Category: Darwin

The Birth of Life & the Future of Consciousness

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UPDATE. Here's a video of our dialogue: https://youtu.be/9jlVjOILsCU 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 [...]

Physicalism and Its Discontents: A Study in Whitehead’s Panexperientialist Alternative [draft]

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UPDATE: Here is a PDF of the final draft accepted for publication under the revised title "The Varieties of Physicalist Ontology: A Study in Whitehead's Process-Relational Alternative." I've just finished drafting this article, which will hopefully be featured in a special issue of the Journal of Philosophy, Theology, and the Sciences focused on panpsychism. It still [...]

Panpsychism: a brief reply to Massimo Pigliucci

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 The Side View recently published an essay by Massimo Pigliucci titled "The Stoic God is Untenable in Light of Modern Science." Pigliucci is entering into a critical dialogue with a few other Side View authors, Brittany Polat and Kai Whiting, about how best to inherit from ancient Stoic philosophy.  I don't have a horse in the contemporary interpretations of [...]

On the Matter of Life: Towards an Integral Economics

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I'm posting a revised version of a long essay I wrote a decade ago. It draws on thinkers including Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, William Irwin Thompson, Francisco Varela, Alfred North Whitehead, and Alf Hornborg in search of a more integral approach to economics. I had not yet encountered the social ecology [...]

Genes v. Organisms in Biological Explanation (responding to the Dawkins v. Weinstein debate)

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Here's the recent debate between Richard Dawkins and Bret Weinstein on the relationship between cultural and biological evolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYzU-DoEV6k Here are two response videos from me arguing for the relevance of Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson et al.'s theory of autopoiesis and Alfred North Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jx06_OY6gU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DnL0_fydic   Some relevant essays that [...]

Back to teach at Schumacher College in April 2019: “The Evolution of Consciousness and the Cosmological Imagination”

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I'll be teaching another short course at Schumacher College in the UK the week of April 22nd-26th, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNAO2-b1yuI Here's a link if you're interested in registering: https://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/courses/short-courses/re-enchanting-the-cosmos Here's what I'll be teaching on: “The Evolution of Consciousness and the Cosmological Imagination” This week-long course will trace the evolution of consciousness in the West from [...]