Last autumn, as part of the Complexity Weekend hackathon, I hosted a live panel discussion with four unique and fascinating minds. We discussed archaeoacoustic design as a form of extended cognition, the continuity between the ancient and postmodern worlds, biomimicry, and many more interesting threads at the intersection of complex systems research and creative innovation.
I’m doing this again tomorrow (11/14) for a panel on complex systems science and the evolution of Web3 — more info here. Hope you can join us!
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177 - Systems Design & Extended Cognition at Complexity Weekend with Tom Carter, Jenn Huff, Pietro Michelucci, and Richard James MacCowan

Join paleontologist-futurist Michael Garfield and an avalanche of amazing guests for deep but irreverent discussions at the edge of the known and knowable: on prehistory and post-humanity and deep time, non-human agency and non-duality, science fiction and self-fulfilling prophecies, complex systems and sustainability (or lack thereof), psychedelics as a form of training for proliferating futures, art and creativity as service and as inquiry. New episodes on a roughly biweekly basis. Get bonus material and support the show at patreon.com/michaelgarfield or michaelgarfield.substack.com 

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“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 Weird with Sean Esbjörn-Hargens 125 - Stuart Kauffman on Physics, Life, and The Adjacent Possible 60 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens Goes Meta on Everything: Integral Ecology & Impact 45 - Kerri Welch (Fractal Synchronicity & The Future of Time) 3 - Tony Vigorito (Synchronicity)  ✨ Other Mentions: William Irwin Thompson Carl Jung Joseph Campbell Bill Plotkin Dave Snowden & The Cynefin Framework Stafford Beer Frozen 2 (film) The Matrix (films) 

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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 

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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 

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If you care about this show as a public good, consider signing up on Substack or Patreon today for bonus episodes, live calls, and more — or at least mash “subscribe” on Spotify or Apple Podcasts and leave a five-star review.  The unborn future archaeologists who find these episodes inscribed in DNA will thank you! Today I welcome you to join me for a long-awaited trialogue with two of the most thoughtful people I know: Gregory Landua, co-founder of Regen Network (and CEO of Regen Network Dev PBC), a project to bend finance and computing back into service of regenerative land stewardship, and Speaker John Ash, a machine learning engineer and artist/musician who walked away from his fintech job in 2017 in protest of the profit motive to build a democratic language model named Iris based on Cognicism, a new framework for collaboration rooted in shared wisdom.  Gregory and John are two of the most prominent and articulate advocates in my network for a third way beyond starry-eyed technoutopianism and desperate doomer thinking. Neither of them pull any punches when it comes to their cutting critiques of extractive capitalism and its capture of both sustainability discourse and potentially emancipatory new information technologies. But both recognize, as I do, that with a deeper and more fundamental understanding of the nature of trust, money, technology, and value that humankind is fully capable of a socioeconomic transformation that could empower us to make every transaction serve our collective well-being. It took me a while to come around to believing in the notion that AI and Web3 could actually heal the damage we’re doing to the biosphere, and even now I acknowledge that tools, like people, tend toward the production of harmful externalities when embedded in structurally unjust systems. But as I discussed with evolutionary biologist Manfred Laubichler and physicist Geoffrey West back in episode 212, not all innovation is created equal — and we may be on the cusp of a psychological and cultural reformation that opens up new paths to sanity and right relations. And it’s well past time for us to move beyond a “nature good, tech bad” or “tech good, nature bad” duality — both sides come from the same flaw in comprehension that allows us to believe we can escape our natural limits, or that self-destruction will allow us to escape our duties as the steward-servants of our living world. Enjoy this soulful and provocative discussion! ✨ Mentioned & Related Links: The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David WengrowUSGS on climate change and monsoons in the US SWEarlier recording of Gregory Landua & Speaker John Ash in dialogueGregory Landua on Kevin Owocki’s Green Pill PodcastMG on “value creation” as the export of externalitiesSpeaker John Ash on CognicismSpeaker John Ash on Cognition & ConflictSpeaker John Ash on SpotifyAn Oral History of The End of “Reality” by MGAccelerando by Charles StrossGlasshouse by Charles StrossRapture of the Nerds by Charles Stross & Cory Doctorow ✨ 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 (intro/outro: “Olympus Mons” & “Sonnet A”; episode codas “Transparent” & “Signal”) 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: 213 - Amber Case & Michael Zargham on Entangled Technologies & Design As Governance206 - Scout Rainer Wiley on AI vs. BS Jobs, The Return of Culture, and Eldritch Wonders in The Bright Apocalypse193 - Kimberly Dill on Environmental Philosophy: In Defense of Wildness & Night181 - Jim Rutt on The Pre- and Post-History of GameB178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions176 - Exploring Ecodelia with Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, and Sam Gandy at the Psilocybin Summit163 - Bitcoin & Fungal Economies with Toby Kiers & Brandon Quittem146 - Raising Earth Consciousness with Ralph Metzner, Dennis McKenna, Gay Dillingham, Valerie Plame Wilson, Allan Badiner, and Michael Garfield at Synergia Ranch, April 2016141 - Nora Bateson on Warm Data vs. The Cold Equations133 - Brian Swimme on Telling A New Story of Our Universe122 - Magenta Ceiba on Regenerative Everything94 - Mark Nelson on Ecotechnics & Biosphere 2 (Part 1)61 - Jamaica Stevens (On Crisis, Rebirth, Transformation)60 - Sean Esbjörn-Hargens Goes Meta on Everything: Integral Ecology & Impact56 - Sophia Rokhlin (Anarchy, Ecology, Economy, and Shamanism)51 - Daniel Schmachtenberger (Designing A Win-Win World for Everyone) 

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177 - Systems Design & Extended Cognition at Complexity Weekend with Tom Carter, Jenn Huff, Pietro Michelucci, and Richard James MacCowan

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