FUTURE FOSSILS Michael Garfield

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✨ About This Episode
The world is getting hotter, faster, stranger, and scarier every year. Species disappear each day, life-critical diversity replaced with media, consumer goods, capital, and trash. And yet…what do any of us feel inspired to do about it? Why has humankind thus far failed to wield its religions as an instrument for biospheric action? Reading the above probably generated more distress than motivation. Might Western civilization actually be better off reclaiming what the modern world felt it didn’t need — namely, the sacred? What if Christianity has ALWAYS at its core held teachings meant to stir up riotous love — the kind that gets us off our asses striving joyously to serve the living world we are?
Endlessly subversive author and Rice University Professor Timothy Morton (Twitter | Substack | Patreon | YouTube | Instagram) thinks so — and their new book Hell: In Search of A Christian Ecology argues eloquently for a weird and wonderful postmodern nondual Christianity in which we give up trying to run the place and realign ourselves with Life. Hell is a rousing and reviving work I underlined extensively, and our discussion traces and retraces Tim’s characteristically good-lurid and good-florid, stark-but-dreamy, mystically mundane, paradox-rich writing. We soar into romantic numinosity and dwell in body horrors, throw curtains open to pure light and celebrate the stains we can’t erase. Trigger warnings plenty, here — but one of them is that in the high-brow, low-brow oscillations you might find yourself awakened to the nature of your being-as-the-God-shaped-hole-in-everything.
I’ll let them introduce what is easily one of the most potent episodes this show has ever published:
“A wonderful three-dimensional podcast. Like, I can't thank you enough for wanting to go all the way around the mulberry bush and then into the mulberry bush and then outside the mulberry bush, then pulverize the mulberry bush into powder, send it around a particle accelerator, and watch the diffusion cloud chamber patterns as you compose another symphony using fractal geometry. I just love this.”
If that’s the kind of conversation you enjoy, then buckle up. Tim knows precisely the poetic mind-keys with which we can find The Garden in the flames of Hell itself, and Heaven in the sinful body of the Technocene.
Over the next two hours, we round the bases on a Greatest Hits of all my favorite topics, all of which appear in some sublime form in Tim’s wonderful new book. And we perform embroidery and exegesis of this anthem to raves and William Blake and AI and facing childhood trauma on the way to saving the biosphere from one of its own most deliciously sinful experiments (namely, civilization), we cover a kaleidoscopic swirl of topics such as:
• Making climate action (and America) cool again• Nonduality, convergent evolution, and the sacred as the feeling of biology• When teleology goes bad, then redeems itself through pluralism• Flipped gnosticism and dispensing with master/slave thinking• What deals with the devil teach us about how to wisely wield AI• “The Black Goo” as a science fiction trope and how it relates to…• How to make the best of living in Hell, aka social media• The Peacock Angel Melek Taus and having sympathy for the devil• Failure as comedy, sin as a blessing, thinking as a kind of failure mode• Evolution as a Christic promise of possibility better futures, and yet…• Why we shouldn’t use “emergentism” to solve “the meaning crisis”
We also pay dues to a totally prodigious list of inspirations.
As per our custom, those of you supporting the show have subsidized the extra time it takes for me to organize a thorough bibliography with links to the books, papers, films, TV shows, podcast episodes, and historical figures mentioned therein.
Thank you for listen

Now also on YouTube!
In this episode we’re joined by Andrés Goméz Emilsson, President and Director of Research at the Qualia Research Institute (QRI), with whom we go deep on their computational approach to probe the mysteries of consciousness and the psychedelic experience — and thereby, perhaps, make the world a substantially happier place. Join us for an adventurous dialogue at the intersections of phenomenology, spirituality, and mathematics…with stops along the way to ask about the neurobiological construction of time’s arrow(s), the geometry of DMT space, and the ethical challenges of creating conscious computers. It’s a trip…!
00:00:00 Intro, Thanks, and News00:11:18 Dialogue Starts00:14:15 The Origins of Qualia Research Institute00:17:37 The Importance of Consciousness Research00:22:18 Phenomenology and Symmetry00:47:38 The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT00:54:12 Avoiding Dissonance in Psychedelic States00:56:09 Complexity, Music, and Cognitive Processing00:57:22 Future Shock and Technological Overwhelm01:04:28 Pharmacological Adaptations to Technology01:08:39 Temporal Perception and Psychedelics
✨ Support This Work:
• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon.• Help me pitch my next big projects Humans On The Loop & Jurassic Worlding.• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Server, the Future Fossils Server, and Future Fossils FB Group.• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Buy the music on Bandcamp — this episode features “You Don’t Have To Move” off The Age of Reunion & “Sonnet A” off Double-Edged Sword.• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org reading list.• Browse original paintings and prints or commission new work.
✨ Related Episodes:
212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West176 - Richard Doyle128, 165, 203 - Kevin Kelly99, 132, 140 - Erik Davis131 - Jessica Nielson & Link Swanson42, 43 - William Irwin Thompson111, 199 - Android Jones14, 52, 161 - Michael Philip57, 140, 153 - Mitch Mignano60, 113, 150 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens
✨ Mentioned:
QRI Research LineagesAndrés’ Noonautics Advisory Board BioThe Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences: Symmetries, Sheets, and Saddled ScenesThe Pseudo-Time ArrowNon-Ordinary States of Consciousness Contest: Psychedelic Cryptography (Innovate)Digital Sentience Requires Solving the Boundary ProblemQualia Mastery (Guided Meditations, Part 1 & 2)Principia Qualia by Michael Edward JohnsonThe Psychedelic Transhumanists: A Virtual Round Table Between Legends Living & Dead by Michael GarfieldOne Half A Manifesto by Jaron LanierJürgen Schmidhuber’s HomepageThe Peripheral (TV series adapting William Gibson)Toward A New Evolutionary Paradigm 1.0 by Michael GarfieldAn ‘Integrated Mess of Music Lovers’ in Science by Michael Garfield for SFIWestworld (TV series adaptation)
Sean McGowanMike JohnsonDavid PearceAndrew GallimoreJim O’ShaughnessyJulio TononiKarl FristonRobin Carhart-HarrisIlya PrigogineJaron LanierSteven LeharRupert SheldrakeWilliam GibsonJürgen SchmidhuberAlain GorielyDarren ZhuHugh EverettSean CarrollIsaac NewtonStephen WolframChris LangtonJames C. ScottH. P. LovecraftNoonautics


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

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.”– Terence McKenna
This week I meet our guest Tom Morgan (LinkedIn, Twitter) in mid-leap as we both make giant bids to meet our destiny and better serve the world. Tom Morgan, who calls himself a “curiosity sherpa” and writes the superb blog What’s Important, worked for years in finance while he grew increasingly compelled by transcendental mysteries. His blog reflects a rare appreciation for the edges of our knowledge and his reputation is for getting high-performing businesspeople to ask deeper questions. In this conversation we discuss complexity and higher intelligences, the heroic metamyth, the alchemy of money, love as an organizing principle in transrational cognition, and holding other people through their personal encounters with the so-called “meaning crisis.”
If this discussion does it for you, look below to find scores more potentially life-changing (certainly mind-altering) talks and essays we discussed therein…

✨ Support The Good Work
• Learn about my new project on wisdom and technology, Humans On The Loop!• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon.• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Server, the Future Fossils Server, and Future Fossils FB Group!• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Buy the music on Bandcamp! This episode features “Olympus Mons” off the Martian Arts & “Tin Heart” off Double-Edged Sword.• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers.• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work.• Read my pitch for Jurassic Worlding, my next book on the future of evolution!

✨ Mentioned Media
Looking Over The Edge – Tom Morgan
For The Person Who Has Everything – Tom Morgan
Adventure Capital: An Interview with Jim O'Shaughnessy – Tom Morgan
Heresies of The Heart – Tom Morgan
The Great Betrayal – Tom Morgan
Tom’s recent five-minute talk at the Sohn Investment Conference
Toward A New Evolutionary Paradigm 1.0 – Michael at SFI in 2019
Intimations Of A New Worldview – Brett Andersen
The Master and His Emissary – Iain McGilchrist
Cognition All The Way Down – Michael Levin and Daniel Dennett at Aeon Magazine
Animism Is Normative Consciousness – Josh Schrei on The Emerald Podcast
The Passion of The Western Mind – Richard Tarnas
Tech Ethics As Psychedelic Parenting – Michael at CBA Innovation Lab
Exodus as Revolution – William Irwin Thompson at the Lindisfarne Association
Picbreeder
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned – Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman
Proof of Spiritual Phenomena – Mona Sobhani
The Phenomenon: Control System, or Developmental Driver? – Stuart Davis
Meditations on Moloch – Slate Star Codex
Studies on Slack – Slate Star Codex
Alison Gopnik on Child Development, Elderhood, Caregiving, and A.I. – Michael for Complexity Podcast

✨ Related Episodes:
212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere
202 - Caveat Magister on Psychomagic, Amusement Parks, & Turning Your Life Into Art
196 - Robert Poynton on Improvisation As A Way of Life
191 - Roland Harwood on Learning To Be Liminal
186 - A Manifesto for Weird Science
161 - On Play & Innovation with Michael Phillip: Hermes, EvoBio, Bitcoin, and Good Noise
150 - A Unifying Meta-Theory of UFOs & The We

This week I riff with Austin Wade Smith (they/them) — an animist, designer, ecologist, and creative technologist based in Brooklyn, New York and the Executive Director of Regen Foundation, a US-based non-profit working with distributed ledgers and AI to design sovereign regenerative economics. Austin’s work explores opportunities for social, legal, economic, and information technologies to foster greater interdependence between individuals and our living world. They teach design and engineering courses related to their research at universities in New York.
In this conversation we explore what Austin calls “a simple framework designed to expand the legibility of the ‘more than human world’ (such as ‘Nature’, Non-Humans, ‘More-than-Human Ecologies’, etc.) to various anthropogenic infrastructures and technologies, with the aim of increasing the ‘surface area’ through which non-humans directly exert influence on human-made systems.”
How can we make ecosystems more legible to the economic and political contexts in which they now exist?
Get ready for a conversation that up-ends conventional categories to hack open a new possibility space for human-machine symbiosis and technologically-assisted biospheric stewardship!
PS — I’m trying to launch a NEW podcast, Humans On The Loop, about how to use our new AI superpowers wisely. Here’s more info in case you’d like to help support this project or know someone who might!
✨ Relevant Links:
AustinWadeSmith.comTwitterLinkedInEssaysRegen Foundation“Legibility for Our Living World with Austin Wade Smith” on Ma Earth“Corporate Metabolism” by Xander Paco Nathan“The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone” by Cosma Shalizi
✨ Support This Show & The Family It Feeds:
• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes.• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal.• Buy the music on Bandcamp! This episode features “Olympus Mons” off the Martian Arts EP.• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers.• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work.
✨ Select Related Episodes:
• 217 - Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash on Regenerative Accelerationism & How To Heal A Broken Internet• 215 - Social Science & Collective Intelligence with Brigham Adams of Goodly Labs• 213 - Amber Case & Michael Zargham on Entangled Technologies & Design As Governance• 212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere• 180 - Web3 & Complex Systems with Park Bach, Sid Shrivastava, Shirley Bekins, & Avel Guénin-Carlut at Complexity Weekend• 178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions• 176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit• 76 - "Technology as Psychedelic Parenting at Palenque Norte, Burning Man 2017


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 marks the beginning of Embodied Ethics in The Age of A.I., a six-week online course led by writer and teacher Joshua Schrei, host of The Emerald Podcast.  This course is, in large part, inspired by an episode he wrote last year called “So You Want To Be A Sorcerer in The Age of Mythic Powers” — exploring the mythic dimensions of tech innovation and calling for a reclamation of initiatic mystery schools in order to provide us with the requisite self-mastery to wield tools like generative language models. I’m honored to be part of the all-star crew lined up to co-facilitate this course and as part of our pre-game sync and prep, I met with Josh to talk about the forces we’ve unleashed and how to live responsibly in a world where tech is, in Arthur C. Clarke’s words, now undoubtedly “indistinguishable from magic.” We explore the need to pace ourselves and anchor novelty production in ecologies of accountability; what it means to raise kids well amidst the A.I. revolution; and why humans cannot seem to stop invoking power and powers greater than our understanding.
If you enjoy this conversation, join us — and several dozen other awesome people — from 4/18-5/16 to learn and grow together and answer the call to better ourselves in service of this great historical unfolding!
(Big big thanks to former Center for Humane Technology Innovation Lead Andrew Dunn, founder of The School of Wise Innovation, for everything you’ve done to help inspire and organize all of this…)
✨ Support This Show & The Family It Feeds:
• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the music on Bandcamp. This episode features:
Tålmodighed (from Live at The Chillout Gardens, Boom Festival 2016)Gamma Pavonis (from Pavo: Music For Mystery)The Cartographers (from Get Used To Being Everything)• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work
✨ Mentioned & Related Links:
“Modern culture is ‘ahead of the one.’ Modern culture is rushing to get somewhere.”
* Josh Schrei on Howl In The Wilderness Podcast Episode 120
Sam Arbesman’s Cabinet of Wonders
Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky
Rick Rubin and Dan Carlin discuss magic
Michael Garfield w/ host Kiki Sanford on This Week In Science Episode 965
“Information overload is a personal and societal danger” by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr
Future Fossils 172 - Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Systems Thinking, Fractal Governance, Ontopunk, and Queering W.E.I.R.D. Modernity
Center for Humane Technology
The Age of Em by Robin Hanson
“Scan Lovers” from How to Live in The Future by Michael Garfield at Boom Festival 2016
Wisdom 2.0 Summit
”The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” by Marc Andreessen
Iron John by Robert Bly
“The Model Isn’t The Territory, Either” by Douglas Rushkoff
Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of The Noosphere by Richard Doyle
“Chief Philosophy Officer” by Peter Limberg
“The Next Tech Backlash Will Be About Hygiene” by Jonnie Penn at TIME Magazine
Douglas Rushkoff at Betaworks in 2023: “I Will Not Be Automated”
Zohar Atkins (Website, Twitter)
My comments on “Hallucination Is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models” by Xu, et al.
“For The Intuitives” (Part 1, Part 2) on The Emerald Podcast


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I’m honored to share a profound and soulful conversation on science and spirituality with Neil Theise, professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, discoverer of a new human organ (the interstitium), lifelong Zen meditator, and author of the superb book, Notes on Complexity.
✨ Mentioned & Related Links:
Embodied Ethics in The Age of AIComplexity, Culture & Consciousness - a Minds.com panel discussion with Neil Theise, Erik Davis, Michael Garfield, Richard Doyle, and Mitch Mignano hosted by Bill OttmanThe Golden Oecumene (trilogy)by John C. WrightThe End of Burnout by Jonathan MalesicTom Morgan - What Is Important?Divining The World with Joshua Ramey - Weird Studies 22Darwin’s Pharmacy by Richard DoyleScience and Nonduality ConferenceJane Prophet & Gordon Selley - Technosphere (1, 2, 3)”The King Is Dead, Long Live The King: Festivals, Science, & Economies of Scale” by Michael GarfieldThe New Yorker on Cormac McCarthy & Mathematical Platonism”Multiverses, Nihilism, and How it Feels to be Alive Right Now” by Like Stories of OldComplexity: Life at the Edge of Chaos by Roger LewinEmergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson
✨ Support The Show:
• Subscribe on Substack or Patreon for COPIOUS extras, including private Discord server channels and MANY secret episodes• Make one-off donations at @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the music on Bandcamp• Buy the books we discuss at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org page and I get a small cut from your support of indie booksellers• Browse and buy original paintings and prints or email me to commission new work
✨ Related FF Episodes:
14 - WESTWORLD Problems (feat. Michael Phillip of Third Eye Drops)42 - William Irwin Thompson, Part 1 (Thinking Together at the Edge of History)65 - John David Ebert (Hypermodernity & Blade Runner 2049)125 - Stuart Kauffman on Physics, Life, and The Adjacent Possible172 - Tyson Yunkaporta on Indigenous Systems Thinking, Fractal Governance, Ontopunk, and Queering W.E.I.R.D. Modernity176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit194 - Simon Conway Morris on Convergent Evolution & Creative Mass Extinctions212 - Manfred Laubichler & Geoffrey West on Life In The Anthropocene & Living Inside The Technosphere


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