In a special edition of the new Worldviews series, Brendan Graham Dempsey asks Jim about his life and worldview using a faith development interview. They discuss Jim's life chapters from growing up through becoming a complexity guy and GameB advocate, his age 11 epiphany that religion is bullshit after researching world religions at the library, the formative influence of his wife and parents who built lives from poverty, his realization that exponential growth on a finite planet driven by advertising and economic systems is destructive, understanding the limits of knowledge through complexity science and rejecting naive Newtonianism, his three core values of human well-being, ecological richness, and preserving humanity's path to bring the universe to life, the belief that humans may be the only general intelligence in the universe, the sacred as high-dimensional experiences that can't be explained scientifically, the importance of humility given how often we're wrong, the decision-making method of studying enough for a bullshitter's understanding then walking until reaching a conclusion, utilitarian deontology, human life as a leaf node on the tree of emergence, language and science as major transitions with AI as a potential third, disbelief in the supernatural, explaining evil through game theory, psychopathy as evil by nature, humans as mesoscale entities, a universe fine-tuned for emergence, and much more.

Episode Transcript

Institute of Applied Metatheory

A God That Could be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet, by Nancy Ellen Abrams

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.