Curt Jaimungal

Filmmaker; Host of Theories of Everything

About

Curt Jaimungal is a Toronto filmmaker and the host of Theories of Everything, a podcast launched in 2020 that he describes as exploring theoretical physics, consciousness, AI and God in a technically rigorous manner. He describes himself as "a Torontonian with a degree in mathematical physics from the University of Toronto" and says he analyses candidate theories of everything from that analytic perspective, while increasingly opening up to alternative approaches. Before the show he directed Better Left Unsaid, a crowdfunded documentary examining the differences between the moderate and the extreme left. He says the separating factor of the show is "its focus on depth even at the risk of limiting the audience due to how much detail we delve into subjects", and that it increasingly conducts original research on air rather than merely conveying existing information. He publishes a written companion to the show on Substack, where paid subscribers get early access and original essays.

Key Contributions

Created and hosts Theories of Everything, a show he has run since 2020, on theoretical physics, consciousness, AI and God
Directed Better Left Unsaid, a crowdfunded documentary on the differences between the moderate and the extreme left
Has published more than 360 weekly episodes of the show, which is carried on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify
In this collection his conversations carry Michael Levin, Iain McGilchrist with John Vervaeke, Joscha Bach with Ben Goertzel, and Matt Segall on Whitehead
Runs the show's written companion on Substack, publishing original essays alongside the video episodes

6 conversations they hosted

on Theories of Everything

Close Listening

Written in the StoryThe world we live in is a dream the brain weaves, and we are characters inside it; what remains is what in the dream is real. Joscha Bach and John Vervaeke on Theories of Everything, from faces that aren't there to software as a physical law.Joscha Bach Λ John Vervaeke: Mind, Idealism, Computation

Videos & Interviews

Close Listening

Joscha Bach Λ John Vervaeke: Mind, Idealism, Computation

A three-hour 'theolocution' on Theories of Everything, hosted by Curt Jaimungal, in which the two cognitive scientists find they disagree far less than either expected. Bach argues that the world we experience is not the physical world but a model the brain builds: sky and ground, faces and colours exist in the mind, "physical systems cannot be conscious," and only simulated things can be. Vervaeke keeps pressing on the word "real": if everything is a projection, what lets us call anything a projection, and why should the cup, the physicist and the instruments be less real than the physics they produce? They meet in Platonism, where an archetype is the most elegant optimum of a description, and Vervaeke calls himself a Neoplatonist. The second half turns to the meaning crisis: Vervaeke cares less about what people believe than what they practise, while Bach thinks the civilization has no future to project, and offers only integrity, truthfulness and hugging his friends. Late on, Bach proposes that consciousness acts like a government, channelling motivation it does not create, and that software has the ontological status of a physical law, which makes mental states software states. We experience things, he says, "for the same reason that a character in a novel experiences things. It's because it's written in the story."

View Details

Connections

Iain McGilchrist

In conversation

Psychiatrist, Neuroscientist & Author

A second sitting rather than a first: Jaimungal had already given McGilchrist an episode on The Master and His Emissary, and brought him back for The Matter with Things alongside John Vervaeke. Convening two people who work the same seam — attention as the thing that makes a world — is a different editorial act from booking a guest, and this episode is the clearest instance of it on his channel.

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Joscha Bach

In conversation

AI Researcher & Cognitive Scientist

Jaimungal put Bach opposite Ben Goertzel for a long exchange on conscious AI, LLMs and AGI — two people who both think machine minds are coming and disagree about nearly everything downstream of that. Booking them against each other rather than separately is the editorial judgment worth recording here; the disagreement is the content.

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John Vervaeke

In conversation

Cognitive Scientist & Philosopher

Jaimungal introduces Vervaeke as one of the few scholars giving the meaning crisis a serious cognitive-science treatment, and notes in passing that Toronto, where Vervaeke teaches, is his own former home. The episode pairs him with McGilchrist on God, being and meaning — a three-way conversation rather than an interview, which is the format this channel is actually for.

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Matthew D. Segall

In conversation

Associate Professor, CIIS

Jaimungal has Segall walk the whole lineage first — Plato, Aristotle's substance-property logic, Kant, Schelling, Hegel — before arriving at Whitehead, and the long runway pays off where a mathematical physicist and a process philosopher meet on Whitehead's 1922 alternative to general relativity, a gravity without curved spacetime, which Jaimungal sets beside today's torsion and non-metricity reformulations. Earlier, on Kant's claim that mathematics needs intuition and computers could only mimic it, he presses the question this site cares about — 'even if they're embodied?'

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