ethics As Psychedelic Parenting – Michael at CBA Innovation Lab
Exodus as Revolution – William Irwin Thompson at the Lindisfarne Association
Picbreeder
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned – Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman
Proof of Spiritual Phenomena – Mona Sobhani
The Phenomenon: Control System, or Developmental Driver? – Stuart Davis
Meditations on Moloch – Slate Star Codex
Studies on Slack – Slate Star Codex
Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I. – Michael for Complexity Podcast
✨ Related Episodes:
212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere
202 - Caveat Magister on Psychomagic, Amusement Parks, & Turning Your Life Into Art
196 - Robert Poynton on Improvisation As A Way of Life
191 - Roland Harwood on Learning To Be Liminal
186 - A Manifesto for Weird Science
161 - On Play & Innovation with Michael Phillip: Hermes, EvoBio, Bitcoin, and Good Noise
150 - A Unifying Meta-Theory of UFOs & The Weird with Sean Esbjörn-Hargens
125 - Stuart Kauffman on Physics, Life, and The Adjacent Possible
60 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens Goes Meta on Everything: Integral Ecology & Impact
45 - Kerri Welch (Fractal Synchronicity & The Future of Time)
3 - Tony Vigorito (Synchronicity)
✨ Other Mentions:
William Irwin Thompson
Carl Jung
Joseph Campbell
Bill Plotkin
Dave Snowden & The Cynefin Framework
Stafford Beer
Frozen 2 (film)
The Matrix (films)
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This week I riff with Austin Wade Smith (they/them) — an animist, designer, ecologist, and creative technologist based in Brooklyn, New York and the Executive Director of Regen Foundation, a US-based non-profit working with distributed ledgers and AI to design sovereign regenerative economics. Austin’s work explores opportunities for social, legal, economic, and information technologies to foster greater interdependence between individuals and our living world. They teach design and engineering courses related to their research at universities in New York.
In this conversation we explore what Austin calls “a simple framework designed to expand the legibility of the ‘more than human world’ (such as ‘Nature’, Non-Humans, ‘More-than-Human Ecologies’, etc.) to various anthropogenic infrastructures and technologies, with the aim of increasing the ‘surface area’ through which non-humans directly exert influence on human-made systems.”
How can we make ecosystems more legible to the economic and political contexts in which they now exist?
Get ready for a conversation that up-ends conventional categories to hack open a new possibility space for human-machine symbiosis and technologically-assisted biospheric stewardship!
PS — I’m trying to launch a NEW podcast, Humans On The Loop, about how to use our new AI superpowers wisely. Here’s more info in case you’d like to help support this project or know someone who might!
✨ Relevant Links:
AustinWadeSmith.comTwitterLinkedInEssaysRegen Foundation“Legibility for Our Living World with Austin Wade Smith” on Ma Earth“Corporate Metabolism” by Xander Paco Nathan“The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone” by Cosma Shalizi
✨ Support This Show & The Family It Feeds:
• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes.• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Buy the music on Bandcamp! This episode features “Olympus Mons” off the Martian Arts EP.• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers.• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work.
✨ Select Related Episodes:
• 217 - Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash on Regenerative Accelerationism & How To Heal A Broken Internet• 215 - Social Science & Collective Intelligence with Brigham Adams of Goodly Labs• 213 - Amber Case & Michael Zargham on Entangled Technologies & Design As Governance• 212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere• 180 - Web3 & Complex Systems with Park Bach, Sid Shrivastava, Shirley Bekins, & Avel Guénin-Carlut at Complexity Weekend• 178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions• 176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit• 76 - "Technology as Psychedelic Parenting at Palenque Norte, Burning Man 2017
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This week marks the beginning of Embodied Ethics in The Age of A.I., a six-week online course led by writer and teacher Joshua Schrei, host of The Emerald Podcast. This course is, in large part, inspired by an episode he wrote last year called “So You Want To Be A Sorcerer in The Age of Mythic Powers” — exploring the mythic dimensions of tech innovation and calling for a reclamation of initiatic mystery schools in order to provide us with the requisite self-mastery to wield tools like generative language models. I’m honored to be part of the all-star crew lined up to co-facilitate this course and as part of our pre-game sync and prep, I met with Josh to talk about the forces we’ve unleashed and how to live responsibly in a world where tech is, in Arthur C. Clarke’s words, now undoubtedly “indistinguishable from magic.” We explore the need to pace ourselves and anchor novelty production in ecologies of accountability; what it means to raise kids well amidst the A.I. revolution; and why humans cannot seem to stop invoking power and powers greater than our understanding.
If you enjoy this conversation, join us — and several dozen other awesome people — from 4/18-5/16 to learn and grow together and answer the call to better ourselves in service of this great historical unfolding!
(Big big thanks to former Center for Humane Technology Innovation Lead Andrew Dunn, founder of The School of Wise Innovation, for everything you’ve done to help inspire and organize all of this…)
✨ Support This Show & The Family It Feeds:
• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the music on Bandcamp. This episode features:
Tålmodighed (from Live at The Chillout Gardens, Boom Festival 2016)Gamma Pavonis (from Pavo: Music For Mystery)The Cartographers (from Get Used To Being Everything)• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work
✨ Mentioned & Related Links:
“Modern culture is ‘ahead of the one.’ Modern culture is rushing to get somewhere.”
* Josh Schrei on Howl In The Wilderness Podcast Episode 120
Sam Arbesman’s Cabinet of Wonders
Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky
Rick Rubin and Dan Carlin discuss magic
Michael Garfield w/ host Kiki Sanford on This Week In Science Episode 965
“Information overload is a personal and societal danger” by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr
Future Fossils 172 - Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Systems Thinking, Fractal Governance, Ontopunk, and Queering W.E.I.R.D. Modernity
Center for Humane Technology
The Age of Em by Robin Hanson
“Scan Lovers” from How to Live in The Future by Michael Garfield at Boom Festival 2016
Wisdom 2.0 Summit
”The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” by Marc Andreessen
Iron John by Robert Bly
“The Model Isn’t The Territory, Either” by Douglas Rushkoff
Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of The Noosphere by Richard Doyle
“Chief Philosophy Officer” by Peter Limberg
“The Next Tech Backlash Will Be About Hygiene” by Jonnie Penn at TIME Magazine
Douglas Rushkoff at Betaworks in 2023: “I Will Not Be Automated”
Zohar Atkins (Website, Twitter)
My comments on “Hallucination Is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models” by Xu, et al.
“For The Intuitives” (Part 1, Part 2) on The Emerald Podcast
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I’m honored to share a profound and soulful conversation on science and spirituality with Neil Theise, professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, discoverer of a new human organ (the interstitium), lifelong Zen meditator, and author of the superb book, Notes on Complexity.
✨ Mentioned & Related Links:
Embodied Ethics in The Age of AIComplexity, Culture & Consciousness - a Minds.com panel discussion with Neil Theise, Erik Davis, Michael Garfield, Richard Doyle, and Mitch Mignano hosted by Bill OttmanThe Golden Oecumene (trilogy)by John C. WrightThe End of Burnout by Jonathan MalesicTom Morgan - What Is Important?Divining The World with Joshua Ramey - Weird Studies 22Darwin’s Pharmacy by Richard DoyleScience and Nonduality ConferenceJane Prophet & Gordon Selley - Technosphere (1, 2, 3)”The King Is Dead, Long Live The King: Festivals, Science, & Economies of Scale” by Michael GarfieldThe New Yorker on Cormac McCarthy & Mathematical Platonism”Multiverses, Nihilism, and How it Feels to be Alive Right Now” by Like Stories of OldComplexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos by Roger LewinEmergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson
✨ Support The Show:
• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the music on Bandcamp• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work
✨ Related FF Episodes:
14 - WESTWORLD Problems (feat. Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops)42 - William Irwin Thompson, Part 1 (Thinking Together at the Edge of History)65 - John David Ebert (Hypermodernity & Blade Runner 2049)125 - Stuart Kauffman on Physics, Life, and The Adjacent Possible172 - Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Systems Thinking, Fractal Governance, Ontopunk, and Queering W.E.I.R.D. Modernity176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere
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If you care about this show as a public good, consider signing up on Substack or Patreon today for bonus episodes, live calls, and more — or at least mash “subscribe” on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star review. The unborn future archaeologists who find these episodes inscribed in DNA will thank you!
Today I welcome you to join me for a long-awaited trialogue with two of the most thoughtful people I know: Gregory Landua, co-founder of Regen Network (and CEO of Regen Network Dev PBC), a project to bend finance and computing back into service of regenerative land stewardship, and Speaker John Ash, a machine learning engineer and artist/musician who walked away from his fintech job in 2017 in protest of the profit motive to build a democratic language model named Iris based on Cognicism, a new framework for collaboration rooted in shared wisdom.
Gregory and John are two of the most prominent and articulate advocates in my network for a third way beyond starry-eyed technoutopianism and desperate doomer thinking. Neither of them pull any punches when it comes to their cutting critiques of extractive capitalism and its capture of both sustainability discourse and potentially emancipatory new information technologies. But both recognize, as I do, that with a deeper and more fundamental understanding of the nature of trust, money, technology, and value that humankind is fully capable of a socioeconomic transformation that could empower us to make every transaction serve our collective well-being.
It took me a while to come around to believing in the notion that AI and Web3 could actually heal the damage we’re doing to the biosphere, and even now I acknowledge that tools, like people, tend toward the production of harmful externalities when embedded in structurally unjust systems. But as I discussed with evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler and physicist Geoffrey West back in episode 212, not all innovation is created equal — and we may be on the cusp of a psychological and cultural reformation that opens up new paths to sanity and right relations. And it’s well past time for us to move beyond a “nature good, tech bad” or “tech good, nature bad” duality — both sides come from the same flaw in comprehension that allows us to believe we can escape our natural limits, or that self-destruction will allow us to escape our duties as the steward-servants of our living world.
Enjoy this soulful and provocative discussion!
✨ Mentioned & Related Links:
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David WengrowUSGS on climate change and monsoons in the US SWEarlier recording of Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash in dialogueGregory Landua on Kevin Owocki’s Green Pill PodcastMG on “value creation” as the export of externalitiesSpeaker John Ash on CognicismSpeaker John Ash on Cognition & ConflictSpeaker John Ash on SpotifyAn Oral History of The End of “Reality” by MGAccelerando by Charles StrossGlasshouse by Charles StrossRapture of the Nerds by Charles Stross & Cory Doctorow
✨ Support The Show:
• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the music (intro/outro: “Olympus Mons” & “Sonnet A”; episode codas “Transparent” & “Signal”) on Bandcamp• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work
✨ Related FF Episodes:
213 - Amber Case & Michael Zargham on Entangled Technologies & Design As Governance206 - Scout Rainer Wiley on AI vs. BS Jobs, The Return of Culture, and Eldritch Wonders in The Bright Apocalypse193 - Kimberly Dill on Environmental Philosophy: In Defense of Wildness & Night181 - Jim Rutt on The Pre- and Post-History of GameB178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit163 - Bitcoin & Fungal Economies with Toby Kiers & Brandon Quittem146 - Raising Earth Consciousness with Ralph Metzner, Dennis McKenna, Gay Dillingham, Valerie Plame Wilson, Allan Badiner, and Michael Garfield at Synergia Ranch, April 2016141 - Nora Bateson on Warm Data vs. The Cold Equations133 - Brian Swimme on Telling A New Story of Our Universe122 - Magenta Ceiba on Regenerative Everything94 - Mark Nelson on Ecotechnics & Biosphere 2 (Part 1)61 - Jamaica Stevens (On Crisis, Rebirth, Transformation)60 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens Goes Meta on Everything: Integral Ecology & Impact56 - Sophia Rokhlin (Anarchy, Ecology, Economy, and Shamanism)51 - Daniel Schmachtenberger (Designing A Win-Win World for Everyone)
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This week I speak with Jingmai O’Connor (Staff Page | Instagram), Associate Curator of Fossil Reptiles (a.k.a. Priestess of Dead Dino-Birds) at The Field Museum in Chicago, about the magnificent strangeness of Mesozoic flying reptiles, the perverse anthropology of paleontologists, and much else. Contrary to expectations for a show with “fossils” in its title, I don’t ordinarily interview people who actually dig up prehistoric creatures, but as I make perhaps too obvious in this enthusiastic get-to-know-each-other session, I still care deeply for the treasured mysteries that lie in store beneath our feet and love the people who devote their lives to studying the ancient biosphere — even if the system’s crooked and we fight about as much as dinosaurs themselves.
Here’s to Jingmai and her singular life and mind! Do yourself a favor and acquire her book When Dinosaurs Conquered The Skies, truly a treat for all ages, and then if you want to leap like Microraptor into the thicket of her publications you can scope her work on Google Scholar. (And shout out to her friends Rextooth, who do in fact make awesome dino comics.)
✨ Support The Show:
• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes!• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Buy the music of Future Fossils (in this episode: “Olympus Mons” & “Sonnet A”) on Bandcamp.• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I’ll get a cut.• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work!
✨ PLUS! New Single & Music Video “Indecision” from The Age of Reunion
Listen on Bandcamp/Spotify or Watch on YouTube/Instagram.
This one's a Jon-Brion-inspired riff on the phenomenology of near-death experiences and the neurophysiology of 5MEO-DMT, a quick trip up above the plane of normal waking life to see the panoply of possibility exfoliating from the Godhead in each moment. How do you choose your next life? (Trick question.)
Join my small but gorgeous mob by preordering the entire album at Bandcamp (or subscribe on Substack/Patreon to have it all at once right now), and then go talk to integrate your experience with Daniel Shankin.
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This week I speak with social scientist Nicholas Brigham Adams (Twitter, LinkedIn) about his work at Goodly Labs to create new infrastructure for collective intelligence — new systems for collective fact-checking and sense-making that can help us rise to the occasion of our inherently social, planet-scale challenges. And the time for this work is definitely NOW. As paths across social, economic, and ecological networks continue to shrink due to the increasing connectivity of technological systems, humankind migrates from an Earth on which most events seem impossibly distant and irrelevant to an Earth defined by nonlinear, often exponential impacts of seemingly-trivial developments anywhere on the planet. This is the century — and the decade — in which many of us have no choice but to learn, the easy way or the hard way, the consequences of our increasing vulnerability to and power over one another. And one of the places this is most vividly apparent is in how truths and untruths ripple at unprecedented speeds across the globe, forcing us into a new and intense cosmopolitanism. In the 1940s, the message was “Loose lips sink ships.” Perhaps the message for the 2020s is “Cognitive biases spread mind viruses.”
If you’ve followed me for a while, you’ve likely read my 2017 science fiction short story “An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’”, a peek into our present-day post-truth carnival funhouse where AI-assisted forgeries demand vastly more nuanced and sophisticated methods for navigating fundamental uncertainty, far greater humility about our validity claims, and revolutionary tools for thinking together. We have to learn to communicate the degree and dimension of our confidence and of our doubt — to learn how we can rigorously restore the trust necessary for coordination at scale — and Goodly Labs is, in my opinion, one of the most promising efforts in the world right now in this regard. 2024 is very likely to feel like the end of reality for a lot of us, and the stakes are immense: fair presidential elections, concerted ecological action, and effective AI steering policy are all domains of existential risk in which we MUST be able to reconstruct some kind of minimally viable consensus reality. I’d be considerably more worried for our future if I did not know that there are people like Brigham Adams and his amazing team of academics, founders, engineers, and journalists tilting their spears directly at this issue and working around the clock to help midwife that Holy Grail of communications technology: a sane and healthy global brain.
Announcement: The Future Fossils Book Club is back! Join me for to discuss Iron John: A Book About Men by Robert Bly on Saturday 27 January and Saturday 10 February from 12p-2p MST. I’ll send Substack and Patreon supporters the link to both calls soon, and there will be a dedicated private discussion channel in the Discord server.
✨ Mostly-Complete List of Citations:
Study: On Twitter, false news travels faster than true stories (MIT News)LOGIN 2009 keynote: gaming in the world of 2030 by Charles Stross (transcript)Ready Player One by Ernst ClineThe meaning of life in a world without work by Yuval Noah Harari (read at web.archive.org or 12ft.io)Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel KahnemanMotivated Numeracy and The Politics-ridden Brain by Stuff To Blow Your Mind (podcast)Coming Into Being by William Irwin ThompsonExplosive Proofs of Mathematical Truths by Simon DeDeo (lecture video)Stewardship of global collective behavior by Joseph Bak-Coleman et al. (paper)OpenAI's anarchist science chief is a techno-spiritual culthead (Athenil)So You Want To Be A Sorceror In The Age of Mythic Powers by Josh Schrei (podcast)Saul PerlmutterOccupy MovementJamie JoyceLynn MargulisDouglas EngelbartAlexander BeinerDouglas RushkoffSteve JobsStewart BrandW. Brian ArthurJim RuttSense8 (television series)
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