Thomas Lombardo, PhD, is director of the Center for Future Consciousness in Glendale, Arizona. He is author of Future Consciousness: The Path To Purposeful Evolution; The Evolution of Future Consciousness; Wisdom, Consciousness, and the Future; and Mind Flight: A Journey Into The Future. He is also writing a four volume series, titled Science Fiction: The Evolutionary Mythology of the Future. The first volume was published in 2018.

In this 2018 interview, he discusses many of the great villains of science fiction literature: Darth Vader and the evil emperor, The Mule, Alien, and the many reptilian and insectoid creatures. He notes that in almost every case, there is some ambiguity about who is really evil. The discussion turns to historical situations of evil: slavery and the civil war, Nazi Germany and the holocaust. The paradox is that, although sometimes evil must be totally destroyed, in so doing one takes on the qualities of evil oneself.

Edited subtitles for this video are available in Russian, Portuguese, Italian, German, French, and Spanish.

(Recorded on November 2, 2017)

Thomas Lombardo, PhD, is director of the Center for Future Consciousness in Glendale, Arizona. He is author of Future Consciousness: The Path To Purposeful Evolution; The Evolution of Future Consciousness; Wisdom, Consciousness, and the Future; and Mind Flight: A Journey Into The Future. He is also writing a four volume series, titled Science Fiction: The Evolutionary Mythology of the Future. The first volume was published in 2018.

In this 2017 interview, he describes the philosophical conflict between his intuitive sense that there is an external world and the logical argument of Bishop Berkeley that we can only know our own experience and not the world itself. Pondering this paradox, he says, literally made him dizzy. The logical implication of Berkeley’s philosophy is a position known as solipsism — in which one is compelled to acknowledge the lack of direct evidence that other minds exist at all. This is only an inference we make.

(Recorded on October 31, 2017)

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Published on April 5, 2023