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Are we living in a Simulated Universe? How will AI impact the future of work, society & education?
Dr. Melvin M. Vopson is Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Portsmouth, Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Chartered Physicist and Fellow of the Institute of Physics. He is the co-founder and CEO of the Information Physics Institute, editor-in-chief of the IPI Letters and Emerging Minds Journal for Student Research. He is the author of Reality Reloaded: The Scientific Case for a Simulated Universe. Dr. Vopson has a wide-ranging scientific expertise in experimental, applied and theoretical physics that is internationally recognized. He has published over 100 research articles, achieving over 2500 citations.
"As a physicist, and it's not just me but many scientists and Nobel Prize winners have towards the end of their lives arrived at the conclusion that the world has the signature of some kind of intelligent design and we don't know what that is.
You can look at the whole picture from a religious angle. You can look through the simulation theory. I don't know how to formulate or explain what's behind it, but the universe is too perfect and fine-tuned to perfection. Even a small change in anything can lead to a total disintegration of all the fundamental forces, all the equilibrium in the universe, where the matter will not be stable, nothing will be the way it is, and then there will be no life. And I'm not against the idea of evolution because I think that creation and evolution go hand in hand. They are both true, and they are not competing against each other. They are not two competing philosophies or ideologies."
https://www.port.ac.uk/about-us/structure-and-governance/our-people/our-staff/melvin-vopson
https://ipipublishing.org/index.php/ipil/RR
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"One of the big differences I've noticed talking with people from more communally oriented cultures is that American culture has a strong emphasis on the individual on individual happiness, individual achievement on individual self-expression. And there are other cultures where the community, the family, and the neighborhood where they live and the well-being of others are paramount and are the first thing they think about. The most exemplary instance of that is in Bhutan, where they can't even propose a law for the legislature to consider unless they have a full section describing the effect on the community of any given law, the effect on the well-being of the whole population. So nothing is about the individual. It's all about the collective."
What makes a good life? How important are relationships in helping us lead happy and meaningful lives?
Dr. Robert Waldinger is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development at Massachusetts General Hospital, and cofounder of the Lifespan Research Foundation. Dr. Waldinger received his AB from Harvard College and his MD from Harvard Medical School. He is a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and he directs a psychotherapy teaching program for Harvard psychiatry residents. He is also a Zen master (Roshi) and teaches meditation in New England and around the world. His TED Talk about the Harvard study “What makes a good life?” has been viewed more than 42 million times and is one of the 10 most watched TED Talks ever. He is co-author of The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.
https://www.robertwaldinger.com/
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Good-Life/Robert-Waldinger/9781982166694
https://www.adultdevelopmentstudy.org/
https://www.lifespanresearch.org
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
What makes a good life? How important are relationships in helping us lead happy and meaningful lives?
Dr. Robert Waldinger is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development at Massachusetts General Hospital, and cofounder of the Lifespan Research Foundation. Dr. Waldinger received his AB from Harvard College and his MD from Harvard Medical School. He is a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and he directs a psychotherapy teaching program for Harvard psychiatry residents. He is also a Zen master (Roshi) and teaches meditation in New England and around the world. His TED Talk about the Harvard study “What makes a good life?” has been viewed more than 42 million times and is one of the 10 most watched TED Talks ever. He is co-author of The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.
"One of the big differences I've noticed talking with people from more communally oriented cultures is that American culture has a strong emphasis on the individual on individual happiness, individual achievement on individual self-expression. And there are other cultures where the community, the family, and the neighborhood where they live and the well-being of others are paramount and are the first thing they think about. The most exemplary instance of that is in Bhutan, where they can't even propose a law for the legislature to consider unless they have a full section describing the effect on the community of any given law, the effect on the well-being of the whole population. So nothing is about the individual. It's all about the collective."
https://www.robertwaldinger.com/
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Good-Life/Robert-Waldinger/9781982166694
https://www.adultdevelopmentstudy.org/
https://www.lifespanresearch.org
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
The more the science of intelligence (both human and artificial) advances, the more it holds the potential for great benefits and dangers to society.
Max Bennett is the cofounder and CEO of Alby, a start-up that helps companies integrate large language models into their websites to create guided shopping and search experiences. Previously, Bennett was the cofounder and chief product officer of Bluecore, one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S., providing AI technologies to some of the largest companies in the world. Bluecore has been featured in the annual Inc. 500 fastest growing companies, as well as Glassdoor’s 50 best places to work in the U.S. Bluecore was recently valued at over $1 billion. Bennett holds several patents for AI technologies and has published numerous scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals on the topics of evolutionary neuroscience and the neocortex. He has been featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list as well as the Built In NYC’s 30 Tech Leaders Under 30. He is the author of A Brief History of Intelligence: Evolution, AI, and the Five Breakthroughs That Made Our Brains.
"I think anyone who's practiced any sense or form of meditation, realizes that often it's when we turn our minds off and we think less that we feel most aware and present. And I think that is a great sort of introspective case study in the decoupling between conscious awareness and thinking. So I think it is highly possible that we will have very intelligent machines that far surpass us in quote-unquote intelligence, its ability to reason and problem solve, but could very easily not be sentient or conscious at all. Similarly, I think this also applies to other animals. I think folks who argue that animals are not conscious or sentient due to their inability to solve a variety of intellectual tasks may also be wrong. But when it comes to consciousness, we have pretty much no idea how consciousness emerges from matter. There are some hot, relatively speculative ideas, but we have no real scientific grounding on which to define this is how consciousness emerges."
www.abriefhistoryofintelligence.com/
www.alby.com
www.bluecore.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"This is why protecting the indigenous around the world has been an important cause for me because of that history, because of their knowledge, and the potential of losing it forever. I know that around the world that there are groups that are striving and doing the best that they can to maintain and hold onto those languages, doing as much research and capturing as much of that knowledge as possible. You know, fortunately, there are some incredible, dare I say, youngsters these days who are learning, who have such respect for their elders and their history and their past. They are learning the language and holding onto it as best as they can. As I said, I think the fact that it's all being recorded now and put down, and hopefully nothing further bad happens. I think it's key because we've learned so much from the Indigenous. You know, we're part of that history. It's just we've lost our way. They still know where they're going. It's just the rest of us that have been misguided, I would say, in the bigger scheme of things. The other thing was we, you know, for many, I mean we didn't know any better. That's no excuse, but, you know, we all rode on that bandwagon too of enjoying life to the extremes before we knew, really what that meant, how that abused not only people but the Earth. And the situation that we live in, as you see in the film also, I think we're only just seeing the tip of the surface really about the quantity of illness that is coming from the past 50 years of the way things have been done. I mean, the general public didn't know about so, so many of the bad things that were happening. The poisoning, the chemicals in our food, in all of our products, whether it's from, deodorants to hairsprays to makeup. It's really only in the past few years that there's been a decent should I say shift in that world and that finally some companies are taking responsibility for their actions and their positions, and they're trying to change things too. So little by little, little by little, but it's working."
How can the arts inspire us to lead lives of greater meaning and connection? What kind of world are we leaving for future generations?
Julian Lennon is a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, photographer, documentary filmmaker, and NYTimes bestselling author of children's books. Executive Producer of Common Ground and its predecessor Kiss the Ground, which reached over 1 billion people and inspired the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to put $20 billion toward soil health. The natural world and indigenous people are also the focus of Lennon’s other documentaries Whaledreamers, and Women of the White Buffalo. In 2007, Julian founded the global environmental and humanitarian organization The White Feather Foundation, whose key initiatives are education, health, conservation, and the protection of indigenous culture, causes he also advances through his photography, exhibited across the US and Europe. His latest album Jude spans a body of work created over the last 30 years. Julian was named a Peace Laureate by UNESCO in 2020.
https://julianlennon.com
https://commongroundfilm.org
https://kissthegroundmovie.com
https://whitefeatherfoundation.com
https://julianlennon.lnk.to/JudeWE
https://julianlennon-photography.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
How can the arts inspire us to lead lives of greater meaning and connection? What kind of world are we leaving for future generations?
Julian Lennon is a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, photographer, documentary filmmaker, and NYTimes bestselling author of children's books. Executive Producer of Common Ground and its predecessor Kiss the Ground, which reached over 1 billion people and inspired the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to put $20 billion toward soil health. The natural world and indigenous people are also the focus of Lennon’s other documentaries Whaledreamers, and Women of the White Buffalo. In 2007, Julian founded the global environmental and humanitarian organization The White Feather Foundation, whose key initiatives are education, health, conservation, and the protection of indigenous culture, causes he also advances through his photography, exhibited across the US and Europe. His latest album Jude spans a body of work created over the last 30 years. Julian was named a Peace Laureate by UNESCO in 2020.
"This is why protecting the indigenous around the world has been an important cause for me because of that history, because of their knowledge, and the potential of losing it forever. I know that around the world that there are groups that are striving and doing the best that they can to maintain and hold onto those languages, doing as much research and capturing as much of that knowledge as possible. You know, fortunately, there are some incredible, dare I say, youngsters these days who are learning, who have such respect for their elders and their history and their past. They are learning the language and holding onto it as best as they can. As I said, I think the fact that it's all being recorded now and put down, and hopefully nothing further bad happens. I think it's key because we've learned so much from the Indigenous. You know, we're part of that history. It's just we've lost our way. They still know where they're going. It's just the rest of us that have been misguided, I would say, in the bigger scheme of things. The other thing was we, you know, for many, I mean we didn't know any better. That's no excuse, but, you know, we all rode on that bandwagon too of enjoying life to the extremes before we knew, really what that meant, how that abused not only people but the Earth. And the situation that we live in, as you see in the film also, I think we're only just seeing the tip of the surface really about the quantity of illness that is coming from the past 50 years of the way things have been done. I mean, the general public didn't know about so, so many of the bad things that were happening. The poisoning, the chemicals in our food, in all of our products, whether it's from, deodorants to hairsprays to makeup. It's really only in the past few years that there's been a decent should I say shift in that world and that finally some companies are taking responsibility for their actions and their positions, and they're trying to change things too. So little by little, little by little, but it's working."
https://julianlennon.com
https://commongroundfilm.org
https://kissthegroundmovie.com
https://whitefeatherfoundation.com
https://julianlennon.lnk.to/JudeWE
https://julianlennon-photography.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
How can we resolve conflicts without compromising our ethics and moral vision? Each year, wars are being fought in our name or with our support that citizens never get an opportunity to vote on. How can we make our voices heard?
“Warism, taking war for granted as morally acceptable, even morally required, is the primary obstacle to peace.” Duane L. Cady is a philosopher and Professor Emeritus at Hamline University. He was nominated for the 1991 Grawemeyer World Order Award, was named Outstanding Educator of the Year by the United Methodist Foundation for Higher Education, and a festschiff in his honor was published in 2012. Cady is best known for his works on pacifism, including Moral Vision: How Everyday Life Shapes Ethical Thinking, and From Warism to Pacifism: A Moral Continuum.
"The task for us is to understand how we can get moral visions and then consider the ethics of negotiating between and among them, including collisions between moral visions. So my interest is in the extent to which various forms of reason take part in these different projects. I argue that contemporary technical philosophers tend to avoid this kind of problem. They tend to think of reason as much more narrow, whereas I want to include things like ordinary experience, the arts, theater, and reading a book. All those things can have an effect. Or as the case, we can consider now with current events experiencing moral horror, even if it's at a bit of a distance, even on TV or reading about it in the newspaper, have an effect on helping shape our moral vision. And so it's not necessarily a matter of neuro-technical reasoning. That probably is enough to get an idea of what I might do."
https://duanelcady.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
Many people talk to God, but Neale Donald Walsch says God told him, “You’ve got me all wrong.”
Walsch is a modern day spiritual messenger. He spent the majority of his life searching for spiritual meaning before experiencing his Conversations with God. The series of books has been translated into 37 languages. Walsch's newest book, GodTalk: Experiences of Humanity's Connections with a Higher Power, features a compilation of many different stories and perspectives from others who've encountered God in unexplainable and unique ways.
www.nealedonaldwalsch.com
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
How do some people face incredible tragedies and find within these experiences inspiration to improve the lives of others? Our guest today lost her grandfather, who was the assassinated Prime Minister of the Buganda Kingdom, and her father, who was disappeared by Idi Amin, and yet she went on to become a leading conservationist.
Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka is Uganda's first full-time wildlife veterinarian and the Founder and CEO of Conservation Through Public Health. Interested in animals from a young age, she pursued her studies at the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London before returning to Uganda. In the time since, she's worked tirelessly to preserve the animals of Uganda, being awarded the Whitley Gold Award, Sierra Club Earth Care Award, Edinburgh Medal, National Geographic Explorer, and most recently an appointment to become a United Nations Champion of the Earth for Science and Innovation. She is author of Walking with Gorillas: The Journey of an African Wildlife Vet.
"I have always wanted to be around animals and growing up, I cannot remember a time when there were no pets at home. My elder brother Apollo Katerega, who was 10 years older than me, also liked animals, especially dogs and was always bringing stray dogs and cats home. I was the last born of six children. My sister, Veronica Nakibule, who I followed, was five years older than me so were just outside each other's age bracket for playing. Thus the pets at home became my main companions, and we developed a strong bond.
Along the way, I eventually fulfilled my lifelong dream to not only become a veterinarian, but a wildlife veterinarian. In 1996, I began to take care of the critically endangered mountain gorillas of Uganda. Since then, they've increased in number from six hundred and fifty to 1,063 individuals in Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo(DRC). There are no mountain gorillas surviving in zoos outside their range countries, and their only hope is to keep the population thriving where they are naturally found.
The gorillas have shaped my life's calling since I first studied them as a student at the Royal Veterinary College, University of London. I've treated them as the first full-time wildlife veterinarian in Uganda and supported them as Founder and Chief Executive Officer of a grassroots NGO and nonprofit, Conservation Through Public Health, more commonly known as 'CTPH,' that promotes biodiversity conservation through not only improving the health of gorillas and other wildlife, but also the health and wellbeing of the people and livestock with whom they share their fragile habitats."
www.ctph.org
https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781950994267/walking-with-gorillas/
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
"The mind-body problem has been the main thing that I explored in my days in philosophy because I also had some small romances with philosophy as well. And I think this is not a matter of empirical investigation. So I don't think that there is any experience experiment that could tell you if there is a soul that is non-physical. I think that at the end of the day, this is for a philosophical and metaphysical discussion that could be determined by arguments and not experiments."
How we think, feel, and experience the world is a mystery. What distinguishes our consciousness from AI and machine learning?
Liad Mudrik studies high level cognition and its neural substrates, focusing on conscious experience. She teaches at the School of Psychological Sciences at Tel Aviv University. At her research lab, her team is currently investigating the functionality of consciousness, trying to unravel the depth and limits of unconscious processing, and also researching the ways semantic relations between concepts and objects are formed and detected.
https://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/mudriklab
https://people.socsci.tau.ac.il/mu/mudriklab/people/#gkit-popup
www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast
From the publisher's feed
Spirituality & Mindfulness episodes of the popular The Creative Process podcast. We speak to spiritual leaders, mindfulness experts, great thinkers and authors, elders, artists, musicians and others discuss paths to faith, connection, and creativity. To listen to ALL arts, education & spirituality episodes of “The Creative Process · Arts, Culture & Society”, you’ll find our main podcast on Apple: tinyurl.com/thecreativepod, Spotify: tinyurl.com/thecreativespotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!
Exploring the fascinating minds of creative people. Conversations with writers, artists & creative thinkers across the Arts & STEM. We discuss their life, work & artistic practice. Winners of Oscar, Emmy, Tony, Pulitzer, leaders & public figures share real experiences & offer valuable insights. Notable guests and participating museums and organizations include: Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Neil Patrick Harris, Smithsonian, Roxane Gay, Musée Picasso, EARTHDAY.ORG, Neil Gaiman, UNESCO, Joyce Carol Oates, Mark Seliger, Acropolis Museum, Hilary Mantel, Songwriters Hall of Fame, George Saunders, The New Museum, Lemony Snicket, Pritzker Architecture Prize, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine Galleries, Joe Mantegna, PETA, Greenpeace, EPA, Morgan Library & Museum, and many others.
The interviews are hosted by founder and creative educator Mia Funk with the participation of students, universities, and collaborators from around the world. These conversations are also part of our traveling exhibition. www.creativeprocess.info
For The Creative Process podcasts from Seasons 1, 2, 3 visit: tinyurl.com/creativepod or creativeprocess.info/interviews-page-1, which has our complete directory of interviews, transcripts, artworks, and details about ways to get involved.
INSTAGRAM: @creativeprocesspodcast

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