E146| UAP and Disclosure for Experiencers and Skeptics | Michael Garfield in dialogue with Tim Adalin

Evolutionary biologist, complexity thinker and UAP experiencer Michael Garfield joins Tim Adalin for a dialogue on UFOs, entity encounters, and the strange territory where consciousness studies, evolutionary biology, complex systems, the ontologically shocking, information theory and the imaginal meet. Can we engage the strange without becoming impotent, in a way that actually matters for how we live, belong, and make sense together?

• Shownotes

  The following shownotes are AI generated to give a rough sense of topics covered and to aid with search discovery.

  Threads Explored

  • The UFO encounter as a developmental crucible — structurally akin to major evolutionary transitions (multicellularity, the emergence of syntactic language) where an information-scaling crisis is met with a new encoding of complexity

  • Ontological pluralism: different structures of reality co-enacted by different structures of selfhood

  • The three (overlapping, simultaneously-true) frames — "we're doing it to each other" (psyop), "we're doing it to ourselves" (collective projection), and the genuinely external/extra-dimensional other

  • Noise as future information; the limits of prediction; whether there is such a thing as true randomness

  • The economy, the brain, and the biosphere as nested living systems all metabolising the same information surge

  • Higher-dimensional representation as more adaptive — and possibly more real

  • The dissolution of the spirit/matter and self/other distinctions of modernity

  • Disclosure as grassroots and family-scale rather than institutional

  • Staying open to the weird without ceding agency to the big other — and without falling into impotence

  Keywords

  UAP, consciousness, disclosure, higher dimensions, philosophy of science, psychedelics, metaphysics, evolution, reality, interdimensional communication UFO, consciousness, extraterrestrial, disclosure, non-human intelligence, philosophy, higher dimensions, contact, evolution, AI

  Names, Works & References

  Listed roughly in order of appearance.

  • Paul Tillich — "ontological shock" (1973)

  • Ken Wilber — integral theory; meta-perspectival calculus

  • Sean Esbjörn-Hargens — integral philosophy; launched the first PhD program in UFO studies (CIIS, San Diego)

  • The Buddhist tetralemma

  • Terence McKenna (and Ken Adams)

  • Carl Jung — psychoid phenomena; the UFO as archetype in times of strife

  • Terry Patten — Integral Institute

  • Diana Reed Slattery — Xenolinguistics

  • Michelle Girvan — noise injection in machine learning (Santa Fe Institute) [name to verify]

  • Leonhard/Reinhard Pagel — Information is Energy [name to verify]

  • Eric Wargo — precognition; retrocausal information

  • Andrew Gallimore — DMT neuroscience; representational reach

  • Erik Davis — High Weirdness (MIT Press) — not the UFO researcher Eric Davis

  • Richard Doyle — Darwin's Pharmacy; the "ecodelic"

  • Matthew David Segall

  • Alison Gopnik — the explore/exploit tension

  • Andrew P. Smith — The Dimensions of Experience (2008)

  • Donald Hoffman — evolutionary constraints on perception

  • William Irwin Thompson — Coming Into Being; on Zecharia Sitchin and "misplaced concreteness"

  • Jeremy Narby — The Cosmic Serpent

  • Danny Sheehan — New Paradigm Institute; attorney for John Mack

  • John Mack — Harvard psychologist

  • Jacques Vallée

  • Diana Pasulka — religious scholar

  • Edwin Abbott — Flatland

  • Michael Phillip — podcast host; Proclus & Iamblichus

  • Deep Prasad — quantum computing researcher (Vancouver)

  • Teilhard de Chardin & Vladimir Vernadsky — the noosphere

  • Whitley Streber

  • Robert Hastings — UFOs & nuclear facilities

  • Chris Bledsoe — the orbs

  • Beatrice Villaroel — astrophysicist; transient luminous objects on pre-satellite plates

  • Darren Lipnicki — dreams & geomagnetic activity over Perth

  • Stuart Davis — Aliens and Artists

  • Jake Barber — crash retrieval account; "emotion-projection weapons"

  • C. Thi Nguyen (University of Utah) — games, scoring systems & value capture

  • Pooja Olhaver — political economy of attention & funding

  • Michael Levin — bioelectricity; "cognitive glue"

  • Weird Studies podcast

  • Robert Anton Wilson — "reality tunnel"

  • Muse — "when the Zetas fill the skies…"

  • Discordian lore — Malaclypse the Younger / the Elder

  Chapters

  0:00 Intro

  2:26 Meeting the strange where you are: evolutionary biology & the UFO

  4:52 Telos, self-organisation & ontological shock

  8:23 Integral philosophy & the Buddhist tetralemma

  22:11 Has it become sayable? Psychedelics, channeling & attentional capitalism

  26:47 Three frames: psyop, projection & the external other

  38:23 The economy in ontological shock & noise in machine learning

  40:52 Noise, precognition & retrocausal information

  43:15 Metabolic ontology & the ecodelic

  45:42 A psychedelic the whole civilisation is taking at once

  49:54 Decoding animal communication & the interiority of plants

  52:00 The self as the strangest alien

  53:16 Kant, the noumenon & the limits of perception

  55:42 Is there a "there" to break through to?

  1:00:27 Dreaming, the imaginal & communication across time

  1:04:40 A hermeneutics of imagination (William Irwin Thompson)

  1:08:41 Danny Sheehan & a new faculty of perception

  1:12:25 Flatland & higher-dimensional reality

  1:24:42 Jacques Vallée's last word on disclosure

  1:38:01 The stakes: The Big Others

  1:44:03 "You can't do anything with it": impotence & relevance

  1:57:30 Becoming planetary & emotion-projection weapons

  1:59:59 Paranoid vs metanoid

  2:07:16 Games, value capture & why consensus reality isn't enough

  2:11:18 Closing Stories: Contact experiences

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• Michael Garfield

  Michael Garfield is a writer, artist, and award-winning futurist committed to fostering vital conversations on human-technology evolution and emerging planetary culture.

  Trained in evolutionary biology and reconstructive postmodern philosophy, his career has carved a singular path through paleontological fieldwork with "dinosaur heretic" Robert Bakker, complex systems science communication at The Santa Fe Institute, innovation research at Mozilla, community management at The Long Now Foundation, and twelve years of performing and speaking on the international festival circuit. The founder and host of the Future Fossils, Humans On The Loop, and (formerly) Complexity podcasts, he has also produced over a hundred hours of original music, illustrated more than four hundred scientific papers, and written for dozens of publications including Aeon Magazine, Big Think, H+ Magazine, and Reality Sandwich. He is also a faculty member at Weirdosphere and the Communications Director for The AI Capabilities & Alignment Consensus Project.

  Follow Michael’s work on Substack at:

  https://michaelgarfield.substack.com/

  And find a resource to locate the rest of his work here:

  https://linktr.ee/michaelgarfield

  Additional resources mentioned by Michael in this episode:

  Hear more of Michael's experiences on the ⁨@dannyjones⁩ podcast @ https://youtu.be/H0kzIsmZpqs

  https://www.realitystudies.co/p/michael-garfield-ai-deepfakes-rewilding-reality

  https://michaelgarfield.substack.com/t/the-phenomenon

  Miguel Fuentes on epistemic randomness

  https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/16/8/4489

  Some related writing from Michael: https://michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/noisy

• Tim Adalin

  Tim is the founder of Voicecraft and a philosopher with a focus on the relation between participation and transformation. You can connect with Tim individually @ https://www.timadalin.xyz

  On Substack @ https://substack.com/@timadalin

  On Instagram @ https://www.instagram.com/tim_adalin/

  And on LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-adalin/

• About Voicecraft

  Voicecraft conversations deepen how the world is known across themes of psyche, culture and nature.

  The Voicecraft Project is comprised of a media & events platform, academy, and participatory membership network.

• Intro Music - 'The Big Break' by Cantrips

  Listen on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/embed/Qaj-stBL4W0

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