Today we’d like to introduce you to Justin Harnish.
Hi Justin, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
I grew up in small-town Montana amongst the mesas and canyons that made up an ancient tide pool. I explored, imagined, and played in an idyllic upbringing. Recently, reflecting on a picture of my 10-year-old self, I told my dad, “I’m proud of this boy. He was a good friend. He read a lot. He was outside all the time… Still good direction for the good life.”
Like all of us, I had a teacher, John Rogers, that had a superhuman impact on my life. Mr. Rogers didn’t just teach, he enabled students to experience history and geology, he made it relevant and stood for learning as a life path. Mr. Rogers made sure the whole community knew his education would challenge students: for when it was time to teach WWII, the Nazi and Japanese war flags were shown next to their Allied rivals; we read Twain and Marx, and we explored the battlefields of the Greasy Grass (“The Battle of the Little Bighorn” or “Custer’s Last Stand”) from the indigenous and calvary side.
I moved just 120 miles west to Bozeman where I studied Chemical Engineering and Philosophy at Montana State University which deepened my love for deep experiences in the mountains and the expanse of knowledge of all types. Inside and outside of the classroom was an education, all of which set my identity as a freethinker and hopelessly romantic intellect! As part of my undergraduate degree work study, I wrote for the Wallace Stegner Endowed Chair website starting a lifelong love for the stories of place and the evolution of people through their lives.
A brief stint in the southeast as a vegetable oil refinery engineer gave me a different perspective on honor culture and the strangeness of places and customs even within these United States. Boise and the draw of the familiar juxtaposed against new and challenging engineering problems brought me back to the Rocky Mountain West. Stegner once said that “the West is less a place than a process; the Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation” and after living in Montana, Idaho, and Utah for all but two years of his life,I see the wisdom in that adage.
I love my blended family including his wife Samira, Samira’s 4 children, 4 granddaughters, 1 grandson, and his Silky Terrier (formerly known as) Prince!
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I have been very fortunate to have the support and love of family, friends, and especially my loving wife, Samira. There is no obstacle too large that love, patience, and mindfulness cannot overcome.
The biggest scare was when at an early age, I was diagnosed with cancer. It was an early diagnosis and surgery and radiation have led to almost 20 years of remission.
In a way, I was nonchalant about the whole thing, I was able to work the process and had a characteristic (for me) trust in my doctors. I was scared, but also, sure that things would work out. It didn’t seem like an end, just a bump, an obstacle.
I’ve been lucky, and I’m always grateful for what I have, for my examined life, the love I give and receive, and for the amazing paradise of the present moment.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I’m a writer, engineer, technology strategist, and non-profit founder. I am the author of the books Meaning in the Multiverse: A Skeptic’s Guide to a Loving Cosmos and Dance to Spawn A Galaxy: Poems of Potential and has collaborated on numerous patents and papers in semiconductor engineering, data science, and advanced artificial intelligence.
Coupling science, strategic design, and management, I have charted an innovative course for semiconductor, data science, and artificial intelligence products. My expertise in ideating has enabled invention in finance, manufacturing, intelligence, and technology; while my ability to analyze data, design experiments, and inspire awe in the technical teams enables exemplary execution. I work with data scientists and engineers to deliver products and new insights in advanced natural language processing, neural network applications, and classification systems.
My commitment to thought, spirituality, and our shared story are exemplified in my founding of the Jung Society Think Tank. The Jung Society Think Tank is a “book club without a book,” a place where those we might (tongue-in-cheek) call “amateur thinkers” join together to discuss one of the group’s extracurricular research. In the twelve-month history of the JSTT, its members have covered topics ranging from the Neuroscience of Memory to the Sacred Life Of Bees: The Return of the Divine Feminine.
Meaning in the Multiverse is my opus on metaphysics and the possibility of an all-natural, universal meaning. In Meaning in the Multiverse, I explore my lifelong love of the fundamental, the fabric of reality, taking us through a guided tour of the philosophies that put the matter, information, consciousness, and computation as the ultimate constituent of reality. As I uncover different ways that meaning is naturally developed by “a cosmos fundamentally conscious” or “our reality made by a parallel processing quantum computer,” we see a means for a purpose from a universe that doesn’t rely on gods or other fanciful leaps in logic.
My daily mindfulness practice is an essential component of my examined life. I write about my practice and insights on the nature of the mind and loving awareness in my Substack–Ordinary, Illuminated (ordinaryilluminated.substack.
but my side of the experience is illuminated. Anything but ordinary.
Being conscious, and realizing my own headlessness, I am surrounded by mystery and paradox. Examining this formless space is a permanent playground, a literal subjective laboratory all my own.
Eyes closed: sensations are a new cloud of pressure or tingling that aren’t arm or cramp; sounds aren’t traffic or house settling but uncontrollable entreaties on silence, and my visual field can be a chasm or rich with read-in imaginings.
Eyes open: I am a space for things and the myriad creatures, a translation of reality into my experience, all interfering in my mind but effortlessly so…
And so it is with my relationship with our human culture, what I hope to create and how I hope to be in relation to posterity. An ordinary relationship—a natural one anyway—would be dictated by my genetics and their kin-selected means of propagation. The algorithm of selection has methodically increased the diversity of the myriad creatures and our experience is more interesting because of it.
However, given a single human life and not eons of slow-moving genetic drift, desiring an impact on more than a few random genes but on the outlook of people present and future, I have to untether from an ordinary relationship with human culture and endear one and all to their illuminating birthright, no matter how ordinary they may think themselves to be.
I serve my community as the Co-Founder of Women of the World (womenofworld.org), a non-profit women’s refugee service organization I started with my lovely wife Samira Harnish. Women of the World offers custom critical service and capacity building to displaced women resettling in Salt Lake City, where I work and live. Samira was recently awarded the Americas Nansen Award from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for excellence in refugee service.
At Women of the World, I was responsible for setting up their data and tech stack, enabling them to truly quantify their mission to build the self-reliance of the forcibly displaced community they serve. While this impact-creating business process has built donor confidence and benevolence, I am planning to further support the effective altruism movement by developing others’ mission statements into quantitative and impactful data stacks.
So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
For more information on collaborating with me, getting a copy of “Meaning in the Multiverse” or “Dance to Spawn a Galaxy,” or hiring me to speak at your next corporate or nonprofit event, go to https://justinaharnish.com
To subscribe to his Free Substack, go to https://
Pricing:
- Meaning in the Multiverse – Paperback – $20
- Meaning in the Multiverse – Epub – $15
- Dance to Spawn a Galaxy – Paperback – $15
Contact Info:
- Website: https://justinaharnish.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Justin-A-Harnish-Futurist-Author-Speaker-113707687008790/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/JustinAHarnish
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC10jyZsPn8-1Qi4VJ0odKFQ
