🎙️ w/ John Krakauer of Johns Hopkins & @sfiscience.bsky.social on his 2017 paper "Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias."
Neuroscience's reductionist bias, the mereological fallacy, AI as a scientific partner, and much more.
jimrutt.substack.com/p/ep-339-joh...
🎙️ w/ @jeffgiesea.bsky.social, on his essay "Dionysian Futurism" and what's missing from our visions of the future.
The missing fun in Silicon Valley futures, recapturing vitality, bold asymmetric policy, and much more.
jimrutt.substack.com/p/ep-338-jef...
🎙️ w/ @philiprosedale.bsky.social, founder & CEO of Linden Lab & creator of Second Life, about the nature of self, society, & the design of virtual worlds.
Virtual world messianism, Second Life's economy, the duty we owe our immediate neighborhoods, and more.
jimrutt.substack.com/p/ep-337-phi...
🎙️ w/ @rufuspollock.bsky.social on the metacrisis, the wisdom gap, and what a Second Renaissance might look like.
Why open knowledge doesn't make open minds, what the metacrisis really is, pragmatic utopianism, and much more.
🎙️ w/ @ssweetwater.bsky.social about her book *True Human: Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World* and what it means to be human at this moment.
Verb-based identity, the creator-destroyer category, aligning civilization with the biosphere, and much more.
jimrutt.substack.com/p/ep-335-wor...
🎙️ w/ @joscha.bsky.social on the computational and representational foundations of consciousness, mind, and reality.
The brain as a game engine, why panpsychism fails, God as collective optimal agency, and much more.
jimrutt.substack.com/p/ep-334-wor...
🎙️ Matter as a phase of consciousness, teleology as a lure, and the three elements of a fulfilled human life with Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things.
jimrutt.substack.com/p/ep-333-wor...
🎤 Brendan Graham Dempsey interviewed me about my life and worldview.
My age 11 epiphany that religion is bullshit after researching world religions at the library, understanding the limits of knowledge through complexity science, the sacred as high-dimensional experiences, and much more.
🎙️ w/ @michaelshermer.bsky.social on his worldview and his new book, *Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters.*
Fallibilism, one thought too many, the objective discovery of human flourishing, and much more.
jimrutt.substack.com/p/ep-331-wor...
🎙️ w/ @bengoertzel.bsky.social on how he sees the world.
Reincarnation-like phenomena, ASI-human relations, the basic ground of being, and much more.
jimrutt.substack.com/p/ep-330-wor...
🎙️ w/ David Krakauer about his intellectual formation and worldview.
A commitment to chance, the Ouroboros of knowledge, value pluralism, and much more.
jimrutt.substack.com/p/ep-329-wor...
"People don't know anything, and they know less about time than anything."
I summarize the two most popular theories on time in this interview with @brendangdempsey.bsky.social, and explain why I think they're both probably wrong. Full episode link below 👇
@brendangdempsey.bsky.social interviewed me about “A Minimum Viable Metaphysics” and “What I Mean by ‘Metaphysics’.”
Metaphysics as assumptions for learning and reasoning, why determinism and lawfulness aren’t the same, temporal reciprocal emergence, weak & strong anthropic principles, and more.
"The AI figured out that the server wasn't started up, hacked its way out of the test environment... and started the server back up from the outside...
That's not a type of behavior AI was trained for directly."
- @intelligence.org's Nate Soares on why LLMs can do more than they were trained to do
🎙️ w/ Nate Soares on his and E. Yudkowsky’s book *If Anybody Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.* @intelligence.org
Why mitigating existential AI risk should be a top global priority, the problem of pointing minds, a treaty to ban the race to superintelligence, and more.
🎙️ w/ Alex Ebert on “New Age and the Religion of Self: The Anatomy of a Rebellion Against Reality.”
The law of attraction, manifesting, epistemic asymmetry as the cool, the odd coincidence of leaving the gold standard and New Ageism, retribalized collective delusions, regaining hypocrisy, and more.
🎙️ w/ @edelwax.bsky.social on “Full Stack Alignment: Co-Aligning AI and Institutions with Thick Models of Value.”
Pluralism as a core principle in social design, thick models of value, multipolar traps, moral graph elicitation, starting with membranes, Moloch-free zones, co-optation risks, & more.
I often say, “When I hear the word metaphysics, I reach for my pistol.” Yet, I have a metaphysics—whether I know it or not.
For a while, I’ve been puzzling over the question: What are my metaphysics?
This article offers at least a provisional answer.
jimrutt.substack.com/p/a-minimum-...
🎙️ w/ John Preston on *40 Flushes to Grow Your Business: The World’s #2 Business Series,* designed to be read during bathroom breaks.
Breaking free from being a one-person show, business owner support networks, social media pitfalls, lifestyle creep, transparency with employees, and much more.
🎙️ w/ Pablos Holman on *Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters.*
Deep tech vs shallow tech, computational modeling and simulation for real-world problems, space-based solar power, energy storage limitations, the transformation of the apparel industry through automation, and much more.
🎙️ w/ @brendangdempsey.bsky.social on *Psyche and Symbolic Learning,* vol. 2 in his Evolution of Meaning series.
Stage theories of development, the relationship between semantic richness & structural complexity, justification systems theory, cultural evolution, and much more.
"You have more options to wire and to let go of patterns that aren't working for you and to create new patterns that are going to work for you over time."
- Jordan Gruber on known benefits of microdosing psychedelics
🎙️ w/ James Fadiman & @jordangruber.bsky.social on *Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance.*
Typical doses, legal status & classification history, dosing protocols, health applications, research methodologies & limitations, commercial potential, global adoption patterns, and more.
"Like any highly flexible general-purpose tool, you have to build your own mental model of what it can and cannot do and how to use it."
- David Shapiro on rapidly changing AI capabilities and the development of intuition
🎙️ w/ David Shapiro on how to use AI for research and writing.
Post-labor economics, David’s AI tool stack, writing and editing techniques, critique and perspectives through personas, the rapid adoption of AI tools across industries, understanding limitations, challenges for AI startups, and more.
"The Columbia naturalists... accepted that all qualities and features of human life ... are as natural as anything else in nature. ... Then they added this objective relativism, which said, we don't know what it's like or what it means to say that an object exists in isolation."
- Lawrence Cahoone
🎙️ w/ Lawrence Cahoone on *The Orders of Nature* and his systematic approach to naturalist philosophy.
Objective relativism, the rejection of simples, Wimsatt's notion of emergence, natural religion & the fine-tuned constants of the universe, and much more.
🎙️ w/ Adam B. Levine on humanity’s changing relationship with AI and “thinking on demand.”
The GPT-5 release, the evolution of vibe-coding, the Midnight Protocol project, automated negotiation systems, local AI on personal devices, the future of AI agents as personal representatives, and much more.
🎙️ w/ @daveshap.bsky.social about his 6-part series on “post-labor economics.”
Historical economic transitions, labor as societal pillar, the pyramid of prosperity, the pyramid of power, blockchain & crypto, radical financial transparency, liquid democracy, and much more.
🎙️ w/ Ken Stanley on the Fractured Entanglement Representation hypothesis in deep learning neural networks.
Open-endedness in AI systems, the paradox of finding things by not looking for them, Unified Factored Representation as an alternative to FER, connections to biological evolution, and more.