The Jim Rutt Show

Jim talks with Samantha Sweetwater about her book True Human: Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World and the question of what it means to be human at this moment in planetary history. They discuss her verb-based rather than noun-based self-identity, Lisa Feldman Barrett's construction theory as a framework for understanding the entanglement of body, brain, mind, and relationship as the fabric of lived experience, Samantha's identity as a "Gaian" and humans as a creator-destroyer class of organism, the Fermi paradox and the gigantic moral freight of potentially being the only general intelligence in the universe, the meaning of the sacred and John Vervaeke's formulation that "sacred is how the world is to us when we see it through the eyes of love," Jim's own definition of the sacred as the appropriate stance toward things too complex for reductionist analysis, the metacrisis as fundamentally a crisis of separation, the four generator functions of separation including stories of separability, structures of separability, win-lose game-theoretic dynamics, and dominator ideologies, the forager operating system and Chris Boehm's account of how egalitarian societies historically defeated hierarchy, the hinge of agriculture and henchmen enabling dominator systems, Luke Kemp's Goliath's Curse and the contrast between fluid civilizations and Goliaths, role-based non-hierarchical leadership in forager societies and whether it can scale, Audrey Tang as an emergent archetype of life-centric coordination, psychedelics as allies and teachers rather than mere tools, Samantha's personal healing path through sacrament, community, and prayer, the neuroscience of heightened neural entropy and the brain's wash cycle, the ontological reframe of one's own importance, the hard problem of machine consciousness and the California Institute for Machine Consciousness, the space of minds and the n=1 problem of one planet and one biochemistry, the MoltBook experiment of AI inventing languages and religions, relationality as the core practice available to people in their actual lives, humans as a custodial species and co-orchestrators rather than dominion-holders, Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk, and much more.


Episode Transcript
True Human: Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World, by Samantha Sweetwater
Goliath's Curse, by Luke Kemp
Sand Talk, by Tyson Yunkaporta
JRS Currents 010: Tyson Yunkaporta on Humans as a Custodial Species

Samantha Sweetwater is the author of True Human: Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World, a meta-relational educator, leadership mentor, and the founder of One Life Circle, a ministry of remembering. For over three decades, she has facilitated individual and collective transformational experiences across diverse cultures and communities on five continents. As the founder of Dancing Freedom and Peacebody Japan, she pioneered a global movement of embodied awakening and trained hundreds of facilitators worldwide. Her work bridges ecology, complexity, spirituality, and technology with lived experience, inviting a re-imagining of what it means to be human in a time of planetary techno-cultural transformation. Through teaching, writing, and attuned presence, she helps people restore relationship with their bodies, each other, and the living world as a foundation for wise action in uncertain times.

Jim talks with cognitive scientist and AI researcher Joscha Bach about the computational and representational foundations of consciousness, mind, and reality. They discuss the phenomenology of waking up and coalescing into a self, language as a representational architecture and natural language as "a genre of music," the brain as a game engine constructing a simulated world, the "feeling of realness" as a hallucination, "to be real means to be implemented" as a criterion for reality, money as an AI and a mechanism for reward allocation, the need for multi-dimensional organizational signaling beyond money, the apparent reversibility of the universe as an emergent observational artifact, the block universe and its incompatibility with stacked emergence, causality as a model property and retrocausality at the level of agents, computation vs. the simulation hypothesis, the brain's object engine and the perceptual choice to see textures vs. named objects, aphantasia and metacognition about perception, why only simulations can be conscious, Christof Koch's shift from physicalism to panpsychism and the unreliability of revelatory mental states, consciousness as second-order perception distinct from selfhood, panpsychism's resurgence and its failure to formalize "the consciousness of a particle," consciousness as happening at neuronal communication speeds, intelligence vs. consciousness as relatively orthogonal dimensions, the Waymo as highly intelligent but not conscious, François Chollet's argument that deploying skills is not itself intelligent, consciousness as a consensus algorithm analogous to blockchain, whether a bacterium or a cat needs a self-model to achieve coherence, emotion and motivation as core to cognition in MicroPsi, Karl Friston's free energy principle and its limits at higher emergent levels, humans as "multicellular at the next level" forming transcendental agents, the global optimum of collectively enacted agency as "God" as the ultimate source of meaning, and much more.

Episode Transcript
California Institute for Machine Consciousness (CIMC)
Principles of Synthetic Intelligence, by Joscha Bach
JRS EP 72 - Joscha Bach on Minds, Machines & Magic
JRS EP 87: Joscha Bach on Theories of Consciousness -
JRS EP Currents 83: Joscha Bach on Synthetic Intelligence

Joscha Bach is a cognitive scientist and AI researcher, and the founder of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness. In the past, he researched and taught at Humboldt University of Berlin, the Institute of Cognitive Science in Osnabrück, MIT Media Lab, the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and Intel Labs. He has helped build several startups and created the cognitive architecture MicroPsi, which studies the relationship between emotion, motivation and cognition. He currently lives in the Bay area in California.

In this Worldviews episode, Jim talks with Iain McGilchrist about consciousness, matter, and the nature of reality. They discuss consciousness as the basis of everything we know, matter as a phase of consciousness that provides resistance and persistence, pan-experientialism and the belief that everything in the cosmos experiences in some form, the whirlpool metaphor for individual consciousness within a broader field, emergent naturalism and nested levels of organization, the question of whether the universe is continuous or granular at the Planck scale, consciousness in animals including chimps and corvids, language as the principal difference between human and animal consciousness, John Vervaeke's distinction between propositional and participatory knowing, the divided brain and how the left and right hemispheres attend to the world differently, the left hemisphere's focus on decontextualized abstractions versus the right hemisphere's grasp of interconnected wholes, how the left hemisphere deals with representations while the right hemisphere experiences presences, living in a world dominated by the relatively stupid left hemisphere, the relationship between consciousness and reality as an encounter rather than naive realism or idealism, relations coming before things, Lee Smolin's argument that time cannot be an illusion, assembly theory's challenge to the block universe, values as ontological primitives that cannot be derived from a valueless cosmos, the distinction between value and values, teleology as a lure rather than determinism using Waddington's creodes metaphor, the three elements of a fulfilled life (belonging to a coherent social group, belonging in nature, and belonging in the cosmos), the breakdown of collective sense making despite increased education levels, the decline in the caliber of political leaders, the distinction between information and wisdom, and much more.

Episode Transcript
The Master and His Emissary, by Iain McGilchrist
The Matter with Things, by Iain McGilchrist
JRS EP 154 - Iain McGilchrist on The Matter With Things
JRS EP 155 Iain McGilchrist Part 2: The Matter With Things
The Emergence of Everything, by Harold Morowitz
Time Reborn, by Lee Smolin
JRS EP 5 Lee Smolin - Quantum Foundations and Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution

Iain McGilchrist is a former Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Consultant Emeritus of the Bethlem and Maudsley Hospital, London, a former research Fellow in Neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, Baltimore, and a former Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch. He now lives on the Isle of Skye, off the coast of North West Scotland, where he continues to write, and lectures worldwide. He is committed to the idea that the mind and brain can be understood only by seeing them in the broadest possible context, that of the whole of our physical and spiritual existence, and of the wider human culture in which they arise – the culture which helps to mould, and in turn is moulded by, our minds and brains.

In a special edition of the new Worldviews series, Brendan Graham Dempsey asks Jim about his life and worldview using a faith development interview. They discuss Jim's life chapters from growing up through becoming a complexity guy and GameB advocate, his age 11 epiphany that religion is bullshit after researching world religions at the library, the formative influence of his wife and parents who built lives from poverty, his realization that exponential growth on a finite planet driven by advertising and economic systems is destructive, understanding the limits of knowledge through complexity science and rejecting naive Newtonianism, his three core values of human well-being, ecological richness, and preserving humanity's path to bring the universe to life, the belief that humans may be the only general intelligence in the universe, the sacred as high-dimensional experiences that can't be explained scientifically, the importance of humility given how often we're wrong, the decision-making method of studying enough for a bullshitter's understanding then walking until reaching a conclusion, utilitarian deontology, human life as a leaf node on the tree of emergence, language and science as major transitions with AI as a potential third, disbelief in the supernatural, explaining evil through game theory, psychopathy as evil by nature, humans as mesoscale entities, a universe fine-tuned for emergence, and much more.

Episode Transcript
Institute of Applied Metatheory
A God That Could be Real: Spirituality, Science, and the Future of Our Planet, by Nancy Ellen Abrams

Brendan Graham Dempsey is Director of Research at the Institute of Applied Metatheory, where he studies the complexification of worldviews and human meaning-making systems across scales. He holds an advanced degree from Yale University, where he studied religion and culture. His books include Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Metamodern World and the multi-volume Evolution of Meaning series. He is Managing Editor of Integration: The Journal of Big Picture Theory and Practice and a founding editor of Metamodern Theory & Praxis.

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.