Jim talks with Gregg Henriques about his take on the free will versus determinism debate. They discuss the importance of definitions, the enlightenment gap, the complexity lens, why “will” is confusing & choice is a better referent, free choice vs determinism, levels of analysis, description vs explanation, freedom as description, the tree of knowledge system, […]

Jim talks with Robin Hanson about the ideas in his essay “Beware Cultural Drift: Thoughts on modernity’s monoculture mistake.” They discuss drift in fundamental cultural values, the current unprecedented rate of change, boutique multiculturalism, weak selection pressures, drift without selection, understanding small cultures, agency risk, comparing corporate cultures with macro-cultures, the decrease in macro-cultures, the convergence of global

Jim talks with Richard Bartlett about the ideas in his essay “What we learned from a 3-month co-living experiment.” They discuss Jim’s visit to a co-living house, community & its recent decline, starting small & iterating, the co-living experiment in Andalusia, pre-registration, co-living plus events, finding the right place, the importance of landscape, the vibe, finances, membrane

Jim talks with Robert Conan Ryan about seven ethical perspectives and why everyone should know them. They discuss why understanding ethical stances is valuable, a horseshoe spectrum, pragmatism, virtue ethics, consequentialism, deontology, elitist power, deification, social justice, stacking up ethical stances, Aristotle’s golden mean, sociopaths in the military, running the polis, coherent pluralism, the multi-perspectival

Jim talks with Matthew David Segall about the ideas in his and Bruce Damer’s new essay, “The Cosmological Context of the Origin of Life: Process Philosophy and the Hot Spring Hypothesis.” They discuss the “philosophy as footnotes to Plato” idea, the hot springs origin of life hypothesis, closing the gap between chemistry & life, Whitehead’s idea

Vance Crowe interviews Jim about how he maps the problem-space of current and future AI risk. They discuss the beginnings of AI, the era of broad AI, artificial general intelligence, the Wozniak test, artificial superintelligence, the paperclip maximizer problem, the timeline of AGI, FOOM, limitations of current governance structure, bad uses of narrow AI, personalized

Jim talks with James Lindsay about the ideas in his recent essay “National Divorce Is National Suicide.” They discuss the meaning of a national divorce (where the United States would split into two countries), different shapes it could take, the possibility of parallel experiments in civilization design, statistics on support for the idea, the proposed

Jim talks with Jonathan Rowson of Perspectiva about a new social practice they’re creating, the antidebate. They discuss the nature of debate, the spectacle of endemic polarization, why debate may be irredeemable, multiple ways of knowing, the Oxford Union debates, the debate apocalypse of 2020, the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debate, the elitist aspect of debates, longtermism,

Jim talks with Jeremy Sherman about the ideas in his book Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves. They discuss how Jim found Jeremy’s work, Jeremy’s relationship with Terrence Deacon, the mystery of purpose, teleology, Aristotle’s four causes, the natural history of trying, crypto-Cartesianism, aims, emergent constraints, hylomorphism, regularity, Kolmogorov complexity, the second

Jim talks with Stuart Kauffman about the ideas in the recent paper he co-authored with Andrea Roli, “Is the Emergence of Life an Expected Phase Transition in the Evolving Universe?” They discuss the fragmentation of the origins of life field, Pasteur’s test of spontaneous generation, primitive soup, Watson & Crick’s discovery of the structure of