The Sane and Miraculous

Hey listener to The Sane & Miraculous podcast ... You shouldn't be hearing this episode!

Sorry, this is me doing a weird bit of plumbing. If you're hearing this, you have accidentally drifted into a liminal space, a podcast hinterland. The feed you're hoping to be on is elsewhere.

Specifically, if you want to listen to newer and future episodes of this podcast, you will have to do something.

Most likely, just delete this pod from your podcast player, and search for "The Sane & Miraculous" again in that same player to be reconnected with the up to date goodness.

You can also find the pod on Substack, where you can get all the episodes, plus articles and extra content: https://podoflions.substack.com/

Here's the pod on Apple Podcasts
And here it is on Spotify

https://podoflions.substack.com/

Just me today. Chattin’ some chats. Yawpin’ some yawps. Talking about Karma. But this is not your mammas Karma.

In this episode, you may very well learn

* The two types of Karma (It’s not “Good“ and “Bad“)

* How do you get more of the kind you want and get rid of the kind you don’t want

* Are you born with it?

You are not required to believe in any particular metaphysical anything (souls, reincarnation, etc) to understand and benefit from this formulation of Karma. If you believe that you are, or appear to be, a “person” living a “life“ in a “world“ then this will be applicable to you.

Ok, much love, I hope you enjoy xxx

--

Chameleon photo by Anastasia Mezenina

Support the podcast at https://podoflions.substack.com/

Coming from deep in the vault, rumored to be lost forever, and available to the public for the first time ever, we bring you: Russell Price!

This is the historic first ever recording made for the Sane & Miraculous, with Coach, NLP practitioner, hypnotherapist and all round swell guy Russell “Rusty“ Price.

We talk about

• Trauma informed hypnotherapy
• How to stop eating a tub of ice cream every night
• Working with abandoned parts
• Limitations of the “Manifestation“ mindset
• Rusty being a goddamn joy to be around
• The weather in Bali and Colorado
• … and much much more.

Links

Rusty on Instagram

Rusty’s free ebook Principles

Scott Pilgrim vs The World

Polyphia - G.O.A.T

Moana

Christina Berkley is founder of the Center for Deep Intelligence, a transformational response to the new wave of Artificial Intelligence.

We talk about the impact of AI and other technologies on the soul, and ways to reclaim your depth and connection in the modern world.

Consider subscribing to the substack, it's good for the soul: The Sane & Miraculous substack

You can find Christina and the Center for Deep Intelligence at these links

https://centerfordeepintelligence.com/

https://christinaberkley.com/

Here's my conversation with Connor Wood. Connor is, among other things, a writer and an adult convert from atheism to Catholicism.

We had a really interesting and wide ranging conversation, discussing the merits and failings of liberalism, ritual and religion, the story of Connor's conversion, and the question of how we can make sense of miracles in the light of modernity.

I hope you enjoy!

And please consider subscribing to my substack to support this podcast

The Sane & Miraculous substack

Notes

Connor's Essay about his mother and countercultural origins 

Connor's Culture Uncurled substack

Talking about consciousness baby! In this one I cover some stuff:

• What is the hard problem?
• What are some weak ass common responses to the hard problem, focussing specifically on the computational theory of mind (CTM).
• Implications of CTM.
• Criticisms of CTM
• What else might be going on?
• And why the real winning move is not to play.

ENJOYEEEEEE

Links to save you the trouble of googling

• Computational Theory of Mind
• Nick Bostrom: Simulation hypothesis
• How to be an ok Person "The Simulations" (contains some duplication with this ep)
• Black Mirror Christmas Special
• Greg Egan (sci fi novels exploring implications of CTM): Diaspora, and Permutation City (there are more, but these ones stood out)
• Musks (inane) video game argument
• Movies: The Matrix, Tron, Her
• CGP grey on the Transporter problem
• John Searle: Chinese Room Argument (note, this is slightly different from the argument I describe in the episode, here for historical reference)

I keep having more things to say about AI! 

Todays episode is about psychic poisoning, depths vs surfaces, and AI art vs the human soul.

I keep talking about AI because I think the phenomenon of generative AI is illuminating something about consciousness; by automating things that we didn't previously imagine could be automated, it's revealing what cannot be automated. It's revealing an aspect of what it means to be human.

PS There's a section in the podcast about art history. My mum, Jayne Jones, is an artist and art teacher, and a lot of my art history knowledge comes from conversations with her. I only pretend to know what postmodernism means, while she has a degree in pretending to know what postmodernism means. So I'm sure she will be slightly horrified with how I've synopsized it in this episode, and I just want to say: any mistakes, distortions and oversimplifications are mine.

At what point is never better than late? We push the envelope this week with a podcast episode on the July 21st 2023 cinematic phenomena Barbenheimer!

Me, Michael Porcelli, and my very own wife Lindsay Chrisler, exchange hot takes and deep in the weeds analysis about these two radically different, yet strangely intertwined movies.

Christiane Pelmas is a teacher and mentor in the realms of the erotic, ecology, ethics, soul, myth, sexuality and intimacy.

Today she’s talking with me about her wild and fun transformational origin story, as well as the power of telling stories for healing, the dangers of materialism and more.

If you want to dig deeper into her work, you can find her here: https://www.christianepelmas.com/

I talk with Michael Porcelli about reasons to fear and hope as we enter a new period of history, the Age of AI.

Topics include

• What's happening right now?
• An overview of the technology, how it works and what makes it different from previous computing technologies
• The good news / bad news of technology
• Economics and copyright
• Searching for depth
• Implications for Art
• Machine Consciousness
• The alignment problem
• Intelligence explosion
• And then we get into some more Sci Fi stuff at the end there

This is obviously an extremely timely topic, and I think it’s an important one, technologically, politically, philosophically and spiritually.

References
Some things we reference

WarGames

Adversarial Policies Beat Superhuman Go AIs

And two things that are extremely relevant to the conversation that we didn’t reference because they happened after we recorded

Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down - Eliezer Yudkowsky

Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4