While the world debates AI’s impact on jobs and geopolitics, another revolution is taking place in our minds. Mind Revolution is a home for people interested in exploring this inner revolution reshaping how we experience our selves and bodies, other people, and the world.

It’s all happening too fast. And we are not prepared.

Why me?

I am Houston Wood, an emeritus professor of sociology, author, synthesizer, and big-picture thinker.

My earlier books explored how people make meaning, how outsiders colonize the experiences of Indigenous people, and how meaning-making can encourage violence, war, and peace.

I worry now that recent breakthroughs are transforming the basic architecture of human meaning-making itself.

My path to examining this changing mental architecture began when I became an emeritus professor in 2018 and started writing a book about consciousness—a natural step after decades of researching meaning-making. The focus of that book kept shifting and left me struggling to think coherently in ways I never had struggled before.

For a while, I thought my difficulties arose from the subject itself. Experts haven't settled on a common definition of "consciousness." It's hard to write a book about something that different researchers describe in different ways.

But I finally realized I was having trouble writing that book because, however defined, human consciousness is being transformed. Powerful, revolutionary forces are remaking the very architecture of our minds.

My earlier books, articles, and teaching seem insignificant in the shadow of this fact: By the end of this century, people will likely experience themselves and the world much differently than all people who have come before. Our experiences may arise from human-machine collaboration, or even straight from machines, with no human contributions at all.

Why subscribe?

Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives. I hope soon this will be a gathering place for researchers and thinkers seeking to help steer the transformation ahead.

I will begin with a post, “Manifesto for Mind Revolution,” an overview of this Substack’s purpose.

Future posts will include summaries of recent developments in the revolution of consciousness (with contributions for other interested researchers) and discussions of:

· Previous mind revolutions in history

· A probable timeline for our current mind revolution

· A geography of mind-transforming innovations

· A catalog of fundamental human experiences now being reshaped

· Mind transformation as an AI alignment and safety problem

· What happens when thinking and memory are outsourced to machines

· The future evolution of human emotions

· The final sexual revolution

· Why AI may marry but can never fix us

· Our changing relationship with death

· Edmund Carpenter’s discoveries about how technology redesigns consciousness

· The uncanny valley of digital duplicates creating multiple versions of “me”

· The proliferation of neurodiversities

· Understanding the evolution and potential imminent extinction of star-made minds

· A cosmic sociology preparing us for our own and other alien minds

And much more.

Here’s a good place to start: Mind Revolution Manifesto