Encounter ethics and the 'Dark Forest' critique

My buddy Andrew Davis is back on the pod, and this time we're talking about aliens — yes, that kind. Andrew is a process philosopher who's been publishing serious academic work in astrobiology, and with Obama casually confirming UFOs are real, the Age of Disclosure documentary making waves, and Spielberg's Disclosure Day film on the way, it felt like the right time to ask: how does a Whiteheadian process thinker engage the question of extraterrestrial life? Turns out, with a lot more philosophical firepower than you'd expect. We dig into Andrew's critical engagement with Steven Dick's cosmo-theology and why he thinks Dick is right that humanity is cosmologically peripheral but wrong to draw the metaphysical conclusion that we're therefore insignificant — because we're an anthropo-cosmic expression of what this universe is doing, not an accident in it. Andrew introduces his concept of exo-axiology (the philosophical exploration of value beyond Earth), and we get into why Whitehead's philosophy of organism flips the modern assumption that the universe is fundamentally dead and life is the weird anomaly. For Whitehead, life, mind, and value go all the way down — which means if you rewind evolution on another planet with the right conditions, something like us might show up again, not because it's designed for us, but because the universe is in the business of producing aesthetic intensities. We tackle the Fermi Paradox, the Dark Forest hypothesis, whether aliens would be hostile or hospitable (Andrew's a cosmological optimist who thinks any civilization advanced enough to reach us would've had to undergo a spiritual evolution to get past the bottleneck), plasma intelligence, UAPs, and why we should take people's encounter experiences seriously without being naive about them. Phil Clayton apparently thinks Andrew is the David Ray Griffin of this generation, so take that for what it's worth — it's worth a lot. Also, if you've had a weird encounter story and want to share it, send it to me. I'm collecting them. And if you've been wanting to get into Whitehead's process philosophy, Andrew's intro course is running in March and April at whiteheadsuniverse.com Listeners who took the last round loved it. Limited space. Go sign up.

You can WATCH the conversation on YouTube

Andrew M. Davis is an American process philosopher, theologian, and scholar of the cosmos. He is the academic and research director for the Center for Process Studies where he researches, writes, teaches, and organizes conferences on various aspects of process-relational thought (Whitehead and Beyond).

Andrew’s Previous visits to the podcast

• Whitehead’s Universe: a Guide to Thinking Process
• Mind, Value, and the Cosmos.
• the Power of Love & the Experience of God

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