Bobby Azarian joins Brendan to discuss his new book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity. In the first half of their conversation, Bobby presents the new cosmic narrative offered by the complexity sciences. Unlike the older, reductionist account, this is a story in which life is inevitable and part of a broader cosmic design towards greater and greater knowledge creation. Beginning with the laws of thermodynamics, Bobby recounts the emergence of order out of (and by means of) chaos; the emergence of life out of ordered structures; and the emergence of consciousness out of life. In the second part of the conversation, the two speculate on the broader significance and meaning of this new cosmic narrative. Have we only seen the beginning of the Universe's waking up? Why does the Universe appear fine-tuned for its own coming to consciousness? How do these ideas relate to religion and purpose?

0:00 Introduction

PART I: The Narrative

5:40 Entropy, Energy, and Order out of Chaos

11:47 Order for Entropy, or Entropy for Order?

18:15 The Inevitability of Life

23:00 Reductionism or Creationism? A Third Option

40:40 Evolution, (Self-)Knowledge, and Consciousness

PART II: Implications & Speculations

1:00:11 The Emergence of a Cosmic Mind

1:08:36 Modernist Transhumanism or Metamodernist Spirituality?

1:18:18 What Set Up a Self-Organizing Universe?

--- 1:21:07 A Multiverse Explanation?

--- 1:24:34 Cosmological Natural Selection?

--- 1:29:00 An Intelligent Programmer (AKA "God")?

--- 1:44:48 Cosmic Mind Creating Cosmic Mind?

--- 1:47:21 The Fall of Consciousness into Unconsciousness, and Its Return to Self-Knowledge

1:51:28 Final Thoughts

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