Moving from Naive to Authentic Progress: A Vision for Betterment
The Great Simplification #126 with Daniel Schmachtenberger
Today, I welcome back Daniel Schmachtenberger to unpack a new paper, which he co-authored, entitled Development in Progress, an analysis on the history of progress and the consequences of ‘advancement’.
Current mainstream narratives sell the story that progress is synonymous with betterment, and that the world becomes better for everyone as GDP and economies continue to grow. Yet, this is an incomplete portrayal that leaves out the dark sides of advancement. What are the implications when only the victors of history write the narratives of progress and define societal values? What are the value systems embedded in our institutions and policies, and how do they reinforce the need for ongoing growth at the expense of the natural world and human well-being? Finally, how do we change these dynamics to form a new, holistic definition of progress that accounts for the connectedness of our planet to the health of our minds, bodies, and communities?
In case you missed it…
Last week, I was joined by educator and indigenous researcher Vanessa Andreotti to discuss what she calls “hospicing modernity” in order to move beyond the world we’ve come to know and the failed promises that “modernity” has made to our current culture. Whether you refer to it as the metacrisis, the polycrisis, or - in Nate’s terms - the human predicament, Vanessa brings a unique framing rooted in indigenous knowledge and relationality to aid in understanding, grieving, and building emotional resilience within this space. What does it mean to live and work within systems that are designed to fail, embedded in an aimless culture?
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There are between 150-200 books behind Daniel.
I was naturally intrigued by some of the tiles.
So here's the list of 100 books I've been able to discern 👇
tldr; These titles reflect themes of science, philosophy, ethics, consciousness, and evolutionary biology among many other topics.
1. Egyptology - Emily Sands
2. Consciousness - Susan Blackmore
3. Spaces - John Harte
4. What If - Randall Munroe
5. The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology - Robin Dunbar
6. Cosmology - Sean Carroll
7. The Ancestor's Tale - Richard Dawkins
8. Theatre of the Mind - Daniel J. Siegel
9. The Blank Slate - Steven Pinker
10. The Big Picture - Sean Carroll
11. Why Evolution Is True - Jerry Coyne
12. Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond
13. The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
14. The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
15. Science and Religion - Alister McGrath
16. The Blind Watchmaker - Richard Dawkins
17. Life Ascending - Nick Lane
18. The Greatest Show on Earth - Richard Dawkins
19. The Logic of Science - Peter Godfrey-Smith
20. Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Daniel Dennett
21. The Fabric of the Cosmos - Brian Greene
22. A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking
23. The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
24. Thinking, Fast and Slow - Daniel Kahneman
25. The Demon-Haunted World - Carl Sagan
26. The Moral Landscape - Sam Harris
27. Free Will - Sam Harris
28. The End of Faith - Sam Harris
29. Rationality: From AI to Zombies - Eliezer Yudkowsky
30. How the Mind Works - Steven Pinker
31. The Better Angels of Our Nature - Steven Pinker
32. Gödel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter
33. The Elegant Universe - Brian Greene
34. The Drunkard's Walk - Leonard Mlodinow
35. The Information - James Gleick
36. Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate - Manjit Kumar
37. Six Easy Pieces - Richard Feynman
38. The Varieties of Religious Experience - William James
39. The Meme Machine - Susan Blackmore
40. The Extended Phenotype - Richard Dawkins
41. The Language Instinct - Steven Pinker
42. Collapse - Jared Diamond
43. The Stuff of Thought - Steven Pinker
44. The Happiness Hypothesis - Jonathan Haidt
45. The Righteous Mind - Jonathan Haidt
46. Moral Tribes - Joshua Greene
47. The Ethical Brain - Michael S. Gazzaniga
48. Superintelligence - Nick Bostrom
49. Life 3.0 - Max Tegmark
50. Our Mathematical Universe - Max Tegmark
51. From Eternity to Here - Sean Carroll
52. The Grand Design - Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
53. The Hidden Reality - Brian Greene
54. The Conscious Mind - David Chalmers
55. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking - Daniel Dennett
56. The Expanding Circle - Peter Singer
57. Animal Liberation - Peter Singer
58. The Quest for Consciousness - Christof Koch
59. The Emperor's New Mind - Roger Penrose
60. Good and Real - Gary L. Drescher
61. The Meaning of It All - Richard Feynman
62. The Character of Physical Law - Richard Feynman
63. Why Does the World Exist? - Jim Holt
64. Something Deeply Hidden - Sean Carroll
65. Complexity: A Guided Tour - Melanie Mitchell
66. The Vital Question - Nick Lane
67. The Rational Optimist - Matt Ridley
68. Why Buddhism Is True - Robert Wright
69. Waking Up - Sam Harris
70. The Moral Animal - Robert Wright
71. The Red Queen - Matt Ridley
72. Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
73. Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari
74. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century - Yuval Noah Harari
75. The Beginning of Infinity - David Deutsch
76. How to Create a Mind - Ray Kurzweil
77. The Magic of Reality - Richard Dawkins
78. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn
79. The Nature of Space and Time - Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose
80. Enlightenment Now - Steven Pinker
81. Thinking in Systems - Donella H. Meadows
82. The Feynman Lectures on Physics - Richard Feynman
83. The Pleasure of Finding Things Out - Richard Feynman
84. The Demon in the Machine - Paul Davies
85. The Singularity Is Near - Ray Kurzweil
86. Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely
87. The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
88. Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
89. The Emerging Mind - Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
90. The Philosophy of Science - Samir Okasha
91. The Ego Tunnel - Thomas Metzinger
92. The User Illusion - Tor Nørretranders
93. Consciousness Explained - Daniel Dennett
94. The Accidental Universe - Alan Lightman
95. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst - Robert Sapolsky
96. The Metaphysical Club - Louis Menand
97. The Botany of Desire - Michael Pollan
98. I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas Hofstadter
99. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot
100. The Order of Time - Carlo Rovelli
A friend sent me the link to this podcast with a comment: "got 3.5 hours? worth listening to". The next day I wrote to her: "This was the most insightful podcast interview I have listened to in years! It's so dense in terms of ideas and eye-opening perspectives that I think I'll spend another 3.5 hours listening to it again. No kidding."