Jim talks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about his book Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Metamodern World. They discuss the meaning crisis & its symptoms, reciprocal narrowing, the pre-modern & the modern, the emergence of reductionism, the meaning of complexity & emergence, sacralizing the scientific creation narrative, Prigogine's theory of dissipative systems, the universe as a process of endless complexification, marrying Bobby Azarian's Unifying Theory of Reality & Gregg Henriques's Unified Theory of Knowledge, consciousness vs sentience, Integrated Information Theory vs John Searle's biological functionalism, the odds that intelligent life evolved only once in our galaxy, tying complexification to the God concept, making the "religion that is not a religion" accessible through mythopoeia & storytelling, the Omega Point, whether approaching the Omega Point implies pushing for a techno-Singularity, Emergentist ethics & practices, and much more.

Episode Transcript

Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Modern World, by Brendan Graham Dempsey

"Awakening from the Meaning Crisis," by John Vervaeke - YouTube series

JRS EP143 - John Vervaeke Part 1: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis

The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex, by Harold Morowitz

The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity, by Bobby Azarian

JRS EP 159 - Bobby Azarian on the Romance of Reality

JRS EP105 - Christof Koch on Consciousness

JRS EP 167 - Bruce Damer on the Origins of Life

JRS EP 171 - Bruce Damer Part 2: The Origins of Life – Implications

JRS EP40 - Eric Smith on the Physics of Living Systems

Brendan Graham Dempsey is a writer whose work focuses on the meaning crisis and the nature of spirituality in metamodernity. He is the host of the Metamodern Spirituality podcast and the writer behind the six-volume (and counting) Metamodern Spirituality Series. He earned his BA in Religious Studies from the University of Vermont and his MA in Religion and the Arts from Yale University. He lives in Greensboro Bend, Vermont, where he runs the holistic retreat center Sky Meadow.