Reclaiming Attention from 'The Ravenous Maw of The Screen' with Richard Doyle

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When, suddenly, the barrier between “imagination” and “reality” evaporates as our familiar notions of here/there, now/then, in/out, and other/self twist up into a ball of non-Euclidean spaghetti, whom better to help steer the course through these “turbulent philosophical waters” than Richard Doyle, aka “M0b1ius”, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor at Penn State Center for Humanities and Information in the College of Liberal Arts?

After his postdoctoral research at MIT in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Doyle wrote The Wetwares Trilogy, a sequence of books on the history of information biology that reached its climax with one of my favorite reads of all time, Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of the Noosphere. He is also the author of The Genesis of Now: Self Experiments with the Bible & the End of Religion and Into The Stillness: Dialogues on Awakening Beyond Thought (with Gary Weber), and has taught courses on “aliens, Philip K. Dick, nanotechnology, rebellion itself, ecstasy, Sanskrit rhetorical traditions, Burroughs, basic argumentation, The Non Dual Bible, and everything in between.”

I discovered Doyle through his appearances on my first favorite podcast, Erik Davis’ Expanding Mind, and in the thirteen years since he has shown up for me time and time again as mentor, friend, and inspiration. And since this project is, ostensibly, a way of training my own language model to reflect the wisdom of my friends and colleagues, I can think of no one else I’d rather prime the batch. It is my great privilege and honor to be able to have him as the first guest in this series, as a way of of helping set the tone for everything that is to come…

Links

Richard Doyle’s faculty web page and publicationsLearn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The Loop

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Chapters

0:00:00 – Teaser

0:03:36 – Episode Intro

0:12:44 – Introducing Richard Doyle

0:29:33 – The Ego as Inflammation

0:33:58 – Practicing Care in The Planet-Wide Makerspace

0:48:30 – Digital Connection vs. Embodied Connection

0:55:46 – Psychedelics as Training Wheels for Transhumanism

1:02:43 – “Storytelling” Isn’t A Professional Service (??)

1:05:25 – Techniques for Reclaiming Attention & Finding Peace

1:15:22 – Meditation as “The Halting Problem”

1:17:30 – Beyond The Limits of