Sam Senchal - EPISODE 24
Sam Alexander Senchal is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the edge of observation, consciousness, meaning, free will, and computational physics. Published with the Wolfram Institute, he builds bridges between analytic philosophy, theology, and the Ruliad view of reality, arguing that our deepest spiritual intuitions may be tracking something structurally real in the universe. Before this work, Sam spent years in institutional investing and product design, raising and allocating roughly $500M across complex financial structures—a background that keeps his metaphysics grounded in how systems behave in the wild. He’s the author of The God Conjecture and, in his spare time, writes and produces music.
Interdisciplinary researcher and author Sam Alexander Senchal joins Paul to explore The God Conjecture—a radical attempt to show how a certain picture of God and creation can live inside modern physics and computation without collapsing into dogma or nihilism. They unpack the Ruliad (the space of all possible computations), dig into why observers like us matter so much, and make the case that ethics are discovered, not invented—with “good” as the efficient path toward integration and “evil” as wasted computation that keeps us stuck.
From there, the conversation drops into the human trenches: shame, addiction, and rock bottom as the narrowest point in your story that opens into a superhighway of new possibilities, and how Paul’s Smart Funny Tortured framework and post-traumatic sovereignty map onto Sam’s formal model of constraints and attractors. They trace why big religions don’t die (their massive “limit objects”), how postmodernism both liberated and fragmented us, and what truly godlike creativity looks like in an age of rapidly advancing AI. If you’ve ever felt too smart for the religion you left and too soulful for a purely mechanical universe, this episode offers a new map of meaning—and a reminder that your healing and your choices are part of how reality learns itself.
Sam’s paper: The God Conjecture (GitHub)
