Talk of Today

Julian Assange & Freedom of Expression with Human Rights Advocate Chamira Gamage

Chamira Gamage is a Human Rights Advocate at Amnesty International who has been instrumental in campaigning and lobbying for the Assange campaign globally. He has taken a complex and at times unpopular case and ensured it was being given the attention it deserves, based on the core principles press freedom, freedom of expression, and the impact it has on us all, both now and in the future. Chamira is also the Co-Founder and CEO of Thinkrs, a critical thinking Chrome Extension and soon to come News App, which helps users consider context as they read in to help them be better informed.

We cover:

Chamira's background
The backstory of Julian Assange and Wikileaks
How has Assange been treated
Why does this matter to all of us
What can we do

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1h 2m - Nov 2, 2021

The Quantum Internet with Dr. Peter Rohde

Dr. Peter Rohde is an ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Quantum Software & Information at the University of Technology Sydney. Peter is also a mountaineer, musician, cryptoanarchist, and author of the recently released book "The Quantum Internet".

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1h 47m - Oct 20, 2021

Patterns of Creation with Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta

Tyson Yunkaporta is an Australian academic, arts critic, researcher, and member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland. He recently started the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, which is focused on applying Indigenous thinking to issues that complexity scientists and technologists are currently working on across domains including economics, governance, evolutionary dynamics, cognition, and the environment. Tyson is also the author of the world-view reconfiguring book 'Sand Talk' which served as the basis of our conversation. In the book, Tyson explores our global systems from an Aboriginal perspective and how this viewpoint could help us resolve some of the complex sustainability issues facing our world.

In our conversation we cover:

The indigenous notion of story and the problem with the narrative at the heart of Western civilisation
The value in true diversity, identity, and place
Violence and the need for its integration in society
Why instead of pursuing growth we should seek 'increase'
The need for humanity to retake our place as custodians of the land we're connected to.

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1h 32m - Oct 6, 2021

The LBRY of the World with Jeremy Kauffman

Jeremy is CEO of LBRY, a blockchain based protocol which is aiming to do what bitcoin has done for money for publishing. In that, rather than relying upon third parties to aggregate and distribute content, library has built a technology that allows this to be done peer to peer without fear of censorship or demonetisation. He's also CEO of Odyssee, a youtube-like video streaming platform built on LBRY technology.

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53m - Sep 1, 2021

The New Liberals of Australia with Victor Kline

Victor Kline is the Party Leader of the New Liberals in Australia. He's a Sydney based barrister specialising in the area of Refugee and Asylum Seeker Law. He's founder and director of the The Refugee Law Project as well as editor of the Federal Court Reports and Federal Law Reports.

We cover:

The need for an Independent Commission Against Corruption with teeth
The moral crisis of our immigration policies and some potential solutions
Australia's vast potential as an energy superpower
Brain drain, the crippling of Australian universities, and getting back on track to becoming the 'smart country'
The plans the New Liberals have and the challenges they face.
Why Climate inaction is actually unAustralian

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1h 11m - Aug 20, 2021

Universal Basic Income & Property Rights with Prof. Karl Widerquist

In this episode I am once again joined by philosopher and economist Prof. Karl Widerquist, professor of philosophy at Georgetown University in Qatar.

He was co-founder of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network, the first Basic Income network in the United States, and was also co-chair of the Basic Income Earth Network from 2008-2017.

He's recently coauthored a several of books, two of which served as the basis of our discussion. These are The Prehistory of Private Property which debunks three false claims commonly accepted by contemporary political philosophers regarding property systems, and the book Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy which explores how philosophers use and perpetuate myths about prehistory. While there's barely any mention of universal basic income in these texts, the conclusions that lead from them can be seen to be strongly support a social program like UBI.

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2h 16m - Aug 7, 2021

Complex Systems and Information with Prof. Karoline Wiesner

This episode is another dive into what is one of the most fascinating and promising fields of our age: complexity science. It's a relatively new field that is transforming how we see and understand the world across multiple disciplines. Most importantly, it's can provide us with a deeper understanding of our collective interactions with the complex biophysical system we call, Earth and how we might avert the catastophes that loom.

Joining me today is Professor Karoline Wiesner, Professor of Complexity Science at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and Associate editor for the journals Entropy and Advances in Complex Systems

Her research focuses on the use of information theory in the study of formation, maintenance and stability of complex systems.

She is also one of the authors of the recently released book What is a Complex System, which served as the basis of my interview with her.

In our conversation, we cover:

What is a complex system?
What is complexity and what are some ways we can measure it?
Why information theory and complexity science are such powerful tools for understanding the world?
We also spend some time discussing entropy, order, and disorder, as well as a bit on how these things might be related to ethical value, which, if has been a pet interest of mine in recent times.

Unfortunately we didn't get to cover all of the topics I wishes to explore as we were bedevilled by technical difficulties, so the conversation might not flow as normal. Regardless, I still had a great time speaking with Prof. Wiesner and I hope you enjoy it as well.

Links

Prof. Wiesner's Book: What is a Complex System?

Prof. Wiesner's website

Prof. Wiesner on Research Gate

‍Book mentioned: Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker

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1h 36m - Jul 21, 2021

The Free Energy Principle, Consciousness & Psychedelics with Dr. Adam Safron

This episode is a bit of a wild one. It's a three hour discussion bringing together a unifying principle for life, the free energy principle (a topic I explored in greater detail in my conversation with Maxwell Ramstead), with several pernicious problems that have plagued us for years, like consciousness, free will, intelligence, and what the hell is going on when we take psychdelic substances.

Leading us on a tour of these awe-inspiring, interconnected, mind-bending topics is the scientist Dr. Adam Safron. Adam is has recently finished a postdoc the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University and has moved on to the John's Hopkins Centre for Psychdelics and Consciousness Research.

His work brings together neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy from a complex systems perspective and is truly fascinating. His ultimate aim is is providing a multi-level account of the factors that help people to be adaptive, creative, and free in all aspects of their lives.

One of his more recent projects has been developing a theory of consciousness, Integrated World Modeling Theory, which in the context of the free energy principle and integrated information theory, proposes that conscious experiences are what it is like to model an embodied self and world with coherent organization by space, time, and cause.

In our conversation we cover:

The Free Energy Principle
The Big 5 Personality trait model, and it's recent cybernetifaction
Intelligence and why the artificial intelligence of the future might have to be embodied in order to reach its purported potential
Adam then takes us through his theory of consciousness, Integrated World Modeling Theory,
Free will
Psychedelics and the brain

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3h 23m - May 24, 2021

Democracy Earth, Proof of Humanity ID, and UBI with Herb Stephens

Herb is co-founder and treasurer of the Democracy Earth foundation, a non-profit building a blockchain-based open source "liquid democracy" governance platform, with the aim of bringing blockchain-based tools for democracy to the world at large, as well as executive Director of the Independent National Union, a new organisation with the aim of strengthening political power independent from the two-party system to enable the Independent governing of American cities, states and nation.

He's a serial software entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, having built and sold multiple companies mostly building systems where power purposefully shifts to the user through technology. When he learned of blockchain technology in 2012, considering it to be "the best invention since the Internet itself", Herb dedicated the rest of his career to social entrepreneurship.

In our conversation, we cover:

Sovereign identity and proof of humanity ID
Quadratic voting
Currency, nation-states, and the blockchain revolution we will see
How the Universal Basic Income token works, what the philosophy behind it is, and what the plans for it are
What's wrong with politics in the US at the moment

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2h 2m - May 12, 2021

Climate Change & Collapse with Prof. Will Steffen

Today we're talking about climate change and the precarious position we are all in, threatened with the very collapse of our societies and the biosphere upon which they rest, all due to our inaction. Joining me to explore this sobering topic is Earth systems scientist Professor Will Steff. Will is a climate change expert and researcher at the Australian National University, Canberra. He's held many positions related to guiding our species back onto a sustainble climate trajectory. He was the Executive Director of the Australian National University's Climate Change Institute,he served as a Science Adviser to the Australian Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, he was a founding Climate Councillor of Australia's Climate Council, and has been an author and reviewer of five of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) assessments and special reports between 2000 and 2018.

In our conversation, we cover:

How bad is the current situation?
Tipping points
The difficulty of modelling a system as complex as our climate and thus, the need for a great deal of humiltiy and caution when dealing with climate change
The threat social collapse due to climate change
and why we really need to get our act together by 2030 in order to try and stablise the climate system.

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1h 34m - Apr 26, 2021

Blockchain Economics & The Origins of Innovation

Prof. Jason Potts is a Distinguished Professor of Economics at RMIT University and Co-director of the Blockchain Innovation Hub at RMIT in Melbourne Australia.

In our conversation we cover:

The economy as a complex adaptive system
Why capitalism is a misnomer, and instead, the economic system in which we live might be better characterised as an institutional market society for the growth of knowledge.
We explore why innovation actually begins before the creative entrepreneur in what's called an innovation commons.
and, of course, what will likely become a defining technology in this decade and those to come: blockchain. Jason explains why this will be the base layer for the emerging digital economy and why NFTs, non-fungible tokens, are the start of a new age of experimentation in property rights.

If you've had any hesitancy or misgiving about blockchain technology in the past, Jason will likely change your mind.

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1h 57m - Apr 12, 2021

The Capability Approach, Corona Virus, and Freedom with Prof. Jonathan Wolff

My guest today is the philosophy professor Jonathan Wolff. Jonathan is the Alfred Landecker professor of values and public policy at the University of Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government.

We cover:

The Capability Approach
Global justice and the nation-state
The difficulties of translating philosophy into policy
Balancing Life & Liberty in the context of the corona virus, and;
Universities in a post-covid world

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2h 18m - Nov 2, 2020

Rewilding the Singularity with Michael Garfield

My guest today is Michael Garfield, a writer, musician, artist, poet-philosopher, paleontologist-futurist who's setting the seeds for a planetary renaissance. With incisive eloquence, he takes the threads of technology, science, and the wonders of the natural world to weave together a cosmic story of Life, one that needs to be shared more wildly.

In our conversation we cover:

Corona virus and the epistemic crisis
Community and fragmentation
Evolution as a multi-billion year remix project
Psychedelics as training wheels for transhumanism
Nested complexity, restoring democracy, and regenerative communities
Rewilding the future
The power of ideas

http://www.samhbarton.com/podcast/rewilding-the-singularity-with-michael-garfield

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1h 48m - Oct 28, 2020

Living Between Frames with Nora Bateson

Nora Bateson is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and educator, and as President of the International Bateson Institute, an organisation that integrates the sciences, arts and professional knowledge to create a qualitative inquiry of the integration of life. Her work is focused on the innumerable relationships that define our world and who we are, understanding the role that perception and context plays in our interactions. Her work brings the fields of biology, cognition, art, anthropology, psychology, and information technology together into a study of the patterns in ecology of living systems.

In our conversation, we cover:

Ineffability, perception, and the baggage of language
Why the changes we need begin with the changing our relationships with ourselves and each other
How COVID has shown us the perils of the incessant seeking of efficiency
The need to engage with the world with humility.

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Links

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1h 34m - Oct 20, 2020

Idea Markets with Mike Elias

Mike is the founder of IdeaMarkets, a stock market for credibility that's currently under development. His team hopes to align financial incentives with the credibility of publishers to help combat misinformation and to really make the truth pay for those who seek it.

In our conversation we cover:

The promise of distributed ledger technologies, aka crypto
Decentralised finance
Idea markets and aligning financial incentives with truth seeking
Truth as an ordering force in the world
China's panopticon
The logic of non-violence
UFOs and undervalued ideas

Find Mike Online:

Shownotes available here.

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1h 54m - Sep 6, 2020

Information and Life with Prof. Paul Davies

Topics covered:

What is information?
What's the difference between computation and information processing?
What is order?
Emergence and reductionism
Cancer through the lens of information
Top-down causality

I think this episode is on one of the most fascinating topics we've explored so far. Today we're talking about information, a concept that we've only had for less than a century, but one that is proving to be absolutely foundational to our understanding of the universe and the ongoing process of life.

My interest in information started about 5 years ago when I was thinking about what a foundation for morality might be.

Whenever we think about what might be a preferable state of affairs, we're fundamentally picturing realities with different configurations of matter. When making decisions of right and wrong, we're imagining worlds with matter organised in different ways. There's something about certain material configurations that makes us think that they have intrinsic moral worth, whether they're living systems with sentience or entire ecosystems.

Configurations of matter, by definition, are information. Information is a quantity that is inextricably tied to entropy, the measure of how disordered a system is.

In order to develop a fundamental understanding of right or wrong, one that extends beyond what our anthropocentric lenses may tell us, and encapsulates all of life, we must think about the physical makeup of these systems. There's no other way.

As you'll learn in this episode, a deeper understanding of information will completely revolutionise how we see and interact with the world. It's impact is hard to overstate.

Joining me to cover this topic is celebrated physicist and science communicator, Prof. Paul Davies. Paul is a British scientist who has focused on theoretical physics, cosmology, and astrobiology.

At Arizona State University in Phoenix, he established the BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, a “cosmic think tank” devoted to brainstorming deep foundational questions across all the sciences. He's got a deep interest SETI, the (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and chairs the SETI Post-Detection Taskgroup. He's also been involved in developing fascinating new theories of cancer which we cover in this episode.

Paul has received numerous awards for his work, including the Templeton Prize, the Faraday Prize, and in 2007 he was named a member of the Order of Australia.

Paul is also the author of 28 books. His most recent is The Demon in the machine —an eye-opening exploration of information and our world and was the basis of this conversation.

Paul Davies' personal website: cosmos.asu.edu

Paul Davies' Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/PhysicistPaulDavies/

Beyond Center website: beyond.asu.edu

Beyond Center Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/BeyondCenter/

Beyond Center Youtube Page: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_cmoMSKLD9rUMe4X7m_BOw

Paul's Book: https://www.amazon.com/Demon-Machine-Paul-Davies/dp/024130959X

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1h 39m - Jul 13, 2020

The Constructal Law with Prof. Adrian Bejan

The constructal law is a law of physics that predicts natural design and its evolution in biology, geophysics, climate change, technology, social organization, evolutionary design and development, wealth and sustainability. The law states that for a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live) it must evolve such that it provides greater and greater access to the currents that flow through it. If the second law of thermodynamics is seen as the irreversibility of energy flow, the constructal law describes just how these flows organise across time. The constructal says that as a flow system continues to evolve, its design will change to increase the rate of whatever is flowing through it. The applications of the law are vast, as I'm sure you can imagine. It explains why rivers form the way that they do, why the vasculature of our bodies and cities manifest in the branching ways that they do, why hierarchies manifest spontaneously, why birds fly in formation, even why wealth inequality arises. It's the physics principle that underpins economies of scale and the Pareto distribution (also known as the Matthew principle), the observation the majority of wealth is normally found within the hands of a few. If you're like me, you're might be wondering why you've never heard of it before. It might be because it's a relatively new development, but who knows. Regardless, I'm thrilled to have come across it and to share it with you all. My interest in it, apart from it being something foundational to the world we live in, is what it may mean for how we structure our societies and our moral and ethical viewpoints. Harnessing the flows of energy are foundational to life, from the smallest of organisms all the way to our technologically enhanced species. We do this better than any of the rest. It's our unique capacity to extract energy from the world and put it to use that's responsible for why we've progressed so far, from apes playing with fire to people who can split atoms and channel the awesome power locked within. As our interconnected global society continues to emerge, we must understand the natural laws that shape our world so that we're better equipped to build societies that work not just for those that live within them, but for the planet as a whole. Joining me to explore this topic is distinguished Professor Adrian Bejan from Duke University, the man who formulated the constructal law in 1995. To call Adrian prolific would be an understatement. He's authored more than 650 peer-reviewed articles as well as 30 books, one of which being the most widely-used engineering textbook in the English language. His books The Physics of Life, Design in Nature, and his most recent book*, Freedom and Evolution,* were the resources I used to base our conversation on. He's ranked among the top 0.01% of leading world scientists in the new citations impact database created by Stanford University’s John Ioannidis. He's the recipient of 18 honorary doctorates from universities in 11 countries, In 2018 he was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Mechanical Engineering for his pioneering interdisciplinary contributions in thermodynamics and convection heat transfer, and in 2019 he was awarded the Humboldt Research Award for lifetime achievement for his pioneering contributions to his field and the constructal law. Earlier this year, the French government awarded Adrian with the title of Knight of the French Order of Academic Palms, an award reserved for distinguished academics for their valuable services to universities, education and science. I feel deeply privileged to have had a chance to speak to someone who has contributed so much to our understanding of the structure of reality. In our conversation, we cover: Adrian's background and history what is constructal law and how shapes our world why inequality is an unavoidable fact of nature the physics of economies of scale and... Support this podcast

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1h 41m - Jul 7, 2020

Decentralised Organisations with Richard Bartlett

In this episode of Talk of Today we're joined by Richard Bartlett. Richard is an expert in bringing people together and catalysing decentralised forms of organising. He's co founder of Enspiral (Enspiral.com) - a network of people supporting each other to grow up and to get paid for doing meaningful work. He's currently working on a project called Microsolidarity (microsolidarity.cc) that's focused on building and sharing a collection of methodologies for community building, answering the questions of How can we build small scale, high trust, mutually developmental groups. I'm a huge fan of Richards work and the joy he seems to exhibit in living and interacting with people. I first came across his work on twitter — I highly recommend following him. For show notes and links to Richard's work and other things discussed in our conversation, head to my website website (samhbarton.com) . I'm excited to share this conversation with you all. Our ability to tackle the grand global challenges we face ahead is dependent upon us, all of us, coming together in the places we call home, and taking action. Links The Hum (https://www.thehum.org) Enspiral (https://enspiral.com/) Microsolidarity (microsolidarity.cc) Richard's Website (http://richdecibels.com/) Richard's Twitter (https://twitter.com/RichDecibels) Richards newsletter (https://richdecibels.substack.com/) Rich's Book: Patterns for Decentralised Organising (https://leanpub.com/patterns-for-decentralised-organising/) Support this podcast

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1h 20m - Jun 26, 2020

The Free Energy Principle with Dr. Maxwell Ramstead

The Free Energy Principle is a formal description of how life resist entropy across scales by minimising surprise. Surprise here being an information-theoretic view of how unlikely a particular sensory state of an organism is, not the psychological phenomenon of surprise — though they are definitely linked. The free energy principle describes how organisms attempt to reduce the difference between their model of the world and their perception of it. Joining me to shed light on this topic is Maxwell Ramstead. Maxwell is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal and at the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University. He has coauthored several papers in leading journals, which exploring the applications of the free energy principle to the dynamics of cognition and the mind, phenomenology, ecology, and socio-cultural systems. In our conversation, we cover: - What is the Free Energy Principle - What is active inference - The 4 E A approach to cognition (embedded, embodied, enactive, extended and affective) - Entropy - Potential societal implications of the Free Energy Principle Support this podcast

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2h 48m - Jun 5, 2020

Chaos, Order, and Emergent System Design with Matthew Pirkowski

Matthew Pirkowski (@MattPirkoswki) is one of Twitter's most incisive thinkers, offering penetrating insights in things ranging from representations of value, the many problems of social media platforms and how we interact with them, the evolution of society, and designing emergent systems. In our conversation we cover: - The substance underlying Jordan Peterson's main body of work and its implications for ethics. - The role money plays in scaling social groups - Specialisation as epistemic speciation - Social media and our incoherent information environments - Emergent system design ‍ Support this podcast

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2h 15m - May 10, 2020