Infinite Content. Zero Meaning.

Alex Ebert on Consciousness, Technology, and Automaticity

Hi people,

We are releasing some of the talks / discussions from last year’s Future of Consciousness series on our Youtube channel. They were wonderful!

In case you missed the Future of Consciousness seminar, you can still catch all of it now. For the next week, we are offering 50% off on the original price for those who feel the call:

In this episode of the Future of Consciousness series, we’re joined by Alex Ebert, musician, philosopher, and frontman of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, for a wild and lucid journey into the mechanics of mind, the automation of thought, and what comes after the so-called “singularity.”

What happens when the drive to problem-solve—what Ebert calls “problematizing”—is so successful that it destroys the very conditions for novelty, difference, or surprise? What happens when technology collapses time and space so thoroughly that there’s no more distance between thought and realization, stimulus and satisfaction?

We might reach the singularity not as gods, but as bored ghosts.

Ebert draws a throughline from the loudness wars in music—where sonic dynamics were flattened into an undifferentiated wall of sound—to the flattening of consciousness itself in the digital age. Just as dynamic range in music was sacrificed for consistency and impact, the dynamic arc of human becoming is now being eroded by algorithms that anticipate our every thought and desire.

“All thinking converges on thoughtlessness.”
– Alex Ebert

We could be moving inexorably toward a new state of automaticity—one eerily similar to the instinctual symbiosis of animal minds, but reached via the opposite route: hyper-rationality, total optimization, and the offloading of memory, meaning, and imagination.

And yet, Ebert is no doomsayer. What he offers is more like a recursive myth of becoming: that just as humanity once ruptured out of nature, it may rupture again—this time out of automation and into a qualitatively different state of being. A monk may appear like a drunk, but something wholly different is happening beneath the stillness.

This talk is surprising, sharp, and unsettling in the best possible way.

Please, if you enjoy my efforts here, support the YouTube channel by subscribing, liking, and (if inspired) sharing this and other videos. It helps us reach more people who are ready to engage with radical, playful and transformative ideas—and allows us to grow our platform.

If you want to go deeper, you can access the entire Future of Consciousness course—featuring deep discussions on the nature of reality, transcendence, systems theory, and the paranormal, among other themes—for half off, via the link above. Also, you can still join our current live seminar, Breaking the AI Barrier, which has been fantastic so far, with a dynamic community exploring the edge of AI and metaphysics. Here is a code for 20% off if you join before our next session on Sunday: