Try free for 30 days
-
We Are Agora
- How Humanity Functions as a Single Superorganism That Shapes Our World and Our Future
- Narrated by: Justin Price
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from Wish List failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for $28.99
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also picked
-
Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think
- How Humans Learned to See the Future–and Shape It
- By: Byron Reese
- Narrated by: Stephen Bel Davies
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Look around. Clearly, we humans are radically different from the other creatures on this planet. But why? Where are the Bronze Age beavers? The Iron Age iguanas? Byron Reese argues that we owe our special status to our ability to imagine the future and recall the past, escaping the perpetual present that all other living creatures are trapped in. Envisioning human history as the development of a societal superorganism he names Agora, Reese shows us how this escape enabled us to share knowledge on an unprecedented scale, and predict—and eventually master—the future.
-
The Blind Spot
- Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience
- By: Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson
- Narrated by: Perry Daniels
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Blind Spot goes where no science book goes, urging us to create a new scientific culture that views ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature's self-understanding, so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium.
-
Infinite Progress
- How the Internet and Technology Will End Ignorance, Disease, Poverty, Hunger, and War
- By: Byron Reese
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For years we’ve been inundated with bleak forecasts about the future. But in this electrifying new book, author Byron Reese debunks the pessimistic outlook as dangerous, and shows instead how technology will soon create a dramatically better world for every person on earth, beyond anything we have dared to imagine. With the art of a storyteller, Reese synthesizes history, technology, and sociology into an exciting, fast-moving narrative that shows how technological change has had dramatic effects on humanity in the past.
-
Why? The Purpose of the Universe
- By: Philip Goff
- Narrated by: Philip Goff
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Why are we here? What's the point of existence? On the "big questions" of meaning and purpose, Western thought has been dominated by the dichotomy of traditional religion and secular atheism. In this pioneering work, Philip Goff argues that it is time to move on from both God and atheism. Through an exploration of contemporary cosmology and cutting-edge philosophical research on consciousness, Goff argues for cosmic purpose: the idea that the universe is directed towards certain goals, such as the emergence of life.
-
-
Almost KLOPP like
- By Anonymous User on 30-01-2024
-
Free Agents
- How Evolution Gave Us Free Will
- By: Kevin J. Mitchell
- Narrated by: Kevin J. Mitchell
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Scientists are learning more and more about how brain activity controls behavior and how neural circuits weigh alternatives and initiate actions. As we probe ever deeper into the mechanics of decision making, many conclude that agency—or free will—is an illusion. In Free Agents, leading neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell presents a wealth of evidence to the contrary, arguing that we are not mere machines responding to physical forces but agents acting with purpose.
-
-
Flawed central argument
- By Anonymous User on 11-03-2024
-
Notes on Complexity
- By: Neil Theise
- Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith
- Length: 4 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nothing in the universe is more complex than life. Throughout the skies, in oceans, and across lands, life is endlessly on the move. In its myriad forms—from cells to human beings, social structures, and ecosystems—life is open-ended, evolving, unpredictable, yet adaptive and self-sustaining. Complexity theory addresses the mysteries that animate science, philosophy, and metaphysics: how this teeming array of existence, from the infinitesimal to the infinite, is in fact a seamless living whole and what our place, as conscious beings, is within it.
-
-
Good
- By Anonymous User on 13-05-2023
-
Stories, Dice, and Rocks That Think
- How Humans Learned to See the Future–and Shape It
- By: Byron Reese
- Narrated by: Stephen Bel Davies
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Look around. Clearly, we humans are radically different from the other creatures on this planet. But why? Where are the Bronze Age beavers? The Iron Age iguanas? Byron Reese argues that we owe our special status to our ability to imagine the future and recall the past, escaping the perpetual present that all other living creatures are trapped in. Envisioning human history as the development of a societal superorganism he names Agora, Reese shows us how this escape enabled us to share knowledge on an unprecedented scale, and predict—and eventually master—the future.
-
The Blind Spot
- Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience
- By: Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson
- Narrated by: Perry Daniels
- Length: 11 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Blind Spot goes where no science book goes, urging us to create a new scientific culture that views ourselves both as an expression of nature and as a source of nature's self-understanding, so that humanity can flourish in the new millennium.
-
Infinite Progress
- How the Internet and Technology Will End Ignorance, Disease, Poverty, Hunger, and War
- By: Byron Reese
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For years we’ve been inundated with bleak forecasts about the future. But in this electrifying new book, author Byron Reese debunks the pessimistic outlook as dangerous, and shows instead how technology will soon create a dramatically better world for every person on earth, beyond anything we have dared to imagine. With the art of a storyteller, Reese synthesizes history, technology, and sociology into an exciting, fast-moving narrative that shows how technological change has had dramatic effects on humanity in the past.
-
Why? The Purpose of the Universe
- By: Philip Goff
- Narrated by: Philip Goff
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Why are we here? What's the point of existence? On the "big questions" of meaning and purpose, Western thought has been dominated by the dichotomy of traditional religion and secular atheism. In this pioneering work, Philip Goff argues that it is time to move on from both God and atheism. Through an exploration of contemporary cosmology and cutting-edge philosophical research on consciousness, Goff argues for cosmic purpose: the idea that the universe is directed towards certain goals, such as the emergence of life.
-
-
Almost KLOPP like
- By Anonymous User on 30-01-2024
-
Free Agents
- How Evolution Gave Us Free Will
- By: Kevin J. Mitchell
- Narrated by: Kevin J. Mitchell
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Scientists are learning more and more about how brain activity controls behavior and how neural circuits weigh alternatives and initiate actions. As we probe ever deeper into the mechanics of decision making, many conclude that agency—or free will—is an illusion. In Free Agents, leading neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell presents a wealth of evidence to the contrary, arguing that we are not mere machines responding to physical forces but agents acting with purpose.
-
-
Flawed central argument
- By Anonymous User on 11-03-2024
-
Notes on Complexity
- By: Neil Theise
- Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith
- Length: 4 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nothing in the universe is more complex than life. Throughout the skies, in oceans, and across lands, life is endlessly on the move. In its myriad forms—from cells to human beings, social structures, and ecosystems—life is open-ended, evolving, unpredictable, yet adaptive and self-sustaining. Complexity theory addresses the mysteries that animate science, philosophy, and metaphysics: how this teeming array of existence, from the infinitesimal to the infinite, is in fact a seamless living whole and what our place, as conscious beings, is within it.
-
-
Good
- By Anonymous User on 13-05-2023
-
The Loom of Time
- Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China
- By: Robert D. Kaplan
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 14 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Greater Middle East, which Robert D. Kaplan defines as the vast region between the Mediterranean and China, encompassing much of the Arab world, parts of northern Africa, and Asia, existed for millennia as the crossroads of empire: Macedonian, Roman, Persian, Mongol, Ottoman, British, Soviet, American.
-
How Emotions Are Made
- The Secret Life of the Brain
- By: Lisa Feldman Barrett
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose research overturns the long-standing belief that emotions are automatic, universal, and hardwired in different brain regions. Instead, Barrett shows, we construct each instance of emotion through a unique interplay of brain, body, and culture.
-
-
Groundbraking, but useless
- By J on 14-11-2021
-
The Beginning of Infinity
- Explanations That Transform the World
- By: David Deutsch
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 20 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A bold and all-embracing exploration of the nature and progress of knowledge from one of today's great thinkers. Throughout history, mankind has struggled to understand life's mysteries, from the mundane to the seemingly miraculous. In this important new book, David Deutsch, an award-winning pioneer in the field of quantum computation, argues that explanations have a fundamental place in the universe.
-
-
Inspiring
- By Dirk Bertels on 21-03-2017
-
Journey of the Mind
- How Thinking Emerged from Chaos
- By: Ogi Ogas, Sai Gaddam
- Narrated by: Cary Hite
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Why do minds exist? How did mud and stone develop into beings that can experience longing, regret, love, and compassion - beings that are aware of their own experience? Until recently, science offered few answers to these existential questions. Journey of the Mind is the first book to offer a unified account of the mind that explains how consciousness, language, the Self, and civilization emerged incrementally out of chaos.
-
Selfless
- The Social Creation of “You”
- By: Brian Lowery
- Narrated by: Aaron Goodson
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Social psychologist and Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business Brian Lowery argues for the radical idea that the “self” as we know it, does not exist. The self—that “voice in your head”—is a social construct, created in our relationships and social interactions. We are unique because our individual pattern of relationships is unique. We change because our relationships change. Your self isn’t just you, it’s all around you.
-
-
Thought provoking
- By BDH on 02-11-2023
-
The Emperor's New Mind
- Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics
- By: Roger Penrose
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 18 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this absorbing and frequently contentious book, Roger Penrose puts forward his view that there are some facets of human thinking that can never be emulated by a machine. The book's central concern is what philosophers call the "mind-body problem". Penrose examines what physics and mathematics can tell us about how the mind works, what they can't, and what we need to know to understand the physical processes of consciousness.
-
-
Not adapted for audio book. Inscrutable to laymen.
- By Anonymous User on 12-10-2020
Publisher's Summary
Discover a groundbreaking new way of thinking about life, society, and the future of our species that bridges science and human history.
Could humans unknowingly be a part of a larger superorganism—one with its own motivations and goals, one that is alive, and conscious, and has the power to shape the future of our species?
This is the fascinating theory from author and futurist Byron Reese, who calls this human superorganism “Agora.”
In We Are Agora, Reese starts by asking the question, “What is life and how did it form?” From there, he looks at how multicellular life came about, how consciousness emerged, and how other superorganisms in nature have formed. Then, he poses eight big questions based on the Agora theory, including:
- If ants have colonies, bees have hives, and we have our bodies, how does Agora manifest itself? Does it have a body?
- Can Agora explain things that happen that are both under our control and near universally undesirable, such as war?
- How can Agora theory explain long-term progress we’ve made in the world?
In this unique and ambitious work that spans all of human history and looks boldly into its future, Reese melds science and history to look at the human species from a fresh new perspective. Told with his characteristic wit and compulsive readability, We Are Agora will give readers a better understanding of where we’ve been, where we’re going, and how our fates are intertwined.