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Jim talks with Michael Shermer about his worldview and his new book, Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters. They discuss Michael’s self-identification as a monist and realist who believes in a physical objective world, the concept of fallibilism, intersubjective verification of the interobjective, reliance on authorities and institutions, the battle between the book of authority versus the book of nature, balancing rationality with empiricism, the dependence of mathematical truths on axioms, January 6 as an example of people acting rationally on false beliefs, Shermer’s journey from born-again Christian to atheist and Jim’s opposite journey from Catholicism to atheism, treating religious literature like great literature with deeper truths, the study of consciousness and the hard problem versus the easy problem, separating intelligence from consciousness, consciousness as a biological process like digestion, the question of machine sentience, a critique of Donald Hoffman’s interface theory, evidence for veridical perception through mimicry in nature and animals climbing trees, skepticism about brain-in-a-vat and simulation scenarios, minimum viable metaphysics, Thomas Nagel’s concept of one thought too many, Jonathan Rauch’s constitution of knowledge, the replication crisis in psychology, the breakdown of trust in institutions due to COVID and the noble lie, the problem of scaling laws with followership, moral realism and the survival and flourishing of sentient beings, the principle of interchangeable perspectives, discovering moral values through problem-solving, the evolution of ethics and the expanding moral sphere, and much more.

• Episode Transcript
• Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters, by Michael Shermer
• The Michael Shermer Show
• Why People Believe Weird Things, by Michael Shermer
• The Believing Brain, by Michael Shermer
• Why Darwin Matters, by Michael Shermer
• The Science of Good and Evil, by Michael Shermer
• Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, by Michael Shermer
• “A Minimum Viable Metaphysics,” by Jim Rutt
• JRS EP 287 – Jonathan Rauch on the Epistemic Crisis

Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine and the host of the podcast The Michael Shermer Show. For 30 years he taught college and university courses in critical thinking, and for 18 years he was a monthly columnist for Scientific American. He is the author of New York Times bestsellers Why People Believe Weird Things and The Believing Brain, Why Darwin Matters, The Science of Good and Evil, The Moral Arc, Heavens on Earth, Giving the Devil His Due, and Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational. His new book is Truth: What it is, How to Find it, Why it Still Matters. Follow him on X @michaelshermer.

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Jim talks with Ben Goertzel about his worldview. They discuss Ben’s morning experience of consciousness crystallizing from ambient awareness, his identification as a panpsychic, the concept of pattern being more fundamental than stuff, Charles Peirce’s ontology of first/second/third, the idea of uryphysics as a broader notion of physics beyond metaphysics, parapsychology and psi phenomena including remote viewing and Project Stargate, reincarnation-like phenomena and cases from India, experimental design in parapsychology research, the legitimation of both AGI and psi research, the consciousness explosion occurring alongside AI/ASI development, Jeffrey Martin’s work on fundamental well-being and persistent nonsymbolic experience, the immense design space of possible minds, human cognitive limitations like seven plus or minus two short-term memory, the single-threaded nature of human consciousness versus potential multi-threaded ASI, scenarios for beneficial superintelligence and options for humans to remain in human form or upload, the question of how long human existence would remain interesting post-singularity, psychedelics as tools for accessing different states of consciousness and insights into mind construction, the absence of shamanic institutions in modern culture, experiences with DMT and heroic doses, holding multiple contradictory perspectives simultaneously, Walt Whitman’s notion of containing multitudes, Ben’s intuitive sense that consciousness and the basic ground of being are fundamentally joyful and compassionate, arguments for why superintelligence will likely be good based on efficiency of mutually trusting agents, and much more.

• Episode Transcript
• The Consciousness Explosion, by Ben Goertzel
• JRS EP 217 Ben Goertzel on a New Framework for AGI
• JRS EP 211 Ben Goertzel on Generative AI vs. AGI
• JRS Currents 072: Ben Goertzel on Viable Paths to True AGI
• Evidence for Psi: Thirteen Empirical Research Reports, ed. Damien Broderick & Ben Goertzel

Dr. Ben Goertzel is a cross-disciplinary scientist, entrepreneur and author.  Born in Brazil to American parents, in 2020 after a long stretch living in Hong Kong he relocated his primary base of operations to a rural island near Seattle. He leads the SingularityNET Foundation, the OpenCog Foundation, and the AGI Society which runs the annual Artificial General Intelligence conference. Dr. Goertzel’s research work encompasses multiple areas including artificial general intelligence, natural language processing, cognitive science, machine learning, computational finance, bioinformatics, virtual worlds, gaming, parapsychology, theoretical physics and more.

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• Episode Transcript
• JRS EP 192 – David Krakauer on Science, Complexity and AI
• JRS EP10 – David Krakauer: Complexity Science
• The Complex World: An Introduction to the Foundations of Complexity Science, by David Krakauer
• Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019, by David Krakauer
• History, Big History, & Metahistory, by David Krakauer
• “A Minimum Viable Metaphysics,” by Jim Rutt
• “More Is Different,” by P.W. Anderson
• The Emergence of Everything, by Harold Morowitz

David Krakauer’s research explores the evolution of intelligence and stupidity on Earth. This includes studying the evolution of genetic, neural, linguistic, social, and cultural mechanisms supporting memory and information processing, and exploring their shared properties. President of the Santa Fe Institute since 2015, he served previously as the founding director of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery, the co-director of the Center for Complexity and Collective Computation, and professor of mathematical genetics, all at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

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• Episode Transcript
• “A Minimum Viable Metaphysics,” by Jim Rutt
• “What I Mean by ‘Metaphysics’,” by Jim Rutt
• JRS EP 322 – Brendan Graham Dempsey on Psyche and Symbolic Learning
• Institute of Applied Metatheory
• The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, by David Deutsch
• JRS Currents 100: Sara Walker and Lee Cronin on Time as an Object

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Jim talks with Nate Soares about the ideas in his and Eliezer Yudkowsky’s book If Anybody Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. They discuss the book’s claim that mitigating existential AI risk should be a top global priority, the idea that LLMs are grown, the opacity of deep learning networks, the Golden Gate activation vector, whether our understanding of deep learning networks might improve enough to prevent catastrophe, goodness as a narrow target, the alignment problem, the problem of pointing minds, whether LLMs are just stochastic parrots, why predicting a corpus often requires more mental machinery than creating a corpus, depth & generalization of skills, wanting as an effective strategy, goal orientation, limitations of training goal pursuit, transient limitations of current AI, protein folding and AlphaFold, the riskiness of automating alignment research, the correlation between capability and more coherent drives, why the authors anchored their argument on transformers & LLMs, the inversion of Moravec’s paradox, the geopolitical multipolar trap, making world leaders aware of the issues, a treaty to ban the race to superintelligence, the specific terms of the proposed treaty, a comparison with banning uranium enrichment, why Jim tentatively thinks this proposal is a mistake, a priesthood of the power supply, whether attention is a zero-sum game, and much more.

• Episode Transcript
• If Anybody Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares
• “Psyop or Insanity or …? Peter Thiel, the Antichrist, and Our Collapsing Epistemic Commons,” by Jim Rutt
• “On Targeted Manipulation and Deception when Optimizing LLMs for User Feedback,” by Marcus Williams et al.
• Attention Sinks and Compression Valleys in LLMs are Two Sides of the Same Coin,” by Enrique Queipo-de-Llano et al.
• JRS EP 217 – Ben Goertzel on a New Framework for AGI
• “A Tentative Draft of a Treaty, With Annotations”

Nate Soares is the President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He has been working in the field for over a decade, after previous experience at Microsoft and Google. Soares is the author of a large body of technical and semi-technical writing on AI alignment, including foundational work on value learning, decision theory, and power-seeking incentives in smarter-than-human AIs.

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Jim talks with Alex Ebert about the ideas in his Substack essay “New Age and the Religion of Self: The Anatomy of a Rebellion Against Reality.” They discuss the meanings of New Age and religion, the New Thought movement, the law of attraction, manifesting, Trump’s artifacts of manifestation, the unmooring from concrete artifacts, individual and collective hallucinations, intersubjective verification of the interobjective, the subjective-first perspective, epistemic asymmetry as the cool, New Ageism’s constant reference to quantum physics, manifesting as a way to negate social responsibility, the odd coincidence of leaving the gold standard and New Ageism, spiritual bypassing, a global derealization, new retribalized collective delusions, the Faustian bargain of AI, rationality as a virus, the noble lie, indeterminacy as a sign of emergence, nostalgia as a sales pitch, regaining the sense of hypocrisy, localized retribalizations, GameB as a series of membranes, and much more.

• Episode Transcript
• “New Age and the Religion of Self: The Anatomy of a Rebellion Against Reality,” by Alex Ebert
• Bad Guru (Alex’s Substack)
• Jim Rutt’s Substack
• “Unclear Thinking About Philosophical Zombies and Quantum Measurement,” by Jim Rutt
• The Century of the Self (documentary by Adam Curtis)

Alex Ebert is a platinum-selling musician (Edward Sharpe and The Magnetic Zeros), Golden Globe-winning film composer, cultural critic and philosopher living in New Orleans. His philosophical project, FreQ Theory, as well as his cultural analyses, can be followed on his Substack.

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Jim talks with John Preston about his book 40 Flushes to Grow Your Business: The World’s #2 Business Series, which is designed to be read during bathroom breaks. They discuss breaking free from being a one-person show, hiring self-guided employees, the importance of business owner support networks, clarity on business goals & personal objectives, the five-gear growth machine business metrics model, marketing fundamentals & investment levels, understanding the customer journey, social media pitfalls, customer inquiry response strategies, complaint management, CEO time management & delegation, working capital needs, lifestyle creep, measuring business metrics, gross profit vs net profit, building high-trust company cultures, transparency with employees, marketing strategies & customer acquisition, hiring & retention strategies, and much more.

• Episode Transcript
• 40 Flushes to Grow Your Business: The World’s #2 Business Series, by John Preston
• Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, by Simon Sinek
• The JP Business Academy

John Preston is a Hall of Fame sales and business coach who transforms complex concepts into actionable insights for entrepreneurs and sales teams, drawing from his 22+ years as a television news reporter and producer. As the creator of JP Business Academy, he specializes in making business education accessible through live, engaging training sessions and online teaching. He can be reached by email at john@thejpbusinessacademy. 

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Jim talks with Pablos Holman about the ideas in his new book Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters. They discuss deep tech versus shallow tech, computational modeling and simulation for real-world problems, the hacker mindset, the role of inventors, nuclear power and renewable energy solutions, population growth, development challenges, space-based solar power, the likelihood of fusion power, mistakes in German energy policy, energy storage limitations, the transformation of the apparel industry through automation, and much more.

• Episode Transcript
• Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters, by Pablos Holman
• Deep Future (company)
• Intellectual Ventures Lab

Pablos is a hacker, inventor, and bestselling author of Deep Future: Creating Technology that Matters, the indispensable guide to deep tech. Now Managing Partner at Deep Future, investing in technologies to solve the world’s biggest problems. Previously, Pablos worked on spaceships at Blue Origin and helped build The Intellectual Ventures Lab to invent a wide variety of breakthroughs including a brain surgery tool, a machine to suppress hurricanes, 3D food printers, and a laser that can shoot down mosquitos—part of an impact invention effort to eradicate malaria with Bill Gates. Pablos hosts the Deep Future Podcast and is a top public speaker—his talks have over 30 million views.

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Jim talks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about the ideas in his book Psyche and Symbolic Learning, volume 2 in his Evolution of Meaning series. We discussed hierarchical complexity, stage theories of development, constructivism & realism, dynamic skill theory, the Lectical Scale, ego development & consciousness, meaning systems & worldviews, cross-cultural developmental patterns, statistical distributions of developmental stages, the relationship between semantic richness & structural complexity, justification systems theory & cultural evolution, and much more.

• Episode Transcript
• A Universal Learning Process, by Brendan Graham Dempsey (Volume 1)
• Emergentism, by Brendan Graham Dempsey
• In Over Our Heads, by Robert Kegan
• “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, by Thomas Nagel
• EP 172 Brendan Graham Dempsey on Emergentism
• EP 293 Brendan Graham Dempsey on Cosmic Teleology and Emergence Vectors

Brendan Graham Dempsey is a writer, researcher, organic farmer, and the director of Sky Meadow Institute, an organization dedicated to “promoting systems-based thinking about the things that matter most.” He graduated summa cum laude with a BA in religious studies and classical civilizations from the University of Vermont and earned his master’s from Yale University, where he studied religion and culture. He is the author of Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics and host of the Metamodern Spirituality Podcast. His primary interests include theorizing developments in culture after postmodernism, productively bridging the divide between science and spirituality, and developing sustainable systems for life to flourish. All of these lead through the paradigms of emergence and complexity, which inform all of his work.