September 28, 2025 • 66 mins
In this conversation, philosopher Matt Segall and I address the role of philosophy in contemporary culture, emphasizing the need for discernment amidst ideological ferment. We critique transhumanist Silicon Valley ideologies, highlighting their left-hemisphere bias and magical thinking. We also discusses the implications of AI, arguing that while it's a valuable tool, the real danger lies in the extractive, capitalist machine driving its development.
More about Matt, including his Substack, his YouTube channel, and his conversation with Michael Levin.
God Human Animal Machine by Meghan O’Gieblyn https://amzn.to/3IzujNq
Against the Machine, by Paul Kingsnorth https://amzn.to/4ntYp4b
‘Other,’ by R. S. Thomas
The machine appeared
In the distance, singing to itself
Of money. Its song was the web
They were caught in, men and women
Together. The villages were as flies
To be sucked empty.
God secreted
A tear. Enough, enough,
He commanded, but the machine
Looked at him and went on singing.
Join Chad's newsletter to learn about all new offerings, courses, trainings, and retreats.
Finally, you can support the podcast here.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Chad Woodford (00:00):
All right, welcome Matt. Good to be here
(00:02):
with you. Chad, I'm really happyto have you here. I'm gonna I'm
gonna jump right in with yourbio, and then we can start the
conversation. So Matthew DavidSiegel, PhD, is a
transdisciplinary philosopherand associate professor in the
philosophy cosmology andconsciousness program at
California Institute of integralstudies in San Francisco. His
work bridges process relationalmetaphysics with contemporary
(00:25):
science and spirituality,drawing inspiration from
thinkers such as Alfred NorthWhitehead, Goethe and Rudolf
Steiner. Siegel's scholarshipchallenges dualistic and
mechanistic paradigms andinvites a renewed integration
between the natural sciences andhumanities. I got to experience
this when I was in his classes,when I was in the master's
(00:46):
program at the philosophycosmology and consciousness
program. So I can, I can attestto the validity of all that.
He's also the author of a couplebooks, including physics of the
world soul, which we read in oneof his classes. And I can highly
recommend in the book, hesituates Whitehead's philosophy
of organism within the contextof contemporary scientific
cosmology, engaging withrelativity, quantum evolutionary
(01:10):
and complexity theories toadvocate for an unsold
interpretation of the universe.
And on the topic of an installedinterpretation of the universe,
I just want to say a few morewords about the kind of the
mission of the program that thatMatt teaches in, and the one I
just finished last year, I gotmy master's last year in, which
is in a nutshell, and maybe,maybe you can add to this once
(01:33):
we get into it. But in anutshell, the mission of the
program is to transformindividuals in society through
this kind of ensouled worldviewperspective, and just to say a
little bit about their statedmission, which it's to open our
consciousness through learningand imagination to those
creative and evolutionaryenergies suffusing the Earth,
(01:54):
the universe and the deeppsyche, and to participate fully
in the regeneration of humancommunities and their enveloping
life systems. And, you know, itdraws from the deep wells of
philosophical and spiritualwisdom to bring forth a profound
vision of a vibrant planetaryera. So this to me, like when I
was considering matriculatingwith the program, this to me,
(02:18):
was so exciting and so unique.
And I feel like PCC, thisphilosophy, cosmology and
consciousness program is maybe,like, you know, singular in the
world. I don't know. It's one ofthose rare academic programs
that is both academicallyrigorous, but also is sort of
pushing the envelope in terms ofwhat's sort of valid subject
(02:40):
matter for academic inquiry, andwhat can be, you know, explored.
And I feel like, you know, it's,it's so necessary right now with
everything that's happening inthe world. And I just, yeah, I
just can't say enough goodthings about this program. I'm
not, you know, trying to sellyou on it, but, but it's a great
place, and I really, reallyvalued my time there. So, so,
yeah, so that's a little bitabout Matt, a little bit about
(03:02):
program he's a professor in. AndI wanted to start by kind of
getting into a little bit ofyour work, Matt, and the
philosophy that you write andtalk about, which is essentially
process philosophy, right? Wouldyou say,
Matt Segall (03:18):
Yeah, process short of description, yeah. Good place
to start.
Chad Woodford (03:23):
And, you know, a lot of my listeners and viewers
probably aren't familiar withthat so much, so I just wanted
to, kind of like set the tableand just briefly describe that
or talk about that. One thingthat I find entertaining as a
philosopher is the ways thatphilosophers like to, kind of
like endlessly refine and sortof differentiate their
philosophy versus other people'sphilosophy, and then come up
(03:44):
with new labels and that kind ofthing, right? So, you know, we
had pantheism for a while, andthen more recently, we have
panpsychism. And of course, isidealism and and, and then
panentheism is sort of like afurther kind of gloss on
panpsychism as I understand it.
And so I think, would you saythat process philosophy is pan
atheistic, or how would you sortof couch
Matt Segall (04:11):
that there are many process philosophers who are
also atheist, or at least Non,non theist. So I wouldn't want
to while I, you know, I wouldsay panentheism is probably a
term I would be comfortablewearing, and there that's a long
(04:32):
conversation unpack exactly whatthat means. But I wouldn't want
to claim that process philosophyas such, necessarily is
identical to or leads one topanentheism or pantheism or
theism. I think there are waysof being a process. Philosopher
like Nietzsche, for example,there are many contemporary
(04:55):
Whitehead Ian's who inherit theidea of process as. Opposed to
substance, but don't like histheology, and try to fully
eliminate and scrub clean fromhis work any residue of the
theological right. And they canstill be process oriented
(05:16):
without that. But for me,personally, I think process
philosophy allowed me to recoversome sort of theistic
understanding, the pan andtheistic understanding. Whereas,
had I not been exposed toprocess thought, I don't know
that, I would have been temptedby the theist a theist
(05:38):
orientation, right? And then getinto why that might be
Chad Woodford (05:40):
right? Yeah, I my personal background is that I
grew up Catholic and that I wasan atheist for a while, and then
I got into more Easternphilosophy, and, like, the yoga
Danta tradition and all that andso. And then when I was in law
school, I got really into thehistory of Western philosophy
and and so, like, I come at itfrom my own unique perspective,
(06:03):
which is that, you know, like, Ithink for a long time I felt
like religion is bad and, youknow, so anything that's like
theology would probably havetriggered me at some point, you
know. And so it's justinteresting to kind of try to
talk about this stuff in a waythat is not going to result in
excess, excess, like,ideological baggage around these
(06:23):
terms and that kind of thing,right? So maybe we should just
explain, like, for people whodon't know, because this is sort
of a general audience kind ofchannel, like process philosophy
was new to me when I when Ientered the program at PCC. And
so how would you sort ofdescribe it to somebody who
doesn't know that much about,like, you know, Whitehead or the
history of philosophy and stuff,you know, like, what's a simple
(06:47):
way to, kind of, like, explainit to people?
Matt Segall (06:49):
Well, process philosophy is usually said to
have started with this ancientGreek, pre Socratic philosopher
named Heraclitus, who saideverything flows and that you
cannot step into the same rivertwice. And that basic sentiment
(07:09):
that you know to philosophize,we're always going to need to
begin in the present, and thatthe present is perpetually
perishing into an open future.
That realization is it eruptsout of our direct encounter with
experience and process.
Philosophers think we need tostay with that experience rather
(07:33):
than rush to find some source offoundation that would be fixed
and unchanging and static, wherewe might anchor our reflections
on the nature of realityprocess. Philosophers say, Well,
if we're going to talk aboutreality really, we should always
keep in mind that it is a term Ilike to use, CReality. There's a
(07:57):
creative process that's alwaysunderway. So reality is again,
never the same twice, just likeHeraclitus river. And so a lot
spills out from that sort ofpremise, the basic orientation
of a process philosophy. Butthat's the basic starting point,
right?
Chad Woodford (08:17):
Okay, that's, yeah, that's great. I mean, I
like that. I feel like it's alittle bit of a foreshadowing of
where we may end up in thisconversation, which is talking
about Ian McGilchrist and thebrain hemispheres, but, but,
yeah, it's like, it's a goodreminder, because I feel like so
much of western philosophy thatcame after that, like after
Plato and after all, that was,was not that right? It was, it
(08:39):
was kind of, it was moreabstracted, it was more
rational. It was more sort ofremoved from immediate
experience. And this idea offlow and everything was kind of
anathema too, especially likeonce you hit, you know, Newton
and the Enlightenment all that,then, you know, then the idea of
flow and process kind of fellaway, right? So, so I think it's
(09:00):
really crucial, and it's such apregnant time for that to be for
that to be reintroduced or to betalking about that. So we'll
come back to that in a second.
But I wanted to jump to the roleof philosophy in sort of
mainstream culture or in ourpresent time, because I feel
like it's a time, like it's atime of ideological ferment. I
think we can all agree, right?
(09:22):
And, you know, especiallybecause of AI and what's
happening in Silicon Valley andwhat's happening in politics, to
me, it all feels kind ofconnected. And before we started
recording, we were talking abouthow Peter Thiel is doing this
four part lecture series in SanFrancisco right now about the
Antichrist. And I just, to me,it seems like a very strange,
(09:43):
even bizarre, like time to bealive, because these ideas are
kind of reaching the mainstream.
These ideas, what you know,whether it's transhumanism or
techno Christianity or the darkenlightenment, you know, these
are all like being. Takenseriously and presenting what I
feel is both a challenge and anopportunity for other folks,
(10:06):
like you know, for like us orwhoever, to hopefully bring like
a different perspective, right?
So, because a lot of what'shappening, I feel is there's
this false choice being offeredby these, people I mentioned, or
by people like even like the NewAtheists or Sam Harris, there's
a false choice between secularrationalism or physicalism,
(10:29):
scientism, and then sort oftraditional, Abrahamic faiths.
But there's no sort of, likethird way. And I feel like a lot
of what's beautiful about thephilosophy cosmology and
consciousness program and yourwork and and all that is that
it, it offers a third way, in asense of, you know, we don't
have to choose between sort ofscience and religion. We can,
(10:51):
sort of, we can bring in processphilosophy or different, you
know, Eastern traditions, orwhat, whatever it is. And so I
guess, having said all that youknow, do you see this as a time
of maybe increasing relevance ofphilosophy generally and and how
(11:12):
do you see the role ofphilosophers in potentially
shifting our share sharedworldview, that's a big
question. But yeah,
Matt Segall (11:22):
yeah, I think we're in a really pregnant moment,
precisely because of how chaoticit is. And it's pregnant in the
sense that we're betweenstories, as Thomas Berry would
put it, or between cosmologies,the old say world view of
(11:46):
whichever level we want toarticulate it from say, the
liberal political world order,like is broken down, the myth of
progress, where, through Thespread of democracy and
capitalism and technology,things are just going to get
better and better. Very fewpeople believe that anymore. I
(12:08):
mean, there's still a lot ofpeople who do, but it's
increasingly being called intoquestion. And what is the
alternative myth for ourcivilization? The alternative
sort of motivating story thatdrives us to work together. I
don't know. Nobody knows. And soPeter Thiel has his idea. He's
(12:29):
within the Maga orbit. But evenwithin Maga and the Trump
umbrella, there's a variety ofcompeting factions in terms of
political opposition. TheDemocrats are a bunch of
chickens running around withtheir heads cut off. There's
various forms of progressive andleft wing political philosophies
(12:49):
that are constantly infighting,and so it's no it's not clear
who's going to capture the flag.
And in that context, I thinkphilosophers and philosophy has
an increased importance, right?
Because we're going back tofirst principles we're really
trying to understand. Okay,well, what is human nature
(13:11):
anyways? And what are wesupposed to be doing here on
this planet? What is the natureof this universe that has
brought forth creatures capableof even asking about their own
nature and organizing acivilization? Everything now is
on the table. And I think tolook at a historical period that
would be a little bit like ours.
It's a bit like the first fewcenturies of the first
(13:34):
millennium, when you know theRoman Empire was was in place.
But by the third or fourthcentury, like it's starting to
begin its collapse. And I thinkthe American empire may be
pretty far along in its collapseright now. And at that time in
the Mediterranean, and, youknow, in the Roman world, there
(13:58):
were all these competingphilosophies and schools. There
was Plato's Academy, Aristotle'slyceum. There were the Stoics,
the Epicureans, the skeptics,and they all had very different
conceptions of what the humanbeing is, what is the good life?
How are we to be orientingourselves? And the Roman Empire
was so large and seemed so likecivic life that was at such a
(14:25):
gigantic scale, I think a lot ofpeople feel that way about the
nature of our globalcivilization right now. People
began increase as that,especially as that global system
began to break down, and ournational systems begin to break
down, and people are losingtrust in government. People are
turning inward and beginning toexplore their own consciousness.
(14:46):
Sometimes this leads toconspiratorial thinking as sort
of mass media and legitimateoutlets of information are no
longer available. People createtheir own versions of their own
explanations for what's what'sgoing on, who the big players
and movers and shakers in theworld are, but also, you know,
(15:08):
people start exploring their owninner life. And while philosophy
might be dying or already deadwithin academia, in terms of the
ancient sense of philosophy as away of life where you can ask
the big questions and findmeaning, it seems to me, to be
flourishing outside of theacademic context. People are
really hungry for philosophicaldirection and and insight. So
(15:34):
it's both the best of times andthe worst of times.
Chad Woodford (15:40):
Yeah for Yeah, but, you know, yeah, I agree
with that. And I guess thequestion that I'm constantly
asking myself is because you'resaying that people, people are
sort of, like, maybe a more opento new ideas, or, like, looking
inwards, searching, searchingand seeking. But you know, it's
so easy for them to, you know,when you look at who's
(16:01):
dominating the podcast charts,for example, or, you know, even
best sellers or YouTube orwhatever, it's so easy to sort
of like, you know, encounterthese kind of false peaks, so to
speak, like, you know, likeyou'll just see like, oh, this
popular guy, you know, JordanPeterson, or whoever you know.
Like, you can encounter somebodyand think, like, Oh, this guy
(16:22):
seems to have wisdom. He seemsto be offering, like, a new
alternative philosophy orwhatever. But maybe it's not,
you know, the best thing foreveryone. So, like, how do you
how does a person, I guess, a,like, how do we help people just
sort of cultivate discernment?
And B, yeah, like, how do, Iguess, that's the question is,
how do you help people cultivatediscernment? Cultivate
(16:42):
discernment, you know, or how doyou expose them to the right
thinking?
Matt Segall (16:45):
You know, that's the most important question to
ask right now. Like, yeah, weall, we all, I include myself.
Need guidance when it comes topsychic and intellectual
hygiene, there are no filtersanymore, and it's not like the
mass media that used to do thefiltering for us could always be
trusted, either, but there wasat least a coherent narrative
(17:08):
that allowed us to kind of goabout doing democracy in a more
or less reasonable way, even ifthere were many shadows and
things that you know going onbehind the scenes that were that
were terrible. Now it's a totalinformation war. And you know,
these major events areoccurring. People are getting
assassinated. It feels likewe're back in the 1960s again in
(17:31):
terms of the level of politicalviolence. And who do you trust
to interpret and understand andexplain motivations? Who's
really responsible? I don't havegood answers to that, other than
be a student of history. Try tosee how you know history doesn't
(17:53):
repeat exactly, if you're aprocess philosopher. But as I
think it was, Mark Twain said,It rhymes. And so we can look to
the 1930s and 40s to understandour moment. We can look to
ancient Roman times and how, youknow, the last sort of I get.
You know, there was the BritishEmpire, but I think the Roman
Empire, the British Empire,these are examples we can look
(18:17):
back to and see how thatsituation developed and
unraveled to understand thecurrent situation with the
American Empire, but the presentis always going to surprise us.
Yeah, we don't know what's goingto happen tomorrow.
Chad Woodford (18:33):
That's true, yeah? And maybe there's nothing
you know. Well, I always thinkabout the yoga tradition, or the
yoga dantic tradition, which,you know, there's these, these
texts and these, these kind ofancient teachers who offer these
techniques for cultivatingdiscernment. And so that's like
one thing that I turn to. But,you know, it might not work for
(18:54):
everyone, but, but, yeah.
Anyways, that's two
Matt Segall (18:58):
good two good suggestions meditation practice.
I mean, if you're very easilybrought into a heightened state
of emotional reactivity bysomething you read on social
media, you're gonna have a hardtime navigating this information
ecology, so being able tomoderate your own mental
processes, which is whatmeditation helps you cultivate
(19:22):
super important and studyingsome history and yes,
philosophy,
Chad Woodford (19:27):
yeah, which you know is that maybe it's a big
ask in the age of, like, whennobody's reading anything, but,
but, yeah. I guess the otherthing, though, is maybe there's
nothing to do. Like, maybe I wasreading a quote while I was
reading part of JosephCampbell's The Hero with 1000
faces. And in that, in thatbook, he quotes from, I think it
(19:49):
was Lisa, I have it here, yeah,Arnold Toynbee, there's great
Toynbee quote that I'll read,schism in the soul, schism in
the body, Social. Rule will notbe resolved by any scheme of
return to the good old days,archaism, or by programs
guaranteed to render an ideal,projected future, Futurism, or
(20:10):
even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together
again the disintegratingelements, only birth can conquer
death, the birth, not of the oldthing again, but of something
new, kind of like you're talkingabout with process, with
process. But the idea there, Iguess, that I like, is that,
like you were kind of sayingbefore, we're going through
maybe, you know, a certain kindof death experience as a
(20:33):
society, and maybe the onlything to do is let that process
play out and and maybe, asidefrom that, try to minimize
suffering. And, you know, yeah,I mean, maybe there's not much
you can do, I guess, to correctthings until maybe people won't
wake up until things get reallybad or something. I don't know.
I don't know.
Matt Segall (20:53):
There's no question that the you know, you mentioned
Toynbee and I immediately Ithink about the role that
spirituality and religion playand motivating a civilization.
He thought that that was really,it's kind of, kind of the
opposite, opposite of theMarxist understanding of how
civilizations work, not that,you know, not that material
conditions don't matter. But Ithink there is a spiritual
(21:16):
dimension to all this. We'reconscious beings, and so the
ideas that we have aboutourselves in the world are, of
course, going to shape how webehave, how we act, how we treat
each other. And I think aboutyou mentioned the Abrahamic
faiths earlier, and howobviously they've become the
institutions that have takenform to mediate and enforce the
(21:41):
doctrines of these traditionsare quite rigid, rigid,
inflexible, and we could easilyquestion to what extent they're
actually offering real supportto the further evolution of the
human species. However, if we goback a few 1000 years again, you
know to the first century, whenthis, this dude, Jesus, is
(22:04):
alleged to have walked aroundand done some stuff the people
in that time, where they had awhole rather large menu of
spiritual, religious,philosophical options to choose
From. And there was a lot of, Iwould say cosmological pluralism
(22:25):
and uncertainty. You know,whatever we might say about
Christianity and how stale mostof the institutional churches
are today at that point,whatever it was that happened
seemed to it was like a supersaturated, saturated solution
just before crystallization, andlike Jesus did something, and
(22:48):
then all of a sudden, this newsocial movement erupts that
within a couple of centuries,has taken over the largest
empire at that point in worldhistory. And in large part the
reason Christianity has becomemore of a conservative force and
maybe limiting human evolutionin our time is because of that
(23:10):
merger with the Roman Empire.
But you know, if we fast forwardto our time, then there
similarly feels to be a lot ofcosmological uncertainty we are
in terms of a guiding worldviewfor a planetary civilization
that's trying to sort of findits sea legs. There are a lot of
(23:31):
options on the table, and itseems to me that we're just
waiting for that spark, andwhether that comes in the form
of a single person or a new kindof community or a new idea, or
some combination of all three ofthose, and other factors, I feel
like we're on the verge of somesort of major spiritual shift
(23:54):
that reorients people'sperception and motivations.
Could be 100 years away. Youknow, in world history terms, a
century, you know, is not a longtime, and we have to be patient
in order to see these thingsreally unfold. But I think, you
know, all that occurs to me justbecause you mentioned Toynbee
(24:14):
and his philosophy of history, Ithink recognizes these massive,
rather rapid transformations atthe level of consciousness that
this plays a really importantrole in how our species does its
thing on this planet. Yeah?
Chad Woodford (24:30):
Like, I like what you said about was it a super
saturated solution or whatever?
Yeah, that's interesting. It's avery optimistic way of looking
at the current situation, likethe more sort of philosophies
and ideologies that are outthere, the maybe, the better the
Chad, the greater the chances ofone of them catching hold. But
yeah, this idea of sort ofleader to take us out of the
(24:50):
mess is interesting because, isit Gavin Newsom? Because, you
know, it. Reminds me of, like,I'm so I'm reading just, just to
pull my cards on the table, likeI'm reading this new book by
Paul. Is it Paul Kingsnorth, youknow, against the machine. And
he talks about spanglers sort ofview of the way that
(25:13):
civilizations unfold, and how,like one side in his theory,
like one sign of, sort of theend times of a particular
civilization is the appearanceof a Caesar, you know, the
appearance of, like, a leaderwho is going to guide us into
the further decline, you know.
So it's like, Yeah, it'sinteresting. Like, in terms of,
(25:33):
like, thinking about a singularfigure, you know, it's like, how
do you know which way they'regoing to take us, and who that's
going to be and all that stuff,yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. It
also reminds me of this great GKChesterton quote about, like,
what you were saying about sortof the way that conservatives
and liberals have have takenthings. I think you said
(25:54):
something like, the whole modernworld is divided into
conservatives and progressives,and the business of progressives
is to, like something like,yeah, make mistakes, and the
business of conservatives is toprevent mistakes from being
corrected. I think that's whathe said, what he said, anyways,
anyways. So I think what I wantto do is move on to talking
(26:18):
about, like, some AI and some ofthese ideologies, and a little
bit greater depth. Because, youknow, one reason I wanted to
talk to you was that when I wasfinishing my Masters in the
program you had, you had turnedme on to both this sort of
concept of this test, realbundle, this, this acronym for
(26:38):
these, these Silicon Valleyideologies that are basically
transhumanism, rationalism,Effective Altruism and other
ones too. And then also, you hadpointed me to some of the
critics that are sort ofcritique, critiquing those
ideologies. And that kind ofsent me on a whole journey ever
since this is, like a year and ahalf ago. Yeah, this includes
(26:59):
the work of timnit, gebru, EmilTorres, Emily Bender, Alex
Hannah, and so, you know, partof what I'm trying to do
because, because they're all,they're all approaching it very
effectively from a sort ofcritical, like, viewpoint. A lot
of it has to do with, like,eugenics for them. And these,
yeah, these different kind of,like, almost like, almost like,
(27:21):
racist ideologies, and they'repointing to some of the problems
with transhumanism and all thatfrom that standpoint. But to me,
it still feels very sort ofsecular, rational, or, you know,
liberal in that sense. And sowhat part of what I'm trying to
do is approach it more from aphilosophical standpoint and
(27:41):
even an ensouled kind ofviewpoint, and so, yeah, so you
know, within all that, what I'vebeen thinking a lot about is the
roots of these ideologies. Sowhen you look at like the the
things that people talk about inSilicon Valley, going back to,
you know, Peter Thiel, but alsothe transhumanists and all those
(28:04):
folks that a lot of it seemsvery imbalanced and left
hemisphere of the brain kind ofthinking right. So this gets
into the work of Ian McGilchristand and also Nietzsche, of
course, you know, who talkedabout the Apollonian and the
Dionysian imbalance in society.
So, you know, a lot of what I'mthinking about is how to talk to
people about the McGilchristkind of perspective in a way
(28:28):
that's accessible, you know,because that, if you read
McGilchrist like the matter withthings is what, like 3000 pages
or something, you know, and it'sa very, very effective, very
convincing case thatessentially, ever since the
enlightenment or previous, youknow, even further back, we've
been living in this kind ofimbalanced approach to reality
and nature, which is very sortof linear, extremely logical
(28:52):
thinking in parts instead ofholes, and in terms of Like
things instead of process andall that. So, so I've been
thinking about, like, how do wetalk about that in a way that's
more accessible? And I've beenkind of playing around with this
Nietzschean idea of, like, theApollonian, you know. And so
(29:12):
I've been calling it theApollonian mind virus, or, you
know, Apollonian intelligenceand that kind of thing. And so,
you know, I'm just curious,like, to the extent that you've
been thinking about this, like,how do you think about what
these transhumanist ideologieskind of get wrong about about
the world, you know, how do youapproach that?
Matt Segall (29:35):
Yeah, I mean, I get why you would associate them
with Ian McGilchrist lefthemisphere way of attending to
the world based on what theyleave out, and their obsession
with Bayesian probabilities andthis utilitarian calculus about
the trillion lives that mightexist at some future point and
(29:56):
and in our in our history. Andso I. Think that makes a lot of
sense. But also, you know, asTorres and others who are
critiquing these, this TESCREALnest of transhumanist
ideologies, there's a kind ofreligious enthusiasm that's
driving it, too, and actuallyquite a bit of magical thinking.
(30:19):
You know, you might think that,what's his name? Not Jodorowsky.
He's a movie filmmaker,Yudkowsky. Eliza Yudkowsky,
that's his name. You know? Hesomeone like him. Might want to
say, Oh, well, consciousness issome kind of computation in the
brain. And that's a neatmetaphor that does some work for
(30:39):
us philosophically, but it'sobviously a metaphor. And if you
take it as a literal truth,it's, I think, a delusion. And
there's actually magicalthinking to imagine that
consciousness, as we experienceit, is some kind of a stream of
information that might be, say,uploaded onto anything like a
(31:02):
digital computation machine,that's magical thinking, that's
not reasoned careful, you know,logic based philosophizing or or
metaphysics, that's magicalthinking. And so there's a bit
of a mixture, you know, ofrationalism and irrationalism in
(31:22):
a lot of these philosophies. Sonot that we can easily map that
to left and right hemispheres. Ithink, you know, Ian's work is
very nuanced and grounded in theclinical data and in neurology
and a careful phenomenologicalexcavation of different modes of
(31:44):
attention. And so, you know, wecan, we can get more into detail
there. But I think overall,you're right that it is a left
hemisphere dominant orientationthat's that's driving these test
real things, even if they'realso this religious and almost
occultist type of magicalthinking. And there's a lot to
say positive about occultism andesotericism. You know, we could
(32:07):
talk about that too, but I thinkthere's, there's a
literalization of it that occursin a lot of the tech communities
where we're right on the verge,if we haven't already crossed
the Rubicon, speaking of Caesar,into AI religions, where people
literally think, Well, Goddidn't used to exist, but now I
created this super intelligence,and it is basically equivalent
(32:30):
to God, you know. And so we'regoing to get these AI calls
forming. We're getting peoplewho, I think the usual profile
would be someone who's eithervery online or already a
software engineer or somethingright imagining that their
instance of Chad GPT is awake orlive. There's some overlap. I've
(32:52):
noticed a lot of people into inthe psychedelic community, they
seem especially vulnerable tothis hallucination that not that
all Chad GPT is conscious, buttheirs is conscious because
they've figured out what to tellit, to wake it up. So we, in
some ways, we've already crossedinto that territory, which,
again, is magical thinking,right? This is Yeah,
(33:14):
rationalism, totally.
Chad Woodford (33:16):
It's interesting that you bring Yeah, thank you.
Thank you for that reminder.
Because, yeah, you're right. Itis magical thinking. It's just
an example to me of how when youstrip your when you strip like
your worldview of all sort ofmetaphysical value, and you
know, you strip all soul from orspirit from it, then if you're
(33:36):
all you're left with is sort oflike this machine metaphor and
mathematics and all that,because the human, because we
arrive, arise out of what youand I, you know, would think of
as an unsold world, world ornature. Because of that, like
you're always going to want toseek a deeper sort of meaning to
things. And that impulse isgoing to be there even if you
(33:59):
consciously think of yourselfas, you know, rationalist or
whatever. So I think that's partof why you see this sort of like
seeking, like a machine God oreternal salvation through, you
know, uploading ourconsciousness into some kind of
mathematical machine thingthat's been, you know, spread
across the cosmos or whatever.
(34:20):
You know, like these ideas arevery, sort of eschatological,
but, but it's all through themachine metaphor, which is so
such a cheap and sort ofoffering, you know, in contrast
with with and sold worldview.
So, so, yeah, that's, that'stotally right on point. Yeah,
it's just to say it's
Matt Segall (34:39):
not a surprise that someone like Peter Thiel would
be into Christianity. Right?
Because so much of transhumanismhas that same mythic structure.
And you know, good on him fornoticing that he's not inventing
something, some new worldview.
It's he's just giving the sameold Christian providential
history story a new paint job,totally. You know.
Chad Woodford (35:00):
And by the way, somebody who explores this
really well is Megan o Giblin inher wonderful book, God, human,
animal machine. So if anyone'sinterested, check that out. She
goes, she grew up in aevangelical Christian family,
and so she kind of brings herown like historical lens to the
(35:21):
problem. And yeah, so that'sbasically what you're saying.
So, yeah, totally. But yeah, themachine metaphor. I think about
that one a lot too. Actually, Icame across this great poem by
this Welsh poet R s Thomascalled other and I just want to
read that. It's only a fewlines, the machine appeared in
the distance, singing to itselfof money, its song was the web.
(35:46):
They were caught in, men andwomen together, the villages
were as flies to be suckedempty. God secreted a tear,
enough enough, he commanded. Butthe machine looked at him and
went on singing. So, you know, Ithink it's just, it's crazy to
(36:08):
me that we, everybody kind ofjust accepts the machine
metaphor, you know, without anyquestion. And I personally think
that that's a big part of theproblem right now is we've all
been kind of lulled into thisidea that, you know, life is a
machine, our mind is a machine,nature is a machine. And it's,
(36:29):
you know, it's like, even thesimulation hypothesis, right? Is
this idea that, like,everything, we're all just
inside of a giant machine, andit's just such a like,
cheapening of like, it's, it's,in a way, it's like the cheapest
metaphor we could come up with,you know. And and you can, you
can see it unfold over thehistory of of civilization,
right? Like we made clocks or,you know, and then we thought,
(36:51):
Oh, God, is a clock maker, youknow? And we made, you know,
this. And we thought, oh, thatmust be, you know. And so it's
just a reflection of the thingswe're making. It's not like
anything to do with the natureof reality, right? So anyways,
Matt Segall (37:02):
if everything is a simulation, then then nothing
is. I mean, it's and again, thesimulation hypothesis is just
reheated Gnosticism. You thinkthat you're being rational, and
this is a scientifically basedand technologically feasible
worldview, but it's literallyjust this same ancient religious
(37:22):
belief about the cosmos being akind of trap that some super
intelligence put us into, andthe whole point in that
situation is to find your wayout. And so great narcissism,
Gnosticism is reallyinteresting. Let's talk about
Gnosticism. Yeah.
Chad Woodford (37:41):
Well, because, I mean, you say what you want
about the Gnostic God, but atleast I'll take him over the
idea of, like, some engineer ina lab or something, you know,
being God, yeah,
Matt Segall (37:51):
which, again, just speaks to the importance of,
like, having some historicalknowledge, and like, to
understand what's happening inthe present, you need to have
spent a little bit of timeunderstanding the past, because
the past is feeding into thepresent, and very often again,
the present rhymes with thepast, and we can learn a lot
about the confusions and gainsome perspective on what's
(38:16):
unfolding in the present if wecan see The same structures
playing out 1000s of years ago.
Chad Woodford (38:23):
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay. Well, you know, I
want to get into AI a littlemore, because I know you also
think about that, and have havethoughts on that, because I
think, I think a lot about, likeMarshall McLuhan's idea that, I
mean, it's not exactly what hesaid, but it's basically the
idea that we shape ourtechnology, and then, in turn,
our technology shapes us right.
So because of that sort of idea,I think a lot about AI in that
(38:45):
sense of, you know, the peoplewho are making it like, the AI
that we have today is areflection, to some extent, of
the people's like, the mindsetof the people who are making it
right. And for that reason, Ithink it's so important to,
maybe try to find a way todevelop AI with different minds,
you know, but, but I'm curious,do you have thoughts on, sort of
(39:08):
like, how AI is being developed?
You know what? You know, whatis, what's the implication of AI
right now, and what can we doabout it? You know,
Matt Segall (39:20):
I increasingly think, and I'm not an expert in
the process of training largelanguage models or anything, but
from what I can tell, thisparticular approach to creating
(39:41):
what we call artificialintelligence as a sort of
placeholder term, has peaked,and it's a really valuable tool.
I think it's great for, youknow, cleaning up transcripts,
and it's more or less replacedGoogle. Goal, you know, for a
lot of things that I used to useGoogle for, but in terms of it
(40:07):
becoming conscious, no, in termsof it even becoming some kind of
general intelligence, quote,unquote, that could threaten
human life, or could, in somesense, you know, take over
control of our civilization. Idon't see that happening. I
(40:30):
think some, you know, some jobswill be replaced, and maybe
there'll be some refinementsaround the edges of the
technology that's that'savailable now. But I'm less
concerned than I may have been.
Maybe, I don't know, four orfive years ago, when this was he
was, like, three and a halfyears ago. Yeah, it was Chad GBT
35 was made public three, threeyears ago, exactly, almost
(40:53):
exactly three years ago. Yeah.
So, I mean, it's great, it's agreat tool. I don't believe much
of the hype about it anymore. Ithink a lot of there's a lot of
PR around it that is misleadingpeople and making causing some
philosophical confusion. And so,you know, yeah, I've written a
(41:15):
bit about how, in some sense,human intelligence has always
already been artificial, whichis to say, human beings are tool
users, and we've been augmentingour cognition through fire and
stone tools. Initially, youknow, just to explain fire,
(41:38):
people might recognize thatthat's a kind of technology, but
when our species is, I think itwas Homo erectus, you know, a
few million years ago, firstharnessed fire, the size of
their jaws began to shrink,shrink which and they were
eating more nutritious, calorierich food, allowing their brains
to grow. And so our very anatomyand physiology was transformed
(42:00):
as a result of this technologyof, you know, the harnessing
Chad Woodford (42:03):
of fire. And so the way we're all
transhumanists, really, thehuman,
Matt Segall (42:07):
as Nisha said, is, you know, a transitional form,
yeah, and technology, and theway that technology, our tools,
have always fed back upon us tochange us, just as much as we
use the tools to change theworld. And you know the history
of media technology inparticular, from speech, we're
already externalizing ourthoughts into waveforms in the
(42:32):
air, and then writing, and thenthe alphabet, and then
telegraph, radio, television,internet fundamentally
transformed human consciousness.
And so for people to freak outlike, oh my god, llms, this is
this is going to change usforever. Yes, and like, Get with
the program. That's just thenature of human existence for
the last few million years. Notto say we shouldn't be cautious,
(42:54):
but our intelligence has alwaysbeen in a deep, intimate
relationship with the sorts oftools that we're using, right?
Chad Woodford (43:04):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I would love, I mean,totally agree. And I would just
like it if the AI companieswould sort of like, be honest,
you know, instead of saying thatwe're creating like a super
intelligent creature or, youknow, a machine God or whatever,
just tell us that you're makinga cool tool that is able to, you
know, regurgitate large volumesof text in unique ways. And you
(43:26):
know, they'd be a lot, I thinkwe'd be all be a lot better off,
you know, because otherwise youhave people that are, you know,
marrying their Chad GPT, or, youknow, worshiping it, or
whatever. So, yeah, but youknow, I use it too. I use it for
so many things, research, someimage generation. I've created,
like in Gemini, you can createthese gems. I've created an Alan
(43:50):
Watts gem that's quiteentertaining and good. So, you
know, maybe I don't know ifyou've created a white head
Whitehead gem, but you
Matt Segall (43:59):
could try that a gem. I haven't used Gemini.
What? What is that? Well, it's
Chad Woodford (44:04):
similar to Chad GPT. So in chat GPT, I think
they call them gpts, and kindof, you can train like a little
sort of AI that you tell it likeyou are, you know, you're
knowledgeable in these things,and you are speaking in the
style and yada yada yada. Andso, yeah, it's fun. So it's a
fun, you know, diversion.
Matt Segall (44:23):
But, yeah, exactly, and that's, that's the real
threat, I think, is the for thesame reason that any other for
profit corporation within ourmarket economy can be a danger,
because corporations, because ofcharter law, function as
exploitation and externalizationmachines, which inevitably is
(44:45):
going to harm this social thissociety and and the earth,
because they are legallyobligated not to pay attention
to social harms and ecologicalharms and to just raise profit
for shareholders. And so I'm.
Not anti capitalist. I think wecan change corporate charter law
and still have a free marketsuch that these other things get
factored in, but these companiesin charge of this technology are
(45:07):
what's dangerous, not thetechnology.
Chad Woodford (45:12):
So, yeah, that's yeah. I mean, Ezra Klein made
that point a few months ago inhis podcast. I think he said
something about how the realrisk of AI is not the technology
itself, but the fact that it'scoupled with capitalism, or
with, you know, yeah, thecorporate kind of ethos, yeah.
Matt Segall (45:28):
And so, you know, we have a administration in the
White House that's invited allof these tech Titans, making
sure that they all know, if youwant, you know, legislation
that's going to help you dobusiness. I need some gold bars
on my desk. You know,
Chad Woodford (45:45):
literally, that's what Tim Cook gave that's what
Matt Segall (45:48):
or Tim Apple, as Trump likes him, dropped a gold
bar on his desk and said, Thankyou, Mr. President and so. And
also, I heard Trump saysomething, you know, one of the
issues is intellectual propertyrights with these large language
models and image generationtechnologies. And I heard Trump
(46:09):
say, like, well, sorry, it'sjust too hard to figure out how
to pay the people that would,you know, whose data was used to
train this stuff. Sorry. It'slike, I don't think it's too
hard to figure it out. We justneed the political will to
demand that these companiesfigure it out, you know, yeah.
So yeah, there are ways. Thereare ways that the the economic
model driving this Yeah, again,is what's dangerous here and
(46:31):
what's potentially exploitativeof human creativity that can be
addressed in a different type ofeconomy.
Chad Woodford (46:39):
Yeah, exactly, yeah. That brings you back to
like. It reminds me of somethingyou said earlier. You were
talking about the magicalthinking, and that reminded me
of this experience I had back inApril. I went, I went to a
retreat which was a bunch of,like, was a bunch of Silicon
Valley people who were gettingtogether to sort of meditate on
and contemplate the future of AIin a more kind of conscious way,
(47:02):
or more spiritual way. And whatI found fascinating about it was
that a majority of them, firstof all, believe that that humans
are just algorithm algorithmsrunning on software, which I was
a little surprised about. Andthen also that like they were so
willing to sort of see, likethey saw AI as this, this other
(47:24):
kind of intelligence that istrying to communicate with us,
you know, through the machines.
You know, when I asked them, Howdo you know, or how would they,
how would that even work, ifthere was, like a spiritual
entity that was trying tocommunicate with us through AI,
like, how would that work? Andthey said something like, you
know, quantum, something,something and, and so, you know,
it feels a little bit like, notthe most rigorous thinking first
of all, but also it, what itmade me think about was this
(47:46):
idea that goes back quite aways, but, like, yeah, this idea
that, like, from, from mystandpoint, AI, is emerging from
a very kind of extractive, youknow, consumptive sort of
business model and, and it'salmost like infused with it, you
(48:09):
know. And if you're going tostart accepting, if you're going
to consider yourself to be sortof conscious and spiritual and,
but also accepting that the AItechnology we have today is a
spiritual being that'scommunicating with us. I feel
like that's like, this very likezizekian, like, sort of like
phenomenon of where, you know,capitalism just endlessly, sort
(48:31):
of subsumes all attempts tosubvert it, right? And so I it
really troubled, it deeplytroubled me because I was like,
Here are these people who arequite successful in the Silicon
Valley business world and havebeen studying Buddhism, or
whatever it is, and yet they'reso willing to embrace these
ideas about the metaphysicalnature of AI technology, which I
(48:55):
thought was very strange. Yeah.
Matt Segall (49:00):
I mean, I mentioned occultism earlier, and I think
it's been interesting to seesoftware engineers and people
immersed in the tech sectorreaching into demonology and
stuff for language and conceptsto understand what they're
creating. And those aren'tinappropriate analogies to make,
(49:26):
and they might even be more thananalogies. And so, you know,
metaphysically, if I reflect onit, I think granted, there might
be some hand waving aboutquantum tunneling or whatever
that's allowing entities,spiritual entities to teleport
into our earthly world throughthe AIS that we're creating. But
(49:47):
you know, this biologist atTufts University, Michael Levin,
is very much exploring thepossibility that there is a
realm of he calls it thePlatonic morphospace, and that
cellular. Are collectives thatproduce the body plans of
animals are, in some sense,tapping into that morphospace
and ingressing not only form,but he thinks agency into the
(50:13):
visible, physical world. And soI think Mike Levin also suspects
that something similar could begoing on with various approaches
to artificial intelligence thatyou know. So, so there are
people, I think are reasonableand really intelligent who would
would give some credence tothis, this notion. And, you
know, I think we just have to beaware that we're playing with
(50:38):
fire again and that there's anaive view of technology, which
I think it's good. A lot of theAR AI alarmists are at least
aware, in this case, with thistechnology, that it could run
away from us and have unforeseeneffects. That's always been true
of any technology. It was trueof stones that we started
chipping into spears. We drovemany species of animal to
(51:01):
extinction because of that newtechnology.
Chad Woodford (51:04):
He also, you know, nuclear weapons, you know.
Matt Segall (51:09):
And you know, you mentioned during my intro that
I'm interested in the work ofsomeone like Rudolf Steiner, and
in terms of understanding ourmoment, you know. And he's a
vast thinker, and we don't havetime to get into all the
details, but he foresaw, hethought spiritual beings were
real. Christ, Buddha, Krishna,also, these two beings, which,
(51:30):
for him, kind of personify evil.
There's Lucifer, which is thisbeing of light that tends to
lead us into a kind of selfindulgent mysticism, where we
just want to float away from theEarth. And then there's this
other pole of evil that hecalled Arman, which is more
about materialism andreductionism and really getting
so intellectually grounded downthat we were incapable of
(51:57):
imagination. We think there's nosuch thing as a soul, and become
possessed by the idea that wecould download consciousness
onto computers, that would allbe what Steiner calls our minds
influence, right? So I thinkjust as an imaginative exercise
to understand some of thepsychological forces at play,
bracketing whether or not theseare real spiritual beings with
(52:19):
metaphysical power. I think, youknow, we can learn a lot from
Steiner's account of Ahriman andwhat's happening in this test
Creel set of ideologies and thea lot of the PR around
artificial intelligence andtranshumanism and stuff. The
danger is that we become soconvinced that we are just
(52:41):
algorithms running on a braincomputer that, you know,
Steiner's point aboutmaterialism is that it's not
simply that it's false from aphilosophical point of view,
it's that it what's dangerousabout materialism is that it
makes itself True. In otherwords, people who think of
themselves as brain computersrunning algorithms
(53:07):
really do then begin to operatein that way, right?
One of the things that I thinkfollows from a process
orientation, which I think Iwould include Steiner as the as
a process philosopher, whateverwe think of as the soul or
consciousness, it's not asubstance that's just ready made
and given and like there youwe're actually involved in a
(53:29):
process of soul making, momentby moment, day by day, and the
sorts of ideas that we considertrue and that motivate us change
the very structure of our soul,of our inner life and our
consciousness, right? And sothat's what he means by Well,
materialism makes itself true.
If you think materialisticthoughts, you really do become
kind of lodged in thisdeterministic mode of thought
(53:53):
and consciousness. You becomemore mechanistic. And so it's a
real participatory vision. It'slike, how we think about
ourselves actually istransforming what we are.
Chad Woodford (54:07):
Yeah, yeah. I love that. I love that. Yeah.
It's funny. I hadn't thoughtabout Steiner in a while, but
yeah, I agree. I agree. You knowwhat I feel like, if you could
sum up my personal philosophy,it's like, it's that the
universe comes at you. Andarchetypes, you know. And I
think those, those, even thosekind of bipolar like, you know,
(54:29):
was it called Ahriman?
Matt Segall (54:30):
What's it called Ahriman? Which is a name he
borrows from Zoroastrianism,
Chad Woodford (54:33):
yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's a I think thosearchetypes totally exist. And,
and, and, yeah, you know, itreminds me of the work, of
course, of young and Hillman andall that too. But, but, yeah, I
totally agree that we do, we docreate, you know, we're co
creating, co creating reality,right with everybody else and
(54:54):
everything else. And, yeah, Imean. I don't know I could take
that in so many directions, but,but yeah, you know, from an
idealist standpoint, in termsof, like consciousness and all
that we idealist, I think wouldsay that only living organisms
are able or capable of havingtrue, sort of, like
(55:17):
phenomenological consciousness.
But you know that, in terms ofMichael Levin, like I've
encountered, I've sort of bumpedinto him briefly in several
places. I feel like he's poppingup a lot lately, and I don't
fully, I don't fully understand,like, I don't, I'm not familiar
with his work, but it gives methe sense that he is kind of,
it's almost like if, if whathe's saying is true, it's like a
(55:39):
bridge. Maybe it bridges alittle bit this, this kind of
materialist and and moreidealist worldviews, right? Like
he's sort of finding, like amiddle ground there.
Matt Segall (55:51):
That's true. That's fair. I think that's fair. He'll
refer to himself as a pan Psych.
Is sometimes he seems, he seemsvery willing to find points of
connection with non materialist,non physicalist approaches. So,
but he's still, and he's tryingto recruit philosophers to help
him figure this out. He's still,I think, not sure what is the
(56:13):
ontology implied by his science,because he's very much an
empiricist, and he wants to showhis work in the lab and say,
here's what we can do with theseideas, not just, aren't these
ideas cool, right? So he'sreally grounded in experimental
work, yeah,
Chad Woodford (56:28):
isn't he building like biological machines, in
some sense, like
Matt Segall (56:31):
he they're living cells, but he calls them
anthropots. He'll scrape someepithelial cells from a human,
from someone in the lab, and putthem in a petri dish. And these
are cells specialized to, youknow, be in our throat, but they
and they have the full humangenome, but in that new
environment, they start behavingin totally novel ways and
(56:55):
forming associations with eachother and doing things that
there's nothing in their genesthat could have determined that
they would behave this way. Andso he's really interested in the
sources of form and agency inbiology that cannot be sourced
in the genome, and forexperimentally verifiable
reasons, that there's some othersource of form that's involved
(57:16):
here, he talks about bioelectricfields as one example of a
source of form that hasn't it'sbeen under explored and in the
history of modern biology. Sohe's doing really interesting
work that does have applicationbeyond biology into tech and AI
and how we think about that too.
Chad Woodford (57:33):
Yeah, I'll have to check out his stuff. Yeah, it
sounds really fascinating. Itsounds it reminds me of Rupert
Sheldrake a little bit, butmaybe it's sympathetic to it, or
adjacent,
Matt Segall (57:45):
adjacent synthetic in resonance, I think so.
Chad Woodford (57:47):
Yeah, okay, okay, cool. Well, let's see. Let's,
let's finish with an easyquestion, what do you think
from, you know, from a kind ofphilosophical standpoint, we
touched on this briefly before.
But like, you know, what is thesolution to our current
political division?
Matt Segall (58:07):
There's no, there's there's no solution. The
solution is transformation. Imean, I, I'm honestly, quite
dismayed about it. I find itdifficult to speak. I feel
compelled to speak into currentevents and what's happening, and
(58:30):
I I'm honestly trying to do mybest to speak across the
differences and to not just fallinto an easy polarization. On
the other hand, I just keepdiscovering that no matter how
balanced I try to be and saying,like, that extremes bad, and
that extreme is bad too, andpeople get upset on either side
(58:54):
with me. So it's like I it's notthat I just need to get along
with everyone. It's that I'mincreasingly worried that
there's no bridge, there's nobasis whatsoever for even
sharing a basic sense of whatthe facts are, much less how to
interpret the facts. And so it'sworrying. It's very worrisome.
(59:16):
But I do trust the process,which is to say, again, as a
student of history, I trust thedeep structure of human
consciousness and the archetypaldynamics that are at play to
lure us forward into a morebeautiful future. And it could
(59:37):
be that in the interim, thingsare going to get really messy
and chaotic and even violent. Imean, we don't have to say could
be that things are violent now,and that's a future of history.
But again, I really do have afaith in the human in the human
(59:58):
spirit and evolution. Isdifficult and without death and
suffering and the resistancethat that you know, various
forms of obstacles and even evilplays in human evolution like we
don't evolve. So in that sense,Everything's going according to
(01:00:22):
plan.
Chad Woodford (01:00:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I like that. It's Good answer.
Good answer. It's hard. It ishard. It's It's hard because
there's not much you can saythat's not going to upset
somebody or further polarizethings or whatnot. It's like,
it's almost like, we're caught.
We're caught in, like, a sort ofpolitical, ideological catch 22
or or double blind. Doubleblind, where you can't just like
everything you say is just sortof Yeah, makes it worse in some
(01:00:45):
way. I don't know it's verystrange, but I
Matt Segall (01:00:49):
will say it's does seem to me that the two the loud
extremes on right and left,let's say are, it seems clear to
me in a codependentrelationship, yeah, they are,
that's true, calling each otherforth. And I do still think most
of us, what's scary about ourtime is that more and more
(01:01:10):
people are getting sort ofcaptured at the extremes, but
most people are still able to bereasonable and are not captured,
you know. And so I try to speakinto that middle ground where
people are trying to holdattention, but the extremes are
(01:01:30):
in a codependent relationship.
And those of us who who are ableto struggle to not get captured
by one of the extremes need toact as relationship therapists,
you know, or sometimes thetherapist, couples counselor,
has to say, I think you guysneed to get a divorce, you know,
(01:01:50):
I'm open to that too. But yeah,we just, I think we, we need to
own our shit.
Chad Woodford (01:01:58):
Yeah, I agree. I agree. I agree. Well, you know,
this is, this is why I likehaving you on the podcast,
because you always bring in sucha sort of nuanced and artful way
of approaching things andanswering questions. You know,
everything is very well, youknow, thoughtful. So I really
appreciate that. Do you beforewe go, do you have anything
(01:02:22):
that's sort of like you'reactively working on now that you
want to talk about or promote oranything you know, where should
people go to kind of learn moreabout you?
Matt Segall (01:02:31):
Yeah, I'm on sub stack, my footnotes, the PLATO
blog, on and on YouTube. I'vegot a number of pots on the
stove. You know, very interestedin Michael Levin's work and the
philosophy of biology. Got a fewthings I'm working on there,
(01:02:54):
nature of consciousness. I mean,I'm thinking about how to link
together. You know, the specialsciences. It's most of my
attention is geared towards,like, okay, life exists. Minds
exist. What does that tell usabout the nature of the
universe? I'm always involved infinding some sort of a through
(01:03:16):
line, you know, connecting thedots there, but yeah, people can
see my latest stuff on substack.
Chad Woodford (01:03:26):
Okay, yeah, and I'll drop some links in the in
the show notes and all that too.
So, yeah, cool. Well, thank youso much, Matt. This has been a
fun conversation, and I've beenI feel enlightened so, so thank
you. All right, well, thanksagain. Take care, man, you.
All right, welcome Matt. Good to be here
(00:02):
with you. Chad, I'm really happyto have you here. I'm gonna I'm
gonna jump right in with yourbio, and then we can start the
conversation. So Matthew DavidSiegel, PhD, is a
transdisciplinary philosopherand associate professor in the
philosophy cosmology andconsciousness program at
California Institute of integralstudies in San Francisco. His
work bridges process relationalmetaphysics with contemporary
(00:25):
science and spirituality,drawing inspiration from
thinkers such as Alfred NorthWhitehead, Goethe and Rudolf
Steiner. Siegel's scholarshipchallenges dualistic and
mechanistic paradigms andinvites a renewed integration
between the natural sciences andhumanities. I got to experience
this when I was in his classes,when I was in the master's
(00:46):
program at the philosophycosmology and consciousness
program. So I can, I can attestto the validity of all that.
He's also the author of a couplebooks, including physics of the
world soul, which we read in oneof his classes. And I can highly
recommend in the book, hesituates Whitehead's philosophy
of organism within the contextof contemporary scientific
cosmology, engaging withrelativity, quantum evolutionary
(01:10):
and complexity theories toadvocate for an unsold
interpretation of the universe.
And on the topic of an installedinterpretation of the universe,
I just want to say a few morewords about the kind of the
mission of the program that thatMatt teaches in, and the one I
just finished last year, I gotmy master's last year in, which
is in a nutshell, and maybe,maybe you can add to this once
(01:33):
we get into it. But in anutshell, the mission of the
program is to transformindividuals in society through
this kind of ensouled worldviewperspective, and just to say a
little bit about their statedmission, which it's to open our
consciousness through learningand imagination to those
creative and evolutionaryenergies suffusing the Earth,
(01:54):
the universe and the deeppsyche, and to participate fully
in the regeneration of humancommunities and their enveloping
life systems. And, you know, itdraws from the deep wells of
philosophical and spiritualwisdom to bring forth a profound
vision of a vibrant planetaryera. So this to me, like when I
was considering matriculatingwith the program, this to me,
(02:18):
was so exciting and so unique.
And I feel like PCC, thisphilosophy, cosmology and
consciousness program is maybe,like, you know, singular in the
world. I don't know. It's one ofthose rare academic programs
that is both academicallyrigorous, but also is sort of
pushing the envelope in terms ofwhat's sort of valid subject
(02:40):
matter for academic inquiry, andwhat can be, you know, explored.
And I feel like, you know, it's,it's so necessary right now with
everything that's happening inthe world. And I just, yeah, I
just can't say enough goodthings about this program. I'm
not, you know, trying to sellyou on it, but, but it's a great
place, and I really, reallyvalued my time there. So, so,
yeah, so that's a little bitabout Matt, a little bit about
(03:02):
program he's a professor in. AndI wanted to start by kind of
getting into a little bit ofyour work, Matt, and the
philosophy that you write andtalk about, which is essentially
process philosophy, right? Wouldyou say,
Matt Segall (03:18):
Yeah, process short of description, yeah. Good place
to start.
Chad Woodford (03:23):
And, you know, a lot of my listeners and viewers
probably aren't familiar withthat so much, so I just wanted
to, kind of like set the tableand just briefly describe that
or talk about that. One thingthat I find entertaining as a
philosopher is the ways thatphilosophers like to, kind of
like endlessly refine and sortof differentiate their
philosophy versus other people'sphilosophy, and then come up
(03:44):
with new labels and that kind ofthing, right? So, you know, we
had pantheism for a while, andthen more recently, we have
panpsychism. And of course, isidealism and and, and then
panentheism is sort of like afurther kind of gloss on
panpsychism as I understand it.
And so I think, would you saythat process philosophy is pan
atheistic, or how would you sortof couch
Matt Segall (04:11):
that there are many process philosophers who are
also atheist, or at least Non,non theist. So I wouldn't want
to while I, you know, I wouldsay panentheism is probably a
term I would be comfortablewearing, and there that's a long
(04:32):
conversation unpack exactly whatthat means. But I wouldn't want
to claim that process philosophyas such, necessarily is
identical to or leads one topanentheism or pantheism or
theism. I think there are waysof being a process. Philosopher
like Nietzsche, for example,there are many contemporary
(04:55):
Whitehead Ian's who inherit theidea of process as. Opposed to
substance, but don't like histheology, and try to fully
eliminate and scrub clean fromhis work any residue of the
theological right. And they canstill be process oriented
(05:16):
without that. But for me,personally, I think process
philosophy allowed me to recoversome sort of theistic
understanding, the pan andtheistic understanding. Whereas,
had I not been exposed toprocess thought, I don't know
that, I would have been temptedby the theist a theist
(05:38):
orientation, right? And then getinto why that might be
Chad Woodford (05:40):
right? Yeah, I my personal background is that I
grew up Catholic and that I wasan atheist for a while, and then
I got into more Easternphilosophy, and, like, the yoga
Danta tradition and all that andso. And then when I was in law
school, I got really into thehistory of Western philosophy
and and so, like, I come at itfrom my own unique perspective,
(06:03):
which is that, you know, like, Ithink for a long time I felt
like religion is bad and, youknow, so anything that's like
theology would probably havetriggered me at some point, you
know. And so it's justinteresting to kind of try to
talk about this stuff in a waythat is not going to result in
excess, excess, like,ideological baggage around these
(06:23):
terms and that kind of thing,right? So maybe we should just
explain, like, for people whodon't know, because this is sort
of a general audience kind ofchannel, like process philosophy
was new to me when I when Ientered the program at PCC. And
so how would you sort ofdescribe it to somebody who
doesn't know that much about,like, you know, Whitehead or the
history of philosophy and stuff,you know, like, what's a simple
(06:47):
way to, kind of, like, explainit to people?
Matt Segall (06:49):
Well, process philosophy is usually said to
have started with this ancientGreek, pre Socratic philosopher
named Heraclitus, who saideverything flows and that you
cannot step into the same rivertwice. And that basic sentiment
(07:09):
that you know to philosophize,we're always going to need to
begin in the present, and thatthe present is perpetually
perishing into an open future.
That realization is it eruptsout of our direct encounter with
experience and process.
Philosophers think we need tostay with that experience rather
(07:33):
than rush to find some source offoundation that would be fixed
and unchanging and static, wherewe might anchor our reflections
on the nature of realityprocess. Philosophers say, Well,
if we're going to talk aboutreality really, we should always
keep in mind that it is a term Ilike to use, CReality. There's a
(07:57):
creative process that's alwaysunderway. So reality is again,
never the same twice, just likeHeraclitus river. And so a lot
spills out from that sort ofpremise, the basic orientation
of a process philosophy. Butthat's the basic starting point,
right?
Chad Woodford (08:17):
Okay, that's, yeah, that's great. I mean, I
like that. I feel like it's alittle bit of a foreshadowing of
where we may end up in thisconversation, which is talking
about Ian McGilchrist and thebrain hemispheres, but, but,
yeah, it's like, it's a goodreminder, because I feel like so
much of western philosophy thatcame after that, like after
Plato and after all, that was,was not that right? It was, it
(08:39):
was kind of, it was moreabstracted, it was more
rational. It was more sort ofremoved from immediate
experience. And this idea offlow and everything was kind of
anathema too, especially likeonce you hit, you know, Newton
and the Enlightenment all that,then, you know, then the idea of
flow and process kind of fellaway, right? So, so I think it's
(09:00):
really crucial, and it's such apregnant time for that to be for
that to be reintroduced or to betalking about that. So we'll
come back to that in a second.
But I wanted to jump to the roleof philosophy in sort of
mainstream culture or in ourpresent time, because I feel
like it's a time, like it's atime of ideological ferment. I
think we can all agree, right?
(09:22):
And, you know, especiallybecause of AI and what's
happening in Silicon Valley andwhat's happening in politics, to
me, it all feels kind ofconnected. And before we started
recording, we were talking abouthow Peter Thiel is doing this
four part lecture series in SanFrancisco right now about the
Antichrist. And I just, to me,it seems like a very strange,
(09:43):
even bizarre, like time to bealive, because these ideas are
kind of reaching the mainstream.
These ideas, what you know,whether it's transhumanism or
techno Christianity or the darkenlightenment, you know, these
are all like being. Takenseriously and presenting what I
feel is both a challenge and anopportunity for other folks,
(10:06):
like you know, for like us orwhoever, to hopefully bring like
a different perspective, right?
So, because a lot of what'shappening, I feel is there's
this false choice being offeredby these, people I mentioned, or
by people like even like the NewAtheists or Sam Harris, there's
a false choice between secularrationalism or physicalism,
(10:29):
scientism, and then sort oftraditional, Abrahamic faiths.
But there's no sort of, likethird way. And I feel like a lot
of what's beautiful about thephilosophy cosmology and
consciousness program and yourwork and and all that is that
it, it offers a third way, in asense of, you know, we don't
have to choose between sort ofscience and religion. We can,
(10:51):
sort of, we can bring in processphilosophy or different, you
know, Eastern traditions, orwhat, whatever it is. And so I
guess, having said all that youknow, do you see this as a time
of maybe increasing relevance ofphilosophy generally and and how
(11:12):
do you see the role ofphilosophers in potentially
shifting our share sharedworldview, that's a big
question. But yeah,
Matt Segall (11:22):
yeah, I think we're in a really pregnant moment,
precisely because of how chaoticit is. And it's pregnant in the
sense that we're betweenstories, as Thomas Berry would
put it, or between cosmologies,the old say world view of
(11:46):
whichever level we want toarticulate it from say, the
liberal political world order,like is broken down, the myth of
progress, where, through Thespread of democracy and
capitalism and technology,things are just going to get
better and better. Very fewpeople believe that anymore. I
(12:08):
mean, there's still a lot ofpeople who do, but it's
increasingly being called intoquestion. And what is the
alternative myth for ourcivilization? The alternative
sort of motivating story thatdrives us to work together. I
don't know. Nobody knows. And soPeter Thiel has his idea. He's
(12:29):
within the Maga orbit. But evenwithin Maga and the Trump
umbrella, there's a variety ofcompeting factions in terms of
political opposition. TheDemocrats are a bunch of
chickens running around withtheir heads cut off. There's
various forms of progressive andleft wing political philosophies
(12:49):
that are constantly infighting,and so it's no it's not clear
who's going to capture the flag.
And in that context, I thinkphilosophers and philosophy has
an increased importance, right?
Because we're going back tofirst principles we're really
trying to understand. Okay,well, what is human nature
(13:11):
anyways? And what are wesupposed to be doing here on
this planet? What is the natureof this universe that has
brought forth creatures capableof even asking about their own
nature and organizing acivilization? Everything now is
on the table. And I think tolook at a historical period that
would be a little bit like ours.
It's a bit like the first fewcenturies of the first
(13:34):
millennium, when you know theRoman Empire was was in place.
But by the third or fourthcentury, like it's starting to
begin its collapse. And I thinkthe American empire may be
pretty far along in its collapseright now. And at that time in
the Mediterranean, and, youknow, in the Roman world, there
(13:58):
were all these competingphilosophies and schools. There
was Plato's Academy, Aristotle'slyceum. There were the Stoics,
the Epicureans, the skeptics,and they all had very different
conceptions of what the humanbeing is, what is the good life?
How are we to be orientingourselves? And the Roman Empire
was so large and seemed so likecivic life that was at such a
(14:25):
gigantic scale, I think a lot ofpeople feel that way about the
nature of our globalcivilization right now. People
began increase as that,especially as that global system
began to break down, and ournational systems begin to break
down, and people are losingtrust in government. People are
turning inward and beginning toexplore their own consciousness.
(14:46):
Sometimes this leads toconspiratorial thinking as sort
of mass media and legitimateoutlets of information are no
longer available. People createtheir own versions of their own
explanations for what's what'sgoing on, who the big players
and movers and shakers in theworld are, but also, you know,
(15:08):
people start exploring their owninner life. And while philosophy
might be dying or already deadwithin academia, in terms of the
ancient sense of philosophy as away of life where you can ask
the big questions and findmeaning, it seems to me, to be
flourishing outside of theacademic context. People are
really hungry for philosophicaldirection and and insight. So
(15:34):
it's both the best of times andthe worst of times.
Chad Woodford (15:40):
Yeah for Yeah, but, you know, yeah, I agree
with that. And I guess thequestion that I'm constantly
asking myself is because you'resaying that people, people are
sort of, like, maybe a more opento new ideas, or, like, looking
inwards, searching, searchingand seeking. But you know, it's
so easy for them to, you know,when you look at who's
(16:01):
dominating the podcast charts,for example, or, you know, even
best sellers or YouTube orwhatever, it's so easy to sort
of like, you know, encounterthese kind of false peaks, so to
speak, like, you know, likeyou'll just see like, oh, this
popular guy, you know, JordanPeterson, or whoever you know.
Like, you can encounter somebodyand think, like, Oh, this guy
(16:22):
seems to have wisdom. He seemsto be offering, like, a new
alternative philosophy orwhatever. But maybe it's not,
you know, the best thing foreveryone. So, like, how do you
how does a person, I guess, a,like, how do we help people just
sort of cultivate discernment?
And B, yeah, like, how do, Iguess, that's the question is,
how do you help people cultivatediscernment? Cultivate
(16:42):
discernment, you know, or how doyou expose them to the right
thinking?
Matt Segall (16:45):
You know, that's the most important question to
ask right now. Like, yeah, weall, we all, I include myself.
Need guidance when it comes topsychic and intellectual
hygiene, there are no filtersanymore, and it's not like the
mass media that used to do thefiltering for us could always be
trusted, either, but there wasat least a coherent narrative
(17:08):
that allowed us to kind of goabout doing democracy in a more
or less reasonable way, even ifthere were many shadows and
things that you know going onbehind the scenes that were that
were terrible. Now it's a totalinformation war. And you know,
these major events areoccurring. People are getting
assassinated. It feels likewe're back in the 1960s again in
(17:31):
terms of the level of politicalviolence. And who do you trust
to interpret and understand andexplain motivations? Who's
really responsible? I don't havegood answers to that, other than
be a student of history. Try tosee how you know history doesn't
(17:53):
repeat exactly, if you're aprocess philosopher. But as I
think it was, Mark Twain said,It rhymes. And so we can look to
the 1930s and 40s to understandour moment. We can look to
ancient Roman times and how, youknow, the last sort of I get.
You know, there was the BritishEmpire, but I think the Roman
Empire, the British Empire,these are examples we can look
(18:17):
back to and see how thatsituation developed and
unraveled to understand thecurrent situation with the
American Empire, but the presentis always going to surprise us.
Yeah, we don't know what's goingto happen tomorrow.
Chad Woodford (18:33):
That's true, yeah? And maybe there's nothing
you know. Well, I always thinkabout the yoga tradition, or the
yoga dantic tradition, which,you know, there's these, these
texts and these, these kind ofancient teachers who offer these
techniques for cultivatingdiscernment. And so that's like
one thing that I turn to. But,you know, it might not work for
(18:54):
everyone, but, but, yeah.
Anyways, that's two
Matt Segall (18:58):
good two good suggestions meditation practice.
I mean, if you're very easilybrought into a heightened state
of emotional reactivity bysomething you read on social
media, you're gonna have a hardtime navigating this information
ecology, so being able tomoderate your own mental
processes, which is whatmeditation helps you cultivate
(19:22):
super important and studyingsome history and yes,
philosophy,
Chad Woodford (19:27):
yeah, which you know is that maybe it's a big
ask in the age of, like, whennobody's reading anything, but,
but, yeah. I guess the otherthing, though, is maybe there's
nothing to do. Like, maybe I wasreading a quote while I was
reading part of JosephCampbell's The Hero with 1000
faces. And in that, in thatbook, he quotes from, I think it
(19:49):
was Lisa, I have it here, yeah,Arnold Toynbee, there's great
Toynbee quote that I'll read,schism in the soul, schism in
the body, Social. Rule will notbe resolved by any scheme of
return to the good old days,archaism, or by programs
guaranteed to render an ideal,projected future, Futurism, or
(20:10):
even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together
again the disintegratingelements, only birth can conquer
death, the birth, not of the oldthing again, but of something
new, kind of like you're talkingabout with process, with
process. But the idea there, Iguess, that I like, is that,
like you were kind of sayingbefore, we're going through
maybe, you know, a certain kindof death experience as a
(20:33):
society, and maybe the onlything to do is let that process
play out and and maybe, asidefrom that, try to minimize
suffering. And, you know, yeah,I mean, maybe there's not much
you can do, I guess, to correctthings until maybe people won't
wake up until things get reallybad or something. I don't know.
I don't know.
Matt Segall (20:53):
There's no question that the you know, you mentioned
Toynbee and I immediately Ithink about the role that
spirituality and religion playand motivating a civilization.
He thought that that was really,it's kind of, kind of the
opposite, opposite of theMarxist understanding of how
civilizations work, not that,you know, not that material
conditions don't matter. But Ithink there is a spiritual
(21:16):
dimension to all this. We'reconscious beings, and so the
ideas that we have aboutourselves in the world are, of
course, going to shape how webehave, how we act, how we treat
each other. And I think aboutyou mentioned the Abrahamic
faiths earlier, and howobviously they've become the
institutions that have takenform to mediate and enforce the
(21:41):
doctrines of these traditionsare quite rigid, rigid,
inflexible, and we could easilyquestion to what extent they're
actually offering real supportto the further evolution of the
human species. However, if we goback a few 1000 years again, you
know to the first century, whenthis, this dude, Jesus, is
(22:04):
alleged to have walked aroundand done some stuff the people
in that time, where they had awhole rather large menu of
spiritual, religious,philosophical options to choose
From. And there was a lot of, Iwould say cosmological pluralism
(22:25):
and uncertainty. You know,whatever we might say about
Christianity and how stale mostof the institutional churches
are today at that point,whatever it was that happened
seemed to it was like a supersaturated, saturated solution
just before crystallization, andlike Jesus did something, and
(22:48):
then all of a sudden, this newsocial movement erupts that
within a couple of centuries,has taken over the largest
empire at that point in worldhistory. And in large part the
reason Christianity has becomemore of a conservative force and
maybe limiting human evolutionin our time is because of that
(23:10):
merger with the Roman Empire.
But you know, if we fast forwardto our time, then there
similarly feels to be a lot ofcosmological uncertainty we are
in terms of a guiding worldviewfor a planetary civilization
that's trying to sort of findits sea legs. There are a lot of
(23:31):
options on the table, and itseems to me that we're just
waiting for that spark, andwhether that comes in the form
of a single person or a new kindof community or a new idea, or
some combination of all three ofthose, and other factors, I feel
like we're on the verge of somesort of major spiritual shift
(23:54):
that reorients people'sperception and motivations.
Could be 100 years away. Youknow, in world history terms, a
century, you know, is not a longtime, and we have to be patient
in order to see these thingsreally unfold. But I think, you
know, all that occurs to me justbecause you mentioned Toynbee
(24:14):
and his philosophy of history, Ithink recognizes these massive,
rather rapid transformations atthe level of consciousness that
this plays a really importantrole in how our species does its
thing on this planet. Yeah?
Chad Woodford (24:30):
Like, I like what you said about was it a super
saturated solution or whatever?
Yeah, that's interesting. It's avery optimistic way of looking
at the current situation, likethe more sort of philosophies
and ideologies that are outthere, the maybe, the better the
Chad, the greater the chances ofone of them catching hold. But
yeah, this idea of sort ofleader to take us out of the
(24:50):
mess is interesting because, isit Gavin Newsom? Because, you
know, it. Reminds me of, like,I'm so I'm reading just, just to
pull my cards on the table, likeI'm reading this new book by
Paul. Is it Paul Kingsnorth, youknow, against the machine. And
he talks about spanglers sort ofview of the way that
(25:13):
civilizations unfold, and how,like one side in his theory,
like one sign of, sort of theend times of a particular
civilization is the appearanceof a Caesar, you know, the
appearance of, like, a leaderwho is going to guide us into
the further decline, you know.
So it's like, Yeah, it'sinteresting. Like, in terms of,
(25:33):
like, thinking about a singularfigure, you know, it's like, how
do you know which way they'regoing to take us, and who that's
going to be and all that stuff,yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. It
also reminds me of this great GKChesterton quote about, like,
what you were saying about sortof the way that conservatives
and liberals have have takenthings. I think you said
(25:54):
something like, the whole modernworld is divided into
conservatives and progressives,and the business of progressives
is to, like something like,yeah, make mistakes, and the
business of conservatives is toprevent mistakes from being
corrected. I think that's whathe said, what he said, anyways,
anyways. So I think what I wantto do is move on to talking
(26:18):
about, like, some AI and some ofthese ideologies, and a little
bit greater depth. Because, youknow, one reason I wanted to
talk to you was that when I wasfinishing my Masters in the
program you had, you had turnedme on to both this sort of
concept of this test, realbundle, this, this acronym for
(26:38):
these, these Silicon Valleyideologies that are basically
transhumanism, rationalism,Effective Altruism and other
ones too. And then also, you hadpointed me to some of the
critics that are sort ofcritique, critiquing those
ideologies. And that kind ofsent me on a whole journey ever
since this is, like a year and ahalf ago. Yeah, this includes
(26:59):
the work of timnit, gebru, EmilTorres, Emily Bender, Alex
Hannah, and so, you know, partof what I'm trying to do
because, because they're all,they're all approaching it very
effectively from a sort ofcritical, like, viewpoint. A lot
of it has to do with, like,eugenics for them. And these,
yeah, these different kind of,like, almost like, almost like,
(27:21):
racist ideologies, and they'repointing to some of the problems
with transhumanism and all thatfrom that standpoint. But to me,
it still feels very sort ofsecular, rational, or, you know,
liberal in that sense. And sowhat part of what I'm trying to
do is approach it more from aphilosophical standpoint and
(27:41):
even an ensouled kind ofviewpoint, and so, yeah, so you
know, within all that, what I'vebeen thinking a lot about is the
roots of these ideologies. Sowhen you look at like the the
things that people talk about inSilicon Valley, going back to,
you know, Peter Thiel, but alsothe transhumanists and all those
(28:04):
folks that a lot of it seemsvery imbalanced and left
hemisphere of the brain kind ofthinking right. So this gets
into the work of Ian McGilchristand and also Nietzsche, of
course, you know, who talkedabout the Apollonian and the
Dionysian imbalance in society.
So, you know, a lot of what I'mthinking about is how to talk to
people about the McGilchristkind of perspective in a way
(28:28):
that's accessible, you know,because that, if you read
McGilchrist like the matter withthings is what, like 3000 pages
or something, you know, and it'sa very, very effective, very
convincing case thatessentially, ever since the
enlightenment or previous, youknow, even further back, we've
been living in this kind ofimbalanced approach to reality
and nature, which is very sortof linear, extremely logical
(28:52):
thinking in parts instead ofholes, and in terms of Like
things instead of process andall that. So, so I've been
thinking about, like, how do wetalk about that in a way that's
more accessible? And I've beenkind of playing around with this
Nietzschean idea of, like, theApollonian, you know. And so
(29:12):
I've been calling it theApollonian mind virus, or, you
know, Apollonian intelligenceand that kind of thing. And so,
you know, I'm just curious,like, to the extent that you've
been thinking about this, like,how do you think about what
these transhumanist ideologieskind of get wrong about about
the world, you know, how do youapproach that?
Matt Segall (29:35):
Yeah, I mean, I get why you would associate them
with Ian McGilchrist lefthemisphere way of attending to
the world based on what theyleave out, and their obsession
with Bayesian probabilities andthis utilitarian calculus about
the trillion lives that mightexist at some future point and
(29:56):
and in our in our history. Andso I. Think that makes a lot of
sense. But also, you know, asTorres and others who are
critiquing these, this TESCREALnest of transhumanist
ideologies, there's a kind ofreligious enthusiasm that's
driving it, too, and actuallyquite a bit of magical thinking.
(30:19):
You know, you might think that,what's his name? Not Jodorowsky.
He's a movie filmmaker,Yudkowsky. Eliza Yudkowsky,
that's his name. You know? Hesomeone like him. Might want to
say, Oh, well, consciousness issome kind of computation in the
brain. And that's a neatmetaphor that does some work for
(30:39):
us philosophically, but it'sobviously a metaphor. And if you
take it as a literal truth,it's, I think, a delusion. And
there's actually magicalthinking to imagine that
consciousness, as we experienceit, is some kind of a stream of
information that might be, say,uploaded onto anything like a
(31:02):
digital computation machine,that's magical thinking, that's
not reasoned careful, you know,logic based philosophizing or or
metaphysics, that's magicalthinking. And so there's a bit
of a mixture, you know, ofrationalism and irrationalism in
(31:22):
a lot of these philosophies. Sonot that we can easily map that
to left and right hemispheres. Ithink, you know, Ian's work is
very nuanced and grounded in theclinical data and in neurology
and a careful phenomenologicalexcavation of different modes of
(31:44):
attention. And so, you know, wecan, we can get more into detail
there. But I think overall,you're right that it is a left
hemisphere dominant orientationthat's that's driving these test
real things, even if they'realso this religious and almost
occultist type of magicalthinking. And there's a lot to
say positive about occultism andesotericism. You know, we could
(32:07):
talk about that too, but I thinkthere's, there's a
literalization of it that occursin a lot of the tech communities
where we're right on the verge,if we haven't already crossed
the Rubicon, speaking of Caesar,into AI religions, where people
literally think, Well, Goddidn't used to exist, but now I
created this super intelligence,and it is basically equivalent
(32:30):
to God, you know. And so we'regoing to get these AI calls
forming. We're getting peoplewho, I think the usual profile
would be someone who's eithervery online or already a
software engineer or somethingright imagining that their
instance of Chad GPT is awake orlive. There's some overlap. I've
(32:52):
noticed a lot of people into inthe psychedelic community, they
seem especially vulnerable tothis hallucination that not that
all Chad GPT is conscious, buttheirs is conscious because
they've figured out what to tellit, to wake it up. So we, in
some ways, we've already crossedinto that territory, which,
again, is magical thinking,right? This is Yeah,
(33:14):
rationalism, totally.
Chad Woodford (33:16):
It's interesting that you bring Yeah, thank you.
Thank you for that reminder.
Because, yeah, you're right. Itis magical thinking. It's just
an example to me of how when youstrip your when you strip like
your worldview of all sort ofmetaphysical value, and you
know, you strip all soul from orspirit from it, then if you're
(33:36):
all you're left with is sort oflike this machine metaphor and
mathematics and all that,because the human, because we
arrive, arise out of what youand I, you know, would think of
as an unsold world, world ornature. Because of that, like
you're always going to want toseek a deeper sort of meaning to
things. And that impulse isgoing to be there even if you
(33:59):
consciously think of yourselfas, you know, rationalist or
whatever. So I think that's partof why you see this sort of like
seeking, like a machine God oreternal salvation through, you
know, uploading ourconsciousness into some kind of
mathematical machine thingthat's been, you know, spread
across the cosmos or whatever.
(34:20):
You know, like these ideas arevery, sort of eschatological,
but, but it's all through themachine metaphor, which is so
such a cheap and sort ofoffering, you know, in contrast
with with and sold worldview.
So, so, yeah, that's, that'stotally right on point. Yeah,
it's just to say it's
Matt Segall (34:39):
not a surprise that someone like Peter Thiel would
be into Christianity. Right?
Because so much of transhumanismhas that same mythic structure.
And you know, good on him fornoticing that he's not inventing
something, some new worldview.
It's he's just giving the sameold Christian providential
history story a new paint job,totally. You know.
Chad Woodford (35:00):
And by the way, somebody who explores this
really well is Megan o Giblin inher wonderful book, God, human,
animal machine. So if anyone'sinterested, check that out. She
goes, she grew up in aevangelical Christian family,
and so she kind of brings herown like historical lens to the
(35:21):
problem. And yeah, so that'sbasically what you're saying.
So, yeah, totally. But yeah, themachine metaphor. I think about
that one a lot too. Actually, Icame across this great poem by
this Welsh poet R s Thomascalled other and I just want to
read that. It's only a fewlines, the machine appeared in
the distance, singing to itselfof money, its song was the web.
(35:46):
They were caught in, men andwomen together, the villages
were as flies to be suckedempty. God secreted a tear,
enough enough, he commanded. Butthe machine looked at him and
went on singing. So, you know, Ithink it's just, it's crazy to
(36:08):
me that we, everybody kind ofjust accepts the machine
metaphor, you know, without anyquestion. And I personally think
that that's a big part of theproblem right now is we've all
been kind of lulled into thisidea that, you know, life is a
machine, our mind is a machine,nature is a machine. And it's,
(36:29):
you know, it's like, even thesimulation hypothesis, right? Is
this idea that, like,everything, we're all just
inside of a giant machine, andit's just such a like,
cheapening of like, it's, it's,in a way, it's like the cheapest
metaphor we could come up with,you know. And and you can, you
can see it unfold over thehistory of of civilization,
right? Like we made clocks or,you know, and then we thought,
(36:51):
Oh, God, is a clock maker, youknow? And we made, you know,
this. And we thought, oh, thatmust be, you know. And so it's
just a reflection of the thingswe're making. It's not like
anything to do with the natureof reality, right? So anyways,
Matt Segall (37:02):
if everything is a simulation, then then nothing
is. I mean, it's and again, thesimulation hypothesis is just
reheated Gnosticism. You thinkthat you're being rational, and
this is a scientifically basedand technologically feasible
worldview, but it's literallyjust this same ancient religious
(37:22):
belief about the cosmos being akind of trap that some super
intelligence put us into, andthe whole point in that
situation is to find your wayout. And so great narcissism,
Gnosticism is reallyinteresting. Let's talk about
Gnosticism. Yeah.
Chad Woodford (37:41):
Well, because, I mean, you say what you want
about the Gnostic God, but atleast I'll take him over the
idea of, like, some engineer ina lab or something, you know,
being God, yeah,
Matt Segall (37:51):
which, again, just speaks to the importance of,
like, having some historicalknowledge, and like, to
understand what's happening inthe present, you need to have
spent a little bit of timeunderstanding the past, because
the past is feeding into thepresent, and very often again,
the present rhymes with thepast, and we can learn a lot
about the confusions and gainsome perspective on what's
(38:16):
unfolding in the present if wecan see The same structures
playing out 1000s of years ago.
Chad Woodford (38:23):
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay. Well, you know, I
want to get into AI a littlemore, because I know you also
think about that, and have havethoughts on that, because I
think, I think a lot about, likeMarshall McLuhan's idea that, I
mean, it's not exactly what hesaid, but it's basically the
idea that we shape ourtechnology, and then, in turn,
our technology shapes us right.
So because of that sort of idea,I think a lot about AI in that
(38:45):
sense of, you know, the peoplewho are making it like, the AI
that we have today is areflection, to some extent, of
the people's like, the mindsetof the people who are making it
right. And for that reason, Ithink it's so important to,
maybe try to find a way todevelop AI with different minds,
you know, but, but I'm curious,do you have thoughts on, sort of
(39:08):
like, how AI is being developed?
You know what? You know, whatis, what's the implication of AI
right now, and what can we doabout it? You know,
Matt Segall (39:20):
I increasingly think, and I'm not an expert in
the process of training largelanguage models or anything, but
from what I can tell, thisparticular approach to creating
(39:41):
what we call artificialintelligence as a sort of
placeholder term, has peaked,and it's a really valuable tool.
I think it's great for, youknow, cleaning up transcripts,
and it's more or less replacedGoogle. Goal, you know, for a
lot of things that I used to useGoogle for, but in terms of it
(40:07):
becoming conscious, no, in termsof it even becoming some kind of
general intelligence, quote,unquote, that could threaten
human life, or could, in somesense, you know, take over
control of our civilization. Idon't see that happening. I
(40:30):
think some, you know, some jobswill be replaced, and maybe
there'll be some refinementsaround the edges of the
technology that's that'savailable now. But I'm less
concerned than I may have been.
Maybe, I don't know, four orfive years ago, when this was he
was, like, three and a halfyears ago. Yeah, it was Chad GBT
35 was made public three, threeyears ago, exactly, almost
(40:53):
exactly three years ago. Yeah.
So, I mean, it's great, it's agreat tool. I don't believe much
of the hype about it anymore. Ithink a lot of there's a lot of
PR around it that is misleadingpeople and making causing some
philosophical confusion. And so,you know, yeah, I've written a
(41:15):
bit about how, in some sense,human intelligence has always
already been artificial, whichis to say, human beings are tool
users, and we've been augmentingour cognition through fire and
stone tools. Initially, youknow, just to explain fire,
(41:38):
people might recognize thatthat's a kind of technology, but
when our species is, I think itwas Homo erectus, you know, a
few million years ago, firstharnessed fire, the size of
their jaws began to shrink,shrink which and they were
eating more nutritious, calorierich food, allowing their brains
to grow. And so our very anatomyand physiology was transformed
(42:00):
as a result of this technologyof, you know, the harnessing
Chad Woodford (42:03):
of fire. And so the way we're all
transhumanists, really, thehuman,
Matt Segall (42:07):
as Nisha said, is, you know, a transitional form,
yeah, and technology, and theway that technology, our tools,
have always fed back upon us tochange us, just as much as we
use the tools to change theworld. And you know the history
of media technology inparticular, from speech, we're
already externalizing ourthoughts into waveforms in the
(42:32):
air, and then writing, and thenthe alphabet, and then
telegraph, radio, television,internet fundamentally
transformed human consciousness.
And so for people to freak outlike, oh my god, llms, this is
this is going to change usforever. Yes, and like, Get with
the program. That's just thenature of human existence for
the last few million years. Notto say we shouldn't be cautious,
(42:54):
but our intelligence has alwaysbeen in a deep, intimate
relationship with the sorts oftools that we're using, right?
Chad Woodford (43:04):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I would love, I mean,totally agree. And I would just
like it if the AI companieswould sort of like, be honest,
you know, instead of saying thatwe're creating like a super
intelligent creature or, youknow, a machine God or whatever,
just tell us that you're makinga cool tool that is able to, you
know, regurgitate large volumesof text in unique ways. And you
(43:26):
know, they'd be a lot, I thinkwe'd be all be a lot better off,
you know, because otherwise youhave people that are, you know,
marrying their Chad GPT, or, youknow, worshiping it, or
whatever. So, yeah, but youknow, I use it too. I use it for
so many things, research, someimage generation. I've created,
like in Gemini, you can createthese gems. I've created an Alan
(43:50):
Watts gem that's quiteentertaining and good. So, you
know, maybe I don't know ifyou've created a white head
Whitehead gem, but you
Matt Segall (43:59):
could try that a gem. I haven't used Gemini.
What? What is that? Well, it's
Chad Woodford (44:04):
similar to Chad GPT. So in chat GPT, I think
they call them gpts, and kindof, you can train like a little
sort of AI that you tell it likeyou are, you know, you're
knowledgeable in these things,and you are speaking in the
style and yada yada yada. Andso, yeah, it's fun. So it's a
fun, you know, diversion.
Matt Segall (44:23):
But, yeah, exactly, and that's, that's the real
threat, I think, is the for thesame reason that any other for
profit corporation within ourmarket economy can be a danger,
because corporations, because ofcharter law, function as
exploitation and externalizationmachines, which inevitably is
(44:45):
going to harm this social thissociety and and the earth,
because they are legallyobligated not to pay attention
to social harms and ecologicalharms and to just raise profit
for shareholders. And so I'm.
Not anti capitalist. I think wecan change corporate charter law
and still have a free marketsuch that these other things get
factored in, but these companiesin charge of this technology are
(45:07):
what's dangerous, not thetechnology.
Chad Woodford (45:12):
So, yeah, that's yeah. I mean, Ezra Klein made
that point a few months ago inhis podcast. I think he said
something about how the realrisk of AI is not the technology
itself, but the fact that it'scoupled with capitalism, or
with, you know, yeah, thecorporate kind of ethos, yeah.
Matt Segall (45:28):
And so, you know, we have a administration in the
White House that's invited allof these tech Titans, making
sure that they all know, if youwant, you know, legislation
that's going to help you dobusiness. I need some gold bars
on my desk. You know,
Chad Woodford (45:45):
literally, that's what Tim Cook gave that's what
Matt Segall (45:48):
or Tim Apple, as Trump likes him, dropped a gold
bar on his desk and said, Thankyou, Mr. President and so. And
also, I heard Trump saysomething, you know, one of the
issues is intellectual propertyrights with these large language
models and image generationtechnologies. And I heard Trump
(46:09):
say, like, well, sorry, it'sjust too hard to figure out how
to pay the people that would,you know, whose data was used to
train this stuff. Sorry. It'slike, I don't think it's too
hard to figure it out. We justneed the political will to
demand that these companiesfigure it out, you know, yeah.
So yeah, there are ways. Thereare ways that the the economic
model driving this Yeah, again,is what's dangerous here and
(46:31):
what's potentially exploitativeof human creativity that can be
addressed in a different type ofeconomy.
Chad Woodford (46:39):
Yeah, exactly, yeah. That brings you back to
like. It reminds me of somethingyou said earlier. You were
talking about the magicalthinking, and that reminded me
of this experience I had back inApril. I went, I went to a
retreat which was a bunch of,like, was a bunch of Silicon
Valley people who were gettingtogether to sort of meditate on
and contemplate the future of AIin a more kind of conscious way,
(47:02):
or more spiritual way. And whatI found fascinating about it was
that a majority of them, firstof all, believe that that humans
are just algorithm algorithmsrunning on software, which I was
a little surprised about. Andthen also that like they were so
willing to sort of see, likethey saw AI as this, this other
(47:24):
kind of intelligence that istrying to communicate with us,
you know, through the machines.
You know, when I asked them, Howdo you know, or how would they,
how would that even work, ifthere was, like a spiritual
entity that was trying tocommunicate with us through AI,
like, how would that work? Andthey said something like, you
know, quantum, something,something and, and so, you know,
it feels a little bit like, notthe most rigorous thinking first
of all, but also it, what itmade me think about was this
(47:46):
idea that goes back quite aways, but, like, yeah, this idea
that, like, from, from mystandpoint, AI, is emerging from
a very kind of extractive, youknow, consumptive sort of
business model and, and it'salmost like infused with it, you
(48:09):
know. And if you're going tostart accepting, if you're going
to consider yourself to be sortof conscious and spiritual and,
but also accepting that the AItechnology we have today is a
spiritual being that'scommunicating with us. I feel
like that's like, this very likezizekian, like, sort of like
phenomenon of where, you know,capitalism just endlessly, sort
(48:31):
of subsumes all attempts tosubvert it, right? And so I it
really troubled, it deeplytroubled me because I was like,
Here are these people who arequite successful in the Silicon
Valley business world and havebeen studying Buddhism, or
whatever it is, and yet they'reso willing to embrace these
ideas about the metaphysicalnature of AI technology, which I
(48:55):
thought was very strange. Yeah.
Matt Segall (49:00):
I mean, I mentioned occultism earlier, and I think
it's been interesting to seesoftware engineers and people
immersed in the tech sectorreaching into demonology and
stuff for language and conceptsto understand what they're
creating. And those aren'tinappropriate analogies to make,
(49:26):
and they might even be more thananalogies. And so, you know,
metaphysically, if I reflect onit, I think granted, there might
be some hand waving aboutquantum tunneling or whatever
that's allowing entities,spiritual entities to teleport
into our earthly world throughthe AIS that we're creating. But
(49:47):
you know, this biologist atTufts University, Michael Levin,
is very much exploring thepossibility that there is a
realm of he calls it thePlatonic morphospace, and that
cellular. Are collectives thatproduce the body plans of
animals are, in some sense,tapping into that morphospace
and ingressing not only form,but he thinks agency into the
(50:13):
visible, physical world. And soI think Mike Levin also suspects
that something similar could begoing on with various approaches
to artificial intelligence thatyou know. So, so there are
people, I think are reasonableand really intelligent who would
would give some credence tothis, this notion. And, you
know, I think we just have to beaware that we're playing with
(50:38):
fire again and that there's anaive view of technology, which
I think it's good. A lot of theAR AI alarmists are at least
aware, in this case, with thistechnology, that it could run
away from us and have unforeseeneffects. That's always been true
of any technology. It was trueof stones that we started
chipping into spears. We drovemany species of animal to
(51:01):
extinction because of that newtechnology.
Chad Woodford (51:04):
He also, you know, nuclear weapons, you know.
Matt Segall (51:09):
And you know, you mentioned during my intro that
I'm interested in the work ofsomeone like Rudolf Steiner, and
in terms of understanding ourmoment, you know. And he's a
vast thinker, and we don't havetime to get into all the
details, but he foresaw, hethought spiritual beings were
real. Christ, Buddha, Krishna,also, these two beings, which,
(51:30):
for him, kind of personify evil.
There's Lucifer, which is thisbeing of light that tends to
lead us into a kind of selfindulgent mysticism, where we
just want to float away from theEarth. And then there's this
other pole of evil that hecalled Arman, which is more
about materialism andreductionism and really getting
so intellectually grounded downthat we were incapable of
(51:57):
imagination. We think there's nosuch thing as a soul, and become
possessed by the idea that wecould download consciousness
onto computers, that would allbe what Steiner calls our minds
influence, right? So I thinkjust as an imaginative exercise
to understand some of thepsychological forces at play,
bracketing whether or not theseare real spiritual beings with
(52:19):
metaphysical power. I think, youknow, we can learn a lot from
Steiner's account of Ahriman andwhat's happening in this test
Creel set of ideologies and thea lot of the PR around
artificial intelligence andtranshumanism and stuff. The
danger is that we become soconvinced that we are just
(52:41):
algorithms running on a braincomputer that, you know,
Steiner's point aboutmaterialism is that it's not
simply that it's false from aphilosophical point of view,
it's that it what's dangerousabout materialism is that it
makes itself True. In otherwords, people who think of
themselves as brain computersrunning algorithms
(53:07):
really do then begin to operatein that way, right?
One of the things that I thinkfollows from a process
orientation, which I think Iwould include Steiner as the as
a process philosopher, whateverwe think of as the soul or
consciousness, it's not asubstance that's just ready made
and given and like there youwe're actually involved in a
(53:29):
process of soul making, momentby moment, day by day, and the
sorts of ideas that we considertrue and that motivate us change
the very structure of our soul,of our inner life and our
consciousness, right? And sothat's what he means by Well,
materialism makes itself true.
If you think materialisticthoughts, you really do become
kind of lodged in thisdeterministic mode of thought
(53:53):
and consciousness. You becomemore mechanistic. And so it's a
real participatory vision. It'slike, how we think about
ourselves actually istransforming what we are.
Chad Woodford (54:07):
Yeah, yeah. I love that. I love that. Yeah.
It's funny. I hadn't thoughtabout Steiner in a while, but
yeah, I agree. I agree. You knowwhat I feel like, if you could
sum up my personal philosophy,it's like, it's that the
universe comes at you. Andarchetypes, you know. And I
think those, those, even thosekind of bipolar like, you know,
(54:29):
was it called Ahriman?
Matt Segall (54:30):
What's it called Ahriman? Which is a name he
borrows from Zoroastrianism,
Chad Woodford (54:33):
yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's a I think thosearchetypes totally exist. And,
and, and, yeah, you know, itreminds me of the work, of
course, of young and Hillman andall that too. But, but, yeah, I
totally agree that we do, we docreate, you know, we're co
creating, co creating reality,right with everybody else and
(54:54):
everything else. And, yeah, Imean. I don't know I could take
that in so many directions, but,but yeah, you know, from an
idealist standpoint, in termsof, like consciousness and all
that we idealist, I think wouldsay that only living organisms
are able or capable of havingtrue, sort of, like
(55:17):
phenomenological consciousness.
But you know that, in terms ofMichael Levin, like I've
encountered, I've sort of bumpedinto him briefly in several
places. I feel like he's poppingup a lot lately, and I don't
fully, I don't fully understand,like, I don't, I'm not familiar
with his work, but it gives methe sense that he is kind of,
it's almost like if, if whathe's saying is true, it's like a
(55:39):
bridge. Maybe it bridges alittle bit this, this kind of
materialist and and moreidealist worldviews, right? Like
he's sort of finding, like amiddle ground there.
Matt Segall (55:51):
That's true. That's fair. I think that's fair. He'll
refer to himself as a pan Psych.
Is sometimes he seems, he seemsvery willing to find points of
connection with non materialist,non physicalist approaches. So,
but he's still, and he's tryingto recruit philosophers to help
him figure this out. He's still,I think, not sure what is the
(56:13):
ontology implied by his science,because he's very much an
empiricist, and he wants to showhis work in the lab and say,
here's what we can do with theseideas, not just, aren't these
ideas cool, right? So he'sreally grounded in experimental
work, yeah,
Chad Woodford (56:28):
isn't he building like biological machines, in
some sense, like
Matt Segall (56:31):
he they're living cells, but he calls them
anthropots. He'll scrape someepithelial cells from a human,
from someone in the lab, and putthem in a petri dish. And these
are cells specialized to, youknow, be in our throat, but they
and they have the full humangenome, but in that new
environment, they start behavingin totally novel ways and
(56:55):
forming associations with eachother and doing things that
there's nothing in their genesthat could have determined that
they would behave this way. Andso he's really interested in the
sources of form and agency inbiology that cannot be sourced
in the genome, and forexperimentally verifiable
reasons, that there's some othersource of form that's involved
(57:16):
here, he talks about bioelectricfields as one example of a
source of form that hasn't it'sbeen under explored and in the
history of modern biology. Sohe's doing really interesting
work that does have applicationbeyond biology into tech and AI
and how we think about that too.
Chad Woodford (57:33):
Yeah, I'll have to check out his stuff. Yeah, it
sounds really fascinating. Itsounds it reminds me of Rupert
Sheldrake a little bit, butmaybe it's sympathetic to it, or
adjacent,
Matt Segall (57:45):
adjacent synthetic in resonance, I think so.
Chad Woodford (57:47):
Yeah, okay, okay, cool. Well, let's see. Let's,
let's finish with an easyquestion, what do you think
from, you know, from a kind ofphilosophical standpoint, we
touched on this briefly before.
But like, you know, what is thesolution to our current
political division?
Matt Segall (58:07):
There's no, there's there's no solution. The
solution is transformation. Imean, I, I'm honestly, quite
dismayed about it. I find itdifficult to speak. I feel
compelled to speak into currentevents and what's happening, and
(58:30):
I I'm honestly trying to do mybest to speak across the
differences and to not just fallinto an easy polarization. On
the other hand, I just keepdiscovering that no matter how
balanced I try to be and saying,like, that extremes bad, and
that extreme is bad too, andpeople get upset on either side
(58:54):
with me. So it's like I it's notthat I just need to get along
with everyone. It's that I'mincreasingly worried that
there's no bridge, there's nobasis whatsoever for even
sharing a basic sense of whatthe facts are, much less how to
interpret the facts. And so it'sworrying. It's very worrisome.
(59:16):
But I do trust the process,which is to say, again, as a
student of history, I trust thedeep structure of human
consciousness and the archetypaldynamics that are at play to
lure us forward into a morebeautiful future. And it could
(59:37):
be that in the interim, thingsare going to get really messy
and chaotic and even violent. Imean, we don't have to say could
be that things are violent now,and that's a future of history.
But again, I really do have afaith in the human in the human
(59:58):
spirit and evolution. Isdifficult and without death and
suffering and the resistancethat that you know, various
forms of obstacles and even evilplays in human evolution like we
don't evolve. So in that sense,Everything's going according to
(01:00:22):
plan.
Chad Woodford (01:00:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I like that. It's Good answer.
Good answer. It's hard. It ishard. It's It's hard because
there's not much you can saythat's not going to upset
somebody or further polarizethings or whatnot. It's like,
it's almost like, we're caught.
We're caught in, like, a sort ofpolitical, ideological catch 22
or or double blind. Doubleblind, where you can't just like
everything you say is just sortof Yeah, makes it worse in some
(01:00:45):
way. I don't know it's verystrange, but I
Matt Segall (01:00:49):
will say it's does seem to me that the two the loud
extremes on right and left,let's say are, it seems clear to
me in a codependentrelationship, yeah, they are,
that's true, calling each otherforth. And I do still think most
of us, what's scary about ourtime is that more and more
(01:01:10):
people are getting sort ofcaptured at the extremes, but
most people are still able to bereasonable and are not captured,
you know. And so I try to speakinto that middle ground where
people are trying to holdattention, but the extremes are
(01:01:30):
in a codependent relationship.
And those of us who who are ableto struggle to not get captured
by one of the extremes need toact as relationship therapists,
you know, or sometimes thetherapist, couples counselor,
has to say, I think you guysneed to get a divorce, you know,
(01:01:50):
I'm open to that too. But yeah,we just, I think we, we need to
own our shit.
Chad Woodford (01:01:58):
Yeah, I agree. I agree. I agree. Well, you know,
this is, this is why I likehaving you on the podcast,
because you always bring in sucha sort of nuanced and artful way
of approaching things andanswering questions. You know,
everything is very well, youknow, thoughtful. So I really
appreciate that. Do you beforewe go, do you have anything
(01:02:22):
that's sort of like you'reactively working on now that you
want to talk about or promote oranything you know, where should
people go to kind of learn moreabout you?
Matt Segall (01:02:31):
Yeah, I'm on sub stack, my footnotes, the PLATO
blog, on and on YouTube. I'vegot a number of pots on the
stove. You know, very interestedin Michael Levin's work and the
philosophy of biology. Got a fewthings I'm working on there,
(01:02:54):
nature of consciousness. I mean,I'm thinking about how to link
together. You know, the specialsciences. It's most of my
attention is geared towards,like, okay, life exists. Minds
exist. What does that tell usabout the nature of the
universe? I'm always involved infinding some sort of a through
(01:03:16):
line, you know, connecting thedots there, but yeah, people can
see my latest stuff on substack.
Chad Woodford (01:03:26):
Okay, yeah, and I'll drop some links in the in
the show notes and all that too.
So, yeah, cool. Well, thank youso much, Matt. This has been a
fun conversation, and I've beenI feel enlightened so, so thank
you. All right, well, thanksagain. Take care, man, you.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.