Hello Folks and Funky Peeps!

On today’s podcast I sit down with philosopher Tam Hunt to talk about Panpsychism, a school of thought that tries to collect science and spirituality together and find a common ground. When Tam’s book “Eco, Ero, Eros” came past my desk I was intrigued for two reasons: he was taking the macro/micro ideas found in Buddhism and linking it to science in fascinating ways, and he had a few things to say about creativity…on a molecular level. I gave him a call and despite neither of us knowing each other, we set up an interview quickly. I hope you enjoy our chat and check out his book.

Topics discussed in this podcast:
The mind-body “problem” and panpsychism
Does everything “think” or have subjectivity? Where does “mind” emerge?
Alfred North Whitehead and the birth of panpsychism
How Tam went from being a Materialist to his current philosophy
How philosophy still affects us every day…even if you are a physicist
How science, spirituality and philosophy can all work together
Modern science’s current ideas about our place in the universe
Tam’s biography, Cornwall, UK, and time in the army and San Diego
What is post-modern environmentalism
“How New-Agey am I?”
The next book: How to craft a rational spirituality?
How religion evolves…but does not accept that it does
Tam’s spiritual journey out of atheism
His experiences with acid and marijuana
Burning Man and crowd-based consciousness experiment
The Institute of Noetic Sciences
Einstein’s assumption about the speed of light and the “block universe idea”
Free will…do we have it?
The philosophical concept of creativity, or the EROS

I also asked Tam to recommend his top ten favorite books:
1) Alan Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Really Are
2) Douglas R. Hofstadter and Dan Dennett, The Mind’s I
3) Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach
4) David Ray Griffin, Unsnarling the World-Knot
5) Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon
6) Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
7) Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
8) David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind
9) Ken Wilber, The Marriage of Sense and Soul
10) Tam Hunt, Eco, Ego, Eros
(I see what you did there, Tam!)

Mr. Hunt lives in Santa Barbara and runs Community Renewable Solutions LLC. Let me just cut and paste from his site: “Hunt is an attorney with substantial experience in California regulatory law and policy, specializing in renewable energy and energy efficiency policy. His regulatory work takes him to the California Public Utilities Commission, the California Energy Commission, the California Air Resources Board, and occasionally to Sacramento to watch sausage-making in action. He is also a Lecturer in climate change law and policy and renewable energy law and policy at UC Santa Barbara.”

So, yeah, he’s doing good work. He has a blog here. And a Twitter here.

By the way, subscribers to the podcast now receive my weekly newsletter “Friday Document Dump” (guess when it comes out!). Blatantly borrowing an idea from another podcaster, I provide 10 links to things I found interesting this week, from essays to artist portfolios, videos and more. Look for it!!

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