Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More

Jim talks with Lawrence Cahoone about his book The Orders of Nature and his systematic approach to naturalist philosophy. They discuss fallibilist & local metaphysics, objective relativism, the rejection of simples, Jim’s materialism which grants emergence first-class existence, Wimsatt’s notion of emergence & nonaggregativity, downward causation & pruning rules, natural complexes, Aristotle’s four causes & the use of purpose in biology, the distinction between teleonomy & teleology, the five orders of nature (physical, material, biological, psychological & cultural), characteristic time scales in emergence theory, why particular disciplines coevolved in intellectual traditions, Erik Hoel’s theory about emergence having the highest causal power, natural religion & the fine-tuned constants of the universe, the choice between multiverse explanations & a single ground of nature, Darwin’s views on divine purpose, comparisons to deists like Spinoza & Einstein, and much more.

• Episode Transcript
• The Orders of Nature, by Lawrence Cahoone
• The Emergence of Value: Human Norms in a Natural World, by Lawrence Cahoone
• The Feynman Lectures on Physics, by Richard Feynman

Lawrence Cahoone graduated with a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Stony Brook University in 1985. Cahoone’s areas of specialization are American Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Culture, Metaphysics and Natural Science and Modernism and Postmodernism. Since 2000, Cahoone has taught at Holy Cross and is now currently an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Holy Cross. He has also written and published seven books in his career, including The Emergence of Value, The Orders of Nature, and Cultural Revolutions.

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More

Jim talks with Adam B. Levine about humanity’s rapidly changing relationship with AI and “thinking on demand.” They discuss the GPT-5 release & pricing, open-source AI models, the three-dimensional framework of AI advancement (models & hardware & agent frameworks), the evolution of vibe coding, development tools, agent-based development, AI implementation strategies with humans in the loop, the Midnight Protocol project, Vendor Relationship Management versus CRM, automated negotiation systems, the trillion-dollar opportunity in improving the infosphere, enshittification risks, local AI processing on personal devices, the future of AI agents as personal representatives, and much more.

• Episode Transcript
• Speaking of Bitcoin! Podcast
• JRS EP 313 – Chris Colin on Why Customer Service Sucks
• JRS EP 316 – Ken Stanley on the AI Representation Problem
• The Intention Economy, by Doc Searls
• Midnight Protocol

Adam B. Levine has spent over a decade pioneering disruptive technologies before they become mainstream. He launched one of the earliest Bitcoin podcasts, Let’s Talk Bitcoin! (2013), founded Tokenly (2014)—one of the earliest companies exploring what could be done with blockchain tokens—and served as CoinDesk’s first podcast editor (2019), hosting shows like Speaking of Bitcoin and Markets Daily. In 2021, he founded 330.ai, a startup building cutting-edge tools to boost creativity with AI.

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More

Jim talks with David Shapiro about his six-part series on “post-labor economics.” They discuss historical economic transitions, the logic of labor substitution, automation & AI’s  impacts on employment, the four basic human economic offerings (strength, dexterity, cognition & empathy), labor as a societal pillar, the pyramid of prosperity (universal basic services, collectively owned public & private assets, conventional private assets, & residual wages), the pyramid of power (immutable civic bedrock, freedom to transact, radical transparency, direct programmable democracy, & forkable constitutional meta-governance), blockchain & cryptocurrency, radical financial transparency, liquid democracy, governance innovation, and much more.

• Episode Transcript
• “Post-Labor Economics pt. 1: The Rise of Automation,” by David Shapiro on Substack
• “You should let the human race die out,” by David Shapiro on Substack
• Why Nations Fail, by Daron Acemoğlu and James Robinson
• The Bitcoin Standard, by Saifedean Ammous
• “An Introduction to Liquid Democracy,” by Jim Rutt

David Shapiro is an American AI thought leader, author, YouTuber, and former IT infrastructure and automation engineer based in Raleigh, North Carolina. With over 16 years of experience in technology, including four years focused on artificial intelligence, Shapiro has emerged as a prominent voice in AI philosophy, cognitive architectures, and post-labor economics. His work centers on the societal and economic implications of AI, advocating for a future of post-scarcity and hyper-abundance where automation meets basic human needs at low cost.

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More

Jim talks with Ken Stanley about the Fractured Entanglement Representation hypothesis in deep learning neural networks. They discuss open-endedness in AI systems & evolution, the Picbreeder experiment & its significance, the objective paradox of finding things by not looking for them, comparisons between Picbreeder & SGD networks, visual differences in internal representations, weight sweep experiments, modular vs tangled decomposition, implications for creativity & continual learning & generalization abilities, Unified Factored Representation as an alternative to FER, the relationship to grokking in neural networks, scaling considerations & evidence in larger models, potential methods to achieve UFR, connections to biological evolution and DNA representation, and much more.

• Episode Transcript
• Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, by Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman
• “Questioning Representational Optimism in Deep Learning: The Fractured Entanglement Representation Hypothesis” by Akarsh Kumar, Jeff Clune, Joel Lehman, and Kenneth Stanley
• JRS EP137 – Ken Stanley on Neuroevolution
• JRS EP130 – Ken Stanley on Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned

Kenneth O. Stanley is the Senior Vice President of Open-Endedness at Lila Sciences.  He previously led a research team at OpenAI also on the challenge of open-endedness. Before that, he was Charles Millican Professor of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida and was also a co-founder of Geometric Intelligence Inc., which was acquired by Uber to create Uber AI Labs, where he was head of Core AI research. He is an inventor of popular algorithms including NEAT, novelty search, and CPPNs. He has won more than 10 best paper awards and his original 2002 paper on NEAT also received the 2017 ISAL Award for Outstanding Paper of the Decade 2002 – 2012 from the International Society for Artificial Life.  He is also a coauthor of the popular science book, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective (published originally in the US by Springer), and has spoken widely on its subject.

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More

Jim talks with Ed Latimore about his new book Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business: Boxing and the Art of Life. They discuss Ed’s chess playing & street hustling, size differences in modern heavyweight boxing, growing up in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, childhood trauma & violence, his relationships with his single mother & absent father, middle school & gifted programs, the cocaine prank incident, his high school football career, academic struggles, attending University of Rochester, spending his father’s life insurance money, his boxing career, the All American Heavyweights program, alcohol abuse, sobriety, Olympic trials, military service, a degree in physics, his current life as an author & speaker, and much more.

• Episode Transcript
• Hard Lessons from the Hurt Business: Boxing and the Art of Life, by Ed Latimore
• “5 reasons why I quit boxing with only one loss,” by Ed Latimore
• “The book made me do it—why I’m boxing again,” by Ed Latimore

Ed Latimore is a former professional heavyweight boxer, an amateur national champion, a competitive chess player, and a bestselling author with a B.A. in Physics from Duquesne University. He draws on his experiences in the boxing ring, in the classroom, and in recovery to teach people how to build grit and resilience.

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS | More

Jim talks with Zak Stein and Marc Gafni about consciousness, attention, and value as fundamental aspects of reality. They explore continuity & discontinuity in evolution, phenomenology & naturalism, emergence, value theory, selection theory, mathematics as both discovered & created, pre-life organic chemistry, sexual selection & evolutionary dynamics, attraction/allurement across different emergent layers, evolving value, first principles & first values, the intimacy equation concept, desire as disclosing value, consciousness in animals vs simpler systems, machine consciousness, group selection theory, the evolution of complexity, the role of contingency & necessity, religious & materialist perspectives on value, and much more.

• Episode Transcript
• First Principles and First Values: Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come, by David J. Temple
• The Abolition of Man, by C.S. Lewis
• Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society, by Peter M. Senge and Joseph Jaworski
• JRS EP301 – Zak Stein on K-12 Education in the AI Era
• JRS EP240 – Stuart Kauffman on a New Approach to Cosmology

Dr. Zachary Stein is a Co-Founder of the Civilization Research Institute and the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. He was trained at the interface of philosophy, psychology, and education and now works in fields related to the mitigation of global catastrophic risk. He is a widely sought-after and award-winning speaker and a leading authority on the future of education and contemporary issues in human development.

Dr. Marc Gafni has been described as a world philosopher—a kind of galaxy heart brain—integrating wisdom from across multiple disciplines into what he has called a New Story of Value in response to the meta-crisis. He is the author of fifty books, including the award-winning A Return to Eros and Your Unique Self: The Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment, with the academic Journal of Integral Theory and Practice dedicating an entire issue to his Unique Self Theory. Marc is founder with Ken Wilber of the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, and President of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, succeeding Barbara Marx Hubbard.