This week we speak to multidisciplinary independent researcher William Sarill, whose life has traced a high-dimensional curve through biochemistry, art restoration, physics, and esotericism (and I’m stopping the list here but it goes on). Bill is one of the only people I know who has the scientific chops to understand and explain how to possibly unify thermodynamics with general relativity AND has gone swimming into the deep end of The Weird for long enough to develop an appreciation for its paradoxical profundities. He can also boast personal friendships with two of the greatest (and somewhat diametrically opposed) science fiction authors ever: Phil Dick and Isaac Asimov.
In this conversation we start by exploring some of his discoveries and insights as an intuition-guided laboratory biomedical researcher and follow the river upstream into his synthesis of emerging theoretical frameworks that might make sense of PKD’s legendary VALIS experiences — the encounter with high strangeness that drove him to write The Exegesis, over a million words of effort to explain the deep structure of time and reality. It’s time for new ways to think about time! Enjoy…
✨ Support This Work
• Buy my brain for hourly consulting or advisory work on retainer
• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon
• Help me find backing for my next big project Humans On The Loop
• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list
• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work
• Join the conversation on Discord in the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils servers
• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal
• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP
✨ Go Deeper
Bill's Academia.edu page
Bill's talk at the PKD Film Festival
Bill's profile for the Palo Alto Longevity Prize
Bill's story on Facebook about his biochemistry research
Bill in the FF Facebook group re: Simulation Theory, re: The Zero-Point Field, re: everything he's done that no one else has, re: how PKD predicted ChatGPT
"If you find this world bad, you should see some of the others" by PKD
The Wyrd of the Early Earth: Cellular Pre-sense in the Primordial Soup by Eric Wargo
My first and second interviews with William Irwin Thompson
My lecture on biology, time, and myth from Oregon Eclipse Gathering 2017
"I understand Philip K. Dick" by Terence McKenna
Weird Studies on PKD and "The Trash Stratum" Part 1 & Part 2
Weird Studies with Joshua Ramey on divination in science
Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People by Robert & Michele Root-Bernstein
Discovering by Robert Root-Bernstein
✨ Mentions
Philip K. Dick, Bruce Damer, Iain McGilchrist, Eric Wargo, Stu Kauffman, Michael Persinger, Alfred North Whitehead, Terence McKenna, Karl Friedrich, Mike Parker, Chris Jeynes, David Wolpert, Ivo Dinov, Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, Erwin Schroedinger, Kaluza & Klein, Richard Feynman, Euclid, Hermann Minkowski, James Clerk Maxwell, The I Ching, St. Augustine, Stephen Hawking, Jim Hartle, Alexander Vilenkin, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Timothy Morton, Futurama, The Wachowski Siblings, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Leonard Euler, Paramahansa Yogananda, Alfred Korbzybski, Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, Claude Shannon, Ludwig Boltzmann, Carl Jung, Danny Jones, Mark Newman, Michael Lachmann, Cristopher Moore, Jessica Flack, Robert Root Bernstein, Louis Pasteur, Alexander Fleming, Ruth Bernstein, Andres Gomez Emilsson, Diane Musho Hamilton
🧬🕰️⚗️ 228 - William Sarill on Intuition in Science & The Physics of Philip K. Dick