UPDATE. Here’s a video of our dialogue:
Next Tuesday, October 22nd at 7pm, I’ll be in dialogue with astrobiologist Bruce Damer about his hot spring hypothesis of the origins of life. For Bay Area locals, the event will take place at the Mission Street campus of California Institute of Integral Studies and is free and open to the public. For those who can’t make it in person, here is a link to the livestream on Zoom. After the event I will post a recording here.
My contribution will be to explore from a speculative philosophical perspective what Dr. Damer’s biogenesis hypothesis might mean for contemporary cosmology. Can physicalism/scientific materialism adequately explain the emergence of life and consciousness? My answer is no, it cannot, and that some form of naturalistic panpsychism or panexperientialism does a better job. I will ask what “emergence” might mean for materialist accounts of life and consciousness and critique the idea that conscious living agents could ever “emerge” from inert matter. My sense is that even prior to biological life, physical and chemical processes were already in the business of selecting and remembering improbable possibilities on the way to enhanced complexity and more intense modes of experience and agency. The arrival of progenotes and then living cells certainly ramps up this enterprise, which Damer describes so compellingly in terms of the “PIM” (probability-interconnection-memory) cycle (see his essay on the extended evolutionary synthesis webpage); but I think really making sense of biogenesis will require a new physical ontology that finally leaves dualism and the Cartesian idea of matter behind.
Here are some related reflections after attending a lecture Damer recently gave for the Consciousness Hacking Collective in San Francisco:
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?