If you are going to San Francisco...

Let's meet up

I’m going to be giving a talk on cosmological natural selection (and the whole Evolved Universe Hypothesis more generally), at the N2 conference in San Francisco on November 19th, 2023. (Yes, next week. Sorry for the lack of notice! I’m living my usual, chaotic, last-minute life.)

The conference is being held, over three days, to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the birth of that wonderful idea (and terrible word), the Noosphere, thought up by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in 1923.

The group running the conference, Human Energy, define the Noosphere thus: 

The Noosphere is the sphere of thought enveloping the Earth. The word comes from the Greek noos (mind) and sphaira (sphere). The Noosphere is the third stage of Earth's development, after the geosphere (think rocks, water, and air) and the biosphere (all the living things).

Yeah, I still prefer my wife Solana Joy’s alternative and more self-explanatory term: the Thinkysphere. But it should be a great conference.

Conference speakers will include Kevin Kelly (co-founder of Wired, and author of many marvellous books, like Out of Control, and What Technology Wants); Jaron Lanier (futurist, composer, technologist; one of the inventors of Virtual Reality; author of You Are Not a Gadget, Who Owns the Future?, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, etc.), Robert Wright (author of The Moral Animal, and Why Buddhism is True, etc), plus scientists and authors like David Sloan Wilson, Ilia Delio, Brian Swimme, Francis Heylighen, Shima Beigi, and many others.

More information on the conference here.

HELP ME WITH MY TALK

I want to try out my 25 minute talk in advance, so I’m going to invite all my paid subscribers to a Zoom call at 6pm Central European Time this Sunday (November 12th, 2023). That should be 9am in LA/SF, noon on the US East coast, and 5pm UK/Ireland. (Bedtime in India, and the middle of the night for Australians, sorry; blame the world for being round...)

I’ll try out my talk on you, and get your feedback. Plus I’ll bring you up to date on everything Egg and the Rock related, and you can ask me anything. A fairly relaxed, general chat. (I might record it, if that’s OK. If it works out well and seems interesting, I might post it later for free subscribers.)

This is for paid subscribers only, partly because I can’t afford the fees for a Zoom room with, potentially, all 7,000 free subscribers, and partly because I want to say thanks directly to the paid subscribers for their support.

(ASIDE: If you WERE a paid subscriber and have let it lapse, no problem, I still feel I owe you, and I would still like to include you in the Zoom call. No need to reactivate your paid subscription, just answer this email, or mention in the comments that you’d like a Zoom invite, and I’ll add you.)

So, all paid subscribers (and some ex-paid) should get an email containing a Zoom invite tomorrow. (And yes, sure, if you convert to a paid subscription today, I will invite you tomorrow.)

OR WE COULD MEET HERE, IN REAL LIFE…

Mural and entrance to Vesuvio Cafe in North Beach, San Francisco; my favourite SF bar. Photo by Shadle, a generous-hearted resident of Madison, Wisconsin, who contributed this photo to Wikipedia, available under this Creative Commons license: CC BY-SA 3.0

Thanks to the conference, I will be in San Francisco from November 15^th till November 23^rd, and it would be nice to meet up with Bay Area subscribers (free and paid alike!) while I am there. Maybe on Thursday (November 16^th 2023), at 6pm, in, let’s see… How about Vesuvio Cafe? (255 Columbus Avenue, North Beach, San Francisco CA 94133-4508) (Though, warning, I may be horribly jet-lagged.) If you arrive early, I will be across Jack Kerouac Alley, browsing in City Lights Bookstore. (My wife Solana Joy used to work in City Lights, so I have fond memories of visiting her there, and getting the staff discount when buying David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity in hardback…)

And, of course, feel free to pass this post on to any Bay Area friends who might enjoy any of this…

OK, that’s it for now. See some of you by Zoom on Sunday, and others in Vesuvio this coming Thursday, I hope…