In this flipped episode, Brendan Graham Dempsey interviews Jim about the ideas in his recent Substack essays "A Minimum Viable Metaphysics" and "What I Mean by 'Metaphysics'." They discuss metaphysics as assumptions for learning and reasoning, the difference between deduction, induction, & abduction, Jim's belief that there are no paradoxes in the real world, the reality principle, the asymmetry principle, the lawfulness principle, the potential stochastic nature of reality, why determinism and lawfulness aren't the same, consciousness in the tree of emergence, why emergence is important, causal time, downward causality as the main claim of emergence, temporal reciprocal emergence, Jim's reputation for drawing a firearm when the word metaphysics is used, the weak & strong anthropic principles, and much more.

Episode Transcript

"A Minimum Viable Metaphysics," by Jim Rutt

"What I Mean by 'Metaphysics'," by Jim Rutt

JRS EP 322 - Brendan Graham Dempsey on Psyche and Symbolic Learning

Institute of Applied Metatheory

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, by David Deutsch

JRS Currents 100: Sara Walker and Lee Cronin on Time as an Object

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.