The Integral Stage Expanded Universe (ISEU)

By (Mostly) Layman? Some Bruce. Don't blame Bruce.Society & Culture Philosophy

The Integral Stage Expanded Universe (ISEU) episodes

July 06, 2023 SOUL OF A.I. #5 - "Silicon Sages" w/ John Vervaeke
For the fifth episode, Layman sits down with John Vervaeke to explore the topic from the three angles John considers essential: the (cognitive) scientific, the philosophical, and the spiritual. John discusses why the initial announcements about LLM breakthroughs left him concerned and dismayed; why he is distrustful of both the apocalyptic and utopian claims around AI; what his greatest concerns and hopes are, and what the best paths forward are for mitigating the alignment problem; and why he thinks theology, surprisingly, will become central and relevant again.
John Vervaeke is a professor of psychology at Toronto University and creator of the popular YouTube series "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis" and "After Socrates."
AI: The Coming Thresholds and the Path We Must Take
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-_RdKiDbz4&t=0s
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1 hr 12 min
July 06, 2023 SOUL OF A.I. #4 - "Techno-Animism" w/ Tada Hozumi
For the fourth episode, Layman sits down with Tada Hozumi to explore his thoughts on how a Shinto, animist approach to the world of living intelligences might help us wisely interface, also, with new AI systems, and to recognize some of their affordances perhaps not as readily apparent within our pervasive, materialist and reductionist worldviews. As their discussion deepens, they also get into tantric and Kabbalistic dimensions of AI, and an exploration of the possibilities of a techno-shamanist ethics and etiquette for our technological and social media landscapes.
Tada Hozumi launched his career in 2017, when he started doing coaching work around undoing racism through somatic approaches. This piece of work evolved into something he referred to as ‘cultural somatics’, which is an approach to both individual and cultural change that posits that cultures are in fact bodies made of bodies. Because of this, individual change and collective change are necessarily embodied processes that have a fractal relationship. One of the great benefits he saw in this kind of ‘cultural-somatic’ approach was that it showed us that everything we learn about our own somatic process can be applied to an understanding of how to work with social transformation. Through these efforts, he met Dare Sohei, who had a great impact on his work as they introduced him to foundational concepts of what he could call contemporary liberatory animism, which led Tada to develop a cultural somatic framework that saw the ancestors and other intangible presences our cultures speak of as beings that live in the ‘cultural nervous system’ of our ‘cultural somas’.
Professional website
https://tadahozumi.com/
Remember to like, subscribe, and consider supporting The Integral Stage on Patreon to make more of these conversations possible!
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Special thanks and big love to the Limited Hangout guys, Shai Newman, Brandon LaChance, Mike McElroy, Brandon Norgaard, Brendan Graham Dempsey, Francesca, and all of our other Patreon supporters!
1 hr 26 min
July 06, 2023 METATHEORISTS - "Metaforma" w/ Branden Singletary
Layman sits down with Branden Singletary, aka Nexumorphic, to talk about his metatheoretical model, Metaforma, and the philosophical and psychospiritual influences behind his singular and highly creative work.
Branden is a designer and creator, focused on the demonstration of meaningful design – deliberate, purposeful construction, rich with context and meaning, executed with wondrous precision.
Personal website
https://www.nexumorphic.com/
Fathom app
https://hello.fathom.fm/
Support The Integral Stage on Patreon!
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58 min
July 06, 2023 METAMODERN SCENE - "Queer Liminal" with Rachel H.
The queer, liminal, and shamanic all point in their own ways to working fruitfully with 'betweens' and 'crossings,' and yet the possible relations between these worlds and their sensibilities are seldom discussed in the liminal / metamodern communities. Layman sits down with Rachel Hayden to explore these overlaps and to consider what might follow from their more conscious integration.
Rachel tends to fret about what to write on a bio. Fortunately, her Personal Medicine of doing tai chi to become calmer is helping her at the moment. She has long been fascinated with mind-body practices, and uses many of these regularly - tai chi, Eastern and Western meditation and philosophy, and karate, to name a few. These have gotten her through some rough patches, kept her generally healthy, and pointed her toward greater insight and meaning. One of her other favorite things is music - listening, playing guitar, singing, and writing songs. Three years ago Rachel switched from being primarily a bodywork therapist and co-op grocery manager to being primarily a peer supporter. It has become part of who she is, and is probably the job she has loved the most, being with people through life's ups and downs. Being a queer trans woman herself, she often works with LGBTQIA+ people and others who are marginalized by society. Rachel became a CPMC to deepen and expand her approach to peer support, and help people find connections to their inner wisdom. She has a profound faith in authentic Personal Medicine, having realized its power in her own life.
Remember to like, subscribe, and consider supporting The Integral Stage on Patreon to make more of these conversations possible!
https://www.patreon.com/theintegralstage
Special thanks and big love to the Limited Hangout guys, Shai Newman, Brandon LaChance, Mike McElroy, Brandon Norgaard, Brendan Graham Dempsey, Francesca, and all of our other Patreon supporters!
1 hr 15 min
June 11, 2023 METAMODERN SCENE w/ Hemant Gupta
21st CENTURY HUNTER GATHERERS
For episode 7, Layman sits down in the Mumbai branch of the Liminal Café with author and podcaster, Hemant Gupta, to talk about his life and work - in particular, his writings and reflections on the new 'hunter gatherer' roles many of us find ourselves in, in an information ecology which is still in its wilderness stages; and a distinctive, quadratic heuristic he uses to nuance and think through complexity. Together they discuss what good next steps might be to bring a more globally expansive liminal community into being.
Hemant Gupta is an author, illustrator, and podcaster residing in Mumbai, India.
Meditations of a 21st Century Hunter Gatherer book
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BRWQ3WHS
https://www.youtube.com/@ThisJourneyDialogues
1 hr 4 min
June 11, 2023 SOUL OF A.I. #3 - An AI-enhanced Developmental Ecosystem & its Geopolitical Context w/ Fionn Wright
For the third episode of The Soul of AI, Layman sits down with Fionn Wright, the creator of an integrative metatheory that draws on Chinese as well as Western integral models, to explore how AI might be leveraged to develop ecosystems of tools and practices for midwifing a Metamodern culture through and beyond the looming poly-crisis. They discuss the importance of tuning these tools, or at least the use of the tools, towards the cultivation of wisdom, and Fionn makes a case for focusing on the benefits this technology can deliver, and the developmental roles it can serve -- without ignoring or downplaying its real existential and social risks as well.
Fionn is the Wellbeing Head at Qineticare. Having grown up in a family business in Europe and Africa, he earned his Bachelor in International Business from UBC while learning to speak fluent Chinese. Seeing gaps in Shanghai’s traditional market for corporate training, children’s education and language learning, Fionn founded and ran 3 innovative coaching companies, and led a team to develop the first Holistic Wellness Programs in China. Fionn is also trained in Neuroscience for Coaching, NLP Master Practitioner, Mindfulness-based Somatic Therapy, STAGES Developmental Coaching, Leadership Circle Assessment, Business Coaching, Transformative Leadership and with a Masters in Leadership Coaching, he now teaches over 40 types of meditation.
Personal website
https://fionnwright.com
Universifying website
https://universifying.com
Qineticare website
https://qineticare.com/
Fathom app
https://hello.fathom.fm/
Support The Integral Stage on Patreon!
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1 hr 27 min
June 10, 2023 HEIDEGGER FOR A TIME BETWEEN WORLDS w/ Steve March
Layman sits down with Steve March, the founder of Aletheia coaching, to talk about the challenges and rewards of reading Heidegger; his radical focus on the phenomenology of the "everyday" world; his concept of breakdowns in obviousness, and the opportunities such events afford us individually and collectively; being-unto-death; the influence of Heidegger and the concept of 'ontological design' on the Aletheia coaching method; the intersection of technological and poetic attunements in this time of AI; Heidegger's problematic history and associations; and much more.
Steve March became a professional coach in 2000, and in 2003, he became a coach trainer, leading coaching certification courses in the United States, Asia, and Europe. He is the founder and originator of Alethia Coaching, which offers a new paradigm in self-development that helps people move away from a focus on 'improvement', and instead uses a methodology that allows us to 'unfold' into the essence of who we already are.
Aletheia website:
https://integralunfoldment.com/
1 hr 32 min
June 02, 2023 LOVE THE SYSTEM - "Indigenous Data Sovereignty" w/ Trevor & Lee
Layman meets with two of the co-founders of ChinookX Technologies, Trevor Jang and Lee White, to talk about their efforts to establish and insure indigenous data sovereignty for tribal groups on the west coast of Canada, and to discuss the possibilities and the process of the decolonization of the internet.
ChinookX Technologies website
https://chinookx.ca/
1 hr 14 min
May 14, 2023 AUTHOR SERIES - "Crossing the Threshold" w/ Matt Segall
Layman is joined by Matt Segall, this time to discuss his new book, Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead. Matt describes his book as "a philosophical experiment in thinking, feeling, and willing beyond the transcendental threshold of Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy" -- an exercise in opening to a "descendental aesthetic ontology," which places us back into participatory relation with reality, and roots us again in cosmic creativity. In thinking together with Schelling, Whitehead, Nietzsche, and other philosophers, Matt is interested in showing that there are resources for transformative spiritual practice, for a new shamanism, here but often overlooked within the Western philosophical tradition.
Matthew D. Segall, PhD, received his doctoral degree in 2016 from the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. His dissertation was titled Cosmotheanthropic Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead. It grapples with the limits to knowledge of reality imposed by Kant's transcendental form of philosophy and argues that Schelling and Whitehead's process-oriented approach (described in his dissertation as a "descendental" form of philosophy) shows the way across the Kantian threshold to renewed experiential contact with reality. He teaches courses on German Idealism and process philosophy for the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at CIIS. He blogs regularly at footnotes2plato.com.
Crossing the Threshold book
https://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Thres...
Follow The Integral Stage on Fathom!
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Remember to like, subscribe, and support The Integral Stage on Patreon to make more of these conversations possible!
https://www.patreon.com/theintegralstage
Special thanks and big love to Shai Newman, the LIMITED HANGOUT guys, Brandon LaChance, Mike McElroy, Brandon Norgaard, Brendan Graham Dempsey, Francesca, and all of our other Patreon supporters!
1 hr 18 min
May 14, 2023 THE SOUL OF A.I. #2 -- "The Great Illusion" w/ Jill Nephew
The question of the promise and peril of AI is a proper one for our long-running Love the System series, but we thought it deserved its own spot as a sub-series due to the rapid development and proliferation of Large Language Models and other ground-breaking AI technologies over the past six months. It may be too early to tell yet, but with the clear power of this emergent technology, its potential to take over many of the tasks we used to regard as exclusively human, and its rapid public uptake, it feels like we are on the cusp of an epochal change. How are we to secure the psychological and spiritual health of human beings in the face of such developments? How do we ethically and wisely merge living and non-living intelligences? What wisdom from this corner of the internet -- from our respective integral, metamodern, and spiritual communities -- can help us navigate the monumental challenges and opportunities ahead?
For the second episode of The Soul of AI, Layman sits down with Jill Nephew, an engineer and software developer, to explore her unique take on the hype and dominant discourse around artificial intelligence and large language models. Most of the commentators in this area, she argues, have fallen prey to a game of smoke and mirrors: there are no emergent properties, there is no latent intelligence or spark of consciousness, there is no "there" there at all -- nothing nutritious for the human spirit or human society, and certainly no basis for an emergent wisdom culture. She explains why she regards LLM developers as profit-motivated illusionists, and why we should give a hard "no" to this dazzling but ultimately empty and misleading technology.
Jill Nephew is the founder of Inqwire, PBC a company on a mission to help the world make sense. The Inqwire technology is designed to enhance and accelerate human sensemaking abilities. The designing of the system required her to attempt to answer a fundamental question: how does technology interact with the mind's ability to do individual and collective sensemaking, and what are the principles that technology should follow to maximize these abilities? Jill's background includes developing tools, platforms, and meta-data-based software languages to help people find solutions to complex, real-world problems. She developed algorithms and models in the area of constraint-based optimization, drug binding, motion control, disease kinetics, protein folding, atmospheric pollution, human articulated movement, complex fluids, and most recently sensemaking.
Personal website
https://jillnephew.com/index.html
Inqwire website
https://www.inqwire.io/
Follow The Integral Stage on Fathom!
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Remember to like, subscribe, and support The Integral Stage on Patreon to make more of these conversations possible!
https://www.patreon.com/theintegralstage
1 hr 25 min

About The Integral Stage Expanded Universe (ISEU)

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The INTEGRAL STAGE EXPANDED UNIVERSE is an archive of conversations held with people across the developmental, transformational, and regenerative communities. It does not endorse or flinch from anyone…