The Jim Rutt Show

In this Worldviews episode, Jim talks with Iain McGilchrist about consciousness, matter, and the nature of reality. They discuss consciousness as the basis of everything we know, matter as a phase of consciousness that provides resistance and persistence, pan-experientialism and the belief that everything in the cosmos experiences in some form, the whirlpool metaphor for individual consciousness within a broader field, emergent naturalism and nested levels of organization, the question of whether the universe is continuous or granular at the Planck scale, consciousness in animals including chimps and corvids, language as the principal difference between human and animal consciousness, John Vervaeke's distinction between propositional and participatory knowing, the divided brain and how the left and right hemispheres attend to the world differently, the left hemisphere's focus on decontextualized abstractions versus the right hemisphere's grasp of interconnected wholes, how the left hemisphere deals with representations while the right hemisphere experiences presences, living in a world dominated by the relatively stupid left hemisphere, the relationship between consciousness and reality as an encounter rather than naive realism or idealism, relations coming before things, Lee Smolin's argument that time cannot be an illusion, assembly theory's challenge to the block universe, values as ontological primitives that cannot be derived from a valueless cosmos, the distinction between value and values, teleology as a lure rather than determinism using Waddington's creodes metaphor, the three elements of a fulfilled life (belonging to a coherent social group, belonging in nature, and belonging in the cosmos), the breakdown of collective sense making despite increased education levels, the decline in the caliber of political leaders, the distinction between information and wisdom, and much more.

Episode Transcript
The Master and His Emissary, by Iain McGilchrist
The Matter with Things, by Iain McGilchrist
JRS EP 154 - Iain McGilchrist on The Matter With Things
JRS EP 155 Iain McGilchrist Part 2: The Matter With Things
The Emergence of Everything, by Harold Morowitz
Time Reborn, by Lee Smolin
JRS EP 5 Lee Smolin - Quantum Foundations and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution

Iain McGilchrist is a former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Consultant Emeritus of the Bethlem and Maudsley Hospital, London, a former research Fellow in Neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, Baltimore, and a former Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He now lives on the Isle of Skye, off the coast of North West Scotland, where he continues to write, and lectures worldwide. He is committed to the idea that the mind and brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context, that of the whole of our physical and spiritual existence, and of the wider human culture in which they arise – the culture which helps to mould, and in turn is moulded by, our minds and brains.

In a special edition of the new Worldviews series, Brendan Graham Dempsey asks Jim about his life and worldview using a faith development interview. They discuss Jim's life chapters from growing up through becoming a complexity guy and GameB advocate, his age 11 epiphany that religion is bullshit after researching world religions at the library, the formative influence of his wife and parents who built lives from poverty, his realization that exponential growth on a finite planet driven by advertising and economic systems is destructive, understanding the limits of knowledge through complexity science and rejecting naive Newtonianism, his three core values of human well-being, ecological richness, and preserving humanity's path to bring the universe to life, the belief that humans may be the only general intelligence in the universe, the sacred as high-dimensional experiences that can't be explained scientifically, the importance of humility given how often we're wrong, the decision-making method of studying enough for a bullshitter's understanding then walking until reaching a conclusion, utilitarian deontology, human life as a leaf node on the tree of emergence, language and science as major transitions with AI as a potential third, disbelief in the supernatural, explaining evil through game theory, psychopathy as evil by nature, humans as mesoscale entities, a universe fine-tuned for emergence, and much more.

Episode Transcript
Institute of Applied Metatheory
A God That Could be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet, by Nancy Ellen Abrams

Brendan Graham Dempsey is Director of Research at the Institute of Applied Metatheory, where he studies the complexification of worldviews and human meaning-making systems across scales. He holds an advanced degree from Yale University, where he studied religion and culture. His books include Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Metamodern World and the multi-volume Evolution of Meaning series. He is Managing Editor of Integration: The Journal of Big Picture Theory and Practice and a founding editor of Metamodern Theory & Praxis.

Jim talks with Michael Shermer about his worldview and his new book, Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters. They discuss Michael's self-identification as a monist and realist who believes in a physical objective world, the concept of fallibilism, intersubjective verification of the interobjective, reliance on authorities and institutions, the battle between the book of authority versus the book of nature, balancing rationality with empiricism, the dependence of mathematical truths on axioms, January 6 as an example of people acting rationally on false beliefs, Shermer's journey from born-again Christian to atheist and Jim's opposite journey from Catholicism to atheism, treating religious literature like great literature with deeper truths, the study of consciousness and the hard problem versus the easy problem, separating intelligence from consciousness, consciousness as a biological process like digestion, the question of machine sentience, a critique of Donald Hoffman's interface theory, evidence for veridical perception through mimicry in nature and animals climbing trees, skepticism about brain-in-a-vat and simulation scenarios, minimum viable metaphysics, Thomas Nagel's concept of one thought too many, Jonathan Rauch's constitution of knowledge, the replication crisis in psychology, the breakdown of trust in institutions due to COVID and the noble lie, the problem of scaling laws with followership, moral realism and the survival and flourishing of sentient beings, the principle of interchangeable perspectives, discovering moral values through problem-solving, the evolution of ethics and the expanding moral sphere, and much more.

Episode Transcript
Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters, by Michael Shermer
The Michael Shermer Show
Why People Believe Weird Things, by Michael Shermer
The Believing Brain, by Michael Shermer
Why Darwin Matters, by Michael Shermer
The Science of Good and Evil, by Michael Shermer
Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, by Michael Shermer
"A Minimum Viable Metaphysics," by Jim Rutt
JRS EP 287 - Jonathan Rauch on the Epistemic Crisis

Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine and the host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show. For 30 years he taught college and university courses in critical thinking, and for 18 years he was a monthly columnist for Scientific American. He is the author of New York Times bestsellers Why People Believe Weird Things and The Believing Brain, Why Darwin Matters, The Science of Good and Evil, The Moral Arc, Heavens on Earth, Giving the Devil His Due, and Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His new book is Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Still Matters. Follow him on X @michaelshermer.

Jim talks with Ben Goertzel about his worldview. They discuss Ben's morning experience of consciousness crystallizing from ambient awareness, his identification as a panpsychic, the concept of pattern being more fundamental than stuff, Charles Peirce's ontology of first/second/third, the idea of uryphysics as a broader notion of physics beyond metaphysics, parapsychology and psi phenomena including remote viewing and Project Stargate, reincarnation-like phenomena and cases from India, experimental design in parapsychology research, the legitimation of both AGI and psi research, the consciousness explosion occurring alongside AI/ASI development, Jeffrey Martin's work on fundamental well-being and persistent nonsymbolic experience, the immense design space of possible minds, human cognitive limitations like seven plus or minus two short-term memory, the single-threaded nature of human consciousness versus potential multi-threaded ASI, scenarios for beneficial superintelligence and options for humans to remain in human form or upload, the question of how long human existence would remain interesting post-singularity, psychedelics as tools for accessing different states of consciousness and insights into mind construction, the absence of shamanic institutions in modern culture, experiences with DMT and heroic doses, holding multiple contradictory perspectives simultaneously, Walt Whitman's notion of containing multitudes, Ben's intuitive sense that consciousness and the basic ground of being are fundamentally joyful and compassionate, arguments for why superintelligence will likely be good based on efficiency of mutually trusting agents, and much more.

Episode Transcript
The Consciousness Explosion, by Ben Goertzel
JRS EP 217 Ben Goertzel on a New Framework for AGI
JRS EP 211 Ben Goertzel on Generative AI vs. AGI
JRS Currents 072: Ben Goertzel on Viable Paths to True AGI
Evidence for Psi: Thirteen Empirical Research Reports, ed. Damien Broderick & Ben Goertzel

Dr. Ben Goertzel is a cross-disciplinary scientist, entrepreneur and author.  Born in Brazil to American parents, in 2020 after a long stretch living in Hong Kong he relocated his primary base of operations to a rural island near Seattle. He leads the SingularityNET Foundation, the OpenCog Foundation, and the AGI Society which runs the annual Artificial General Intelligence conference. Dr. Goertzel’s research work encompasses multiple areas including artificial general intelligence, natural language processing, cognitive science, machine learning, computational finance, bioinformatics, virtual worlds, gaming, parapsychology, theoretical physics and more.

In the inaugural episode of a new series, Jim talks with David Krakauer about his intellectual formation and worldview. They discuss what woke up as David this morning, his commitments to chance and pattern seeking, his epiphany about the idea of the idea at age 12 or 13, his perverse attraction to the arcane and difficult, evolution as integral to intelligence, the risk-averse character of scholars and the sociology of science, the Santa Fe Institute's attempt to maintain revolutionary science, the Ouroboros concept challenging foundationalism in epistemology, the standard model of physics as foundational versus the view that you can establish foundations anywhere, string theory as a slowly dying pseudoscience, whether beauty is a useful guide in science, emergence and broken symmetries, Phil Anderson's "More is Different" paper, the Wigner reversal and the shift from law to initial conditions, rejecting both weak and strong emergence, effective theories and causally justified concepts, downward causality, micrograining versus coarse graining, the distinction between abiotic and biotic systems, games and puzzles as model systems for complexity, combinatorial solution spaces, heuristics as dimensional reducers and potentially the golden road to AGI, Isaiah Berlin's influence on David's worldview, negative versus positive liberties, value pluralism and historicity, the Fermi paradox and the possibility of alien life, the rational versus the irrational in human life, and much more.

Episode Transcript
JRS EP 192 - David Krakauer on Science, Complexity and AI
JRS EP10 - David Krakauer: Complexity Science
The Complex World: An Introduction to the Foundations of Complexity Science, by David Krakauer
Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019, by David Krakauer
History, Big History, & Metahistory, by David Krakauer
"A Minimum Viable Metaphysics," by Jim Rutt
"More Is Different," by P.W. Anderson
The Emergence of Everything, by Harold Morowitz

David Krakauer’s research explores the evolution of intelligence and stupidity on Earth. This includes studying the evolution of genetic, neural, linguistic, social, and cultural mechanisms supporting memory and information processing, and exploring their shared properties. President of the Santa Fe Institute since 2015, he served previously as the founding director of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, the co-director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation, and professor of mathematical genetics, all at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.