I work on a piece right now about time travel actually the fictional version of that where you have the branching forks of history It's a motif that comes out a lot of time travel stories But it's given birth to by the need to avoid grandfather paradoxes because okay, you could have time travel But we don't have to face these conundrums that these paradoxes seem to give us But when you drill down those paradoxes don't exist and can't exist and so it's really saving us from a hysterical Confusion cabbat time to use these tropes And so I think effectively that kind of branching fork view of the future is a kind of defense mechanism against confronting the trauma Of a single future that we can't know but there is a future that's sending us information that we can't interpret No directly partly because if we couldn't interpret correctly we would create a different future that would be a paradox Usually artists eat philosophers to the punch when it comes to detecting a new area of exploration I think that if you look at something like Shakespeare's Macbeth what the weird sisters are doing is cutting into time and with the cut a Leap over a bunch of causal events becomes possible So that suddenly Macbeth who couldn't imagine how he could become king It was like impossible politically speaking the series of things that would have had to happen for him to become king was a very long list But once the the weird sisters cut into the possible and declare that Macbeth will be king suddenly the causal forces align themselves to make that happen I think it was notary amon with a great decadent French poet who said something like either art or poetry is the chance encounter of the sewing machine and The umbrella on the dissecting table, right? So again There's this idea of the cut you take things that have a proper position in causal schema and then you put them together and suddenly a new Type of connection between objects becomes possible and I think that's what Jung was intuiting with his concept of synchronicity It's a non-causal connection between things probably the discovery of that and its implementation or its manifestation through film editing It is a huge development of the last 200 years that really did change our sense of space and time Greetings future fossils and welcome to the penultimate episode the podcast explores our place in time I can't think of a better way to land and integrate eight and a half years conversations on the mysterious nature of time itself then in a conversation with Jeff Martell and Eric Wargo on Eric's most recent third book from nowhere artists writers and the pre cognitive imagination Jeff and Eric have both appeared on the shows several times already and if you plumb the show notes You'll find links to numerous excellent conversations. I've had it them each But it is my great pleasure today to bring you the first ever conversation between them in which we examine Eric's thesis in from nowhere that all human creativity is a kind of sensing into and pre-memory of future events that have yet to take place not only through one's individual lifetime but braided through conversation and the external representation of mind in physical objects and in cultural and social behaviors and practices in the collective memory structures that bind us through the ages in art and religion I Cannot say enough about how this book has changed the way that I make sense of my own weird experiences Some of which I finally get to share on this show and I'm glad that Jeff in particular gets to bring his Insights as a filmmaker and as an author on art and the symbol into an exploration of This provocative attempt at offering what are in some sense reductionist materialist explanations for the paranormal activity That seems to perfuse and define most humans experience which can hardly in final analysis be called normal an attempt to make Familiar and sensible some of the weirdest events of many of our lives before we dive in I just want to say thanks to everybody who has been supporting the show and thank you for sticking with me through this transition into its new manifestation as humans on the loop an exploration of agency and human identity in the age of Automation and advanced magical technologies in some sense merely an application of the research and philosophical inquiry that has characterized future fossils since 2016 and independent scholarship for the last 20 years finally we're living in an age where These concerns are now a matter of everyday life in which as how do I Thompson put it the going gets weird and weird turn pro I'm glad to have you come with me as future fossils presents a new focused inquiry funded by grants private donations and now also thankfully with the help of happy org tax deductible contributions through a link in the show notes as Well as continued listener support through Michael Garfield sub-stack calm and patreon.com slash Michael Garfield There are now four essays out for humans on the loop and 23 interviews in the editing queue hundreds more planned I have a new weekly podcast release schedule starting in the first week of December and You can go check that out and see who you have to look forward to in the pitch deck. Thank you all Thanks to Eric and JF for joining me in such a stimulating and profound conversation and Stay tuned many great things to come, but you already knew that Alright gentlemen, I'm pleased to be the vector by which you to get to have your first conversation that feels very nice Somewhere in a far future mainframe where automated royalty payments are disseminated retroactively for this kind of thing I am a wealthy although uncredited producer of the social rhizome.
Yeah, so we've got Eric welcome back through your third appearance on future fossils and JF I don't even know what this is five or six something like that. Yeah, we're talking about From nowhere today artists writers in the pre cognitive imagination and as those of you watching on YouTube can tell The pink sticky is represent approximately one quarter of the stuff that I actually highlighted in this book I don't know how we're gonna get to all this today But this is a very encompassing thesis that you're laying out here and I would just love For you to introduce this in whatever way you feel comfortable before we dive in and I know JF You're still reading it and you're writing a review of this book too So maybe before we really have a particular conversation of your reflections on this book before we Restart chopping into specific stuff would be great to sure. Yeah, Eric Sure, first of all, thank you for having me on your show Michael It's always a delight to talk with you and it's awesome to finally meet JF Martell who I've loved his book for a couple years now and so this is I quoted it frequently and from nowhere So this is gonna be a super lot of fun I can give a long introduction or a short introduction I don't know what you prefer, but maybe I'll say that we've talked before about my previous books and my first book time loops Which came out in 2018 now? I was about the topic of precognition about I was getting the science and the evidence and also the physical theories and biological possibilities and then linking it to psychoanalysis and so on it was a sprawling thing But I guess where I really wanted to go with that project was into the arts and creativity because it's such an obvious It's not obvious But if you start to think about the topic of precognition and pick it seriously as I do and as most people and official culture don't yet it's an obvious merger of ideas I got a little and so I actually been working on this book since time loops for six years now And in fact some of it was written as much as six years ago But but I got derailed by the dreamtough Because so many people were emailing me after time loops about their dreams and people coming up to me after I would talk Like really one inside the dreams.
I realized what someone needs to like really tackle this precognition dream topic It's like a detour for a couple years and work on that dream book that I wrote But it was really great to get back to this one because this is the one that really excites me And I'll tell you this is actually just part one of two. There's a secret coming I just think it's such a rich and fascinating subject for a number of reasons because first of all we've all heard those stories of novels or movies predicting some event a lot of people heard of Morgan Robertson's novel that predicted the Titanic disaster and so on but when you start to delve into the lives of artists and writers this stuff happens all the time and it's not mainly with public disasters like 9-11 and the Titanic although there is plenty of that but it's mostly ways in which life imitates art that they will a writer will write about some very specific kind of Character or situation and then it plays out in their lives in a way. That's just done. Can't be it's beyond What feels could be just chance and these things happen all the time and what's really interesting is that Biographers and critics especially totally just Skip over this they just they don't pay it any mind They'll maybe make some kind of added comments it critically above our Coincidentally those words I've learned are the red flags.
Here's another data points from my research But anyway, the people have written about the obvious things like pretty good that Titanic or art works to predict a 9-11 So like that but when you take a biographical approach to the topic which I recommended in time loops and in my dream book It opens the field way wider and and it was like being a bull in the Chinese But there's so much material there to work with and it's I just think it's a fascinating subject So I'll just quickly say I build a case and it's a credit extreme case, but that's the way I work I like to take I like to push the most ridiculous my I like to push the most reductive like extreme version of a thesis and See how much it can explain see what pushback I get and so on But so I make the case that inspiration is Pre-cognition there's an equal sign there that inspiration one of Wells right comes right down to it is a function of the pre-cognitive Imagination and we can join a detail of what that means I guess our discussion But that's my thesis and so the book goes through a number of examples of artists that have seems to display this and mostly focuses on artists I already knew and liked before I started writing that I'm confident that this this is a very universal Can I jump in Michael? Yeah, I just want to say congratulations on writing another wonderful book Eric I'm still reading this book because I've been asked to review it which I'm very excited to do and and I hope I can still review it Even after this conversation, I don't see why not for this particular publication But the point is that I am reading it very carefully and what I love about this book It's actually came as an answer to a wish when I was writing reclaiming art I had a chapter in there called rifton prophecy where I felt this basic and a sketch out this idea this notion This theory of how the imperfections in a work of art can open up this anomalous imaginal space where suddenly things like Prophecy can occur and I had a few examples like you I reached for stuff I had on hand and the book wasn't primarily about that so I didn't dig very deep But I've always thought man somebody should write a book about all the pre cognitive events that are literally strewn across the history of art It's crazy and it's one of those things where I tried to write down the ones I'd remember when I encountered one and write it down But then I had 30 versions of that list and never actually properly worked on trying to ease incidents which are like you say just Countless it's par for the course in the work of an artist in fact I'll give you an example for my own life So I'm a filmmaker more of a writer now than a filmmaker But I still I guess I could still do it in a pinch But there was a time where I was making short films and writing feature films and really trying to make it as a narrative filmmaker And I made a short film and this was in a weird time in my life I was my early mid 20s and I was suffering from a kind of panic disorder I think at the time things weren't great in general and I was one of the symptoms was hypochondria So I always thought I was sick and that's very difficult period for me peaked with the making of my first Which was called hungry ghosts and then after that when I was doing the sound mix for that months later in a studio I had a kind of real episode of true panic and things got pretty bad And then what I did once I got through that is for the first time in a while I found my situation funny like I started to laugh at how Ridiculous I was behaving and I don't mean any judgment here It's just that was the strategy the time and I wrote this monologue that I call possible fever Which is basically a kind of hypochondriac monologue and I shot that with an actor named Carl Horton and Toronto fantastic actor And it did pretty well festivals and that sort of thing this film starts with a guy who's convinced he has cancer He keeps reaching back and touching some spot like just right by his shoulder plates where he's got a bump And and I remember sitting with the actor Kyle and pointing to the exact spot where the bump was and shot the film and then it develops and about four years later I was with my now wife then girlfriend and Just talking and she has a hand on my back and she's you have a bump right here and it was a sack with the same spot And I'm like you're joking and she's she hadn't even thought of my old movie at that point She's making a joke about possible fever No, check it out and I went and there was a lipoma growing right there. It was benign It was easily removed but it struck me as uncannily unlikely So this is all this to say that this sort of thing happens as a matter of course When you engage in creative work in the arts and so I think that this book was it's timely super needed I find that you are piling on compelling case after compelling case the great thing about a bold thesis like this is you have to make it very hard to Refuse and you do that wonderfully So I just want to start by saying that and I was also a fan of time loops But my metaphysical kind of assumptions or at least my hypothetical the monological model that I'm working on is different So I one thing that you find is trying to see how The the cases you're bringing forward could be accommodated by different metaphysical construals Maybe something other than the block universe But having read the disdain that you have for pedantic logicians and people who cite synchronicity I hope that this won't turn into a Two-narcumet of things. Yeah before we get to try to solve a kind of injunction issue here Because I want to call out that later in this conversation I want to plug back to our first two discussions Eric where we start to tease apart what it might look like you say in Earlier point to this book you make it as elsewhere you make the point that Studying this right now is more something that falls more or less in the domain of Jeffrey Kreichel super humanity is that the study of precognition depends so intensely on the symbolic interpretations and these weird like associative thinking and the connectome of The subjects in question that right now it falls squarely in a humanities Investigation but you also say later in this book more fully fledged science of precognition will need to emerge working in tandem with the super humanities And I think that you hint at there being ways that as computing gets more and more advanced and as we can start to quantify the way that my associatives Thinking works in my brain versus the way it works in yours that we might start to be able to notice patterns that we can sort more rigorously In a scientific sense, but before we get to that I wanted to actually pin this conversation to one of the reasons I was excited to get you involved JF was the filmmaking piece because you have a great section in this Eric on the notion of meanwhile and and how the way that we think about time and space in the modern world changed with the emergence of cinema and the idea of as JF you and Phil talked about the jump cuts and the stuff in weird studies The this the notion of the montage the notion of being able to render these kinds of symbolic associations in an inherently linear chronological medium But then to do to play with space and time and idea in our work and how the this this craft emerges in tandem with new ways of thinking about time in the sciences and then there's a deeper association maybe even still which is that you point to the the notion of rupture and discontinuity as a common feature of pre cognitive experiences that these are often experiences about some kind of Traumatic events even if the traumatic event is as trifling as I read something where someone had an idea that I thought was my idea We should that any creative person has had that weren't strum.
You're not gonna be pretty devastating. Yeah Yeah, so for a while I just want to talk about the cut with you and how we see the cut in our artistic craft We see the cut in the way that we chunked up time and space with quantitative techniques and sciences We see the cut in these sort of entropic life events where you point specifically to the use of dissociatives or of ecstatic ritual techniques, etc And yeah, I would love to just hand you that and see where you run with it Yeah, that's great It's actually a huge topic and there are people in film studies who have written about the cut and linking it to psychoanalytic thinking and like Conian Daffic cut obviously and psychoanalysis is hugely significant on the one hand. It's castration. It's the yes as he says the traumatic rupture and So I think this is I think a huge area and they get to know I don't know that literature really I know very sort of basic for the end of the carian stops, but I don't know the The carian film studies literature for instance very well But what felt interesting to me that I had never seen anybody right about was the linkage between the cut and media of the early mid-20th century And the metaphysics of the time and the linking to be the link between isenstein that isenstein quote and Carl Jung's definitions of synchronous Same thing they're talking about the same thing And I feel like that putting union metaphysics in a cultural context of Evolving media and our sort of mediated relationship of the world via chinna and modern picture I thought was something I've never seen a link people have made before I don't know that I know if I'm original there in pointing that out But it felt important rule to point that out historicize young a little bit Obviously you got a long standing kind of love hate relationship with young and I think the hate part comes through more strongly in my writing But there's also a love there and it's like grappling that that internal work is ongoing But I do think it's important in thinking about what I'm writing about the cognition and it's and how to approach it But how to think about it?
I think it's important to set aside these older models that people have or that they reach for because it's all that is available to them Which is the union idiom I think it's important to bring a different vocabulary to thinking about these things because I think it's just really more powerful and richer Ultimately, but have a people have a very strong fierce Attachment attachment. Yes. I agree with you about young. I do think that we need to rethink Yeah, I think it's actually young supposedly who said I'm glad I'm young and not a union Yeah, it's like Lacan was all about a return to Freud.
I'm not comparing myself to Lacan But I think that a return to young is a good idea because I think that if you read his actual writings on synchronicity very closely Especially the footnotes because in young everything that's important in footnotes for some bizarre reason you Come out of it with a very different sense of what he meant by synchronicity than the meaningful coincidence Which people usually use to hand wave the significance of this sort of event But he doesn't do all the work at the same time. So I totally know what you're saying about the cut though I think that this is really brilliant Michael for you to bring that up because it gets us to I think a central Element in this whole discussion because if you think about when does the cut to become a thing in western Let's say intellectual history. I was I've been trying to place it I would think that usually artists they usually beat philosophers to the point when it comes to detecting a new area of exploration I think that if you look at something like Shakespeare's Macbeth You can do much work with that looking at that play and looking at what it tells us about time and cutting cutting into time What the weird sisters are doing is cutting into time and with the cut a leap over a bunch of causal Events becomes possible so that suddenly Macbeth who couldn't imagine how he could become king It was like impossible politically speaking the series of things that would have had to happen for him to become king was a very Long list and he couldn't imagine but once the the weird sisters cut into the possible and declare that Macbeth will be king suddenly the causal Forces align themselves to make that happen so there's some thinking about the cut early on but then I think it was no Tiamont with a great decadent French poet who said something like I don't remember what he was qualifying But either art or poetry or something is the chance encounter of the sewing machine and the umbrella on the dissecting table Right so again There's this idea of the cut you take things that have a proper position and causal schema schemas So an umbrella when it's raining use a sewing machine at the second and then you put them together and you put them together a Causal you just let them land together and suddenly a new type of connection between objects becomes possible It's not causal and I think that's what Jung was intuiting with his concept of synchronicity It's a non-causal connection between things I think that's probably the discovery of that and its implementation or its manifestation through film editing is a huge Development of the last 200 years that really did change our sense of space and time one of the earliest books written about the philosophy of cinema That's really worth reading and Eric. I would recommend it if you haven't looked at it's a Jean Epstein's book on the intelligence of a machine Which was written I think in the 30s and it's a reflection on the film camera as a as a form of AI as a kind of a different form of Consciousness that enables us to develop a new conception of space and time and I think that you could put that alongside Jung's writings on synchronicity And alongside Eisenstein and you'll see how there is a ureca moment there where a lot of people are cluing in to this what I would say is a fifth form of causality I'm borrowing that from Joshua Raimi as opposed to a retro causality anyways can get into that later.
Maybe you've really interesting as you're talking I'm thinking that I guess I'm articulating something that that's been an intuition I haven't had words for but that the cut really is the wrong word We're trying to talk about it as a cut when it's really a leap. Yes It's really a fast it's fast forwarding Yeah, and then those causal linkages work back from that leap to build a causal story Yes, there and so maybe thinking about the cut as really a leap. Mm-hmm. I was gonna say where do you find the cut in philosophy?
I thought it'd be in Congress, but I was gonna say it's a regard to leap So I were on the same wavelength there for sure the security guard was the philosopher of leaps You could say you talk about Kant also Yeah, but I like the way you say the leap because what you're doing is you're actually I'll just interrupt it You son I wanna I don't really have anything particularly to say so I'll let you finish your point No, I know you're not fascinating and I don't know. Yeah, I don't know the philosophical versions of a idea Well, but yeah, I think this is an idea that could like you have okay could radiate in all kinds of directions The whole thing is that it's about skipping over what couldn't be skipped over before there was a time where I thought if I want to get From point name a point B I have to go through all the infinite increments that between those two and then I won't get anywhere like you know or the point is that at some point it becomes possible to think of reality as including rupture and difference as opposed to simply Saying that rupture and difference are purely epistemological Effects that are totally attributable to us like deep down everything's continuous But someone like the ginger those said difference is more fundamental than identity There's a kind of rupture at the very heart and this is very like onion to you a rupture at the heart of the real And so we have to think of reality as being composed of Discontinuous rupture and not just smooth flows, right? And so that's right you think yeah But to go what we were saying before thinking of it as a rupture as a discontinuity almost implies a flaw or making a mistake somehow Or we're traumatizing reality by doing this and even leave implies that like there's something we're passing over or jumping over skipping But I guess one of the implications of and I say this in my chapter on a chromally that one of the implications I think that is this really fascinating to me is could we imagine a psychology in which thinking is not this kind of assembly of New ideas in this kind of linear fashion, but it's simply fast-forwarding We're constantly fast-forwarding to the right answer and then Constructing a causal story to defend it or support it But the brain is essentially a fast-forwarder to answer and that gets back to the idea that I argued in time loops that the brain And was gonna turn out to be a not quantum computer But our hybrid quantum classical computer which has this capability of just fast-forwarding to the answer Specifically without choice Yeah, I like that intuition right that the concept of intuition is essentially an immediate spontaneous and direct kind of Cognizance so extending intuition as a kind of procession into time as you do into the has not yet been or ever into the future and Since that future already exists in a sense It's just a matter of being able to extend our sense of memory Which is quite bizarre and difficult to explain already extending it the other way and saying now you can remember the future And so then that would explain a lot of these spontaneous or seemingly spontaneous cuts or leaps when in fact what it is just retrieval from What my body has not yet experienced or something or my presence quality has not that makes sense is that a yeah exactly? so I want to do a little montage here of Short clips from this book actually because I think we've swirled right into the zone I want to linger in here in different parts here You say Eric it can hardly be an accident at the earliest philosophies of which we have written record grappled centrally with the dichotomy of motion and stasis And this is in your chapter on cave paintings and how the one of the things that has come up in recent years of study on Chauvet and Lisco and these other paintings is that Before a flickering flame they appear to show the animals in motion and you make a really interesting point in this that there is something of the why a stampede that there is a kind of like explosive quality to a heightened state of consciousness where you're at That would be the closest metaphor that people of that time had it's almost less about the animals per se and more about this sort of underlying foam of creation and creative activity that we once analogized through the stampede later you say again It may take real existing technology to provide the needed metaphors to help people understand their impossible experiences and it's funny because I want to link this to Statement you made earlier we say about the induction of dissociative states may also be liable to overlay information about the future under present experiences Almost like an augmented reality app.
This was my number one takeaway from my trial period with Google Glass 11 years ago And you say I think augmented reality in which additional information is superimposed on the cameras I view of the surrounding environment as a particularly at metaphor to understand how precognition is experienced during waking states If you go back and you read the evolution of surveillance one of the things that really stood out to me about Wearing a camera on my head was that you become aware of the fact that you are recording and in some sort of dialogue with the future version of yourself That is witnessing your own point of view through that camera perspective and I started having these kinds of sober dissociative experiences That were very similar to these other experiences I've had under the influence of psychedelics where I'm standing Behind myself and off to one side and this seems related to the way that you talk about the mathematics of close time like curves Where the ball can only ever knock itself into its own path But like the future you is unrecognizable to the present you because otherwise you couldn't like there is there's a sense in which Because we are looking at time from the four-dimensional landscape from a fifth dimensional perspective It's obvious that you having these experiences like these experiences have to be had in a way That do not allow you to change the outcome because you're witnessing a future that already is and so again I get back to what you were talking about with cave art as the beginning of recording and then I just want to point out that you mentioned this specifically about some gentlemen who fell in and thrown who were lost in a cave and Experienced an apparition of the recently deceased Pope John 23 who instead he mainly experienced the Pope's present as just out of view to his right side A common experience of explorers and mountain climbers in extreme survival situations known as the third man factor So again, I don't know exactly what it is I'm like circling here except that everything that you all just said about this resolving the paradox of rupture and a higher dimensional continuity or about permanence or Eternality and movement again shows up in this issue of recording and for you to say specifically Let's see that for you to attach this specifically to cave art I thought was hilarious because the last piece all done on this for now is that Several years ago when I got an Oculus Rift which is a funny product name all things considered We keep making the gouged out eyeball but I do it's damn you'll learn the event Here, yeah the Oculus Rift I told Nikki that I was gonna take it up onto a mountaintop and make art in Tilt brush and her response was Bears Bears motherfucker and so there's like a great where is it in here? You say you're talking about specifically about the footprints of a ten-year-old that might have brought a wolf along into the cave to Observe the art out of caution as much as friendship There could have been bears in there incubating and having their own fierce bear shaman visions I was just like yeah, what is going on here? Like what is it and I know that JF you said the same thing about the television replacing the campfire that we keep coming up with new ways of Exploring this same kind of truism Through the recreation of virtual spaces and then again Okay, the very last thing is that when you're talking about the weird sisters doing a quantum computation that jumps to the solution of Macbeth as the king Which is very similar to what Eric you and I have talked about the work of John John McFadden and quantum biology suggesting that life just solved itself Like solved its own problem that this was the first innovation as precognition in that regard that the X-nehalo is in physics language the emergence of concrete particles out of the virtual particle and so again, yeah What the hell is going on here? All this stuff that we're talking about has something to do really fundamentally with virtuality and yeah Cuz I have a response But this gets back to the thing that you just said before about what JF had said about we are culture finds ways of recreating the spirits versus the campfire and then the TV and as this gets back to the cut thing because both of these you know staring into a campfire is this flickering thing the And a TV is a flicker it's a flicker.
So forget editing is built of this constant fine grained You can call it cutting it's a constant very and that kind of static that temporal kind of static almost is so facilitative of Pre-cognition if somehow the imagination is projecting into those spaces and that's why it's you can get looking at a campfire and having a Vision of something that's gonna happen tomorrow or people looking at a TV screen the way they interpret what they're seeing on the TV screen that Maybe a function of their sort of pouring their pre-cognitive imagination into those micro cuts of the flicker. Yeah, that's a powerful idea I hadn't yeah, that's a cool. I was gonna say something that I don't want to go back I don't know how we should just stay on the cut but it's because you were saying you were we were talking about the cut versus the leap And maybe this is somewhere where maybe this is where the difference in our approaches to the stuff might show itself Is that I guess that if you were to read Macbeth from your point of view You'd say but which is or simply revealing to Macbeth what is going to happen necessarily since the future of Macbeth is already set in stone And that's literally the case because it's a play you can actually jump to the next act and see what's going to happen It's actually set in stone and he can't change it He's simply being informed and so when I'm staring into the fire and I get this kind of leap into the future Where the aesthetic qualities of the fire or the static on the TV at the end once the national anthem is played and suddenly I get this poltergeist like thing comes at me and it's something what you're arguing is that what's going on there? Is that the person is simply the consciousness or the brain is simply dilating in some sense enough for some of that future to come in right?
I'm reminded here of William Burrows's famous cut-up method and I haven't read your whole book So I have been reading them non-linearly so it's possible that you do talk about this in your book You don't not in this book No, I don't have a little bit of the sequel it's coming so William Burrows developed along with Brian Giesen They developed this cut-up technique of course They inherited that from some of the surrealists and data artists there before any earlier like symbolism I sort of think and what it was just like the most the simplest way just for your listeners Michael the simplest application of this technique was just to take a newspaper cut one page into four pieces and rearrange them and then read it as though it was meant to be that way and then seeing what happens and What happened according to Burrows is that he says when you cut into the present Which is beautifully symbolized by the image of cutting into a newspaper because a newspaper presented itself As a picture of the present right when we were in the 20th century you've ever you cut into the present the future leaks out Right so for Burrows the future is not predetermined It's just a teaming virtuality using Michael's term and this is a term I like because I'm a big fan of Jiddo So the virtual is like all these possible worlds and then as the flow of time moves into that zone certain possibilities actualize But that's not what you think is going on is it Eric? No, that's not what I think is going on But what you're articulating is the way most people see it in the most the way that most people like to see it because it retains that idea of Re will and the core larger sense that the future is not pure dain does not like a Calvinist predestination kind of thing I personally don't find the physics behind that possibility Compelling it goes along with the hue ever at many worlds interpretation of court in physics I work on a piece right now about time travel actually the through fictional version of that where you have the branching forks of history and all that It's a motif that comes out a lot of time travel stories But it's given birth to by the need to avoid grandfather paradoxes because it's okay You could have time travel, but we don't have to face these conundrums that these paradoxes seem to give us But when you drill down those paradoxes don't exist and can't exist and so it's really saving us from a hysterical confusion How about time to use these tropes and so I think effectively that kind of branching fork view of the future is kind of defense mechanism against confronting I guess the trauma of a single future that we can't know but there is a future that's Sending us information that we can't interpret it correctly partly because if we couldn't interpret it correctly We would create a different future that it would be a paradox mine So I can't force the reader to think a certain way But I like to force myself to think in that linear term It's neat how that creates new possibilities for not only explaining these phenomena But also for me I've said this a lot in other podcasts You have hardly said it on maybe in one of our earlier interviews But I think of the block universe and that kind of single history as a colon was then colon and Initially people hate it But no one just feels like I'm a prisoner or something like that But when you push through as a certain point you hit a breakthrough at least in my experience that is oh my god It's actually a blissful thing to realize rather than an imprisoning kind of thing and I've had this experience in my own In this end practice. I don't know what you call them I don't have a teacher who would certify them as a septoria or whatever But interestingly in this end literature a number of satori experiences are What we could call an experience of the block universe that kind of permanence that sense of permanence Returnalism around and contrary I think the popular idea of Zen is somehow being about spontaneity and freedom It's actually this blissful awareness that you are just sort of part of this machine and fulfilling a future dog exists it comes through and dies as suzuki's satori experience it comes through and some of the kind of classic colon writings and interestingly I was thinking about this a couple months ago the niches and enlightenment experience Oh, yeah, still maria. Yeah, julan.
Okay. It was he didn't have that model of the block universe Yeah, this is kriy Einstein kriy Minkowski. So he did actualize because we turn on my turtle. Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying It's return.
That's a pre Einsteinian way of saying no matter how you times you live your life or get the same thing It's not like there is this branching for ancient ideas stoicism. It's stoic metaphysics as well Yeah, so no, I can dig that and I can see how it would be Freeing but I think there's a kind of nightmarish quality to the garden of forking paths version of reality as well And I haven't been completely convinced that the many world's hypothesis is bunk the fact is that phenomenologically speaking We have no choice but to act as though the future were open we must proceed as though So what your model does is it inserts a rupture or a rift or a kind of discrepancy between the way the world is and according to you The world is both thinkable and knowable and the way the world is in terms of how we live our lives And so then the question is how do you reconcile? It's the old question that Einstein can never answer how do you reconcile the space time continuum as a model of the physical universe with the flow of time as the actual Stuff of real existence gets back to my love of Freud because Freud was he made these kind of necessary illusions You could call them central that's we cannot face the truth. We cannot face the reality So we have to encrust it with these kinds of illusions They're dialed up with our ego our ego is central to this our ego is as it's kind of organizing image or construct that makes our world consistent And in that process makes it linear and gives us this feeling of free will which as you say we need butch is Fundamentally an error.
That's why I love bringing it back to the sort of old school psychoanalytic thing right? You guys did me the service of actually getting us from point a to point B So thank you because the next thing I wanted to talk about was having Discussed cave art and virtuality at the beginning of your chapter Eric on trauma free will in the prophetic sublime falling from the sky You give us two quotes I'm gonna read those quotes real quick. Andre ktarkovsky's diary entry on of all days I don't know if you noticed this Eric February 3rd 1974 the day that Philip K. Dick had his valice Meltdown he says artistic creation is by definition a denial of death Therefore it is optimistic even in if in an ultimate sense the artist is tragic and then Cormac McCarthy in no country for old men Says you never know what worst luck your bad luck has saved you from which I think if you're gonna say this is the question right if precognition serves Some sort of evolutionary benefit there has to be a sense in which it is Selecting a real out of virtuals and so the in a way It's maybe moot because we can resolve these two perspectives by saying that the time loop constitutes a choice of some kind But that it's not out of ontologically equal sort of alternative realities that exist somewhere else in excessively but out of Virtualities that never come to form or never taken up into the the holistic gesture But I wanted to link this to the bigger point that your book is making stand a step back and ask about the role of the artist and JF like part of the reason I'm really glad that you're in on this call is because Reclaiming art you spend so much time on the symbol and everything that you're talking about here a moment ago is about the tragic nature of the artist and About what it is that we are avoiding and how it is that we come to develop symbolic communication and the Freudian psycho analytic piece of it I just want to read a short bit here the fourth dog game Which you've discussed in earlier books Eric the game of a child learning object permanence by throwing something off the edge of a a bed or disappearing behind a door to rediscover it and then that's how you develop the recording in your own mind and It is you say it is possible to see such play as the stem cell of art making some arbitrary objects stand for or represent something not present Symbolizing in this view arises from kind of necessity and then so I want to attach this.
Thank you to the point that you make about the emergence of the concept of the artist around 500 years ago and the concept of the shaman you suggest that these two groups seem to have emerged as an Early manifestation of an immunological response against the threatening supernormal dimensions of creativity that what passed for anthropology and that age was beginning to illuminate so like modernity in its Preoccupation with the enclosure of wilderness the conquest of nature through number through the totalization of symbolic systems Says and I think that this get back to that question of is precognition something that we can study scientifically or is it gonna remain ever elusive to Quantitative formalization that the artist and the shaman have both been moved Outside of society the artist on a pedestal and the shaman as a sort of anthropological curiosity in the trash stratum as it were and the difference that you make between them is that the artist is the one whose work is Framed completed whereas the shaman and this is where you get these is Brian when artists or a shaman right is a generative work is a work That's inherently participatory actually a work of art or is it something closer to what was going on in Chauvet where the goal was to actually invite people into a rupture and Have them like actually put their hand through the cave wall or like the video drum thing We're like our art exits the virtual and becomes the real and these are why these people have been moved to the edges of society because it's challenging The system that we in the modern world used to regulate Civilization and yeah, just a lot of thinking about the artist Basically being like a songbird in a cage, right? Okay, they're market actors We don't have to worry about the ontological shock that could be induced to following the symbols back to their origin And so yeah, this is for both of you like JF This is where this question about the relationship between art and artifice comes back in and my constant chafe about artists that Understandably do not want their work to be scraped to train AI systems because they have a distinct style But as soon as you are thinking that way then I think you're falling into the pit trap of this sort of incomplete or false or misleading idea of what an artist is historically before the modern idea of the artist which is to participate in these like Transpersonal orbits. I hope I'm making sense What what art can be what art is? neutered to be in this time how the unfinishedness a sort of an honest symbolic encounter is and then this sort of Earned specker denial of death thing and yeah, how ironically profundity of human creativity actually comes from this encounter with our own Paradox of being somehow both mortal and immortal Ticket wherever without will man.
That's what's going to sandwich. You just made So you caught a cat that sandwich. Did you want to start character? Okay?
No, go ahead Okay, so shaman in the artist I agree that there's a connection there the Essentially to me I'm just going to proceed from the naive realist point of view that that whether due to trauma or a simple naive We must embrace in order to live our lives Leaving aside the background reality and I'm totally with you on how you're building your model of the block universe Eric and everything That's great But in terms of like how what do we do with art? What does art do for us now in this world where the future is? Experiences not having happened and therefore open and the past is being fixed because it's happened already So to me it seems that what artists do in a clue and had a great turn for this He called them probes is that artists like shaman what they do is they go probing outside of the epistemic Feel that's been properly contoured and mapped out by a particular polity So we're living in the society. There's certain things that are plausible certain things are implausible certain things are acceptable certain things aren't acceptable But of course since we live in an infinite universe of infinite granularity The chances that our particular model of real is actually accurate over time the chances are a nil So we know that's not the case and yet even our when I say an epistemic model I mean that our thoughts are vocabulary our mental of our conceptual vocabulary is that that kind of that that overlay that we're using to map the World and so we can't even think our way out of it everything we can try to think your way out of an epistemic But you're just bringing those thoughts with you you're bringing it with you everywhere you go So what you need are people who can through intuition through leaps through the imagination through image as opposed to concept an image here Using the term broadly to include sonic images tactile images just to pure kind of aesthetic imaginal stuff are able to probe the outside and so that's a that's an essential function if you want to have a viable and sustainable Sort of society, so it's very important that there are people who test the boundaries and go looking beyond and proclaim to transcend certain categorical distinctions Which are thought to be essential natural cosmic and preordained by the rest of the people and it's also natural and essential that people resist these Individuals who do this just and you'll see this in the animal kingdom, right?
You'll have a male trying his best to mate with a female just making him run through a bunch of hoops and makes all kinds of jumps and build Little stage little dance that goes birds do in order to earn the right to the idea is the rejection is just automatic reflexive and essential So you have to reject that you have to associate the artist with mental illness, which is quite unfair I think in many cases, but the point is you have to do that in order to create the tension necessary for the bright stuff to come to the For and one of the problems I have with modern post-war society is the deployment of the aesthetic as It was always a factor in political control and economic control But the scale on which it's happened since Hiroshima with television and advertising and stuff and now with the Embroilments or the entanglement or the implicitly is the word I'm looking for the kind of complicity of the artist in the kind of cycles of production that perpetuate a Particular epistemic model instead of testing it what we have here is what I've been calling Artifice and all the more reason for artists to be able to go and explore those uncharted territories But it's getting harder and harder to find those for all kinds of reasons So that's what I would say and the goal of all this is of course All of this has to do is predicated on the idea that we don't know the future and our choices and decisions matter So we want to have works that can guide us and we know that's been happening For example, you look at science fiction and its influence on actual aerospace engineering is huge A lot of aerospace engineers were huge science fiction fans And so we're being exposed to these ideas and seeing how artists could take existing technology and kind of amplify or transform it into Forms that were not yet imaginable to the actual engineers that art actually helps us imagine and choose futures And so that might just be a purely phenomenal thing It might have nothing to do with the real reality if the future is already said it doesn't really matter But insofar as we have to get up in the morning do stuff I think that's a good way of approaching art and its usefulness to society I totally agree with that. Yeah, you have to look at up all I'm simply saying there's a second look at it Yes, what you're describing is totally right and yeah, I'm as you're talking I'm thinking of a lot musk he is creating this future that we all read out in high will high line Ray Bradbury He's like making it real, but he's inspired by so it's so we're saying fired by him. Yeah, so yeah raises these questions Yeah, but it's totally true. I love though.
Okay, so getting back to the shaman though Like what you're saying really crystallize something for me because I think there's this way in which we think We tend to think of the shaman as simply working within this other worldview of this culture You know this other belief system of this culture But what if no, they're always transgressive of that culture and always on the margins of the culture So the things that we associate with shalom shamans and their experiences and their practices are never part of the like mainstream worldview of the culture of their time Yeah, and I think that's something that I forget and that the people thinking about shamans forget and it's that's hugely Important and the reason all kinds of questions that certainly didn't go into this book but about the healing properties of that transgression at healing properties of going not whatever the frame it happens to be transgressing that frame What are the healing properties of that because that's their function in a sense? It's that's okay. I think it's huge also you can even say then what is the relationship between art and culture? I don't think art has anything to do with culture It's impossible to make sense of that fully because art always gets immediately always already Reintegrated into culture right but the artistic moment the moment of creation even though it's using materials the culture is produced It's always a little bit outside of culture just like dreams our dreams cultural products or natural products Are they the work of nature the work of culture?
They're both they use cultural motifs cultural forms they use language they use things that were Familiar with it you might dream of an airplane you might dream of Christmas time whatever the point is that but dreaming will happen no matter What and the real power the dreams pack isn't in the content of any particular dream But in what dreaming allows in terms of I don't know that if you adopt a kind of like a lot of you have dreams or dreams are revealing things that aren't yet Manifest the dreaming does that naturally it's not because of culture that it does that so you don't sound Thanks So that just as the shaman doesn't really belong to the traditional culture that we associate them with even though in many cases We primarily imagine a lot of prehistoric cultures by starting with shaman Oh, this is how the religions work and therefore and so but really the shaman is what they believe But the sham is always the one standing on the edge with one foot outside of that culture And that would be one way of explaining the universalism of shamanism across all different cultures Yes, if it's simply a structural function, it's gonna manifest in very much the same way in any particular group no matter what the culture is It's just it's a structural function. It's not a contingent Innovation that happens to have occurred in all these different cultures, right? That's about yeah That's wonderful. That's bad.
I never thought of it that way in terms of the shaman. That's really brilliant. Thanks for bringing that up. That's cool I don't know See what they think I'm technically Okay, then I'll take it as a I said good body after both Kingston's got a PhD's okay one more thing I want to talk about with the two of you because I think this is the most I Frankly there were some parts of this book that I Had something like the equivalent of the experience that you have when you realize you swallowed a 10 strip and here it comes or there's something sort of transcendent and ominous and Ineffable and threatening because you spend a good piece of this last book or rather the last big chunk of this book on Filicatics, Valus Synchronicity's the relationship to the work of Jacques Valle and Diana Pashulka The the notion that the UFO phenomenon Might be if not entirely explained by at least a good many of the things that are going on inside of ufological literature might actually be symptomatic of this pre cognitive cultural time binding that you're exploring here and you say future AI may be the realization of the Noosphere true non-human intelligence already communicating with experiences I have said elsewhere on this show at great length I've talked about some of my own pre cognitive experiences and my UFO experiences and actually the first conversation I ever had on a podcast with Eric Davis on expanding my and was about how the first UFO encounter had as an adult seemed to be testing me In the sense that it was both somehow me and not me in a way that I couldn't truly grok Which is characteristic of the kind of thing you're talking about But there's also quote on me back some saying that the universe is a machine for the production of gods You mentioned that Phil Dick said his downloads of information during the 2 3 74 experience Included a feminine AI voice speaking to him some of the most potent and bizarre Time loops that you explore in the history of science fiction include the Octavia E Butler Harlan Ellison James Cameron Terminator thing which I'll leave people to read your book to hear more about But yeah, and then obviously like the wheels of Ezekiel in the Bible This is something that like to the degree that we become closer in our technological capacity to understanding how these things might be instantiated in concrete Physical technologies Pusilka said as much on Danny Jones's show She said that what seems to be going on right now with the UAP discourse is that it's moving the horizon of conversation out of the divine and into the mechanical into a discussion of of Technolot specific technologies and I love that you make this connection between Vallis Valle Voll from the Star Trek episode that talks about this max Simon earlyx Star Trek teleplay the Apple and Then it occurs to me that to the extent that you're talking about flows in time that we're talking about Keep pointing out that again like this sort of pkd flavored symbols of the divine emerge in the trash stratum thing where it's like The high art that that guides culture comes out of noise Which is actually future information that you're saying that you're saying they have to be clothed in the symbols of the familiar But that it's we are moving down a thermodynamic gradient into a valley into a valley in high-dimensional landscape and I so I've been wanting to tell you to about a 17 year time loop that closed for me this year last month And I think that this is the right place to end this question this conversation about What exactly might be going on with these profound terrifying aschatological Experiences that people have been having for thousands of years that for whatever reason like JF you and Phil talked about in weird studies Investigations of the angelic and the UFO phenomenon that there's something we talked about this in the with Megan Phipps in 214 about the cyber nieces and the angelic machine I want to give actually two real quick anecdotes These both come from 2007 I talked about this with Michael Angelo on our conversation about Paisley and theology and precognition that I had this experience during an acid trip with my now wife where I encountered this thing I called the angel squid and There's like a one of the sentinels from the matrix.
There's like a glowing cybernetic Sefalapod type thing that seemed to be in each of the day of a divine form that symbolize our union And so after the trip that day after we'd come down I was like okay What the hell is that and I went online and I looked up angel squid on Google and it doesn't exist anymore And I can't find on web archive but there was an angel squid calm that somebody had made this chibi little this adorable goofy little like trashy Little angel squid cartoon, but it struck me as such a potent synchronicity And at the moment that I saw that iTunes shuffle came on to Bjork song modern things where she says all the modern things have always been there In a mountain waiting for us and it's like your breakdown of all of this I think about what was I actually seeing I was Interpreting as the divine an experience that I was having on a computer that was a synchronicity that was supercharged by the apparent randomness iTunes shuffle algorithm and Also had that paleontological quality of unearthing something that had been embedded in a mineral substrate later that year I had a dream upon moving to Boulder, Colorado that the whole town was open in one giant party and Everyone had thrown their homes open and everyone's door was open and everyone was out in the streets celebrating and then suddenly It's something turned and it became very ominous and there were cops everywhere channeling the flow of people down the major throwfares of the city And I stopped and I talked to a police officer I said what is going on? She said there was an explosion downtown so check your entropy box then I was like I've got to get downtown I've got to get to the center of this and Right at that moment when I was about to break the police line I looked up and everyone in this enormous crowd of people looked up and the sky had turned from just a normal night sky into a giant digital clock face And on the clock face it said 833 and I woke up from that and I was like what the hell like it had this Eschatological flavor to it It had this sense that this was a conversation about alien contact or a rapture a moment And I went and I looked up the numerology for 833 and it means eight being the number of fate and 33 being a number of angels or a Chrystic number and so for years I wrote songs about this I was like what is this what was this I had a number of other pre cognitive dreams that came true And I was like just waiting for the ships to land and put a giant clock in the sky This year I went with my family because my daughter they throw this thing called Zozobra here in town Which is this giant effigy burn that's been going on now for a hundred years this year And they were basically hyping it up in my daughter's school to the degree that she was weeping because I said we weren't gonna Go so she strong-armed us into going downtown to this enormous thing that used to be genuinely Dionysian and has become a weird corporate state branded affair and Everyone's doors are open downtown. There's house parties everywhere But the whole thing is that Zozobra is the embodiment of gloom and you're burning all of the bad feelings that have accumulated over the last year And it's this giant puppet that's like a monstrous apparition of negativity and it's actually a gross thing to get down there because you have to go through security checkpoints and there's cops everywhere and I've been to these a couple years in the past and I was like yeah, it's I don't really like going through security I don't like being surrounded by cops. Okay, whatever and then we're hanging out waiting in this enormous crowd 65,000 people For the pageantry to begin and they launch a drone fleet up into the sky with a clock Counting down until the show begins and there it is in the sky 833 I was like son of a bitch because you start this chapter chapter 11 on Valets with a quote from Jacques filet when this irreversible learning is achieved UFO phenomenon may go away entirely or it may Assume some suitable representation on a human scale the angels may land downtown Then the last thing I would say about this is I was like yeah, the funny thing about this was that it was so disappointing I was like this is what I was waiting for in years for thank you And then of course you can't talk about this without telling your own story I'll leave it to you to whether or not you want to go into this in more detail But I just think it's funny that your own UFO investigations began with you writing the satire about how a UFO turned out to be a flying blender And then you're at Asselin and UFO historian Greg Bishop gives a PowerPoint presentation on the surreality of UFO encounters and concludes with the observation They may manifest as virtually anything including a flying blender.
What's a drone a flying Right I was like is this what terrace me kind of meant by immunizing the eschatolines is this just like the point is to make it Duh boring and again That's like to that point of the high form and the low form and they're being a trend from the sort of shamanic space into the mundane at the center of the clock Work of society. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to rant about how disappointing precognition can be and how the UFO always That's reminding me of Vildic's best pre-coggin experience I don't think I talked about in this book I talked about it in the in time loops But his like has this pre-coggin of this dream that he finds this book is blue book is it like a specific dimensions? And it's has a very particular appearance blue book contains all of somehow Something about blooming grove or budding grove or my dad's the title and it has a book that contains all the answers I mean we all have those dreams right we find that this thing that oh my god It contains everything you wake up is a dream kind of wishy if how this book he scours his personal library is a house for books everywhere And he binds the book and it's in the shadow of budding grove and it's a biography of Warren Harding From some like book club years ago. It's like the most boring book I have the exact same I had the same thing happen I wrote a screenplay in which it's a long story But there's a book in the screenplay that these children were reading called the Heart of the Forest and one day I was just having to find in my own house My wife had found a box of books and I'm just emptying in there's a heart of the forest and it was like a red book just like in my screenplay And I open it was like the lamest most boring book But who knows the problem is though They say this is why that even if it's time loops right even if for example the 833 thing you saw in your dream was simply this moment This random ass moment with your with your daughter against your will and this place run by cops looking at this guy This guy is just the drones and 833 is just one of the sister counting down But to me this is why I think we need a fifth beyond the four cause of Aristotle we need a fifth We need there's a resonance there What do you do with that once I when I started doing weird studies Phil and I were talking a lot about magic feel for it And I am who do the podcast together?
Talking a lot about magic and I hadn't done any magic since my 20s I had some pretty bad experiences doing chaos magic when I was young or at least some blowback or bounce back when things start to go The other way so I stopped doing that right stuff. I'm still interested in it, but I decided okay We're talking about all this. I'm gonna try a quick sigil working So I do a sigil and of course I ask for a large sum of money So I might make a sigil out of the phrase I receive a large sum of money and the next day I've actually put this check with the identity identifiers blurred out online so people could see I'm not joking the next day I get a check in the mail and it's from the property management company that takes care of where I live and I open it and I see this check and it's the check is for eighteen dollars and thirty seven cents But on the line where you write the amount they've written in large like PT monofon super big the sum It's written in huge letters and then then the amount the sub large sum and it happened the next day So then the whole conversation we're having was like okay, so assuming this is a hit assuming this worked Well, what did I do that did I retro-causily? force an accountant to write me a check two days in the past like he was doing something else I was like a Compulsion to write me a random check it was like some kind of return on my investment on the first month of rent or whatever Or is it that I was simply somehow inspired as you say to ask for that just knowing on some level that tomorrow I'm gonna get a check with this absurdly large Lee written sum on it anyways So it's but at the same time then you have to think about what are the symbolic affordances of this beyond the one-to-one Semiotic message that I'm hoping this thing will give me what does it imply?
Why 1837 turns out the 1837 was the year Wagner got arrested? I remember checking that out and then that took me down and you can do things with these things even if they're seemingly meaningless You can create with them. You can work with them. You can explore them I think that spirit of exploration and creative engagement is very much obviously present both in what you're saying in your book But also in how you made this book like it's an amazing feat to have written this book It's a wonderful book and it to me it just inspires What it does more than it's true that there and I really like this aspect of your work Eric is that you really know how to Make your reader feel like the dreadfulness of mystery right the kind of I don't think the dark side But the sublime and it's most actually sublime meaning But what I feel the most when I'm reading your work is just this sense of wow How crazy could it all be like how if we just allow ourselves to notice the things that we choose to conveniently omit how weird is reality?
Get and it gets really weird and yet it remains thinkable It's it invites and rewards creative engagements And I think that we could maybe that attitude applying to synchronicities even if they turn out to simply be remembered incidents in the future can still generate a wonder for us and engagement and create creative action perhaps I don't know Yeah, I like that's I love that. That's beautiful Yeah, it reminds us the we're the ones making the meaning and we can make the meaning if we choose to yeah Yeah, can I just add that 833 as a piece of music emerged as the coda to a song called you don't have to move Within which the chorus is a line that was given to me by what who knows the UFOs that I saw on the lake the last time I saw them in 2007 where they said to me specifically and this gets back to your piece about science and where science fits and all of this They said angels appear when you stop trying to prove them Mm-hmm and like there's that it like that piece was I find actually I really Drive with your notion of the time loop is a co-op on here because it really is and I know that you've said this elsewhere Like you push this really assertive Proposition but you even say in this book you like to have it come down on one side of the fence of the other is to break the co-op It's like to break what it's actually capable of doing for you like getting outside of a conceptual framework Like somehow we have to reconcile the fact that if we step outside and we look at everything That there is no free will with the fact that we can't actually do that like all we can do is approximate that and conjecture into that space and see I've been notion that like you're saying JF that there is there might be a sort of left hemisphere tendency to Make it just or merely whatever it seems to be after the fact But that is the retrospective gesture of sense making that is only contributing half of This piece and the other half is that sort of prophetic mystery piece. Well said. Yeah.
Yeah, I think so Yeah, so Eric take oh I can say take a sound. No go ahead. Actually, so this is not usually I do these podcast downstairs in my Library, but I wanted to be more at ease and sitting down But we haven't in front of the Ezekiel the last in the last in which I guess let's try and to get down off the wall here But yeah, this is a piece of found art that that I obtained in my time as a an editor for a magazine called Bible review And someone had since I didn't the detailed drawing of Ezekiel's this all these are passages from Ezekiel diagram to UFO and I have no idea created this it was unsolicited submission that really was in the reject pile But I do talk about this and to your point about technology versus organic Things the shaman is Ezekiel called it a living creature even though we would we think of the wheels within wheels that says right here Somewhere so yeah, the living creature right down there. This has been a very delightful and brief thought provoking Yeah, so thank you Michael for or bringing Jeff and I together because this has been very cool.
I hope they'll be more opportunities to discuss Yeah, I would love that. I would love that. Maybe just yeah surface. Oh, yeah I was gonna say you if you do much more than scratch the surface than you're engaged in Cartesian vivisection kids Yeah, you don't want to do that.
That's that's the thing. Okay, is it alive? Is it a machine? It's actually more interesting that we can rotate the object.
Yeah. Yeah, thank you so much guys This is yeah blast and Jeff. I'm really looking forward to your review of this book. I'm sure you do Yes, come over with strange.
I'm singing as an opportunity to it'll be like an essay review So we can talk about it afterwards Eric and see what you thought. I can't wait. Yeah, awesome. Thanks again, Michael Thanks again for listening or watching everyone wherever you are If you enjoyed this episode definitely go back into the show notes check out all the wonderful conversations I've had with Eric and JF on Jeff's book reclaiming art in the age of artifice on Eric's earlier books time loops and pre-cognitive dream work and Stay tuned for the final episode of future fossils before the rebrand in which I share my presentation from Stephen Reed course on technological Metamodernism on myth and magic in the age of Trans-rational science and technology It'll be a great way to ring out this show before we dive into episodes with English scholar Richard Doyle Microsoft responsible AI expert Benjamin Olson and many many other amazing people Howard Ryan Gold author of NetSmart Just a ridiculous list that you can find again in the show notes and finally How to live in the future my first book of collected writings essays and science fiction shorts is on its way from Revolor press and delighted that I finally get to post this and if all goes according to schedule that book will be available So we're pre-over before the holidays in the meantime Michael Garfield at sub stack calm patreon.com slash Michael Garfield or every dot org slash humans on the loop if you want to make a Tax deductible contribution to my independent research and media production.
Thank you so much. Talk to you sir I Clear you don't have to move Challenging If there's one thing I know That angels appear when you're not trying to prove them Clear you don't have to move