Episode Details
Back to EpisodesThe Meaning of Meaning | Transcendent Naturalism #7
Description
In Episode 7 of TN, John and Gregg welcome Brendan Graham Dempsey. Brendan is a writer, theologian, and theorist whose work focuses on the meaning crisis and the nature of spirituality in metamodernity. He is also the host of the Metamodern Spirituality podcast, and he runs the Skymeadow Retreat, which has hosted several metamodern spirituality events. In this episode, Brendan shares about his recent work, which he wrote about in Emergentism, and from his in-progress work on the meaning of meaning. He shows how his work, UTOK, and Bobby Azarian's unified theory of reality can provide a framework to delineate the history and development of cultural meaning-making systems (i.e., large-scale systems of justification). This episode is full of powerful convergences between Brendan's vision and the worldview for bridging science and spirituality that is emerging in TN.
Resources:
Claude E. Shannon: Founder of Information Theory - Graham P. Collins
Publications:
A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology - Robert B. Brandom
The information theory of individuality - David Krakauer
Semantic information, autonomous agency and non-equilibrium statistical physics - Artemy Kolchinsky and David H. Wolpert
Videos:
The Reality of Meaning: Knowledge, Value, and Complexity | Consilience Conference '23
Books:
The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity - Bobby Azarian
Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence - Alicia Juarrero
Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature - Eric J. Chaisson
Quotes:
"Transcendent naturalism is trying to articulate a new worldview that holds science and spirituality, [and] orients us towards a frame of understanding for the 21st century that can enable a collective orientation toward wisdom." - Gregg Henriques
"Meaning equals information relevant to enhancing viability of an entity in context, and meaning is inherently transjective. It's not in the subject, it's not in the object, it's in the relationship between the two." - Brendan Graham Dempsey
"Earth burns like a quasar of complexification in the night sky. So if our measure is mass, then yes, but if our measure is complexification, especially an ontic epistemic conformity that affords awareness, experience, potentiality, growth, oriented towards a potential future, et ce