171 - Eric Wargo on Precognitive Dreamwork and The Philosophy of Time Travel

FUTURE FOSSILS

This week we welcome back anthropologist and science writer Eric Wargo, for a conversation about his book Precognitive Dreamwork and The Long Self — as well as: how tautology (not paradox) rules a time travel universe, what it means to become a time-faring species, the future of precognitive technologies, the concern of a quantum computing financial singularity, why lying to yourself about your own future-sight might be of evolutionary benefit, why retrocausalists don’t believe in randomness, how culture is a tesseract and dreams are future fossils, the controversy of divinatory astrology, and how pre-shocks of future traumas explain some of the more puzzling facts of history.

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• Thanks to Naomi Most for helping edit the first half of this episode! It isn’t easy work.

If you like thinking about mind-expanding future technologies, I recommend you check out David Kelley’s WeFunder for a new human-AI symbiosis governance system that seems like it could shake things up in a good way. If you know people who like to fund tech projects, this one seems worth checking out. (David’s Transhumanity.net is a supporter of the show.)

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✨ Discussed:

• Listening

FF 117 with Eric Wargo

FF 124 with Norman “Dr. Blue” Katz

FF 150 with Sean Esbjörn-Hargens

FF 156 with Stuart Davis

Complexity Episode 9 with Mirta Galesic

• Reading

NPR - Paradox-Free Time Travel Is Theoretically Possible, Researchers Say

Nautilus - This Tenet Shows Time Travel May Be Possible

Johnjoe McFadden - Quantum Evolution

Jonathan Zap - Crossing The Event Horizon

Jacques Vallee - The Invisible College

Ted Chiang - Stories of your Life and Others

Ted Chiang - Exhalation

Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five

Timothy Morton - Hyperobjects

Russell Targ & Jean Houston - Limitless Mind

Jessica Flack - “Coarse-Graining as a Downward Causation Mechanism”

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