This week’s guest my friend Joshua DiCaglio, Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University and author of the fabulous Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry.
It’s a book bout how contemplating scale can transform us — how it’s one thing to understand the microcosm and macrocosm through our maps and another thing entirely to really sit with the mystery of how all of this is happening at once. We can conceptually differentiate ourselves from the rest of the cosmos, but scale makes it clear that at no point do we ever truly stand outside it all.
And this has enormous implications: contemplating scale is not merely an idle curiosity but an existential necessity. In an age of exponential AI, our future hinges on whether we can learn to overcome the tendency to colonize other scales with our abstractions and cultivate the capacity to recognize interdependency with the unthinkably small and large. How does truly understanding this change the way we live? Bewilderment is a rich place to start. Let’s simmer in it for a while…
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Chapters
0:00:00 - Teaser
0:01:12 - Intro Essay: Scale & AI Safety
0:13:25 - You Can’t Paint Fractals
0:21:29 - We Can Only Act on The Scale at Which We Exist
0:23:10 - The Story of Scale Theory
0:27:49 - Discovering Scale through Computer Science & Nanotech
0:38:37 - Being One & Feeling Many
0:44:29 - The Embodiment of Mind & Information
0:59:55 - The Scalar Synecdoche: Are Organizations Really Organisms?
1:18:32 - Why Does It Matter Where We Draw The Lines Around Individuals?
1:33:49 - Responsibility in A World Out of Control
1:53:51 - Closing
Announcements
Check out my new single and music video “The Big Machine” — along with an essay on songwriting as evolution and a list of my favorite sci-fi ballads. Switch it up from this week’s news by diving in for a trip into the scalar reconfigurations of selfhood:
Starting next week I’m hosting a members-only reading and discussion of Federico Campagna’s Prophetic Culture: Recreation for Adolescents with a live call on Sat May 3rd:
Josh’s Links
Joshua DiCaglio’s Website + Google Scholar + X + LinkedIn
Scale Theory Part 1 PDF (almost half the book!)
Microbes as Machines: Life, Control, and the Problem of Scale in the Emergence of Nanotechnology
Language and the Logic of Subjectivity: Whitehead and Burke in Crisis (unfortunately not open-access)
Project Links
Contact me if you have questions or want to work together
Humans On The Loop’s living pitch & planning document
Join the Future Fossils Discord Server for both public and members-only threads
Meet collaborators on the open online commons Wisdom x Technology Discord server
Full episode and essay archives
Podcasts
Humans On The Loop 01 – Richard Doyle
Humans On The Loop 06 – K. Allado McDowell
Humans On The Loop 10 – J.F. Martel
Humans On The Loop 12 – Matt Segall
Humans On The Loop 14 – Jim O’Shaughnessy
Weird Studies 36 — On Hyperstition
Future Thinkers Podcast – Daniel Schmachtenberger
Talks
Michael Garfield — AI-Assisted Transformations of Consciousness
Jacob Foster — Toward A Cultural Ecology of The Noosphere
Books
Chaim Gingold – Building Sim City
Valerie Hanson – Haptic Visions
Andrew Pilsch – Transhumanism
Plato – Phaedrus
Gilbert Ryle – The Concept of Mind
Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan
Geoffrey West – Scale
Anonymous – The Cloud of Unknowing
Douglas Adams – The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
Articles
Marc Andreessen – Why Software Is Eating The World
David Krakauer et al. — The Information Theory of Individuality
William Gibson – Google’s Earth
People
Carl Sagan
Eric Drexler
Richard Feynman
Neal Stephenson
Ray Kurzweil
Plotinus
Pseudodionysus
Stuart Davis
Rina Nicolae
N. Katherine Hayles
Stuart Kauffman
Vannevar Bush
Gregory Bateson
Norbert Wiener
Heinz Von Foerster
Kurt Gödel
Jill Nephew
Humberto Maturana
Francisco Varela
William Burroughs
Dorion Sagan
Lynn Margulis
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
Luigi Mangione
Ilya Prigogine
David Bohm
Ramana Maharshi
Nisargadatta Maharaj
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