Rachell Powell
speaker
762 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 26 Jan
Rachell Powell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
They haven't come from religion or anything.
They've come from science.
I mean, I'm preaching to the choir here, I assume, but a lot of people would probably take issue with that.
But I'm firmly convinced, and I'm always asking people at conferences everywhere, please, someone, give me something that's on the level of these kinds of insights that science has given coming from other disciplines.
And it just doesn't happen.
As I see it, and this is why this is going to become relevant.
So I see the kinds of insights, these profound insights coming from science as sort of falling along two arcs.
One is this kind of like an intuition shattering
wrecking ball that science has where basically it's taking a destructive kind of demolition approach to common intuitions that we have about the world around us, about the causal structure of the world.
So like, you know, relativity of space, time, the micro physical structure of objects, the mechanistic origins
of adaptation, the nature of organisms and their ontology and stuff like this.
So there's a lot of talk about biases in science, but really the deep kind of, in methodology, in data collection and so on.
But I don't want that to distract us from the main plot, which is that science really is about exploding our most cherished assumptions about the causal structure of the world.
And the second kind of arc that these insights have taken, in my view, is sort of this de-centering project.
This is the kind of thing that Freud described as a dethroning, sort of as inflicting like a narcissistic wound on our collective ego by shattering the way humans essentially understand their place in the universe.
And so the idea is you have this great decentering project of science that goes from the work of the likes of Copernicus or Hubble or Darwin, which is moving humanity from a privileged position, whether we're talking about the center of the solar system or a galaxy or the pinnacle of the history of life.
and moving it, translocating us to some kind of unremarkable periphery in this larger system that is not tailored in any way to human existence.
And that gives rise to all sorts of principles that are various ways of formulating that idea.
Some of them are sort of heuristic, like the Copernican principle.
Others are more statistical, like the mediocrity principle and so on.
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