Her response to the question of what will time be like in a world of “post-truth” or virtual reality/questioning the validity of any reality, whether spoken word, forged documents/videos, etc. is great (@58 minute mark). I like her research, to say the least.
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And, much, much more. Finally an interview, that is really an interview … that is, a give-and-take, prompt-and-real-response, a back-and-forth between conversation-partners. What a pleasure! A tip-of-the-chapeau (once again) to @johnnydavis54.
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I have to listen to this again. I do like Michael Garfield and he has been a visitor here on a few occasions. I felt he didn’t dumb down the discourse but just allowed it to be as complex and layered as the subject requires. I have been studying Kerry’s work and there is a lot going on here. I got some ideas for a writing project that I have put on hold for a long time. This conversation made my hesitation more transparent and I believe I am ready to start up a first draft.
So out of these interviews and our infinite conversations we are setting the stage for the sisters of serendipity to sing once again their siren songs. I can feel the juxtapositions of the waves of the long now with the really fast NYC beat-
It feels like a novella.
I do hope we all can hear the beat of a different drummer. This interview could serve as the focus of another lively Cafe conversation. For those who like Gebser this is a great appetizer for a gourmet meal.
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She is very creative here and she is doing some heavy intellectual lifting!
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What a GREAT interview!
“We really just have to get better at holding multiple realities — and recognizing what is important in them.”
The core aim and true usefulness of world history in a beautifully succinct nut-shell…
And thanks for the introduction to Bernardo Kastrup.
So… does the electro-chemistry of my brain produce consciousness or connect me to 11 dimensions of it…? 
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What is your consciousness that the electro- chemistry of your brain could produce it?
And what, may I ask, is electro-chemistry? Where does electro-chemsitry come from?
Chardin said that we ride upon a swarm of the indefinable…that feels right to me.
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Steven Rosen says that the several lifeworld dimensions are embodied by the members of a topological hierarchy corresponding to the series: lemniscate, Klein bottle, Moebius strip, lemniscate, sub-lemniscate.
That feels right to me.
Or is your consciousness an epiphenomena…like steam coming off of a kettle?
My answer would be no. I think Kasturp’s answer would be no.
I think Kerry Welch would probably say no too. And so would Gebser.
It just doesn’t feel right to me.
But there are a lot of zombies out there and they would be glad to have you join them. They are engaged in a form of premature cognitive commitment that is becoming increasingly problematic.
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I like that, too. Mocks our pretensions, accents our responsibility to each other and ourselves, and allows us the freedom to not know everything.
Highlights the real tragedy of the insatiable zombie as well: “more…!” until someone kills you a second time is not life.
“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” — Wendell Berry, quoted by historian John Lukacs in his essay “Putting Man Before Descartes”
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I would go with Wendell Berry. The machine metaphor has run out of gas.
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I put forward the persons that I sense are riding the future wave. I have followed William Brown’s work for awhile now and I like his take on things, his collaborative interest, his openness to PSI, his passionate concern for the environment. He is looking from different dimensions and is able to hold multiple versions of reality. He struggles to find the right words for promoting liberation. It is a useful exercise for me to find a way into his metaphorical landscape. He is another highly developed meta-reflexive!
He speaks “of a star in a jar”. How do we prepare our minds to work with this? What would Arthur Young think about these developments?
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Just got through a second listening.
This has got to be one of the richest podcasts that I’ve experienced in a long time. And not to repeat anything that anyone else has noted, I think it’s worth pointing to.
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The correlations between Gebser’s structures and EEG states. Too bad they got caught up in the dynamic of the conversation, but this is a crucial point for understanding, in my mind, our very recent, recurring theme: what does the integral structure of consciousness “look like”?
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There’s a slough of references in here, some of which I got and others that just flew by. Brand’s The Clock of the Long Now, ?'s Present Shock, ?'s Dancing with the Ghost, "Rocco’s Basilisk (?). (I know I should have searched first and asked later, but I figure @johnnydavis54 has read them all anyway, so he’s probably got the details at hand.)
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In light of recent discussions here, I found their attitudes and assessment of advance IT & singularities not very Kellyesque or Kurzweilish. That’s a bit point in their favor.
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One of the most important points for me was the question: how does the mental structure of consciousness dialog with the magical and mythical structures? This is key and it’s a point that John has been emphasizing and I’ve been agreeing with for some time now. That whole discussion is placed on new footing.
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And, one topic they raise but which has been insufficiently dealt with (it was at the end of the interview, after all) was what makes us valuable for the economy? We’re certainly entangled in the death throes of the mental econonmic whatever, but what does an integral economy “look like”? This is another avenue of inquiry that needs exploring.
This was a brilliant stimulus to keep us hacking away as we have been, and it is welcome encouragement that we are not nearly as alone as we so often believe, but it is also a cogent reminder that we’ve got one helluva lot work ahead of us.
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I appreciate your comments on the Kerry Welch conversation. I read her dissertation and have followed the research and agree that we have our work cut out for us.
I post another Janus faced thinker, ( looking backward and forward at the same time), above and he is a Biologist/Physicist with some good credentials who is struggling in a way I admire to become trans-disciplinarian . William Brown is in the analogical/dialogical tradition of Bohm.
It is very difficult to wrap our minds around this new science that doesn’t turn into dogmatic assertions but tries to re-educate as participatory agentic selves who must take responsibility ( but not blame) for the catastrophic circumstances our negligence has created.
I pay attention to metaphors, anecdote, tones of voice, creased foreheads, gestures, spaces between words. We can tune into the long now and the short staccato and intuit the field of all possibilities. To have this kind of intuition we need to balance the analogical with the digital, a task that no generation has had to do before.
Everything causes everything else… The serendipity sisters are at play!
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I would like to ponder the Arthur Young book, having delved into Welch and Brown, and do an update… I wonder if these different maps have features that overlap a bit? I am drawn to the overlaps, the in betweens, the cracks in the Cosmic Egg. Are we going to convene the Cafe on Monday? I would like to.
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I think it looks like a Klein bottle. And it feels like riding a slippery slope through a dark tunnel with flashing lights, while kids and adults scream in joy and terror!
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I would hope to join in on this one. Keep me up to speed in specifics (time, Zoom, no Zoom…). Looking forward to the close encounters…!
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And in my less-dopamined (which was another nugget in the Welch interview) old age (yes, I’ve got a couple of year on you, John), you will understand why the torus is an exciting enough ride for me. 
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I thought we were doing Tuesdays whenever we were doing. Have I missed something?
Also, I didn’t find your post on Brown, and I’m not familiar with him. I’m not sure I can get smart by the beginning of next week as life’s making a few demands on me given that it’s the run-up to Thanksgiving, which is not, as you probably surmise, a holiday in Germany, but which gets celebrated in the Mahood household as close to the real day as possible, which is next Friday. I can’t miss a holiday that’s only about food, especially since I’m chief-cook-and-bottle-washer for the fest. There are probably rich connections here and pondering is never wasted time. Perhaps this is an organizational issue.
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[In one of the Braveheart battle scenes, Mel Gibson’s William Wallace greets the defection of Irish mercenaries to his side with an extended hand and a “Glad to have you with us,” in Highland brogue. These circumstances are fortunately different, but I formally extend my hand in the same spirit…]
In the “Consciousness” planning thread, you mentioned that the mention of Aurobindo piqued your interest. Please forgive the late response, but this seems to fit better here:
“But if Science has thus prepared us for an age of wider and deeper culture and if in spite of and even partly by its materialism it has rendered impossible the return of the true materialism, that of the barbarian mentality, it has encouraged more or less indirectly both by its attitude to life and its discoveries another kind of barbarism, - for it can be called by no other name, - that of the industrial, the commercial, the economic age which is now progressing to its culmination and its close. This economic barbarism is essentially that of the vital man who mistakes the vital being for the self and accepts its satisfaction as the first aim of life… His ideal man is not the cultured or noble or thoughtful or moral or religious, but the successful man.” (pp. 79-80), The Human Cycle
Written one hundred years ago (while half a landmass away Spengler worked on The Decline of the West). Gebser would have avoided the connotatively charged words “barbarian/barbarism” by referring to “magic” as a consciousness structure (what Aurobindo calls ‘mentality’ in this context). But he would agree with the main point: the materialism which calls us to be mindless consumers (i.e., zombies) is fueled by “economic barbarism”, these days primarily driven by technology (i.e., magic operative through buttons and touch screens) and an underlying assumption that little if anything else in life should matter.
It always strikes me when insights are on point decades before events play out…
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In the conclusion of this conversation William Brown is pretty sober.
. # 91 | William Brown: Holofractal Unified Theory, Quantum Mechanics and Unified Physics - YouTube
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Consider me a student. I have much to learn from all of you, clear from the Infinite catch-up readings here on the site. And history is a brick wall for me…I suppose my current idea of history is Harari’s Sapiens…not a bad start, but I think you @patanswer are probably cringing quite harshly at this admission.
I must admit… its been 10 years since reading Aurobindo…a bit of rereading here and there. I made an attempt to jump into_Life Divine_again a few weeks ago, before finding the kilted-crew here…Aurobindo can be impossible sometimes! The Human Cycle seems perfectly fitting for our time and less daunting.
And though consumed with piecing together a presentation on Love, Power, Justice for tomorrow, you interested me enough with the quote above to “take a break” and reread a couple chapters of THC…I think these two works extend their hands to each other and go frolicking with similar language.
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From one to another, then. 
And the beauty is - since this cosmos of ideas is also expanding faster than light - we can do a lot of “catch-up” through everyone else while reporting in from our own galaxies. To wit, in what seems to be my emerging role as “history guy” (LOL):
Not at all. I haven’t read Sapiens, but Harari has a couple of TED talks which I highly recommend. I’m into big pictures and am quick to defend, especially these days, re-statement (and re-thinking) of the overlooked “obvious”. History is a brick wall for many, but really this is just a reflection of the lesser importance history as ‘sense-making’ has always held for the bulk of mankind than mythology. (Still most certainly true, as I’m sure you can attest - name one US Civil War best-seller that is not on some level a distillation of either “Lost Cause” or “Treasury of Virtue”, for example… The point is, though the modern rationalist tends to look down his nose from his area of expertise, the Gebserian seems to know better how real-life humans operate.) I’m no expert and have no right to cringe. As much as I enjoy helping take down a brick or two when able, sometimes the important thing is acknowledging the limits of how we see history in crucial times of change.
Along with many others!
In turn, I see I will have to order the Paul Tillich book this week. I notice he hails from what I see as a great age of theologian-philosophers in the late 1950s, along with Jacques Maritain and Reinhold Niebuhr…
May your presentation be fruitful for you and all who hear!
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