Conversations with David J. Temple

So, why the &#%! is value so important, anyway? In a world that increasingly tells us our values are just personal opinions or made-up stories, what's the big deal?In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein deliver a powerful and urgent answer. They argue that value is not a human invention but a fundamental part of Reality itself, directly challenging the popular idea that meaning is just a useful delusion. They reveal what happens when a society loses its shared sense of value. The

What if every right you possess—from free speech to privacy—is actually based on a form of desire? And what if our new socio-technological conditions necessitate the protection of new rights, such as the “right to attention?”In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein explore the fundamental nature of desire, unveiling it not as something merely psychological, but as an ontological principle that underpins rights, needs and values. They establish a central thesis of CosmoErotic Humanism:

About this episode:In the first part of this dialogue, we heard the radical claim that attention is a First Principle and First Value of the universe. Now, we explore the devastating consequences of disowning that truth. Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein diagnose our current meta-crisis as a “Planetary Attention Disorder”—a global intimacy disorder where our inability to connect is rooted in the fundamental dysregulation of our attention. How did we get here? The conversation traces a fascinating

We all feel our attention is under constant attack. But what if this digital war for our attention is a battle for something far more fundamental than our productivity? What if attention isn't just something we do, but something the universe is?In this dialogue, Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Zak Stein introduce attention as a fundamental quality of the Cosmos, intrinsically linked to the First Values of Uniqueness, Eros, and Intimacy, noting that the universe itself evolves towards organisms with