Humans On The Loop

This week’s guest is philosopher Kerri Welch, whose doctoral thesis from CIIS (and current book-in-progress) explore a fractal model of time. If you have ever wondered about time, this episode is for you. Instant classic. Kerri’s Academic Papers & Talks:https://ciis.academia.edu/KerriWelch Kerri’s Blog:https://textureoftime.wordpress.com We take a wild tour through the layers of the human brain and mind, examining the correlations between different brain waves and their correspondent states of consciousness – and speculate on our experience of time as an evolved response to a far more complex and awesome world than we can possibly conceive!Twenty minutes in and we’ve already covered the fractal nature of time and we’re on to explaining what happens to the modern self and its boundaries in the torrent of novelty that awaits un in a digital age. Then we go deep for another hour and a half… DISCUSSED:• Fate vs Free Will in light of Chaos Theory• The relationship between technology and our experience of time, overstimulated, interrupted• How Jean Gebser’s structures of consciousness overlay on EEG data• The nature of synchronicity & time vs. timelessness• The effects of ayahuasca, illness, aging, and other time-warping events on the passage of time• Singularities and our asymptotic approach to transcendence• Narrative collapse, fake news, and the end of history• Relativity, scaling laws, and city time vs. country time• What was before TIME?• Pet telepathy as a matter of referential framing• The “future” causing the “past”…• …and the physics (and psychology!) of how to feel the future.• Schizophrenia as possibly a disorder of time perception• Dopamine levels and the experience of duration• Human chronobiology adapted to other planet’s days• Integrating the rational mind with transpersonal experience  QUOTES:“We actually can’t get precise enough to bring the level of predictability that physics once thought it could.”“Children have to be indoctrinated into time, right? They’re not born into linear time. They’re born in a timeless space, and that’s where they live, and then they live in this hypnagogic dream time, which is all present moment. You’ll hear kids say, like, ‘I remember when you were little’ to their parents.”“When we restrict ourselves to linear causal thinking, we are coarse-graining the present moment. We are glossing over the infinite depth of richness available within the present moment. And of course it’s paradoxical: we coarse-grain it by dividing it more finely.”“What we’re experiencing in our culture right now is the entrainment to the fast frequencies. We’re not letting the long slow frequencies have the greatest amplitude. What does that look like? It looks like hanging out with rocks and trees and elders. And that’s the integration that we need in order to nest our super-fast frequencies within, in order to give them direction…if we can nest within the natural structures of the long, slow frequencies that surround us, it will guide these fast frequencies in healthier directions.”“We REALLY just have to get better at holding multiple realities. AND recognizing what’s important about them.”“The dog comes and sits by the door half an hour before the owner comes home because to the dog, the owner’s already home. Their moment is big enough that it’s happening already. But we’re so finely dividing things that we’re like, ‘It’s half an hour away! It’s an eternity!’ But for the dog that’s been sitting bored at home all day…”“Free will comes from a future influence we can’t see. That’s one way I would interpret it.”“The definition of human experience is, to me, the limitation of infinity, in order to have experience.”     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 tattoo artist Christopher Sheehan, who regards his practice as a sacred act and tattoo as a kind of binding of time in the body.https://www.mountaintempletattoo.com/ We talk about:• how he became a tattoo artist and came into “transformational tattooing” as a way of communicating with and programming the subconscious mind;• other ways we bind time into matter with earthworks art and pre-Columbian mounds;• the difference between choosing your own tattoos and the more traditional style of having them chosen for you by the artist;• the virtue and value of The Ordeal in personal transformation;• seeing skin art as a transcultural phenomenon connecting us to other tribes and traditions across time and space;• and the future of tattoo as an art form and a culture, in which skin art merges with speech as part of a new, richer, more embodied language… “If you had to put something in your bathroom mirror…what would you want in your bathroom mirror FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE? That feedback loop with the imagery with which we surround ourselves is TOTALLY game-changing and shifting.”“What identity do I want to imprint upon my life? What connection to something within me do I want to see empowered and enhanced? And the tattoo becomes this living reflection of that enhancement, that empowerment, that connection, alignment.”“So much of our cultural perspective is about comfort and convenience – and to do something that is physically taxing, emotionally and mentally demanding on a level of momentary transcendence – it’s new for a lot of people.”“The tattoo artist and the machinery that they use are going to become more and more intuitive and integrated…kind of like when I oil paint, or even when I get into a flow with dot work and stippling, I don’t even feel like I’m doing it. I’m watching myself INTEND it.”  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 continue the special two-part conversation with historian, poet, and mythographer William Irwin Thompson.  Author of dozens of sweeping works of synthetic insight, Bill Thompson’s greatest work may not have been a book but a community:  The Lindisfarne Association, a post-academic “intellectual concert” for the “study and realization of a new planetary culture,” which anchored in various locations across the United States as a flesh-and-blood meta-industrial village for most of its forty years.  In his latest and last book, Thinking Together at the Edge of History, Thompson looks back on the failures and successes of this project, which he regards as a “first crocus” budding up through the snow of our late-industrial dark age to herald the arrival of a planetary renaissance still yet to come.  This episode pivots from a contemplation of Lindisfarne’s history to our navigation of the turbulence between two world eras – how will we weather all this change, and what new life and worldview awaits us on the other side? We talk about surfing the “winds of creative destruction” in a highly volatile digital economy; the emergence of the elemental spirits of the land into our demon-haunted crystalline electronic infrastructure; the future of parenting in a world too fast and too complex for public schooling or the nuclear family; the tension between emergent new media and art forms and the traditional forms of novel/poem/painting/song/etc.; the relationship between improvisational speaking and spiritual channeling; and the experience of being an “entelechy,” a multitude of smaller agencies comprising an ecology of self, an endosymbiotic “Homo gestalt.” Bill speaks candidly and fluently about his unusual life history as a parent and living journey as an aging mystic, bringing erudite historic overview together with a surprisingly frank perspective on his transpersonal experiences.  It’s an honor to be able to share this discussion with you…     QUOTES: “Mysticism is relevant now because it’s a good description of the daily news; it’s just responsible journalism that there is this mystical quality to an ethereal economy that is electronically blipping wealth back and forth in this computerized online banking world.” “When you have an oxymoronic culture with the djinn inhabiting the computers and moving into the cognitive space symbiotically with human beings, the definition of the environment is changing and that which is invisible to the materialist or the industrialist is now recognized as an endosymbiont with us – so it becomes like the cell with the mitochondria.” “Depressions and catastrophes are transitions from one system to another in complex dynamical systems, so you have to step back and look at the big picture.  And if you try to keep the accounts in a small container, where you say, ‘Nothing is stable! Nothing can be held’  Well, why is Buddhism so popular?  Because that’s exactly what Buddhism is saying!  If you attach and you’re grasping, you’re going to suffer.” “We see [the change] but we always see it negatively.  We see the crash but not the imaginary future that’s emerging.” “When the family always lived together in the nuclear family, what do you have?  They were always arguing and fighting…compression isn’t necessarily a good thing.  It’s what Whitehead would call ’the fallacy of simple location.’  So I embrace that the environment is now planetary.  It’s person-planet.  And through Skype and things like this, I’m in constant communication with the family, and that’s okay.” “As you develop your subtle bodies through yoga…when you reach a certain point, you get what I call a ‘matching grant,’ like how a foundation gives matching grants, and if your evolutionary sheath reaches a certain point, then a being comes to cohabit-ate with you in your auric extended ecology.” “You don’t want to have a hungry ghost as a daemonic guide, so discrimination is definitely called for.” “Some [bacteria] you need in your stomach to digest, and if they get in the wrong place and they’re out of timing, they’re not so good.  If Godzilla tramps through Times Square, it’s not a good thing.  If he goes for a walk in the Jurassic, it’s okay.”   NOTE: Again, here are the links to the first two chats we had in 2011 and 2013, as well as to my video remix of one of Bill’s lectures with footage from Burning Man.  Enjoy and be sure to check out Bill’s awesome books, as well as his extensive lecture series archived online with the Lindisfarne Tapes! 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

William Irwin Thompson, a historian, poet, and mythographer, shares his insights on the intersection of culture, technology, and society. He reflects on the Lindisfarne Association's legacy and its aspirations for a new planetary culture. Topics include the impact of technology on human connections, the transformative emergence of Christianity, and the political dynamics shaping America today. Thompson delves into the evolution of money, the importance of intergenerational wisdom, and the balance between science and spirituality in navigating modern complexities.

This week’s guest is the visionary painter Hannah Faith Yata, whose riotous, ecstatic work explores and celebrates natural biodiversity, and exalts the repressed feminine – the beautiful and the grotesque, death and life in vivid color all at once. We talk about her new show “Dancing in Delirium,” the role and life of wilderness in the Anthropocene – weather control and fear porn (eerily prescient, given recent events; this talk was recorded in July) – the feeling of living through a time of massive change and chaos (and clocking out with cute pet videos) – art as rebellion and the party as a revolution – the pagan conjunction of human and animal revived in cosplay and furry culture – and the ways our ideas are literally making impressions on the land )yet, we are something that the land itself is doing)… “The city, to me – that’s like a virtual reality made out of brick and steel.” “Wildness for me, means: leave it the fuck alone.” “I like to think of my work as this strange awakening of a rebellion…” “I’m not fond of human faces, and I’ll tell you why. For me, seeing somebody’s face and having to analyze every single detail, every wrinkle, every little nuance, is just…if you think about painting and its historical significance, it’s like you’re immortalizing this person. You’re immortalizing their ego. To me, though, I think it’s all about more or less the abolishment of the ego and this realizing that we’re a part of nature, that we see ourselves in nature…I don’t want to shit on portraiture, because I think it’s beautiful, but that’s not my statement.” “I feel like everything today is this dance of trying to keep the ego so that it doesn’t fly off into space.” “It doesn’t have to be pretty…if you or I were thrown out in the wilderness tomorrow, it’s not like there’s some nature god that’s going to protect us. It’s wild out there! Actual wildness is wild!” “We have more moral codes when we go to war against other people than we do hacking through a rainforest. So to personify things and to think of them as these living personalities helps us to remember our respect for these things.” 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 Andrew J. O’Keefe II – documentarian, archivist for Singularity University, devoted recordist of the emergent planetary culture, and a dear old friend I met back in the Dawn of Time when he was working as the personal assistant to Android Jones. http://www.andrewjokeefe.com/https://www.facebook.com/andrewjokeefehttps://twitter.com/andrewjokeefe?lang=enhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewjokeefe/https://medium.com/@andrewjokeefe We talk about the motivations for preserving and reliving the significant (AND insignificant) moments of our lives. From the role of “tapers” in the success of The Grateful Dead & STS9, Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson, and The Exegesis of Phillip K Dick…to how a donation of 600 books started Harvard University…to a vision of our artificial intelligence augmented descendants living in a world of totally recorded life and currently incomprehensible richness and insight…this is a conversation about why we “save” things, and why we should treat our record-keeping as the sacred task it truly is. “If we don’t preserve what’s important to us, then we run the risk of not sharing it ever again. Nobody might never even know that it happened.” “What exactly ARE our priorities?” “The control of where this stuff is headed is out of any one organization or individual’s hands. On the other hand, we have these central systems of control…if we don’t find a way to decentralize what humanity has developed up to this point, we’re probably going to lose it.” “If we let market forces run [the world]; if we let meaningless trends of shit, surface level culture that’s not even real culture, that’s like iterative loop culture, if we let that dictate things, then as everything gets increasingly out of control or asymmetrical, what the hell else do we have to fall back on?” “I think the paradoxes of living in society are only going to increase at an exponential rate. It’s going to terrify people; it’s going to cause mass chaos in unprecedented ways because we have these centuries-old resentments that technology is not going to erase. It’s only going to make further asymmetrical. The history of all borders: there’re losers. Those people are upset…have a right to be upset. Both psychedelics and the ancient modalities of healing…are going to be the most critical tool that we use to move forward.” 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 Hunter Maats, host of the Mixed Mental Arts Podcast and co-author of The Straight-A Conspiracy. We talk about the future of education and human collaboration – moving past a world of routine factory-worker indoctrination and the “insane cargo cult” of the academic system, and into a new model for the transmission of knowledge that suits a truly planetary culture. https://twitter.com/huntermaatshttps://medium.com/@huntermaats The value of myth, ritual, and other deeply-ingrained but often-maligned premodern human activities. How to make sense of authority, expertise, and accreditation in a world where the dominance of academia (and the legitimacy of so many other institutions) is losing hold. How do we structure a “global village?” What is post-academic education? What comes after the fall of the Ivory Tower? How do we recruit premodern impulses into the project of contemporary life without repressing magic, ritual, and myth? We also talk a lot of smack on Richard Dawkins for being the totally irrational pope of Anti-Religion. Hunter mentions my article on the evolution of creativity: https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/how-to-live-in-the-future-part-4-the-future-is-exapted-remixed-35ea5ca9d877 Quotes: “The walls of the Ivory Tower have been falling down for the last thirty years. There are now 60 million scientific papers, 130 million books. It’s literally too much information for a tiny cadre of individuals to try and make sense of. It’s going to take seven and a half billion people to really make sense and draw signal out of that noise.” “If you’re reading a blog post, you’re getting an hour or two of distilled thought. If you’re reading a book, then you’re getting hundreds or thousands of hours of distilled thought. The question is, what is your information diet, and what are you sharing, and what are you engaging with?” “You should structure a global village a lot like you structure an actual village…” “Biologically, we want ritual, we want myth, we want belonging, we want a sense of embeddedness. BUT, we have all this cool stuff now…” “People like [Richard] Dawkins, even though they bang on about reason all the time, are in my assessment not very reflective individuals.” “The flag of science has, for a really long time, been in the hands of narrow minded bigots who have drawn a line around their tribe and said that all other tribes, which they call ‘religion,’ or some kind of primitive savagery, are worthless. And I have no desire of living that way, and I don’t consider what they do ‘science.’ Because science is about changing your mind in light of all available evidence. It’s not about petty tribalism.” Mentioned: George LakoffRichard DawkinsMarie KondoAdam SmithYuval HarariKevin KellyRichard DoyleDavid LoyeCharles DarwinAlfred Russell Wallace 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 singer-songwriter and music therapist Marya Stark, whom I met at the Global Sound Conference in Los Angeles in 2008. We discuss the future of the feminine, relationships, and reproduction – and laugh a lot. • Linkshttp://marya-stark.comhttps://maryastark.bandcamp.comhttps://soundcloud.com/marya-starkhttps://www.facebook.com/maryastarkmusic • Topics- Long Distance Relationships in the Internet Age- The Pre-Trans Fallacy & Getting Back to The Land- The Future of Sex in the Age of Machines- Industrial Medicine & Birth Trauma- Terraforming & Artificial Wombs- Tradition vs. Innovation- Rudolf Steiner’s Lucifer & Ahriman- Artificial hormones in the drinking water feminizing songbirds- Intuition of Altitude- Dancing between the organic and digital: how can we hold both ends of this without succumbing to either?- Reclaiming the sacred traditions of premodern femininity- Bloodwork, Moon Lodges, and the revival of the Sacred Feminine- Adopting a “Bit Torrent” model to our mixed ethnicities and identities, as a response to concerns about cultural appropriation and “buffet-line” spirituality- Building a “Literacy of Empathies”- The moving target of “wisdom,” “experience,” and “adult” through the ages- Soul Retrieval 101- dealing with the emotions of the intuition of A sole connection from a parallel universe or alternative timeline & The perils of “astral polyamory” • Quotes“Just because the wisdom is ancient doesn’t mean it’s the most effective.”“Sometimes when we’re in a distortion paradigm, our strategies for wholeness create more distortion.”“Are we all going to have this magical Golden Age wake-up call? I’m still rootin’ for it.”“Honor the thousands of shoulders that we stand on to be able to host some of this information. Because they were committed to the lineage. They were committed to carrying it through, no matter what. They’d give their lives for it. I have meditation in my life because of those individuals. I’m not going to shit all over them because I think their cultural context or whatever doesn’t match my fucking modern idea and ideals. So how do I hold the complexity of that conversation in my heart while not spinning my ego into circles about how cool I am because I’m a meditator?”“I have to have a prayer for our species that we are connected to an evolutionary architecture…”“It’s as if the pain that everyone is in is the same. And it’s rooted in disconnection and distortion of what they’re capable of.” • Citations- Up From Eden by Ken Wilber- At The Edge of History by William Irwin Thompson- Alien: Covenant (film)- HR Giger and The Zeitgeist of the Twentieth Century by Stanislav Grof- Spiral Dynamics by Don Beck & Christopher Cowan- “The Tower That Ate People” by Peter Gabriel (song)- Videodrome (film)- Homo Deus by Yuval Harari- Team Human Podcast with Douglas Rushkoff 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

“You were a paleontologist, originally.  I’ve always considered myself a ‘paisley-ontologist.’  A paleontologist will excavate the soil in search of fossils and a paisley-ontologist will excavate the present for fossilized perceptions.  So I’m always looking for these kind of nuggets, linguistic impressions or etymological traces that lead us from the present into this sort of timelessness, or this subconscious of words and symbols.  I look at the world as a sort of Rorschach Worship Workshop…”This week’s guest is “The Ungoogleable” Michaelangelo, who all-embracing creative life is as difficult to describe as he is to find via conventional web search.  The only person I’ve ever met – or could imagine – who could successfully pull off the marriage of “comedy,” “necromancy,” AND “rap” – and do it all in a convincing but false Scottish brogue as his alter ego Void Denizen – Michael is one of the wittiest, most hermetic guests this podcast’s ever had.  AND he has some thoughts about the show itself that take us down a labradorite rabbit hole and into underground auroras, where the riddles of the afterlife unfold before our very eyes. Even I learned new things about “Future Fossils” in this conversation!  Come with us on a trip into the Illuminated Unconscious and help us excavate the present in the new discipline of Paisley-ontology… • Michelangelo’s Website:http://www.voidandimagination.com/• MG interviews Void Denizen on Reality Sandwich: http://realitysandwich.com/321767/necromancing-the-philosophers-stone-void-denizens-psychomagical-hip-hop/ • Topics:- artificial intelligence- gaia theory- the anthropocene- the atmosphere as an artifact- mineral consciousness- “upgrade or perish”- flowers were a catastrophe- the importance of turning to face the strange- paisley-ontology- using natural fractals as an inkblot test or oracle- pareidolia- embodied cognition & conceptual metaphor- panpsychism & mind as process- the invention of and reason for sex- aliens & the archetype of the flying saucer- the soul and all its incarnations as a single four-dimensional organism- daimonic information- excavating the future out of the present- fossilized dinosaur brains- accidental summonings- The Mandela Effect & the possibility of changing the past- The Metaforest • Mentions:- How To Know Higher Realms by Rudolf Steiner- The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes- Sex, Ecology, Spirituality by Ken Wilber- Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff & Mark Johnson- Francisco Varela- Neil Theise- Pierre Teilhard De Chardin- Darwin’s Pharmacy by Richard Doyle- Crystal & Dragon by David Wade- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood- Wings of Desire & City of Angels (films)- Daniel Vitalis on Tangentially Speaking Podcast- Crossing The Event Horizon by Jonathan Zap- “Modern Things” by Björk- Interstellar (film) • Other Stuff:- View From The Horizon https://evolution.bandcamp.com/album/view-from-the-horizon-perspectives-on-a-new-age-burning-man-2013  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

Support Future Fossils on PatreonReview Future Fossils on iTunesReview Future Fossils on StitcherJoin the Future Fossils Facebook GroupThis week is part 2 of our conversation with biohacking polyamorous geneticist and aspiring Australian politician Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow Meow, founder of Sydney’s Biofoundry. Get ready for a chat so crazy you’ll think it’s 1999…we spend about 20 minutes arguing about modern art, 20 minutes arguing about the Singularity, and 20 minutes arguing about what’s in the box.• Meow Himself:https://www.facebook.com/meowludo• Biofoundry:http://foundry.bio/https://www.facebook.com/Bio-Hack-Syd-488627521201437/https://www.meetup.com/biohackoz/ • We Talk:- We compare campaigning for nuclear technology to bringing a stripper with a drug problem to family dinner;- IP as Art & The Shape of The Future;- Leveraging existing systems as scaffolding to transition back into a way of life more suited to our paleolithic environment;- Vantablack & the jerk who got an exclusive license to use it for art – and how the art community fought back;- What is GOOD art?- How “What is Life?” and “What is Art?” might be the same question…- What the next few decades will be like if we assume a Technological Singularity…- The social construction of identity- We argue for ages about whether godlike AI will be independent from the biosphere…. • Citations:- Common As Air by Lewis Hyde- Damien Hirst- Anish Kapoor- Alain de Botton- Marcel Duchamp- Michelangelo- James Gansfield- The Architects of Air- Stuart Semple- Andrew Despi- What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly- John Allen (Institute of Ecotechnics)- Shin Gojira- Teranesia by Greg Egan- The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin- Bacterial Polyamory • Quotes:“If you say to ‘them,’ ‘I have fifteen girlfriends, how many of them should I bring?’, you’ll freak ‘em the fuck out.”“Artists have to be subversive. And why not be subversive within the system that exists? Because that provokes other artists to come and then challenge it.”“I’ve had enough wine to say this: everything we do now is meaningless. It’s playtime until the Technological Singularity.”“We are made of atoms, ultimately, but they’re our bitch.”“We’re talking twenty years from now, and I can’t even predict this year. If I could, I would have invested in Bitcoin in March!” • Read more about evolution as entropy: https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/the-evolution-of-surveillance-part-3-living-in-the-belly-of-the-beast-2a42538ee2• Read more about evolution as a remix: https://medium.com/@michaelgarfield/how-to-live-in-the-future-part-4-the-future-is-exapted-remixed-35ea5ca9d877 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