Humans On The Loop

This week’s guest is living legend, transdisciplinary scientist-philosopher Stuart Kauffman, whose pioneering work on self-organization and the emergence of order helped launch the field of complex systems science and has brought us to the very edge of understanding the origins and nature of life. Over his 50+ year career and six books, including this year’s The World Beyond Physics, Stu has done more than almost anyone to restore the historic union of science and philosophy, articulating a new spirituality for our secular age of systems thinking, and filing numerous patents on technologies of chemical synthesis and quantum mechanics.It's an epic conversation with a bold and boundary-less mind. In this episode we drive right to the heart of one of humankind’s biggest and most persistent mysteries: What is life?Stuart Kauffman’s EXTENSIVE & ILLUMINATING Google Scholar Page:https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=yoPM0F8AAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdateThis week’s vocabulary word: “ergodic”https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ergodicBecome a Patreon supporter to listen to Part 2 of this conversation, on quantum physics and consciousness:http://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldWe Discuss:the adjacent possiblethe origins of lifeniche construction & niche propagation (which i initially conflate, but he re-differentiates)exaptationthe incomputability of the list of all possible uses of a thingwhy are there hearts in the universe?“the universe is non-ergodic and most complex things will never exist”“there are no laws whatsoever for the evolution of the biosphere”contingent, or inevitable? enabled, or caused?the economy creates the possibilities into which it is suckedTerence McKenna’s strange attractor at the end of timeconstraint closure and the release of energy in fewer degrees of freedomabiogenesis and the protocell as a model of its environmentare there constraints without work?the number of cell types in an organism is roughly the square root of the number of genes“information is precisely the release of energy into fewer degrees of freedom”Paul Davies & Sara Imari WalkerJohnjoe McFaddenGiuseppe Longothe system will spend more time in macrostates in which there are more microstates (Boltzmann)Supplemental Materials:Stuart Kauffman’s essay, “No entailing laws, but enablement in the evolution of the biosphere”https://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2069.pdf;alsoseeGiuseppeLongoStu’s co-author Wim Hordijk on autocatalysis at Orbiter Mag:https://orbitermag.com/how-did-life-begin-part-3/Michael’s essay, “The Future is Exapted/Remixed”https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/how-to-live-in-the-future-part-4-the-future-is-exapted-remixed-35ea5ca9d877Michael’s extensive notes on the ideas of this episode, “Toward A New Evolutionary Paradigm”https://www.patreon.com/posts/toward-new-1-0-24798022Original intro music by Michael Garfield, “Birds Waking Up In Trees”https://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/love-scenes-field-recordingsShow outro music by Evan “Skytree” Snyder feat. Michael Garfield, “God Detector”https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfield Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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’s guest is Norman Katz, aka Dr. Blue – a lifelong practitioner of hypnotherapy and the impresario of 3SidedWhole, nine acres of magical weirdness in the desert outside Albuquerque, New Mexico. I’ve known Dr. Blue for nearly a decade and he’s deeply enriched my life over the years with his amazing stories, empowering mind hacks, and community of soulful southwestern weirdos. In this episode, he regales us with stories of psychological research into UFOs, past lives, fractals, and flow states; the history of hypnosis, his study under hypnotherapy pioneer Milton Erickson, the psychophysiology of laughter yoga, and – more broadly – the importance, and the surprising ease, of choosing the trance you want to be in…Dr. Blue’s Website:http://www.normankatzphd.com/curricula-vitae.html3SidedWhole Website:http://www.3sidedwhole.com/“We were doing LSD as the patient and the therapist simultaneously…it was quite interesting.”“There still is no study that verifies that hypnosis is a particular brain state or neurological constellation. Hypnosis is not a brain state. It turns out to be a skill and an aptitude that’s based on combining attention, and fantasy, and a predilection for dissociation.”“Our perception of reality is at least half constructed by what we expect, what we imagine, and what we pretend. In fact, it’s really hard to teach people new things, because most of the time they’re trying to match new things to their old models.”“It was the only lecture I’ve ever seen where 300 psychotherapists stood up afterward an gave him a standing ovation. And his theory was, bascially, individual psychotherapy is not only ineffective, it’s wrong, and it disconnects people from their community. He said, the biggest mistake in Western Civilization was when Descartes said, ‘Cognito ergo sum,’ ‘I think, therefore I am.’ And what he should have said was, ‘Convivo ergo sum.’ ‘I celebrate in community, therefore I am.’”“At any point in time, ask yourself this question: ‘If I had been hypnotized to be doing what I’m doing right now and having this experience, what would I have been told?’”“Erickson used to tell his students, ‘Pretend, and pretend you’re not pretending.’”“In the West, most people breathe too much.”“I had a formal psychology training at Harvard. Most of that turned out to be nonsense. Learn to unlearn. Learn to forget. Learn to be innocent. Let yourself continue to reinvent yourself and discover who you are, because you are more than any of us think you are.”Support this show on Patreon to join the book club and for secret episodes:https://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldIntro Music: “Undefeatable Optimism Gets Up From K.O.” by Michael Garfieldhttps://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/love-scenes-field-recordingsOutro Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield)https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfieldAppendix: 51 blackbelt hypnosis skills, a partial list of course (the master skill is to perceive a coherent reality in one frame ignoring the 27 other timelines)instant time travel, to past, present and future. multiple timeline realities possible like in string theory in quantum physicshumor, ability to tell self joke and beginning laughing, and see humor and paradox in all situationsincreased creativity as needed, transcend functional fixedness, and create new uses for objects, tools, situations ability to reframe anythingability to create synthesis to create positive action altered states of consciousnessability to make pain disappearability to increase pleasure to ecstatic levelsability to shift mood instantly ability to tap into higher consciousness, both neurologically and to source (the universe)ability to become WISE without thinking (i.e. go into no trance trance in which wisdom flows)abilities to see life as movie within movie within movies and change the storiesability to profoundly relax and melt, both physically and mentallyto be comfortable both inside and outside shared realitiesability to balance two nervous systems, sympathetic and parasympathetic, i.e. hypno-autogenics masterability to come out of shell and act immediately, go fast or slowability to tell stories within stories within stories with threaded key meanings or conceptsability to create useful symptoms as necessary e.g. lust for reading certain materials, exercise, etc.ability to create amnesia or hyper recall memory (memory palace)ability to be in the now in slow motionability to enter mystical states of oneness or everything-ness and transition through the infinity loopability to create and radiate happiness, joy and energyability to avoid the DARK SIDE of hypnotic hexes, vengeance or negative energy and to recognize when others are doing such and interveneability to do hypnotic shamanic ceremonies to invoke sacred spaceability to intervene in disease or create diseaseability to discern the "truth" or "lies" of self and others trance stateshypnotic protection of self and others, use of attention filterssensory awareness enhancement (Charlotte Selver) both internal and externalmastering use of breathingpeak performance, for self and others – golf example, 2 holes in one in a rowability to direct and choose trances for self and others (magic number in psychology 87 plus or minus two)ability to completely let goability to experience and create compassion through mirror neuronsability to alter blood blow: for healing work, pain control, sex therapyability to have too much funability to create and use posthypnotic suggestion for self and othersability to create health through medical interventions for surgery,psychoimmunology and general well beingability to will to live and to enjoy lifeability to find meaning and purpose in any situation, circumstances, and life challengeability to control altered states of consciousness both from plant guides, extreme circumstances and as training and for emergency interventionsability to tap into special energiesability to erase self and know nothing and be the foolability to deal with death, dying, and transitionsability to hallucinate and now what is not real simultaneouslyability for extreme selective attentionability to shift identity, archetypes AND PERSONALITY CONSTELLLATIONSability to deal with change, both small and largeability for discernment: what to pay attention and listen toability to keep evolvingability to recognize that we not are the healing force, only the gatewaysability to have supreme confidenceability to balanceability to recognize synchronicity and act on itability to shift energy, both physically, metaphysically and also medicallyability to recognize when less is more (homeopathy) – see Andrew Weil, The Marriage of the Sun and Moonability to see through culture and its assumptions in different culturesability to contact the ancestors and invite their presence and wisdomability contact DNA wisdom and ancestral memoriesability to do fractal healingability to stay open and curious(note this does not include classic hypnosis suggestions on the Stanford hypnosis scales, which are elementary) Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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 we’re joined by David Weinberger, Senior Researcher at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Technology exploring the effects of technology on how we think. David’s led a fascinating and nonlinear life, studying Heiddeger as a young philosopher, working in marketing for high technology, working as a journalist, and authoring four books on technology, creativity, and knowledge. His new book, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We're Thriving in a New World of Possibility, explores what changes for us in the age of machine learning.I have to admit, I was worried this was going to be just another technocratic puff piece when I started. Certainly it’s a Harvard Business Review Press volume, speaking largely to a business audience; but this is a book that doesn’t flinch at the weirdness of a world in which we know things we don’t know how we know. David’s argument is for a creative embrace of the complexity and mystery that has always surrounded us – that we are in fact made of – and that is becoming much more obvious in light of superhuman but opaque machine intelligences that rehab us from the delusions of our modern pretense that the world is knowable, transparent, and controllable. But unlike the doomsayers of the AI conversation, David has an enviable peace about the fact that we never actually had a lock on what is really going on – and argues eloquently for a fresh encounter with a world of wonder, possibility, and the unknown.David at Harvard:https://cyber.harvard.edu/people/dweinbergerDavid on Medium (“Machine Learning Might Render The Human Quest for Knowledge Pointless”):https://onezero.medium.com/machine-learning-might-render-the-human-quest-for-knowledge-pointless-5425f8b00a45With open APIs, open access journals, game modding, and other empowering information technologies, we are purposefully making the world less predictable.Laws are not necessarily the most accurate way of describing reality.The death knell for the theory of everything - letting go of unifying universal frameworks.“It’s not really a three-body problem. It’s an every-body problem, because everything with gravity effects everything else.”“Everything - EVERYTHING in our lives we basically don’t know, and can’t predict. But the picture of our lives has been, until recently, ‘It’s simple and law-like.’ The chaos, this is our lives. The laws, they are real, they are helpful, but they don’t govern as much as we like to think.”“We think out in the world with tools. There’s no shame in this, but it does mean we’re not locked in our own heads. And now we have new tools.”“…it depends on what you count as an explanation.”“We need to leave room for the accidental, because that is the stuff of our lives.”“I don’t know what a transparent algorithm is.”Are we willing to trade a thousand auto deaths a year for the explicability of autonomous vehicle safety algorithms? Or fuel efficiency?“An explanation is a tool. It’s not a state of the world.”• Relatedly, we just read Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem in the Future Fossils Book Club:https://www.patreon.com/posts/book-club-3-body-29353389?cid=26063131• Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield).• Additional Music: “Single & Feeling” by Michael Garfield. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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’s guest is Magenta Ceiba, Executive Creative Officer (ECO) for the Bloom Network, a worldwide constellation of regenerative design hackers working in ecology, economics, civil engineering, software design, restorative justice, organizational development, and more. Bloom is hosting Pollination, an “unconference” or immersive in-person hack-a-thon, this coming weekend in San Francisco – a place for this amazing extended international network (including you, potentially) to convene for design sprints for new practices and systems to restore the health and value of our world.I hope you’ll treat this episode as a gateway into an amazing profusion of awesome ideas and people, just the very tip of a very deep and well-furnished rabbithole.Here are some leads to get you started: • See the Pollination 2019 program on Bloom Network’s website.(If you have friends in the Bay Area who might like to come, here’s a promo code for a $50 discount: BLOOM50 so they can join for just $195. The Bloom Network also has low income/scholarship tickets available: please fill in the form here. I am not an affiliate and get no reward from this, other than knowing that you attended and got to participate.)• Magenta’s personal website.• Another excellent conversation with Magenta (plus copious resource links) at Abundant Edge Podcast.• Mark Heley interviews Pollination 2019 MC (and Future Fossils guest) Maya Zuckerman.These three quotes came in Rob Breszny’s email newsletter today and couldn’t be more appropriate:“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”—Buckminster Fuller“We have to encourage the future we want rather than trying to prevent the future we fear.”—Bill Joy“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”—Dan MillmanRelated Episodes:• Episode 46 - Magenta Ceiba’s first appearance on Future Fossils.• Episode 56 - Sophia Rohklin on the inter-relationship of ecology & economy.• Episode 61 - Jamaica Stevens on crisis, rebirth, and transformation.• Episode 98 - Decentralization Panel at Arcosanti w/ members of NuMundo Project, Unify, & The Institute of Ecotechnics.Credits:• Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield).• Additional Music: “Single & Feeling” by Michael Garfield.• Episode Cover Image: Concept Art for The Fifth Sacred Thing by Jessica Perlstein. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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 we dive into the troublesome, urgent, and underdiscussed issue of space ethics with planetary scientist and artist Divya M. Persaud. Can we transcend the traumatic conflict and exploitation that characterize human history, come together in compassionate mutual understanding and respectful discourse, and leave our children with better and more interesting problems? Or are we doomed to transmit the legacy of violence we inherited into fractured futures even more disparate, tragic, and unequal than our own time? A deep dive into the real stakes of space, and a preliminary exposition of the ethical discussions we will need to get there…Divya’s Website:https://divyampersaud.wordpress.com/about/Selected Writings:https://phdvolcanology.wordpress.com/2018/10/08/space-and-time-for-diversity/https://womeninastronomy.blogspot.com/2018/02/talking-about-tesla-by-emily-lakdawalla.htmlhttps://twitter.com/Divya_M_P/status/1080310839465467909Intro Music: Evan “Skytree” Snyder feat. Michael Garfield, “God Detector”https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfieldOutro Music: Divya M. Persaud, “Orogenesis” for Voice, Violin, Saxophone, and Pianohttps://soundcloud.com/divyamp/orogenesis-for-voice-violin-saxophone-and-piano`Additional reading on the ethics of space exploration:https://www.bmsis.org/the-ethics-of-space-exploration/https://theconversation.com/eight-ethical-questions-about-exploring-outer-space-that-need-answers-98878https://www.scu.edu/ethics/focus-areas/bioethics/resources/articles/articles-on-the-ethics-of-space-exploration/https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/conferences/2017-business-and-economics-of-space/Documents/John%20Rummel.pdfSupport Future Fossils on Patreon to get access to our science fiction book club calls, secret episodes, and more:https://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldJoin the daily conversation in the Future Fossils facebook group:https://facebook.com/groups/futurefossils  Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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 we surf the fun-gularity with the brilliant artist, standup comic, and podcaster Ramin Nazer! This episode is significantly less a heady philosophy-of-science discussion than usual and significantly more a wank-fest of two people who love each other’s shows going on about all the mind-blowing visionary notions contained therein. Kick back, light some incense, and prepare for a juicy conversation about where we stand in the Cosmic Order and what to do with all of our creative possibility…covering everything from universal basic income to celebrity schadenfruede, visionary art and science fiction to to the psychological impact of trying to stay original in the midst of a tech singularity. If you’re anything like I am, Ramin is going to inspire the hell out of you. Enjoy…Ramin’s Website:https://rainbowbrainskull.com/collections/printsMichael on Ramin’s podcast, Rainbow Brainskull:https://www.raminnazer.com/blogs/rainbow-brainskull-hour/michael-garfieldMentioned:Archan Nair, The Teafaerie, Nikola Tesla, Onyx Ashanti, King Raam, The Rock, Andrew Yang, Yuval Harari, Bill Gates, Star Trek Discovery, Charles Stross’ Accelerando & Glasshouse, Black Mirror, Esperanza Spalding, Duncan Trussell, Richard Florida, Jeff Bezos, William Irwin Thompson, Terence McKenna, John C. Wright’s Eschaton Sequence, Peter Watts’ Blindsight, Eric Wargo’s Time Loops, Colin Frangicetto, Who Built The Moon?, No Man’s Sky, An Oral History of the End of Reality, Ariana Grande, Jimi Hendrix, Amazon Alexa, Life in the Glass Age at Burning Man 2013, Dadara (Daniel Rozenberg), The Mirage Men, Jason Silva, Randal Roberts, Morgan Manley, Alex Grey, Allyson Grey, Michaelangelo, Slavoj Zizek, Marshall McLuhan, Chuck Palahniuk, Jordan Peterson, Aziz Ansari, Louis CK, Julia Cameron, Alan Shelton, Buckminster Fuller, Frank Zappa, Mortal Kombat, Roko’s Basilisk, Norman “Dr. Blue” Katz, Joe Biden, Awake Aware Alive Podcast, Expanding Mind with Erik Davis, Rak Razam, Adam Dipert, Giant Leap Dance Company, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Greg Parkins, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Weird Studies, Brave BrowserSupport this show on Patreon and score a zillion awesome perks:https://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldSubscribe to our monthly creative explosion of a newsletter:https://michaelgarfield.substack.com Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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

“The human being is actually this kaleidoscope of different ways to relate to time and space. And to be present with it all, to be awake with it all, is what we’re doing.”Jean Gebser mapped the mutating structures of human consciousness, the topology of mind from archaic to magic to mythic to mental to integral. His work inspired generations of inquiry by authors like William Irwin Thompson and Ken Wilber. Now Jeremy Johnson’s latest book for Revelore Press expands into the truly visionary and unique “amensional” reality that Gebser posits as the next mutation for our planetary culture.  “We’re not just going to have an ‘archaic revival’ and dump what we’ve been doing with the nightmare of history. There’s something that’s been achieved in this kind of coalescing of the self and the emergence of spatial linear time that’s true, as well.”“The endgame of perspectivalism and the mental world…is eventually breaking down to the point where everyone has their own little perspectival ‘reality tunnel,’ where nobody’s able to talk to one another and everybody’s in this sense of cultural warfare and fragmentation and social isolation.”“You should know by now that things are ever-present.”Jeremy’s Book:https://revelore.press/product/seeing-through-the-world/ Jeremy’s Podcast:http://www.jeremydanieljohnson.com/mutations Discussed:James JoyceMarshall McLuhanMartin HeideggerSri AurobindoGrant MorrisonTimothy MortonDoug RushkoffEugene ThackerGraham HarmanSupport the show on Patreon for an avalanche of secret episodes, writing, art, music, and the Future Fossils Book Club:https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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

“I want to break the idea that housing is an investment vehicle. I mean housing is a f-cking HUMAN NEED.”This week’s guest is Australian futurist Nathan Waters, whose vision for a mobile, modular mashup of apartment living and driverless cars offers a solution to a trifecta of wicked problems in affordable housing, cost of living, and enjoyable work. We’re talking about a mature and equitable sharing economy that goes asteroid-to-dinosaurs on the exploitative systems of corporations like Uber and Airbnb…this is an episode for anyone who dreams of a fairer and funner world, a world that reconciles the yearning for flexibility and adventure with the desire for a nice place to call your own:Nathan’s popular essay on “driverless hotel rooms”:https://hackernoon.com/driverless-hotel-rooms-the-end-of-uber-airbnb-and-human-landlords-e39f92cf16e1?gi=cecb64856db9Nathan’s blockchain-based skill-sharing economy website:https://www.peerism.org/Nathan’s futures-oriented social media channel, Futawe: https://twitter.com/futawe?lang=enNathan cohosts this YouTube talkshow about the singularity, Hive45:https://www.youtube.com/user/hive45com/videosSomebody either ripped off his driverless hotel rooms idea or just stumbled on it independently:https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/2018/11/27/self-driving-hotel-room/2123668002/https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/autonomous-travel-suites/index.htmlFrom this episode:“A job is a terrible, terrible concept. I think of jobs as modern-day slavery. It’s a bunch of wasted mind and human capital.”“We have material abundance because of capitalism, but now it’s almost an existential threat. And we need to transition quickly to something else.”Most of the housing space and vehicle space we own is unused most of the time.We can’t legislate affordable housing because the incumbent politicians are real estate speculators.Modular hotels made of autonomous vehicle components (adding a z-axis to the not-a-trailer-park for hip young professionals).A new resolution for our age-old dialogue between sedentary and nomadic communities, wanderers and people of place.How to fit 9 billion people into 100K apartment buildings; see also: Paolo Soleri’s Lean Linear City.Building a blockchain-based, decentralized skill-sharing economy.A/B testing modular cities to find the optimum layout for human happiness.Mark Lakeman of City Repair and restoring streets to a safe commons.Can we handle constantly fluctuating and re-organizing architecture?Geophysical filter bubbles.Support Future Fossils Podcast on Patreon and get access to dozens of secret episodes, book club calls, live concert recordings, and more:https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield  Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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’s guest is Eric Wargo, author of Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious. Contrary to your most likely first impression based on the title of the book alone, this is a supremely carefully constructed argument that anticipates its critics, understands statistics and their abuse, appeals to our desire for simplicity in scientific explanations, and single-handedly reorganizes the entire field of parapsychological research beneath a new and rational umbrella that allows for major weirdness without sacrificing mechanistic causation or parsimony. Telepathy and spooky action at a distance, Jungian synchronicity and many worlds quantum physics all get re-evaluated under Wargo’s tesseract-brain model, in which there’s no such thing as entanglement, but living systems co-opt quantum post-selection to “steer” toward evolutionarily significant events. If you have ever dreamt of something that then happened in your waking life, this episode’s for you. And if you think that time’s an arrow and this all sounds like high nonsense, this episode is also for you.I can’t possibly attempt to cover all the subjects we discuss in these two hours, but here are books and essays that we reference (some of which I haven’t read):Eric Wargo - Time Loopshttps://www.amazon.com/Time-Loops-Precognition-Retrocausation-Unconscious/dp/1938398920J. Scott Turner - Purpose & Desirehttps://www.amazon.com/Purpose-Desire-Something-Darwinism-Explain/dp/0062651560(I have to make a personal note that without having read this book, I’ve read enough reviews to caution anyone against taking it as legitimate science. I’ve argued for the importance of beauty and desire, purpose and effort in the evolutionary process – and I’ve argued evolution in general does have a kind of direction. So I’m sympathetic to the author’s desire to re-introduce these ideas into the discussion. But from everything I can tell this particular book misrepresents evolutionary theory in its attempts to get where it wants to go, and I can’t support that.)Paul Davies - The Goldilocks Enigmahttps://www.amazon.com/The-Goldilocks-Enigma-Universe-Right/dp/0713998830%Matthew Fox - “The Return of the Black Madonna”http://www.matthewfox.org/blog/the-return-of-the-black-madonna-a-sign-of-our-times-or-how-the-black-madonna-is-shaking-us-up-for-the-twenty-first-centurySeth Lloyd, et al. - “The quantum mechanics of time travel through post-selected teleportation”https://arxiv.org/abs/1007.2615Eric Wargo - “Dream Paleontology”http://thenightshirt.com/?p=4215Eric Wargo - “What Lies Under The Skin”http://thenightshirt.com/?p=3198Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield)https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfieldAdditional Music: “It All Turned Out All Right” by Michael Garfieldhttps://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/track/it-all-turned-out-all-rightSupport this show on Patreon to join the book club and for secret episodes (and the last ten minutes of this conversation):https://patreon.com/michaelgarfield Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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 is a watershed moment for Future Fossils Podcast: the show’s first guest host! My friend Kevin Arthur Wohlmut is an engineer who creates occasional one-shot podcasts of fiction and nonfiction, and (according to him) worries about the future too much. We met at InterPlanetary Festival last year on the visit that inspired me to move to Santa Fe, and ever since we’ve had a rich correspondence of mutual far-future fiction recommendations and armchair philosophy chats.Kevin sent me his very cool readings of two essays with the same name, each portraying very different version of “The Next Ten Billion Years,” and both so provocative I felt like sharing them here on the show’s main feed – with my own commentary at the end, on blind spots in imagining deep time and our own psychedelically weird future.You can find Kevin active in the Future Fossils discussion groups at Facebook and Patreon.Professor Ugo Bardi blogs at https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com and http://chimeramyth.blogspot.com. You can read his essay here.John Michael Greer posts longer works at https://www.ecosophia.net and shorter works at https://ecosophia.dreamwidth.org. You can read his essay here.Outro reading excerpted from Michael Garfield’s “How to Live in the Future Part 2: The Future is More of Everything.”Cover Artwork by evolutionary robotics researcher Andrew Lincoln Nelson.Theme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield)Additional Music: “On Higher Ground” by Michael GarfieldAdditional Music by http://www.daikaiju.org & http://www.evanbrau.com Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/futurefossils. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. 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