This week I dialogue with Matthew David Segall, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies, Chair of the Science Advisory Committee for the Cobb Institute, and author of the Footnotes To Plato blog as well as numerous books on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Friedrich Schelling. In it, we wrangle with some very fundamental questions, such as:
What distinguishes the organismal and machinic?
How can we support vital cultural activity without reducing the measure of our humanity to our economic productivity?
What if we’re looking for mind in AI in the wrong places, and instead treat both technology and human consciousness as unified within one unfolding process of cosmic self-discovery?
We welcome your feedback and reflections — here, or in the Future Fossils Discord Server — and to join us in the inquiry about what lies beyond modernity, and how to nourish the collective imagination we need to thrive there!
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
Pardon the delay: inexplicable technical issues forced me to re-render this episode half a dozen times. Hopefully you appreciate the “staying up until 1 am to try and ship on time”!
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Chapters
0:00:00 - Teaser
0:01:32 - Intro
0:08:18 - About Matt
0:15:19 - Nouns & Verbs, Machines & Organisms
0:24:24 - Emergence & Epistemic Humility
0:36:55 - The Relationship Between Cultures & Markets
0:49:21 - What Are Markets & Can They Play?
0:58:30 - Our Responsibility To What We Make
1:06:42 - Is Conscious AI A Hyperobject?
1:17:43 - Outro
Mentions
Matt’s Website & Twitter
Matt Segall & O.G. Rose - Re-thinking Economics & The Meaning of Value
Brendan Graham Dempsey & Matt Segall - Physics, Metaphysics, Meta-Metaphysics
Matt Segall & Tim Jackson - The Blind Spot (2024): A Critical and Reconstructive Review
Future Fossils 223 - Timothy Morton on A New Christian Ecology & Systems Thinking Blasphemy
Michael Garfield - Introducing Humans On The Loop
Abraham Flexner - The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge
W. Brian Arthur - The Nature of Technology
W. Brian Arthur - Economics in Nouns and Verbs
Miguel Fuentes - Complexity and The Emergence of Physical Properties
Michael Lachmann, Mark Newman, Cris Moore - The Physical Limits of Communication
Steven Johnson - Revenge of The Humanities
Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson - The Blind Spot
Jessica Flack - Hourglass Emergence: Complexity Begets Complexity thru Information Bottlenecks (video)
Richard Doyle - Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of The Noosphere
Kevin Kelly - The Expansion of Ignorance
William Irwin Thompson - The Borg or Borges?
Danny Hillis - The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live The Entanglement
Kevin Kelly - Out of Control
Kai Ennis
Carl Jung
Stephen Hawking
Friedrich Nietzsch
Richard Dawkins
Alan Watts
Michael Schwartz
Alfred North Whitehead
Sean Esjbörn-Hargens
Felix Guattari
Stuart Kauffman
Rudolf Steiner
David Wolpert
Robert Rosen
Michael Levin
Norbert Weiner
Ken Wilber
Karl Friston
Gilbert Simondon
Humberto Maturana
Francisco Varela
John Vervaeke
Terrence Deacon
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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