Episode touched on Löffler's “deep futurological” approach to the history of abstraction, layers of generativity, and the role of computation in a technological civilization in the making—his involvement with German accelerationism, the role of the Outside, and the possibility of not merely speculating on the posthuman but scientifically grounding it. Or in Löffler’s words: “If this is true, that there is a matrix of possible worlds, then it means that we can find the structure of why these worlds are emerging and then we can ask what comes after the human? And now we don’t have to speculate on the posthuman anymore, now we can scientifically ground it. By logic and science we can derive what could come after the human.”

Davor Löffler is a philosopher and sociologist whose research explores the intersections of technology, anthropology, and cultural evolution. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the Free University of Berlin, where his dissertation examined transformations of social structures, cognition, and temporality in the rise of technological civilization. He has held teaching and research positions at institutions including the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, the Interacting Minds Center in Aarhus, the University of Tübingen’s Institute for Prehistory, the University of Basel, and the New Centre for Research and Practice.

In his extensive study Generative Realitäten I: Die Technologische Zivilisation als neue Achsenzeit und Zivilisationsstufe. Eine Anthropologie des 21. Jahrhunderts (2019), he pioneered a systems view on the history of abstraction. In this work, he elaborated the principles and patterns underlying the co-evolution of technological, social, and cognitive structures in human history, situating them within overarching evolutionary and cosmological processes. Currently, he is working on the second part, applying the evolutionary-based “deep futurology” to explore the emerging meta-anthropic stage of civilization.