Show Notes
Jim talks with Lawrence Cahoone about his book The Orders of Nature and his systematic approach to naturalist philosophy. They discuss fallibilist & local metaphysics, objective relativism, the rejection of simples, Jim's materialism which grants emergence first-class existence, Wimsatt's notion of emergence & nonaggregativity, downward causation & pruning rules, natural complexes, Aristotle's four causes & the use of purpose in biology, the distinction between teleonomy & teleology, the five orders of nature (physical, material, biological, psychological & cultural), characteristic time scales in emergence theory, why particular disciplines coevolved in intellectual traditions, Erik Hoel's theory about emergence having the highest causal power, natural religion & the fine-tuned constants of the universe, the choice between multiverse explanations & a single ground of nature, Darwin's views on divine purpose, comparisons to deists like Spinoza & Einstein, and much more.
More from The Jim Rutt Show
Jim talked with Cory Doctorow—prolific sci-fi and nonfiction author, journalist, activist, EFF special adviser, and author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It—about how structural forces degraded the internet, and what citizens (not consumers) can actually do about it.
Jim talks with Tyson Yunkaporta—indigenous Australian scholar and author of Sand Talk, one of Jim's top ten favorite books—about his metaphysics and worldview, the ecology of sex and creation, and how to wear rationalist and traditional knowledge frameworks simultaneously.
Jim talks with Lisa Buckingham—a veteran HR leader at Vialto Partners, US Soccer, Lincoln Financial, and Thomson—about how the LLM era is reshaping hiring and job architecture, and how companies and workers can roll with the changes.
Jim talks with Peter Wang—chief AI officer, cofounder and CEO of Anaconda, board member of the Center for Humane Technology, and founder of the Austin STEM Center—about Robert Pirsig's metaphysics of quality, how modernity encourages defection, and a secular conception of the sacred.
Jim talks with recurring guest and deep systems thinker Jordan Hall about the scaffolding of his worldview. They discuss the waking-up scenario as a window into consciousness and personal identity, Jordan's phenomenology of waking and the "latent potential of all possible memory," the soul as the binding of finite and infinite, Jim's counter-framing of consciousness as a fusion of perception, interoception, and unconscious memory, the infinite as genuinely real, the Platonic triangle as a concrete example of transcendentals that have no particular location in the causal field, Forrest Landry's distinction between being and existence, knowing with confidence vs. knowing with certainty, Jordan's basic ontological commitment to realism, the incoherence of simulation theory, Jim's "Minimum Viable Metaphysics," the incoherence of unmediated access as the meaning of the word reality, Father Stephen DeYoung's critique of Western substantive essentialism, Bonitta Roy's idea that reality is shareable and participatory, Michael Levin's pragmatic epistemology, how purpose collapses reality to a tractable slice, "begottenness" in Christian metaphysics and the generativity of relationships, Jordan's onto-epistemology as the register before ontology and epistemology are distinguishable, Jordan's recent adoption of "smorthodox" Christianity, the phenomenology of waking as evidence that space-time is secondary, prioritizing meaningfulness over causation as a metaphysical commitment, Updike as "still alive" in the realization of his work, the Greek preoccupation with legacy and honor after death, Eric Weinstein's desire for Einsteinian legacy as a category error, love as the real currency of legacy, the Mark Twain reading as an example of a soul genuinely present in a room, Jim's father as an ongoing example of realization twenty-six years after his death, noticing a parent's turn of phrase in oneself, the sweetness of impermanence, the good vs. abusive father and different relationships to a parent's memory, values and virtues as real, the distinction between courage and bravery, culture as the progressive discovery and embodiment of virtue space, the crab-in-the-bucket problem, fallenness as local optimization, and much more.