Jim talks with Zak Stein and Marc Gafni about consciousness, attention, and value as fundamental aspects of reality. They explore continuity & discontinuity in evolution, phenomenology & naturalism, emergence, value theory, selection theory, mathematics as both discovered & created, pre-life organic chemistry, sexual selection & evolutionary dynamics, attraction/allurement across different emergent layers, evolving value, first principles & first values, the intimacy equation concept, desire as disclosing value, consciousness in animals vs simpler systems, machine consciousness, group selection theory, the evolution of complexity, the role of contingency & necessity, religious & materialist perspectives on value, and much more.

Episode Transcript

First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come, by David J. Temple

The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis

Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society, by Peter M. Senge and Joseph Jaworski

JRS EP301 - Zak Stein on K-12 Education in the AI Era

JRS EP240 - Stuart Kauffman on a New Approach to Cosmology

Dr. Zachary Stein is a Co-Founder of the Civilization Research Institute and the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. He was trained at the interface of philosophy, psychology, and education and now works in fields related to the mitigation of global catastrophic risk. He is a widely sought-after and award-winning speaker and a leading authority on the future of education and contemporary issues in human development.

Dr. Marc Gafni has been described as a world philosopher—a kind of galaxy heart brain—integrating wisdom from across multiple disciplines into what he has called a New Story of Value in response to the meta-crisis. He is the author of fifty books, including the award-winning A Return to Eros and Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment, with the academic Journal of Integral Theory and Practice dedicating an entire issue to his Unique Self Theory. Marc is founder with Ken Wilber of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, and President of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, succeeding Barbara Marx Hubbard.