Jamie was born and raised in suburban Wollongong, then lived in Canberra, and is now in Brisbane with Meg, his partner of eight years. He was a school teacher on and off for ten years, ran an independent radio station, was a tour guide at Australia’s Parliament House, worked as a science communicator, and started Australia’s first dedicated podcasting business. Currently, Jamie is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities (University of Queensland). His research career has focused on contemporary evolutionary theory and how narratives are used to communicate science in nonfiction formats, with a particular emphasis on climate science.
In his own words… “I did a vanity PhD in the Philosophy of Science, have established a quasi-career in academia, and am now writing for TV and working on a book about the larger meaning of recent scientific knowledge.”
Jamie is a human mammal. Here are his thoughts:
What brings you the most joy in life?
Those simple, high-quality things: dinner with friends, a great sentence, reading to Meg while she goes to sleep, a shocking joke, an interesting bird, the starry vault. And, greatest of all, good olive oil.
What does success mean to you?
Having enough money to have enough time to do what we think is important. (And therefore, universal basic income is the most humane policy ever suggested.)
What do you see as your greatest achievement?
Nothing comes to mind.
What are you most grateful for?
Probably my (perhaps) rare talent for gratitude. Every day, I get a genuine thrill from drinking unlimited clean water from a tap in my home. Even as I type this… it’s mind-blowing. And it gets more amazing as I get older too. But I’m equally grateful that I have this feeling without being one of those glassy-eyed cultish types who lack all critical faculties.
What is something most people don’t know about you?
Over the years I’ve memorised hundreds of lines of English verse. Now I know by heart a lot of my favourite poetry and can explore it at will.
Who or what has had the biggest influence on your life?
My parents clearly did in the early years. More recently my partner Meg. Otherwise, factors utterly outside my control, I guess, like the decade and place I was born.
What do you regret?
My personality means I don’t have regrets, don’t experience FOMO. But I have a lot of guilt! If I linger on basically any episode from my past I feel guilty for not having been better, kinder, more sensitive, more diligent, less selfish. Ugh.
Has there been a defining moment in your life? Can you tell us about it?
Recently, I remembered an episode from when I was about six. My schoolyard friends were shaping up for a brawl. They split into two factions and I had to declare my allegiance. Being friends with boys from both sides, I was torn. I whispered to the leader of one side that I would merely pretend to be on the other side, but really was on his. And I told the other team’s leader the equivalent. With dread, I waited for this transparent ruse to blow up in my face. But it worked perfectly. In some ways, my life since has been about unpacking the emotional and political implications.
As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
An alcoholic. That’s what I would tell grownups. I didn’t know what it meant but my favourite character in the Tintin books was Captain Haddock. I asked my dad what he was and he replied, “An alcoholic.”
What advice would you give your younger self?
Don’t read the news. Ever.
What is the most important thing we can teach kids in school?
Make school entirely voluntary (at least from age 12), then the content will sort itself out.
If you could have a conversation with anyone, living or dead, who would you choose and why?
First person I can think of is a high-end sex worker, someone whose clients included billionaires. I think I’d learn something interesting about power, freedom, and desire.
What do you doubt most?
That anything more than a very small percentage of (straight) men don’t have contempt for women.
When did you last have a significant change of mind?
Well, Dan, everyone claims to keep an open mind but struggles to name anything. I keep a ledger! Recent example: geoengineering. I was pro, then anti, now I’m kind of pro again. I also try to deliberately inhabit different worldviews, just to experiment. I certainly hope that in the future I’ll have different politics; if not, I won’t have learned anything.
What is the role of luck in our lives?
Seemingly total.
Do you have a favourite quote? What is it? Why do you like it?
I mentioned above that I know a lot of poetry. But I also like it when Belinda Carlisle sings…
“In this world we’re just beginning,
To understand the miracle of living,
Baby, I was afraid before,
But I’m not afraid anymore.”
I’m convinced that the ‘80s pop song, Heaven is a Place on Earth, is some kind of crypto-atheist anthem.
What would you do with your life if you had unlimited financial resources?
Countless things. There are causes I would bankroll (nuclear disarmament, research into carbon sequestration, disease prevention, poverty alleviation); art projects I would commission; studies I would fund into new questions in social and natural science; and plenty of staff I would hire to achieve these things, none of which I can do myself. I would also never work again and dedicate my own time to where I can offer something unique, namely some kind of blog that was part speculative philosophy, part analysis of football tactics.
If you could have the definitive answer to a single question, what would you ask?
A solution to the Fermi paradox.
What concept/fact/idea should every human on the planet understand?
That assuming others are like you only works some of the time and the frequency depends entirely on how typical you are.
Do human beings have free will?
So-called “libertarian” free will? No. But people can be more or less self-determined (i.e. the causes of their actions are to a greater extent internal or localised to them).
Do you believe in God?
No. I don’t even believe in “belief”.
Could we be living in a simulated universe?
I think it’s implausible. Nick Bostrom is a great philosopher but the simulation argument sucks. Not because of its outlandishness or the argument based on anthropic reasoning. I think it falls down on basic misconceptions about things like “experience”, “consciousness”, “computation”, and “simulation”. It’s the same problem as Descartes’ Evil Demon, Boltzmann brains, or The Matrix idea: they doubt the world but fail to equally doubt the doubter.
Will the continual development of technology have a net positive or negative influence on humanity?
So far, I think it’s net positive (birth control, vaccinations, running-goddam-water, literacy, etc.). I don’t make predictions. But if those nuclear weapons are triggered, that will make it net negative pretty definitively.
What is the single greatest achievement of humanity?
One view of economic history says that during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were a bunch of improvements in agriculture in England. These massively boosted yield and made feeding large populations relatively cheap, laying the foundations for the productivity boom that saw all the massive improvements in standards of living across a lot of the world over the next two centuries. If true, this is important because it allowed an increasing portion of us to confront the dangerous promise of free time.
What do you see as the biggest existential threat to humanity?
Weighing impact, likelihood, and imminence, it has to be nuclear war (deliberate or accidental).
What does it mean to live a good life?
There are so many answers to this. I endorse all of them, except the ones that preclude new answers.
What is a good death?
One that benefits others with closure, catharsis, or organs.
Thanks for your time, Jamie!
Twitter: JamieFreestone
Website: mcgannfreestone.com.au
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