Dr. James Glattfelder: The Complexity Scientist Challenging Everything We Know About Reality

So your book is titled Information, Consciousness and Reality.

What made you choose this order?

So it's always a hard topic to come up with a good book title.

And there's so many ways you can spin it.

And there's always, yeah, like pros and cons.

And actually, what inspired me was Hofstadter, he's called, and he wrote the book Gödel Escher Bach, which was a bestseller.

And I kind of like that trilogy and it seemed to fit well to the topics of like how sort of information seems to be sort of fundamental building block of the physical world and somehow related to consciousness and then reality emerges.

So yeah, I thought that was a nice sort of combination of sort of three topics inspired by another author who was very successful with his book.

Yes, very good.

It's a very interesting way of choosing the words.

And I was also curious, what do you say is your mission altogether, your vision of what you do and what you want people to remember you always? When they see your work, what should it trigger in them?

A lot of the stuff I do, I just do out of a passion and kind of an inner sort of compulsion.

So when I write, it's also for me to understand these topics better.

And I like to sort of break down complex ideas and try and sort of formulate them in an easier way where maybe a layperson sort of can understand it better.

So that's so fascinating.

First of all, sort of egotistically, it's the thing I just like to do.

And the second thing is that, yeah, I like to transmit and hope I can sort of transmit information.

And sort of the broader picture is that, I don't know, if we look at the world today, the poly crisis, there's so many things going so terribly wrong.

And I think we could live in an amazing world.

We have so much technology and knowledge and just fantastic skills to deal and manufacture and engineer reality and we could make this work for so many people but we choose not to and I believe that one of the reasons is that we are in sort of a spiritual crisis we don't really know why we're here we have weird metaphysical sort of narratives that have been handed down which you just adopt because depending on where you live Or, inspired by, unfortunately, science, that there is sort of this metaphysical idea that, no, there's only the physical reality and only physical processes.

And these things are not in any way clear or provable.

These are metaphysical beliefs, even for science.

And I believe that a metaphysical reframing can just really be transformational.

And I think one of the most profound transformations is a realization that what if consciousness is the fundamental thing to existence and everything else is derived and that there's a kinship with the thing I am and all of existence.

And this has been an idea that's been around forever.