The Romance of Reality

“well when i got the request and i read the the title and the subject of your book i was immediately hooked i was like dude i gotta get this guy in quickly the romance of reality how the universe organizes itself to create life consciousness and cosmic complexity”

“like how long did you theorize about this like what what led you to write a book about this”

“and i argue in the book that single-celled organisms probably are not conscious”

“yeah so what i argue in the book is that basically to have a self to have an observer or an eye some sort of witness to this experience it's not good enough to just store some sort of model of the world”

“and this book takes that statement very seriously it says it's not just poetry literally the universe is coming to life not in this pan psychic view that you know kind of says the universe is already conscious i don't think that's as interesting”

“um so yeah it sounds like it when i say that there are all these different options as to why there could be this fine-tuning um but while the story i'm telling in the book is purely mechanistic so you can describe this process which i think is very spiritual and psychedelic it's um also something that you know you”

“so there is a trajectory that the book argues does argues is inevitable”

“because so one thing i talk about in the book is complexity is kind of a function of a couple of things for system to be like optimally complex it has to have a lot of parts and those parts have to be connected”

“so one thing that i talk about in the book is how basically we can look at evolutionary principles because evolution is really optimizing systems to be as robust and energy efficient and stable as possible we can look at these systems we can look at how brains work and we can try to model society after those principles”

“so that's why i call the book the romance of reality there's this intrinsic mystery”

“and and this this theory that you know i describe in the book is definitely not saying there's anything like that it's actually very important that we understand that like for this global super organism that's emerging that is human civilization you need diversity”

“when you write a book like this how do you know when you're done this seems like i got a good ques i got a good answer for that”