What Is Agency?

Jim talks with Bobby Azarian about the ideas in his new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity, which Jim calls "the most Jim Rutt Show-ish book ever"... Jim talks with Bobby Azarian about the ideas in his new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity, which Jim calls "the most Jim Rutt Show-ish book ever." They discuss the meaning & limits of reductionism, why the universe may not be moving toward an increasingly disordered state, life as a channel for dissipating energy, dissipative adaptation, self-organization as Darwinian process, the Fermi paradox, an evolutionary arms race of complexity, biology as knowledge creation, the emergence of agency, the Bayesian Brain Hypothesis, how symbolic thought opens up design space, the probability of complex life, teleology at local & universal scales, Teilhard de Chardin's omega point, global workspace theory, phenomenal vs access consciousness, whether the internet is a global brain, applying the weak & strong anthropic principle to multiverse theory, cosmological natural selection, life as central to reality, and much more. Episode Transcript The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity, by Bobby Azarian JRS EP 157 - Terrence Deacon on Mind's Emergence From Matter JRS EP 105 - Christof Koch on Consciousness JRS EP 18 - Stuart Kauffman on Complexity, Biology & T.A.P. JRS EP 116 - Doug Erwin on the Cambrian Explosion At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, by Stuart Kauffman The Phenomenon of Man, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, by John Barrow & Frank Tipler JRS EP 108 - Bernard Baars on Consciousness JRS EP 5 - Lee Smolin – Quantum Foundations and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution Bobby Azarian is a science journalist and a cognitive neuroscientist with a PhD from the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University. He has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, Scientific American, BBC, Slate, and Aeon. His blog Mind in the Machine hosted by Psychology Today has over 8 million views. He worked on the Emmy-nominated show Mind Field, and he is the author of the new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself To Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity.