FUTURE FOSSILS

By: Michael Garfield
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  • Summary

  • Join paleontologist-futurist Michael Garfield and an avalanche of amazing guests for deep but irreverent discussions at the edge of the known and knowable: on prehistory and post-humanity and deep time, non-human agency and non-duality, science fiction and self-fulfilling prophecies, complex systems and sustainability (or lack thereof), psychedelics as a form of training for proliferating futures, art and creativity as service and as inquiry. New episodes on a roughly biweekly basis. Get bonus material and support the show at patreon.com/michaelgarfield or michaelgarfield.substack.com

    michaelgarfield.substack.com
    Michael Garfield
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Art Philosophy Social Sciences
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Episodes
  • ⏳🎨🔮 231 - Eric Wargo & J.F. Martel on Art as Precognition, Biblically-Accurate A.I., and How to Navigate Ruptures in Space-Time

    ⏳🎨🔮 231 - Eric Wargo & J.F. Martel on Art as Precognition, Biblically-Accurate A.I., and How to Navigate Ruptures in Space-Time
    Nov 21 2024
    Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts✨ Support & Participate• Become a patron on Substack (my preference) or Patreon (15% off annual memberships until 12/21 with the code 15OFF12)• Make a tax-deductible donation to Humans On The Loop• Original paintings available as thank-you gifts for large donors• Hire me as an hourly consultant or advisor on retainer• Buy the books we discuss from Bookshop.org• Join the Future Fossils Facebook group• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils Discord servers• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP and outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP, coda “You Don’t Have To Move → 8:33” from The Age of Reunion✨ About This EpisodeIn this penultimate episode of Future Fossils before we transform into Humans On The Loop, I bring two of my favorite guests and comrades in the so-called “Weirdosphere” back for their first-ever conversation together — and it’s a real banger! Probably the most inspired and provocative conversation I’ve ever had on the nature of time and human creativity.Joining me for this trialogue are Eric Wargo, author of From Nowhere: Artists, Writers, and the Precognitive Imagination (previously on FF episodes 117 and 171), and J.F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in The Age of Artifice and co-host (with Phil Ford) of Weird Studies podcast (previously on FF episodes 18, 71, 126, and 214). Our discussion centers on the concept of precognition — the ability to perceive future events — as the mechanism of all human creative activity. Both Eric and J.F. argue that art, like shamanistic practices, acts as a means of accessing and expressing precognitive experiences, often manifesting as seemingly coincidental events or uncanny correspondences between art and reality. We talk about the role of trauma and dissociation in stimulating creative breakthroughs — why there seems to be a direct biological and psychological link between suffering, displacement, and the discovery of radical new insights and modes of being. Can we create without destroying, or are rupture and connection one thing?We also examine how emerging media through the ages have shaped our experience of time. Starting with the earliest Paleolithic artifacts and the role of cave art in facilitating or encoding ecstatic experience, we trace the evolution of art through to how the development “the cut” in modern cinema led to new ideas of causality. Each new medium provides novel ways of thinking about leaps across space and time, and their study offers new points of entry into a unifying philosophy of rupture and discontinuity.Lastly, we explore some of my own most potent and disquieting precognitive experiences in light of Eric’s argument that the UFO phenomenon may actually be the braided precognitive experiences of future human beings and symbiotic artificial intelligences — a thesis that sheds new light on everything from the lives and work of Philip K. Dick, Jacques Vallée, Carl Jung, Andrei Tarkovsky, to The Book of Ezekiel.Where we’re going, we won’t need roads…Speaking of art, UFOs, psychedelic experience, and time machines, here’s the standalone music video for the song we discuss in this episode that was inspired by my UFO (or were they time machine) experiences in 2007. I threw it back in as a coda to the episode but in case you want to view it in its original resolution and in the context of the entire album, here you go. The “8:33” section starts around 3:58:✨ ChaptersChapter 1: Introduction (0:00:00)Chapter 2: Precognitive Imagination in the Arts (0:08:57)Chapter 3: The Personal is Precognitive (0:13:34)Chapter 4: The Cut and the Leap (0:22:15)Chapter 5: The Brain as a Fast-Forwarder (0:30:38)Chapter 6: Campfires, TVs, and Flickering Consciousness (0:38:57)Chapter 7: The Trauma of Truth (0:48:04)Chapter 8: Prophecy and The Trash Stratum (0:54:33)Chapter 9: UFOs as Time Machines, The Disappointment of Destiny (1:14:39)Chapter 10: Closing and News on Upcoming Releases (1:20:28)✨ Other MentionsAn inexhaustive list of people, places, and key works mentioned in this episode.* Morgan Robertson: Author of a novel that is believed to have predicted the sinking of the Titanic.* Hunter S. Thompson: Author and journalist.* William Shakespeare: Playwright who wrote Macbeth.* Comte de Lautréamont: A French poet who talked about "the cut" in his work.* Jean Epstein: Author of the book on the philosophy of cinema, The Intelligence of a Machine.* Carl Jung: Psychoanalyst who developed the concept of synchronicity.* Sergei Eisenstein: Filmmaker, and film theorist.* Gilles Deleuze: Philosopher who argued that “difference is more fundamental than identity.”* Cy Twombly: Artist whose work is discussed by Eric Wargo.* Andrei Tarkovsky: Filmmaker who wrote a diary entry quoted in From Nowhere....
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    1 hr and 33 mins
  • 🐦‍⬛🐙🖤 230 - Jamie Curcio on Living in Mythpunk, Eldritch Complexity, and Finding The Bright Side of Dark Ages

    🐦‍⬛🐙🖤 230 - Jamie Curcio on Living in Mythpunk, Eldritch Complexity, and Finding The Bright Side of Dark Ages
    Nov 14 2024
    Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple PodcastsThis week I talk with Jamie Curcio to ask, whom do we serve? Who gives us power, and to whom do we give ours? Where does that power come from? To whom do we sell our stories?We explore the world behind the world, linking Jamie’s writing and game world-building in the domain he calls myth punk, and the equally Eldritch complex systems wicked problem of climate action.Studying that link, we can trace the outlines of emergent 21st Century religions — the reinterpretation of axial traditions suited to the digital era, the metamodern revival of land-based animistic traditions, and even weirder novel forms that arise at the end of one world and the effloresence of many others.✨ Jamie's LinksFallen Cycle Podcastmodernmythology.net“Investing In The Unknown”“The Cascade” Part 1, 2, 3Tales From When I Had A Face: B&W EditionTales From When I Had A Face info page✨ Offer Support + Join The Scene• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Make a tax-deductible donation to Humans On The Loop• Invite me to work with you as an hourly consultant or advisor on retainer• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils Discord servers• Join the Future Fossils Facebook group• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Tip me with @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP✨ Chapters1. Jamie's Background (0:05:46)2. Embracing the Unknown and the Role of Artifice (0:11:14) 3. Prometheus, Intentional Mystery, and the Nature of Agency (0:16:21)4. Introducing the Fallen Cycle and its Mythological Framework (0:21:57)5. Exploring Thematic Elements: Gods, Myths, and Consumerism (0:27:32)6. Climate Change, Hyperobjects, and Societal Inertia (0:33:36)7. Festivals, Dionysus, and the Value of Liminal Spaces (0:40:26)8. AI as a Creative Tool and Collaborator (0:46:05)9. Mythology, Role-Playing, and Enacting Change (0:52:16)10. Engaging with Jamie's Work and Final Thoughts (0:56:03)✨ Other MentionsFF 195 — A.I. Art: An Emergency Panel with Julian Picaza, Evo Heyning, Micah Daigle, Jamie Curcio, & Topher SipesA Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Manuel DeLandaJoseph CampbellFriedrich NietzscheArthur SchopenhauerBuddhismWestern EsotericismEvolving Media NetworkWeird Studies Podcast (with Jamie, with Michael)Tom MorganGilles Deleuze“The Soldier and The Hunchback” by Aleister CrowleyPrometheus (Movie)Alien Romulus (Movie)Eric WargoJohn KeatsUnweaving The Rainbow by Richard DawkinsFF 53 — A Very Xeno Christmas with Evan SnyderStephen BatchelorSamurai Jack (TV show)Fern Gully (Movie)Jitterbug Perfume by Tom RobbinsAmerican Gods by Neil GaimanSandman by Neil GaimanJosh SchreiHell by Timothy MortonThe Book of ExodusThe Demon-Haunted World by Carl SaganCyndi CoonDavid Bowie This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • 👾🖼️🏯 229 - Sara Phinn Huntley on Making A Field Guide to DMT Entities

    👾🖼️🏯 229 - Sara Phinn Huntley on Making A Field Guide to DMT Entities
    Oct 29 2024
    Subscribe, Rate, & Review Future Fossils on YouTube • Spotify • Apple PodcastsThis week on Future Fossils I welcome back Sara Phinn Huntley (help her fight cancer!), a multimedia artist, writer, and researcher who has spent the last two decades exploring the intersection of psychedelics, technology, and philosophy.An intrepid psychonaut and cartographer of hyperspace, her current focus involves using VR to represent visual/spatial imagination in real-time. Using a multidisciplinary approach, she documents and maps the states revealed by dimethyltriptamime and other psychedelics, cargo culting higher dimensional artifacts through the intersection of chaos mathematics, Islamic geometry, and 3D diagrammatic performance capture. Her work has been published by the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies and featured in Diana Reed Slattery's Xenolinguistics. She is the art director for The Illustrated Field to the DMT Entities with David Jay Brown (forthcoming at Inner Traditions, 2025).✨ Offer Support + Join The Scene• Become a patron on Substack or Patreon• Make a tax-deductible donation to Humans On The Loop• Invite me to work with you as an hourly consultant or advisor on retainer• Join the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation and Future Fossils Discord servers• Join the Future Fossils Facebook group• Buy the books we discuss from my Bookshop.org reading list• Buy original paintings and prints or commission new work• Tip me with @futurefossils on Venmo, $manfredmacx on CashApp, or @michaelgarfield on PayPal• Buy the show’s music on Bandcamp — intro “Olympus Mons” from the Martian Arts EP & outro “Sonnet A” from the Double-Edged Sword EP✨ Main Points + Big Ideas* The Entanglement of Language and Being: DMT entities reveal a profound connection between language and the construction of reality, echoing themes found in esoteric traditions and the emergence of AI.* The Cartography of Hyperspace: The book serves as a guide to the vast and uncharted territory of DMT experiences, highlighting the challenge of classifying subjective encounters and the potential for mapping a multidimensional reality.* The Reproducibility Problem and the Power of Big Data: While acknowledging the inherent challenges of studying subjective experiences, we point to the potential of emerging technologies like AI, blockchain, and large-scale data analysis to offer new insights.* Embodied Bias and the Nature of Evolution: The nonlinear and multidimensional nature of DMT experiences challenges our understanding of time, evolution, and even anatomy, prompting a re-evaluation of our assumptions about reality.* Attention as a Currency: We emphasize the importance of attention in navigating both the DMT space and the rapidly evolving technological landscape, posing critical questions about who or what deserves our focus.* The Question of Human Survival: The episode ends by urging humanity to confront its self-destructive tendencies and leverage its collective wisdom to navigate the challenges and opportunities of the future.✨ ChaptersChapter 1: Sara's Psychedelic Journey and the Genesis of the DMT Entities Field Guide (00:00:00 - 00:10:00)* Sara's fascination with DMT from a young age.* Her exploration of DMT through various artistic media, including performance art and xenolinguistics.* The inception of The Illustrated Field Guide to DMT Entities book, inspired by classic field guides to nature.* The decision to leverage AI in the book's creation due to the vastness of the subject matter.Chapter 2: Language, Being, and the AI Oracle (00:10:00 - 00:20:00)* The role of language in shaping and interpreting DMT entities, drawing parallels to esoteric traditions like the concept of the Logos.* Sara's process of interacting with AI, describing it as "talking to it" to curate the visual representations of DMT entities.* The blurring of categories and the subjective nature of interpreting the raw data of DMT experiences.* The challenge of reconciling diverse and often conflicting perceptions of the same entities.* Language as a compression tool for expressing ineffable experiences.* The increasing relevance of AI in understanding consciousness, particularly with future advancements in brain modeling.Chapter 3: Navigating Ontological Shock and the Nature of DMT Entities (00:20:00 - 00:30:00)* The challenge of reconciling DMT experiences with our "meat space" understanding of reality.* Sara's personal experience of gaining knowledge through DMT, challenging James Kent's view on the limitations of such knowledge.* The neurological basis for some common DMT hallucinations and its implications for understanding the experience.* The interplay of cultural and personal projections in shaping DMT entity encounters.* Exploring the possibility of psychedelics as a way to interact with a simulated reality.* The existence of phenomena that defy current scientific ...
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    1 hr and 22 mins

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Profile Image for mister pumpkin

Beautiful.

Future Fossils is bound to be the Joe Rogan Experience of the post -2020 world.

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