Humans On The Loop

“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

Eliot Peper (Episode 47) is back on the show this week to talk about the themes around and within his Analog trilogy of very adjacent and believable sci fi novels (Bandwidth, Borderless, and the new “conclusion” Breach): that is, about the complex interactions between people and technology, both the layer cake of deep utilities we take for granted and the new affordances that disruptive tools produce – and how we shape our lives within them.https://www.eliotpeper.com/“One of the most fun things for me as a novelist about writing fiction is that it is very much about the questions, rather than the answers…if the answer’s obvious, I don’t need to write a book about it.”“You can’t really tell history without the history of technology.”“Congress writes laws about what’s going on, not what might be going on ten years from now. Policymaking is largely a reactionary measure.”“We haven’t figured out the new societies we want to build, given the new realities we’ve already invented.”“If you start thinking about the entire internet as an AI, then Google is not a company that is building what could be in the future some kind of AI program. Rather, Google and its status as a corporation, all of the corporate hierarchies that exist within it, and all of the people working on teams there, are actually just one part of that AI.”“I’m not a big believer in unitary self as an idea. I think we are all made up of MANY selves. We have these competing elements within us, and part of what it means to be human is to stitch these together into a coherent narrative. And we do that on the fly all the time.”“Your solution is going to create new problems, and the best way to best way to deal with that knowingly is to try to keep an open mind, try to maintain your beginner’s mind, maintain your state of awareness about the world and continually challenge your own assumptions.”“We are living in an age of acceleration – and yet, we have ALWAYS been confronted by a universe that defies our limited ability to make sense of it.”“My hope is that by using it like reasonable, mutually respectful people, we can turn the digital world into a place that is still gonna have some of the nasty stuff, but is gonna have a lot of the good stuff.”Mentioned: Kevin Kelly, Geoffrey West, Douglas RushkoffTheme Music: “God Detector” by Evan “Skytree” Snyder (feat. Michael Garfield)https://skytree.bandcamp.com/track/god-detector-ft-michael-garfieldAdditional Music: “On Higher Ground” by Michael Garfieldhttps://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/track/on-higher-groundSupport this show on Patreon to join the book club and for secret episodes: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 Bernie Taylor, whose novel interpretation of ancient cave paintings suggests an overlooked and deeply significant alternative take on the subjective experience and world-space of prehistoric human culture. Finding animals hidden in the interplay of paint and rock forms unnoticed by other archeologists, and corresponding with a diverse array of experts over decades (including legendary animal researcher George Gamow), he argues that these murals depict a heroic journey across continents, the crossing of the Iberian Peninsula, an ancient rite of passage coded in time and story that, if accepted by the scholarly community, would transform our understanding of our ancestors.Bernie’s Website: beforeorion.comWe Discuss:• How Bernie noticed an entire parade of African and European animals in the El Castillo’s Cave of Disks that no one had seen before;• The ancient animal versions of the constellations that became the modern ones (crocodile > Draco, great auk > Cygnus, etc.);• The prehistoric origins of the Twelve Trials of Hercules and the origins of the monster from misinterpreted shamanic lore;• Did the ancients really use cave art to track the precession of the equinoxes?• How Bernie reconstructed the ancients’ mapping of the annual calendar to various animal life cycle markers and visible stars;• Was the El Castillo mural testing for the ability to find hidden images - evidence of a shamanic apprentice’s ability to think differently?• The role of neurodiversity in prehistoric AND modern human society, and how that may relate to the function, not dysfunction, of dyslexia and autism;• How this initiatic journey is the earliest record we have of the heroic monomyth, which modern secular artists like Billy Joel continue to express even without knowing why these archetypes persist in human dream and story;• What we might learn from these ancient stories, and the minds of those who made them, to inform our strategies for an(other) era of massive change on Earth;“Modern art isn’t even modern art. It’s a recreation of paleolithic art.”Future Fossils theme music: “God Detector” by Skytree (ft. Michael Garfield)Additional music: "On Higher Ground" by Michael GarfieldJoin the Future Fossils Book Club and get secret episodes, free art and music, and more: 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

My graduate advisor Sean Esbjörn-Hargens is one of the most consistently inspiring and refreshingly different thinkers I’ve ever met. In our first Future Fossils conversation, we discussed his work to apply a profoundly “meta” and pluralistic philosophy to the everyday work of organizational development and social impact. In this discussion, we turn over the rock and examine his decades of inquiry into some of the world’s most puzzling and confounding phenomena – namely, those surrounding the UFO and its aura of science-challenging incursions into mundane reality. Might “Exostudies” be the locus of a transformation in how we understand reality? This is not your normal New Age conversation about aliens, but a rigorous look into the persistent weirdness and problematic implications of one of humankind’s greatest mysteries. As Phil Dick famously said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” If UFOs are here to stay – with all of their attendant provocations to our oversimple categories (self and other, artificial and natural, hallucination and perception, physical and immaterial) – then we are overdue for a new definition of “reality.” In preparation for his Exostudies online course this fall, we look at how to make sense of the stubbornly ineffable – an evolutionary call to take up higher-dimensional logic and more nuanced understandings of What Is…http://www.exostudies.org/“When you go into the UFO field, at least with an open heart and mind, you come across some really crazy shit. It is a freakshow. There are so many bizarre claims being made by standup citizens who are quite believable in what they are saying, even though what they’re saying just does not map onto our general view of reality.”“The truth is stranger than science fiction. Not just fiction, but science fiction.”“The phenomenon is subjective and objective; it’s subjective and objective simultaneously; and it’s neither. So I think what it’s asking us is to re-examine the relationship between mind and matter, and how do we relate to subject and object, and how has our current scientific methodology failed us horribly in having a more sophisticated answer or framing or understanding of how these two aspects are related.”“There are really good, legitimate photographs, and trace evidence, and all kinds of physical evidence for UFO craft and other otherworldly realities…and yet, there are so many fakes. And how do you sift through all that? You almost can’t.”“We’re entering into an augmented and virtual space that’s going to be ontologically fragmented, and highly pluralistic, and solipsistic. So how do we navigate that culturally? I don’t know, but I think we’re largely unprepared.”“We’re not that far from discovering some form of mini-life elsewhere. And as soon as that happens, then the floodgates are going to open in considering the implications of that.”“So many UFO or ET enthusiasts often want to put everything in one box, like ‘they’re all bad,’ ‘they’re all good,’ ‘they’re all future versions of ourselves.’ I think it’s much messier than that.”“I think one of the core strategies is hermeneutic generosity. A sense of critical thinking, but from a place of generosity, where we stay open. Postmodernism has been so jaded – the hermeneutics of suspicion – I think when we approach these phenomena, we need a different orientation.”“To really bring any kind of justice to this inquiry, we need to draw on the best thinking from as many kinds of disciplines as we can – because the phenomenon is that big, and that mysterious, and that paradoxical. So anything short of a meta, integrative approach – and even that – is going to fail.”Mentioned:Diana Slattery, John Mack, Avi Loeb, Ken Wilber, Jeff Kripal, Whitley Strieber, Arthur Brock, George Knapp, John C. Wright, Olaf Stapledon, Stuart Davis, Jeff Salzman, Richard Doyle, Carl Jung, Terence McKenna, William Irwin Thompson, DW Pasulka, Eric Wargo, Jacques ValleeSean’s appearance on the Daily Evolver Podcast:https://www.dailyevolver.com/2019/02/taking-aliens-seriously/If you liked this episode, check out Episodes 60 & Episode 91:https://shows.pippa.io/futurefossils/episodes/60https://shows.pippa.io/futurefossils/episodes/91 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 professional psilocybin retreat host, long-time practicing Buddhist, and general good guy Mitsuaki Chi of Amsterdam. In this episode we get into the practices and benefits of psychedelic community, his unusual path from hardcore meditator to mushroom trip facilitator, and how he understands his life and purpose in light of a mysterious intelligence none of us can fully comprehend…trufflestherapy.comtripsitters.org“Even after so much time in meditation, I was still falling back into my patterns…”Coming to our senses.Going Buddhism-to-Psychedelics (instead of the usual other way around). How does meditation prepare you for tripping?Control? Renunciation? Acceptance? Grief?How does psychedelic healing as spiritual practice interface (if at all) with science and medical institutions?“More circles, less stages. Which is more important, direct experiences from a hundred people or one scientist who has been studying this stuff in a laboratory?”What are the longitudinal benefits of practice in a psychedelic community?“I think the two things people want more than anything are purpose and community [and] I think people are realizing how poisonous social media can be.”SUPPORT FUTURE FOSSILS on PATREON: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

Android Jones is one of the world’s hottest digital artists – even if it’s kind of a mistake to label him this way and limit his creative action to the digital. A master portraitist, designer, and explorer of new tools, Android made concept art for video games in his early years before becoming the creative consultant for the best-in-class Corel Painter software, touring the world while doing live visuals for huge musical acts, collaborating on epic dome projection shows, and ultimately pioneering the possibilities of VR with his latest project, Microdose. But arguably his most vital and illuminating evolutionary edge as an artist has been with his two children, learning to raise the next generation of curious and creative minds. This week on Future Fossils, I sit down for a three-year-overdue discussion with one of the most objectively inspiring people I can call a friend – to talk about our hopes and our concerns for Those Who Come Next, and what being a creative parent means in our Age of Transition.https://androidjones.comhttps://microdosevr.comJoin my community of patrons and receive exclusive perks (like book club membership):https://patreon.com/michaelgarfieldJoin the daily discussions erupting like psychedelic flowers in our Facebook Group:https://facebook.com/groups/futurefossilsWe Discuss:Electromineralism & medium as material agent lending its qualities to your identityTools as extensions of the body, and the most modern tools we have are still so ancientReimagining truths that have real legs on them, not praising absolute truthsFinite & Infinite Games by James P. CarseBeing a part of the six thousand year plus art history conversation that we haveDrilling down to making deeper and more universally relevant art to “provide a greater reflective surface” for viewersVisionary Art, (a different take on)What psychology teaches about making (real) art *for* peopleHow fatherhood changed his art and life and everythingMaking art with kids – both digital and analog media – and how the forms differ as learning experiencesWhat VR has that other media do not, and Android’s first breakthrough moment in Microdose VRWhen Android met Robert Venosa at Art Hardware in Boulder at age 16There are too many things to learnThe future of visual performance is WHAT? (!!!)THE ART SCHOOLGoing Icarus to DaedalusApprenticeshipThe transformative potentials of VR as biofeedbackWhat scares Android Jones?What comes next? 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

Erick Godsey was almost my roommate in Austin, and even though I trust our destinies I still consider it a bummer that we didn’t. He is a nobler beast than I. He’s also the host of The Myths That Make Us, which is an excellent program for reasons that have nothing to do with my recent appearance on his show, but that’s nice too…What Erick IS is devoted to helping people live the absolute best stories that they can, which means first figuring out why we’re living the stories we already ARE.Notes are slim for this episode but that’s because just go listen to it right now.Erick’s website:https://erickgodsey.com“A great idea reconstructs your map. It’s one of the most painful things you can go through, but it’s beautiful.”“I was an atheist but I prayed. At night, I would pray to a thing I didn’t understand and say, thank you, because all the people who were asking for things were stupid, and I was self-righteous.”Don’t read Gödel, Escher, Bach and then take 5 grams of mushrooms. (Psychedelic Conservatives.)“If you tell a twenty-eight year old, ‘Your story is an illusion,’ it f-cks more people up than it helps…especially in Western culture, it’s not the right medicine at the right time.”Our stories are not useful for as long as they used to be. Are they no longer serving us in the “infoquake” of life online? How long will our evolutionary drives and archetypes persist amidst this metamorphosis?Spiritual Bypass. It’s all perfect. There’s a season for bullshitting yourself. Or no, you shouldn’t ever do it. Don’t resist your own psychodynamic forces.Most adaptive story: you are not a noun; you are a verb. Least adaptive story: you are a noun; you have to endure; the world is happening to you.What to do about being disempowered in a global landscape of tragic news, in our own personal lives, to do anything about anything?Is it better to be good or great?How to be good ancestors.Can we bring our full selves to work at our “day jobs”? What does it look like when we do? (AKA, What’s it like working at Onnit?)What are your coping mechanisms and how can you channel them to make the world a better place? 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