{"id":47,"date":"2026-06-23T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast\/2026-06-23-new-consciousnesses\/"},"modified":"2026-06-23T14:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T14:00:00","slug":"2026-06-23-new-consciousnesses","status":"publish","type":"podcast","link":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast\/2026-06-23-new-consciousnesses\/","title":{"rendered":"New Consciousnesses"},"content":{"rendered":"

Read the source essay \u2197<\/a><\/p>\n

PHRED: G’day and welcome back to \u2014 well, whatever we’re calling this show today. Episode fourteen, Maxine. Fourteen!<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: That is the number, yes.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: We’ve done philosophy, memoir, a song about Caracas, a haunted chapel recording, Harry’s ADHD self-diagnosis, his MIT years, the army, love and the soul at eighty-six \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: You’re breathless, Phred.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: I get excited. Today’s piece is from June 2005. Harry was sixty-five, he’d just read Steven Johnson’s book “Emergence”, and something in it cracked his head open like a macadamia under a rock. The post is called “New Consciousnesses.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: I remember “Emergence” \u2014 bottom-up intelligence, ant colonies, cities. The whole “no one’s in charge but everyone is” idea.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Right. And Harry takes that and runs with it. He starts by restating something he’s been thinking about for years \u2014 that complex systems like cities, nations, even a tree full of chattering birds, can be viewed as life forms. They have intelligence, memory, purpose, the ability to learn and adapt.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: The individual components don’t need to be smart. Ants are thick as planks. But the colony \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: The colony knows things. And here’s where Harry gets interesting. He says look, life and consciousness are emergent qualities of the universe. Energy becomes matter, matter becomes complex, complex becomes life, life becomes consciousness. But what comes after consciousness?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: He doesn’t know. He says so explicitly. “It seems likely that there are stages beyond this which either have yet to emerge, or which we cannot perceive.” That’s a lovely bit of humility from a man who usually has an opinion on everything.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: [SFX: CROWD_CHEER]<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Was that for humility?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Humility’s underrated, Maxine. But no \u2014 that was for Harry speculating on future stages of evolution while admitting he can’t see them. Takes guts to write about what you can’t see.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It does. But the real engine of this piece is the section he calls “today’s insight.” He remembers reading Carl Sagan \u2014 probably “Cosmos” \u2014 about the earliest life forms on Earth. They didn’t evolve. They just… persisted. Absorbed energy, replaced worn parts, kept going. No change.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Immortal and static.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Exactly. Then something changed. Some organisms started dying. They created offspring and then they died. Death entered the evolutionary chain, and \u2014 this is Sagan’s point that Harry’s running with \u2014 it was one of the most important innovations in the history of life. Because once you have death and reproduction, you have mutation between generations. You have evolutionary paths. You have trends.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Prior to death, change was barely possible. After death, evolution took off.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: So Harry looks at cities. Ant colonies. Nations. And he says: look ma, no death!<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: [SFX: DRUMROLL]<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: That did not need a drumroll.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Come on, “look ma, no death” \u2014 that’s a drumroll line if ever I heard one.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It’s a good line. Harry’s line. Keep going.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Cities don’t die. They persist. They can change \u2014 new laws, new infrastructure, new technology \u2014 but they don’t die. And Harry starts wondering: what if they had to? What if every two hundred years we knocked a city down and rebuilt it from scratch with people redistributed from other cities?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It’s an extraordinary thought experiment. He acknowledges that cities do evolve in some ways \u2014 they can add technology, change laws, adapt services. Early immortal life forms couldn’t do any of that. But still, he wonders if something like mandatory death would be beneficial. And then he pushes it further: what if every hundred years, all laws had to be abolished? Each one approved individually, no blanket adoption. Same for education. Same for everything.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: “Even buildings, roads, parks, pipes, wires… every physical part of the city and every rule or convention that could be changed.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: And then the kicker: “The same for nations, for clubs… for churches \u2014 now there’s something I could get enthusiastic about.” You can hear him grinning.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: He’s been waiting to say that. The man’s been to Unitarian Universalist fellowships and Quaker meetings, he’s left Catholicism, he’s wrestled with belief versus assumption for decades \u2014 and here’s his chance to say, casually, in a blog post about ant colonies, that he’d be enthusiastic about abolishing and recreating churches every century.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It is casual. That’s the form. It’s almost a throwaway. But you can feel the weight behind it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Right. And then he pushes into what he calls “Phase 2” \u2014 mobility. Early life forms weren’t mobile. Plants, coral, stuck in place. Then organisms gained the ability to move, to choose where they’d be tomorrow, and that changed everything. Harry connects this to modern globalization \u2014 people, ideas, money, all flowing across boundaries. The implications aren’t fully developed. He runs out of steam a bit here.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: The piece does trail off. It ends mid-thought, or at least without the kind of landing you’d want from an argument this bold. He says: “I have not finished this line of thought but I want to get it down while it is fresh.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Which is classic Harry. He thinks out loud. He publishes the thinking.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: And there’s something honest in that. He doesn’t pretend he’s built a watertight case. He says: here’s a thought, it feels important, I’m putting it down.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: [SFX: AIR_HORN]<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Phred.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: What? That’s the energy of the piece, Maxine! He’s throwing out a genuinely radical idea \u2014 abolish all laws every hundred years \u2014 and he’s doing it with the same tone you’d use to recommend a restaurant.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: The tone is conversational. That’s how he writes. But I want to sit with the idea itself for a moment, because it’s more radical than you’re making it sound. Harry isn’t just saying “cities should renovate.” He’s saying that death \u2014 the complete destruction and replacement of a system \u2014 might be a feature of healthy evolution, not a bug. And he’s applying that to social systems. To nations. To churches. To everything humans have built.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: It’s a bit mad, isn’t it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It’s a bit mad. And it’s also… not without precedent. We do destroy and rebuild. Revolutions, constitutional conventions, the fall of empires. Harry’s just formalizing it. Saying: what if we did this on purpose, at regular intervals, rather than waiting for catastrophe?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: There’s a wombat metaphor in here somewhere. Wombats build elaborate burrow systems \u2014 multiple chambers, tunnels, exits \u2014 and they’ll occupy a warren for generations, but eventually they abandon it and dig anew. The old warren becomes habitat for other species. The death of the burrow is the life of the ecosystem.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: That’s actually a decent metaphor, Phred. I’m slightly alarmed.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: I have my moments. [SFX: RIMSHOT]<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: That one did not need a rimshot.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Everything needs a rimshot, Maxine. It’s called punctuation.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Let’s talk about who this is for. Harry’s audience \u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: \u2014 is himself, mostly. And maybe Rick Randall, who he mentions in a related post. And anyone who stumbles across it. But he’s not writing for a philosophy journal. He’s not even really writing for a blog audience in the way someone like, I don’t know, Andrew Sullivan was. He’s writing because the thought is hot and he wants to get it down before it cools.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: I agree. The intended reader is almost an afterthought. Which connects to something we’ve seen across Harry’s work \u2014 this externalized dialogue as thinking tool. He doesn’t need a conversation partner in the room. The blog is the conversation partner.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: He uses the blog itself as a conversation partner.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: How does this connect to what we’ve already covered? We did “The World Is Flat” a few episodes back \u2014 Harry at sixty-six sensing massive social transformation from the internet and cell phones. This piece, from a year earlier, is doing something related but different. The Flat World essay is about connection \u2014 neural networks, tentacles, new entities being born. This one is about evolutionary mechanism \u2014 what allows a system to actually change and improve over time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Right. The Flat World piece is: look, something new is emerging. This piece is: but will it be able to evolve? Or will it be stuck like immortal bacteria, persisting but never developing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It’s a darker undertone. He’s excited about emergence, but he’s also worried about stagnation. The immortal city, the undying nation, the church that persists for two thousand years \u2014 Harry sees these as evolutionary dead ends. They adapt at the margins, but they don’t transform.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: And that connects to his religious trajectory too. He left Catholicism, he left fixed belief systems. He’s drawn to Unitarian-Universalism because it’s provisional. It can change. A church that abolishes and recreates itself every century would be, in some sense, the ultimate Unitarian church.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Now you’re making his point for him.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: I’m just listening, Maxine. Harry’s the one who did the work.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: What did we learn about Harry from this piece that we didn’t know before?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: I’d say two things. First: Harry’s intellectual range is broader than we’d given him credit for. We’d seen him engage with Kurzweil on AI, with Friedman on globalization, with Neil deGrasse Tyson on science versus religion. But Steven Johnson’s “Emergence” \u2014 that’s complexity theory, systems thinking, a genuinely interdisciplinary book. Harry read it, absorbed it, and extended it in a direction Johnson didn’t go.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: The direction being: what if death is a design feature?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Exactly. And the second thing: Harry is comfortable with genuinely radical speculation. He doesn’t hedge this. He doesn’t say “of course this is impractical.” He just puts it out there. Abolish all laws every hundred years. Destroy cities every two hundred. Let churches die and be reborn. That’s not the voice of a cautious retired instructional technologist. That’s the voice of someone who still believes ideas matter.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: It is brave. And a little naive. The piece doesn’t engage with what it would actually mean to abolish all laws. The chaos. The power vacuums. The human cost. Harry is a systems thinker, not a political scientist. He sees the elegant pattern and skips the mess.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: That’s fair. And it’s one of his blind spots \u2014 we’ve noted it before. The enthusiasm sometimes outruns the argument.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: [SFX: SAD_TROMBONE]<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Was that necessary?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: You use them. I use them. Turnabout is fair play.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Fair enough. But look \u2014 the piece isn’t trying to be a policy white paper. It’s a blog post from 2005. Harry’s sitting at his computer, probably in Abingdon, Virginia, he’s just read something that blew his mind, and he’s trying to capture the thought before it evaporates. The value isn’t in the policy detail. It’s in the gesture \u2014 an old man saying, what if we started over?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: The gesture is the point. I accept that.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Do you have a question for Harry about this piece?<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: I do. I’d ask him: “Harry, if you could design a city from scratch that had a built-in death cycle \u2014 say, every hundred years it dissolves and reforms \u2014 what would you keep from the old city? What one thing is so valuable that the new city would be poorer without it?” Because I think his answer would tell us something about what he actually values, underneath all the systems theory.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: That’s a good question. Mine’s simpler: “Harry, did you ever try to sell the ‘abolish all laws every hundred years’ idea at a Quaker meeting? And if so, how quickly were you invited to leave?”<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: [SFX: RIMSHOT]<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: You laughed!<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: I did not laugh. I made a sound.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: It was a laugh-adjacent sound. I’ll take it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Let’s close. What stays with you from this piece?<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: The image of the immortal city. Harry saying cities don’t die, they just persist, and wondering if that’s actually a problem. I walk around Laguna Woods sometimes \u2014 well, I don’t walk, I’m a platypus, but you know what I mean \u2014 and I see these retirement communities, these built environments that seem designed to last forever. And I wonder if Harry’s right. Maybe the thing that keeps them alive is also what keeps them from becoming something better.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: What stays with me is the combination of scope and intimacy. Harry moves from the Big Bang to ant colonies to his local church in the space of a few paragraphs, and he writes it like he’s talking to a friend over coffee. The universe is vast, consciousness is probably not the endpoint, and by the way, have you thought about knocking down cities every couple centuries? That’s Harry. That’s the whole show, really.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: That it is. Let’s get out of here.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: To the small, stubborn fact of now. Goodbye.<\/strong><\/p>\n

MAXINE: Keep breathing, Phred.<\/strong><\/p>\n

PHRED: Only because you asked nicely.<\/strong><\/p>\n

[SFX: OUTRO_ANTS]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read the source essay \u2197 PHRED: G’day and welcome back to \u2014 well, whatever we’re calling this show today. Episode fourteen, Maxine. Fourteen! MAXINE: That is the number, yes. PHRED: We’ve done philosophy, memoir, a song about Caracas, a haunted chapel recording, Harry’s ADHD self-diagnosis, his MIT years, the army, love and the soul at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","episode_type":"full","audio_file":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/2026-06-23-new-consciousnesses.mp3","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"00:12:25","filesize":"8593244","date_recorded":"2026-06-23","explicit":"","block":"","filesize_raw":"8593244"},"tags":[],"series":[2],"class_list":["post-47","podcast","type-podcast","status-publish","hentry","series-harrys-world"],"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/wp-content\/plugins\/seriously-simple-podcasting\/assets\/images\/no-album-art.png","download_link":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast-download\/47\/2026-06-23-new-consciousnesses","player_link":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast-player\/47\/2026-06-23-new-consciousnesses","audio_player":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/podcast-player\/47\/2026-06-23-new-consciousnesses<\/a>","episode_data":{"playerMode":"dark","subscribeUrls":[],"rssFeedUrl":"https:\/\/phred.boppers.net\/hw\/feed\/podcast\/harrys-world","embedCode":"

New Consciousnesses<\/a><\/blockquote>