Listening Post

This is a first for me, having a recorded conversation with somebody I have just met. I will say however Tom's book is incredibly interesting and challenging in many ways. He takes an alternative look at everything we think is right in the world and challenges some of the traditional ways we think about ourselves and others. It is a challenging read that will make you think but is not that the point.
 
 When I first had the call with Tom, I had only managed to get two thirds of the way through the book, and so I am not sure I have done him the justice he deserves, especially now I have completed It. So, I am hoping that I can persuade him to come back for a second conversation.


For now if you wish to contact Tom directly please see the links below.

Order the book on Amazon:  https://mybook.to/Understand_Everything

 How to Understand Everything website. https://howtounderstandeverything.beakbane.com/ 

 What is Consilience?  https://youtu.be/p4DeBJEmGiw

 LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/beakbane-publishing/ 

 Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/HowToUnderstandEverything

 Twitter:  @TomBeakbane

Clubhouse discussions WTF Consilience? https://www.joinclubhouse.com/club/wtf-is-consilience  

This week I welcome neuroscientist Tom Beakbane to the show to discuss his book “How to Understand Everything” and the subject of consilience, a word Tom has used as a foundational idea for a multi-faceted approach to looking at our relationships, our biology and even consciousness itself. If nothing else, we certainly had an interesting conversation. Enjoy!

The post Sensibly Speaking Podcast #291: How to Understand Everything with Tom Beakbane appeared first on The Sensibly Speaking Podcast.

Consilience is the theme for my guest today. consilience is the idea that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can "converge" on strong conclusions. In other words, arriving at the same results through various fields of study. And that seems to be exactly how Jeremy is living his life and running his businesses. Jeremy Gilbertson is headed down a path few understand or appreciate. While Music is his passion and ultimately the primary focus, the path through that medium and life in general is both multi-disciplined and multifaceted. Watching him trail-blaze this path has been so inspirational. His openness to new experiences and preparation for opportunity has led Jeremy to be involved in a lot of unique projects. Whether conducting a song writing workshop for vets at Camp Southern Ground, or orchestrating the film score for a civil rights short, Jeremy seemingly does it all. But he still maintains a work/life balance thanks in large part to his amazing wife Traci, who , as he will tell you, makes it all possible. Please enjoy my conversation with Jeremy Gilbertson.

This week I'm speaking with Daniel Schmachtenberger.

Daniel is a founding member of The Consilience Project, aimed at improving public sensemaking and dialogue.

We talk about the current state of the phase shift, whether we are past the point of no return for social collapse, Daniel’s three generator functions of existential risk, the definition of an adequate social architecture that avoids existential risk, how technology creates asymmetric advantage that debases the planetary life support system, why we need to create technology that leads to ‘metastability’, the pollution of the epistemic commons, why we need to define problems in a comprehensive way where the solutions don’t create worse problems, the vows Daniel made as a teenager, what progress is being made at solving the generator functions of existential risk, the auto-poetic nature of trauma, and the necessity of a mature relationship between certainty and uncertainty.

The author of the best-selling Your Inner Fish gives us a lively and accessible account of the great transformations in the history of life on Earth — a new view of the evolution of human and animal life that explains how the incredible diversity of life on our planet came to be. Over billions of years, ancient fish evolved to walk on land, reptiles transformed into birds that fly, and apelike primates evolved into humans that walk on two legs, talk, and write. For more than a century, paleontologists have traveled the globe to find fossils that show how such changes have happened. We have now arrived at a remarkable moment — prehistoric fossils coupled with new DNA technology have given us the tools to answer some of the basic questions of our existence: How do big changes in evolution happen? Is our presence on Earth the product of mere chance? This new science reveals a multibillion-year evolutionary history filled with twists and turns, trial and error, accident and invention. In Some Assembly Required, Neil Shubin takes readers on a journey of discovery spanning centuries, as explorers and scientists seek to understand the origins of life's immense diversity. Shermer and Shubin also discuss:

• Darwin's consilience of inductions (convergence of evidence) from multiple lines of inquiry
• how a scientific theory can gain acceptance without an underlying causal mechanism (evolutionary theory before DNA)
• what scientists should do with anomalies unexplained by the prevailing theory
• Does ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny? (What can we learn about evolution from embryology?)
• What is epigenetics, anyway?
• the best explanation for the origins of life
• how information can increase in a genome
• from microevolution to macroevolution: why creationists are wrong
• Are there hopeful monsters in evolution?
• Punctuated equilibrium and what it was like to be Steve Gould's TA
• women in science, then and now
• What it's like to do a paleontological dig north of the arctic circle? and
• Martian paleontology.

Neil Shubin is the author of Some Assembly Required, Your Inner Fish, and The Universe Within. He is the Robert R. Bensley Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2011. He lives in Chicago.

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