FUTURE FOSSILS #109 - Bruce Damer on The Origins and Future of Life

Bruce Damer is a living legend and international man of mystery – specifically, the mystery of our cosmos, to which he’s devoted his life to exploring: the origins of life, simulating artificial life in computers, deriving amazing new plans for asteroid mining, and cultivating his ability to receive scientific inspiration from “endotripping” (in which he stimulates his brain’s own release of psychoactive compounds known to increase functional connectivity between brain regions). He’s about to work with Google to adapt his origins of life research to simulated models of the increasingly exciting hot springs origin hypothesis he’s been working on with Dave Deamer of UC Santa Cruz for the last several years. And he’s been traveling around the world experimenting with thermal pools, getting extremely close to actually creating new living systems in situ as evidence of their model. Not to mention his talks with numerous national and private space agencies to take the S.H.E.P.H.E.R.D. asteroid mining scheme into space to kickstart the division and reproduction of our biosphere among/between the stars…

I find it amazing that anyone as potently psychedelic as Bruce gets the focused listening attention of audiences at NASA, Scientific American, Google, and numerous esteemed academic communities around the world. A late-career PhD who spent his early years designing software that changed the world and going on adventures with his dear friend Terence McKenna, talking to Bruce is an inspiration and reminder that the big questions really DO take the dedication of a lifetime – and that dedication DOES bear fruit.

(Appropriately to the McKenna link, there were some connectivity issues during our call that stretched out Bruce’s voice in a way very reminiscent of the Shpongle grain delay remixes of Terence’s talks. I left these in because I think they’re funny and in keeping with the good doctor’s trippy ideas, but apologies regardless.)

Bruce was the second guest of this show way back in Episode 4, but that was three years ago and his work (and my ability to discuss it with him) has developed considerably since then. Enjoy this high-level update about one of the deepest questions we have on the table, right now…the profound implications of this new model of life’s origins for everything from business and politics to the strategies for thriving through an age of worldwide turbulence and transition…

Bruce’s Website:

https://damer.com

We Discuss:

• Updates on Bruce’s efforts to recreate the conditions of the original “progenote,” a living system before the invention of cells;

• How modern life prevents a second “Genesis” from happening on the Earth;

• Why life must have started in a wet-dry cycling pond, and not in the sea or on land;

• The three properties of life: crowding/containment; networks; and information storage – or P,I,M: Probability, Interaction, Memory;

• The origin of life as a niche-construction process;

• The origin of life vs. the origin of individuality and competition – likelihood that started as integrated consortia, not free-living cells in resource conflict;

• Scaling up the progenote origin of life hypothesis to human systems and the origins of human civilization with “social protocells”;

• Does life require organic molecules, or is it primarily an informational process?

• Are memes even a real thing? (Compared to genes, we can’t point to one…)

• Working with Google to simulate the origins of life with a chemistry-modeling deep learning system;

• The increasing evolvability of (some) genomes in ever-more complex environments leading to a transition from genetic to cultural inheritance;

• How evolutionary networks can bump themselves off local fitness peaks and into novelty to prevent becoming over-adapted to tiny niches;

• Cycles of federalism and fragmentation in both nature and society;

• The possibility of a global plan to build sea walls – to make it an issue of national defense, and a better use of our time than border walls;

• What can we learn from the origins of life about the future of planetary culture and the ongoing evolution of our “progenote planet?”

SEE ALSO:

Bruce on Future Fossils Podcast Episode 4:

https://shows.pippa.io/futurefossils/episodes/5a85dca3144c44bd2557158b

Michael’s Version 1.0 Mind Map & Bibliography of research on major evolutionary transitions in self-organizing systems:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/toward-new-1-0-24798022

Evolution Evolving Conference:

https://evolutionevolving.org/

FUTURE FOSSILS #0086 - Onyx Ashanti on Surfing Exponential Change (Part 1)

This week’s guest is the one-of-a-kind, ever-evolving Onyx Ashanti, a cyborg performance artist of world renown, who is as busy as anyone I know (in the words of Terence McKenna) “immanentizing the Eschaton” with his intensely futuristic machine interfaces as an extension of his cymatic, fractal, exponentiating, indomitably cool and strange philosophy. Onyx is one of the most inspiring and creative people in my network and even though this episode was recorded in December 2017 – and is in some ways just a little dated – it’s still 99% WAY, WAY in our future. A paradox! Just how we like it, around here…http://onyx-ashanti.comhttps://www.youtube.com/user/onyxashantihttps://www.facebook.com/onyxashanti“We have access to technologies and information that are only limited by our abilities to comprehend them.”The creative potentials of encrypted distributed ledgers “that aren’t just about holding until I’m a millionaire.”Marshall McLuhan: “The future of the future is the now.”The uncontrollability of new technologies.When we talk about “THE” future, whose future are we talking about?“The past and the future all exist as constructs in your mind. The past is no more real than the future.”How choosing our story of the past determines what possibilities become probabilities in our future.“When I think about polarities like good and bad, I think about it in an electronic sense. It’s modulation of the relationship between positive and negative that gives you computers.”Physical and spatial computing exercises and how movement in space can help dislodge us from stuck perspectives.“We have to have more art that plays with the malleability of exponential expressions.”Book: Finite & Infinite Games by James P. Carse“There’s a lot of people who think that if they get the right president, or they get the right representative, or they buy the right car, then it’s all going to be alright. That is not the case. It is very, very not going to be alright. There are evolving and exponentially complying streams of possibilities that can collapse into probabilities – IF you understand that possibility collapses into probability.”We spoil the movie AI.“American media culture likes to wrap everything up in a happy ending, a happily-ever-after scenario. And I think that makes us retarded.”Book: Accelerando by Charles StrossTutting (for those who don’t know what tutting is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbBqtuYvags) vs BreakdancingVitalik Buterin, inventor of Ethereum, as an example of the crazy wizard kids these days, “spoon benders”Berlin and Detroit and the collapse of industrial centers as the mulch in which great artistic movements bloom…“If everybody were able to express themselves properly, we would be something else, and it wouldn’t be controlled by the people it’s controlled by. And that something else would be, I think, grander, but at the same time would have a whole other set of problems.”How do you keep the golden moment of a temporary autonomous zone or a bohemian urban revival going for as long as possible before it’s gentrified, coopted, integrated, and extinguished?“Innovation and institution: I won’t say that they’re oxymoronic, but the modulation is going to be different between them. I don’t look to institutions [for innovation]. I don’t believe the college education system is relevant anymore.”“The first thing that should happen is, everyone learns how to learn.”“There is no limit to synaptic connectivity that anyone has observed. There is no brain that is so full that it cannot process one more thing.”Onyx’s favorite nootropics (racetams).Co-evolving brain-machine interfaces for a constant flow state of cyborg immersivity.How would AI perceive information? Likely as music…Book: Starmaker by Olaf StapledonBook: Xenolinguistics by Diana Reed SlatteryJoin the Facebook Group:https://facebook.com/groups/futurefossilsSubscribe on Apple Podcasts:https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/future-fossils/id1152767505?mt=2Subscribe on Google Podcasts:http://bit.ly/future-fossils-googleSubscribe on Stitcher:https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossilsSubscribe on Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/2eCYA4ISHLUWbEFOXJ8C5vSubscribe on iHeart Radio:https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-FUTURE-FOSSILS-28991847/Support the show on Patreon:http://patreon.com/michaelgarfield

FUTURE FOSSILS #55 - "Creativity & Catastrophe" (Talk at Palenque Norte, Burning Man 2017)

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We’re living through a mass extinction – which is also one of the most awesome opportunities for creativity the Earth has ever seen.  In this talk that I gave at Burning Man 2017’s Palenque Norte Speaker Series, I give a short tour of Great Catastrophes of Natural History and show how each of them was also equally the advent of new life, intelligence, diversity, and richness.

Studying how crisis is the mother of invention, it’s my hope that this talk will inspire you to see our turbulent, chaotic age as something to be celebrated.  Learning what we can from evolution, we can shed new light on how to steer ourselves away from global ecological disaster – perhaps to even revel in our role as agents of epochal change in Earth’s amazing story.

http://michaelgarfield.net

http://youtube.com/michaelgarfield

In this talk I discuss:

• Going backward in order to go forward, the reclamation of the traditions and wisdom we have abandoned in our March of Progress;

• The importance of situating ourselves and our moment in the larger context of Natural History;

• The “Press-Pulse” Theory of mass extinction;

• The emergent forms of life and evolutionary creativity ignored by nearly every conversation about how we’re “killing the planet”;

• What The Great Oxygenation Event has to teach us about pollution and creativity as a response to danger;

• Why philosopher Galen Strawson doesn’t believe in free will;

• How the evolution of flowers was a huge catastrophe;

• Richard Doyle’s update of the Stoned Ape Hypothesis and the role beauty and seduction have played in the evolution of consciousness and culture;

• What the evolution of early birds has to teach us about the proliferating ecosystem of mobile devices;

• Hopeful developments in the area of plastic-eating microbes and fungi, and using living machines to digest pollution;

• The wilderness lives on in cities in the Anthropocene;

• And how awesome the film Shin Gojira (2016) is.

• PLUS:  What if we are living in a giant galaxy-sized brain?

Bruce Damer, Jake Kobrin, Mitch Mignano, and more speak up in the Q&A.

Quotes:

“The story of life can be told as a series of nested singularities, nested horizons of knowing and understanding.”

“Sex is a far more effective R&D situation than clonal reproduction.”

“Everything that we’re creating now, we want to treat it with love, and an understanding that it has a life and a destiny of its own, and it’s not something we control.”

“Cultural realities are starting to seem less and less sufficient for describing and experiencing the full range of human potential.”

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Future Fossils #43 - William Irwin Thompson, Part 2 (Thinking Together at the Edge of History)

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This week we continue the special two-part conversation with historian, poet, and mythographer William Irwin Thompson.  Author of dozens of sweeping works of synthetic insight, Bill Thompson’s greatest work may not have been a book but a community:  The Lindisfarne Association, a post-academic “intellectual concert” for the “study and realization of a new planetary culture,” which anchored in various locations across the United States as a flesh-and-blood meta-industrial village for most of its forty years.

In his latest and last book, Thinking Together at the Edge of History, Thompson looks back on the failures and successes of this project, which he regards as a “first crocus” budding up through the snow of our late-industrial dark age to herald the arrival of a planetary renaissance still yet to come.

This episode pivots from a contemplation of Lindisfarne’s history to our navigation of the turbulence between two world eras – how will we weather all this change, and what new life and worldview awaits us on the other side?

We talk about surfing the “winds of creative destruction” in a highly volatile digital economy; the emergence of the elemental spirits of the land into our demon-haunted crystalline electronic infrastructure; the future of parenting in a world too fast and too complex for public schooling or the nuclear family; the tension between emergent new media and art forms and the traditional forms of novel/poem/painting/song/etc.; the relationship between improvisational speaking and spiritual channeling; and the experience of being an “entelechy,” a multitude of smaller agencies comprising an ecology of self, an endosymbiotic “Homo gestalt.”

Bill speaks candidly and fluently about his unusual life history as a parent and living journey as an aging mystic, bringing erudite historic overview together with a surprisingly frank perspective on his transpersonal experiences.  It’s an honor to be able to share this discussion with you…

QUOTES:

“Mysticism is relevant now because it’s a good description of the daily news; it’s just responsible journalism that there is this mystical quality to an ethereal economy that is electronically blipping wealth back and forth in this computerized online banking world.”

“When you have an oxymoronic culture with the djinn inhabiting the computers and moving into the cognitive space symbiotically with human beings, the definition of the environment is changing and that which is invisible to the materialist or the industrialist is now recognized as an endosymbiont with us – so it becomes like the cell with the mitochondria.”

“Depressions and catastrophes are transitions from one system to another in complex dynamical systems, so you have to step back and look at the big picture.  And if you try to keep the accounts in a small container, where you say, ‘Nothing is stable! Nothing can be held’  Well, why is Buddhism so popular?  Because that’s exactly what Buddhism is saying!  If you attach and you’re grasping, you’re going to suffer.”

“We see [the change] but we always see it negatively.  We see the crash but not the imaginary future that’s emerging.”

“When the family always lived together in the nuclear family, what do you have?  They were always arguing and fighting…compression isn’t necessarily a good thing.  It’s what Whitehead would call ’the fallacy of simple location.’  So I embrace that the environment is now planetary.  It’s person-planet.  And through Skype and things like this, I’m in constant communication with the family, and that’s okay.”

“As you develop your subtle bodies through yoga…when you reach a certain point, you get what I call a ‘matching grant,’ like how a foundation gives matching grants, and if your evolutionary sheath reaches a certain point, then a being comes to cohabit-ate with you in your auric extended ecology.”

“You don’t want to have a hungry ghost as a daemonic guide, so discrimination is definitely called for.”

“Some [bacteria] you need in your stomach to digest, and if they get in the wrong place and they’re out of timing, they’re not so good.  If Godzilla tramps through Times Square, it’s not a good thing.  If he goes for a walk in the Jurassic, it’s okay.”

NOTE:

Again, here are the links to the first two chats we had in 2011 and 2013, as well as to my video remix of one of Bill’s lectures with footage from Burning Man.  Enjoy and be sure to check out Bill’s awesome books, as well as his extensive lecture series archived online with the Lindisfarne Tapes!

FUTURE FOSSILS #0028 - Forecasting the Unimaginable with Futurist John Petersen

(New essays , music , coloring book pages, and recorded talks coming soon for my supporters!  Sign up as a Patron if you haven't already...)“You cannot change the present system. This thing is dying, it’s structurally unsustainable. And so to try to somehow fix the present system is just a waste of time. Don’t waste your time on the present system. We have to start working on building the new world.”– John PetersenThis week we welcome futurist John Petersen of The Arlington Institute into the digital archives, for a challenging and visionary chat about how wrong we’re guaranteed to be about the future – and what we CAN expect about the new paradigm (which is coming sooner than you might suspect)…John Petersen started as an engineer before advising the military and White House, and has spent decades as a high-level consultant for emergent technologies and social trends. What he’s learned is that the future emerges at the edges of the known – that it will be, to paraphrase JBS Haldane, “not stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we CAN imagine.”If you’ve been waiting for a “deep end” episode, this is it. Prepare to have your paradigm interrogated and your limits of acceptable considerations challenged.John’s Links:• The Arlington Institute• Berkeley Springs Transition Talks(Climate Change Presentation is at the bottom)• FuturEdition Newsletter(A superb digest email list, one of my main sources for news stories to share and discuss in the Future Fossils Facebook Group)Topics Discussed:• Why experts are so frequently wrong about the future• Systemic social issues and institutional pressures that prevent us from asking the right questions about how to prepare for the unknown• Climate change predictions of a very different nature• The mainstreaming of the merger of humans and technology through brain-machine interfaces• The emergent tension between mysticism and technocracy• The possibility that information is carried by coronal mass ejections and influences the expression of our DNA• The potential contours of our next scientific paradigm• The sculpting and directing of global attention by media as a form of magical reality-manipulation• Love as a defense against malevolent spirits. (No kidding.)• The silver lining of our insane situation in the USA right now• The difference between inner-, outer-, and sustenance-driven psychologies, and their influence on global politics• What it is going to take for us to re-orient toward building a better world instead of clinging to the systems that no longer work for us• And how, instead of “Ender’s Game,” where you’re recruiting people into a massive game that turns out to be war, you could have “Beginner’s Game,” where people know they’re contributing their personal skills and purpose toward building a better world…Books Referenced:• Yuval Harari – Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow• Ray Kurzweil – The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology• David Icke – Human Race Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More• William Strauss & Neil Howe – The Fourth Turning: An American ProphecyOthers Mentioned:• Joe Dispenza• Bob MonroeQuotes from John Petersen:“If you do a vector into the horizon that’s a technology-only vector, then you’re missing the bigger parts of this. If you do artificial general intelligence into an extrapolation of the present world, then OF COURSE you’re going to have big problems. They’re going to try to weaponize it. They’re gonna get out of control. But. BUT. If there’s a new consciousness, then it all starts to change.”“Kurzweil himself said there’s a million times more knowledge that shows up in this century than in the last century. Well, GOD, how do you ride THAT kind of wave with conventional thinking?”“What you’re watching in politics, and the economy, and the financial systems, and in energy, and technology, and ALL of these things, is this basic, fundamental fragmentation that you can track back to this divergence [between those who embrace change and those who reject it], the emergence of a new kind of a mind-shift that is going to allow the exposure and discovery of extraordinary new kinds of capabilities.”“You can’t get from here to there without changing who you are and how you see the world.”Bookmark my Amazon Affiliate Portal  and every time you shop on Amazon I’ll make a small percentage of your purchase.Subscribe to Future Fossils on iTunes:http://bit.ly/future-fossilsSubscribe to Future Fossils on Stitcher:http://stitcher.com/podcast/michael-garfield/future-fossilsJoin the Future Fossils Facebook Group:https://www.facebook.com/groups/futurefossils

FUTURE FOSSILS #0027 - Rak Razam & Niles Heckman (5-MeO DMT & Consciousness)

This week I sit down with Rak Razam and Niles Heckman – psychonauts, journalists, provocateurs, and the film-makers responsible for Shamans of the Global Village.

In a conversation too full of awesome neologisms, delightful turns of phrase, one-liners, and weird genius for me to convey it all, we talk about the role of creative media in helping usher in new modes of human consciousness – and what we’re learning those new modes might be.  We finally get into WHAT those unborn archeologists listening to Future Fossils might be like…and our conjecture’s going to surprise you.

Books we Reference:

(Links are through my Amazon Affiliate account – if you buy any of these books, I get a small percentage of the sale at no cost to you.  Or you can bookmark this link to the Amazon Homepage and they'll send me a tiny cut of anything you purchase.)Octavio Rettig – The Toad of Dawn

Gabor Maté – In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

Steve Kotler & Jamie Wheal – Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work

Richard Doyle – Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, & The Evolution of the Noosphere

Alva Noe – Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons From The Biology of Consciousness

Eckhart Tolle – The Power of Now: A Guide To Spiritual Enlightenment

Michael Murphy – The Future of the Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature

Rudolf Steiner – How to Know Higher Worlds: A Modern Path of Initiation

Ramez Naam – Nexus

Terence McKenna & Dennis McKenna – The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, & The I Ching

Among the topics we fly by:

• 5-Meo DMT and psychedelic neurochemistry;

• Nondual philosophy and the methodologies by which the dissolution of the self-other boundary can be achieved;

• The correlation between flow states and gamma brainwaves;

• “God’s Factory Reset” and the relationship between 5-Meo DMT and endocrinological healing;

• The bizarre mystery that snails apparently operate on gamma brainwave states (“SNAILS MAKE GAMMA”);

• New forms of social media (and new ways of engaging social media) that emphasize community, fellowship, equity, listening, and other real human values;

• The possibility that it is actually the cardiac and enteric nervous systems experiencing and reporting from deep psychedelic states, while the frontal lobe is down-regulated;

• The curious phenomenon of spontaneous gesturing (automatic “mudras”) during tryptamine experiences, and what might be the cause and purpose of them;

• Intelligence in nature, distributed through countless species and systems but potentially orchestrated at an incomprehensible level of unity;

• The importance of direct experience in understanding the strange realms divulged by psychedelics, and beginning to investigate them scientifically;

• The coming wave of “technodelics” that can link human minds together into new meta-organisms and launch us into novel states of consciousness and modes of interacting with reality;

• Experimental designs for exploring the content and revelations of threshold tryptamine doses in “group mind” protocols;

• …We actually talk A LOT about snails.

• Gary Weber - http://happiness-beyond-thought.blogspot.com

Quotes:

“I’m on the outer edge, the lip, the cauldron of Deep Source itself.  And there’s an event horizon within which, just before I can lose full egoic consciousness and the drop has become the ocean, that drop can see the entire ocean like a tsunami wave cresting on the horizon.  And on that lip, on that event horizon, EVERYTHING is there.  I get this incredibly tangible, intuitive sense of the ancestors – and I don’t mean just my chronological, biological ancestors, I mean all those who have gone before in the species and are still perhaps alive as discarnate intelligences on the akashic frequency level on this bandwidth just before the edge of Deep Source, or perhaps intelligences that live within the lights and within the outer edge of Deep Source.”- Rak Razam

“Within the last ten, fifteen years, we’ve learned an incredible amount about the brain and about psychedelics and about the physical correlates of human consciousness.  And we’ve found – without any shadow of any kind of a doubt – with the most rigorous neurological methods available to us – that these spaces that shamans and zen masters and other enlightened or awakened people have been getting into for thousands of years – we’ve found that these things are real.”- Michael Garfield

“Most social media is not social media, it’s anti-social media.”- Niles Heckman

“It’s not that the ego needs to be killed - it needs to be brought back into right relationship.  And psychedelics have proven throughout the 20th Century - and no entheogens and shamanic sacraments again in the 21st - when we reduce the default mode network and lower the egoic self, we rejoin a larger sense of being, and a planetary being, and a divine being, and it seems to be the antidote to history.”- Rak Razam

“Is it safe for us to say, then, that ‘Dream Juice Is The Antidote To History?”- Michael Garfield

“I’ve seen enough around the corner to know what I need to do next.  And it’s a deep transformation of my habits, my rituals, my relationship with life, with myself, my family, my loved ones, my community…and I think it’s the deepening of the spiritual path.  And it makes it very tangible, whether I like it or not.  I can hide from it, it doesn’t go away.  The awareness of awareness of that thing is with me every day.  That’s what it [5 MeO-DMT] has done for me.”- Rak Razam