We are clearly reaching the end of this phase of human civilization. Does that mean that evolution's broad trend towards increasing complexity, scale, and self-awareness is also dying? Many futures are possible, and in this episode, we speculate about one that continues the evolution of ever-greater complexity. Exiting the fantasy of a “sustainable” extraction-based economy, we instead imagine a human society based solely on life itself, where organisms do what is now done with gas-fired kilns, table saws, and circuit boards. We examine the diversity of the metabolisms which are currently evolving in synthetic biology laboratories, and how a novel organism might alternate between photosynthesizing and devouring toxic waste in the process of, for instance, growing into a house. Careful to delineate near-term possibility from developments which would require a scientific (and likely social) revolution, we look from the strange world of self-healing buildings and robots animated by heart cells which we currently inhabit to a much stranger one, in which houses walk and computing is biological. This episode largely focuses on establishing a realm of possibility, saving more conceptual and ethical issues for its sequel, where we ask: what would it be like to adopt an ethic in which life existed for its own sake, but in which humanity actively intervened to promote life's maximum abundance, diversity, and evolutionary potential?
Sub-Self, Meet Meta-Self: Notes on The Emerging World Mind
Jesus of Nazareth and the Biology of Defeat
Social Complexity after the Machines: Interview with Dr. Shane Simonsen
Metanoia: How Worldviews Change
Vivimancer pt. 1: The Water Carrier (excerpt)
Seeds of the World Tree: Programs of Revolutionary Biology and Evolutionary Politics
Social Cohesion vs. the Internet vs. the Establishment vs. the Earth
#66: A Saboteur's Moon Sheds No Light (excerpt)
The Ashes of the World Tree: On Grieving and Fighting
Metamorphosis pt. 3.3: Your Body Is a Map of the Sky
Metamorphosis pt. 3.2: Integration across Landscapes and Brain Regions
Metamorphosis pt. 3.1: The Rupture in the Fabric of Reality Model of Human Cognition
Metamorphosis pt. 2: The Cognitive Evolutionary Avant-Garde
Metamorphosis pt. 1: The Age of Mutual Incomprehension
The Incompetent Authoritarianism of Vladimir Lenin
Revolutionary Biology pt. 2: The Development and Evolution of Sasquatch
Revolutionary Biology pt. 1: Nature vs. Nurture vs. Synthesis
The Raven Politics of Terra Incognita
Narcissists, Strongmen, and Technocrats pt. 2
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