Today’s guest on The Psychology Podcast is Daniel Schmachtenberger. Daniel is a founding member of The Consilience Project, aimed at improving public sensemaking and dialogue.
The throughline of his interests has to do with ways of improving the health and development of individuals and society, with a virtuous relationship between the two as a goal.
Towards these ends, he’s had particular interest in the topics of catastrophic and existential risk, civilization and institutional decay and collapse as well as progress, collective action problems, social organization theories, and the relevant domains in philosophy and science.
Motivated by the belief that advancing collective intelligence and capacity is foundational to the integrity of any civilization, and necessary to address the unique risks we currently face given the intersection of globalization and exponential technology, he has spoken publicly on many of these topics, hoping to popularize and deepen important conversations and engage more people in working towards their solutions. Many of these can be found here.
This episode discusses a wide range of consciousness-raising issues, including the biology of dysfunction, the philosophy and scientific implications of creating systemic cultural and personal changes, the difference between nootropics and smart drugs, the future of cognitive assessments and the quantified self, the future of customized medical and wellness protocols, aspects of human nature that impede compassion and kindness, how changing the genome will change our entire conception of human nature, what we can do to predispose humans toward perspective taking, emotional resilience, and greater empathy, and how to make a scientifically commensurate ethics and existentialism. As you can see, this episode covers quite the gamut. Enjoy the show, and please join in the discussion below!
I’m calling bullshit on this podcast episode. There were so many neologisms, slogans, obfuscations, Shropra-isms and sham-scientific mumbo-jumbo per second of this episode, I thought I was stuck in a “Sounds True” podcast episode. Just ridiculous and unlistenable.
As an abstraction there is little doubt that such synthesis is quite laudable.
Hypothetically the ‘omni’ characteristic ,while used as defining and distinguishing
this evolutionary approach , suffers from a practical and quite fatal observation.
When he admits we are in a new epoch – the issue of ‘omni-all’ falls flat!
New approaches, perspectives means we do not yet know what they are ,so how can we possibly
synthesis them and consider them along with others. NOT too likely. BUT kudos for promoting the
need for synthesis inside and outside the box.
Roger, your entire comment is bullshit. All you’ve done is pull out a bunch of labels without actually explaining anything, or explaining why you disagree with something specific in the episode. Of course, it’s clear that you disagree with one or more claims Schmachtenberger talked about. But what you were disagreeing with specifically is anyone’s guess. All we’re essentially left with is just a ridiculous and meaningless comment.