Exploring the Space of Creative Design

Several years ago, I read Evolutionaries: Unlocking the Spiritual and Cultural Potential of Science's Greatest Idea (2012) by Carter Phipps. In 2020, Phipps co-authored with John MacKay and Steve McIntosh Conscious Leadership: Elevating Humanity Through Business. Phipps is also the co-founder, with McIntosh, of the Institute for Cultural Evolution. 

From 2020 to 2025, Phipps hosted the podcast Thinking Ahead, with 49 episodes exploring the ways that the world is changing and developing across a vast array of domains - from business and politics to science and technology to consciousness and spirituality. In the May 29, 2024 episode, Phipps discusses The Beauty of Evolutionary Thinking with cognitive neuroscientist, science journalist, and author Bobby Azarian.

Azarian's 2022 book The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity explored the evolution of the universe and life, purpose, complexity, and consciousness.

Bobby Azarian now publishes the Road to Omega Substack, where he describes The Unifying Theory of Reality (UTOR) - "a mathematical variational framework for matter, mind, and cosmos." This UTOR white paper is compressed into a Substack post behind the paywall. From quantum mechanics to consciousness to cosmology, Azarian posits "one framework, one variational principle, and testable predictions."

The UTOR white paper builds on Azarian's January 1, 2026 Awakening Game post. Earlier, Azarian introduced the first installment of "The Reality Game - a Meta-Game that contains all other games. It’s real life, viewed through the lens of cosmic evolution: a universe waking up through a dialectical battle between order and chaos, life and entropy, knowledge and ignorance."

"I’m always interested in visions of evolution that open up new pathways for people to appreciate the magnificent journey of the cosmos... chaos is a symptom of transition to higher order, not its opposite." ~ Bobby Azarian

Bobby Azarian, Ph.D., is a cognitive neuroscientist affiliated with George Mason University and a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Psychology Today's Mind in the Machine, The Atlantic, The New York Times, BBC Future, Scientific American, Slate, The Huffington Post, Quartz, and others. His research has been published in journals such as Cognition & Emotion and Human Brain Mapping. Follow him on Twitter @bobbyazarian and visit his website at www.bobbyazarian.com.