Matthew Segall: Is the Universe Ensouled with Experience? Consciousness, Cosmology, and Meaning

Matthew David Segall, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Department at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, and the Chair of the Science Advisory Committee for the Cobb Institute. He is a transdisciplinary researcher, writer, teacher, and philosopher applying process-relational thought across the natural and social sciences, as well as to the study of consciousness. He describes himself as a “process philosopher” and transdisciplinary researcher, reflecting his commitment to bridging multiple fields​. Segall’s work builds on the metaphysical framework of Alfred North Whitehead, extending Whitehead’s philosophy of organism into new domains of science, religion, and ecology. In doing so, Segall reinterprets the Western philosophical lineage – from ancient ideas of a world-soul to German Idealism and beyond – to articulate a participatory, organismic vision of nature. His philosophy portrays a cosmos ensouled with meaning and experience, challenging mechanistic materialism and inviting a renewed dialogue between science and spirit​. Segall integrates insights from Whitehead, Schelling, Goethe, and Steiner into a process worldview, develops an organic (panpsychist) cosmology, practices a bold transdisciplinary methodology, and engages public dialogues that embody a form of sacred activism on behalf of our living planet.TIMESTAMPS:(0:00) - Introduction (0:43) - History of Mind-Body Problem(7:40) - Critiquing Physicalism(12:55) - Quantum Theory Interpretations(16:14) - Addressing Illusionism & Scientism(22:00) - The Metaphysics of Prehension(28:14) - Panexperientialism in Physics(31:55) - Propositional Feelings(37:09) - What is Consciousness?(45:00) - Panexperientialism & Free Will(50:00) - Bridging Science & Philosophy(54:42) - Challenging the Cold/Dead Universe tale(1:00:39) - Misconceptions about Matt's work(1:04:20) - Telos(1:07:44) - Matt's Philosopher recommendations(1:13:00) - Mind At Large (Upcoming Events!)(1:17:40) - Conclusion EPISODE LINKS:- Matt's Website: https://footnotes2plato.com-  @Footnotes2Plato : http://www.youtube.com/@Footnotes2Plato- Physics Within the Bounds of Feeling Alone: https://footnotes2plato.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/physics-within-the-bounds-of-feeling-alone.pdf- Matt's X: https://x.com/ThouArtThat- Matt's Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/matthew.david.segall- Matt's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewdavidsegall- Matt's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/footnotes2platoCONNECT:- Website: https://tevinnaidu.com - Podcast: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/mindbodysolution- YouTube: https://youtube.com/mindbodysolution- Twitter: https://twitter.com/drtevinnaidu- Facebook: https://facebook.com/drtevinnaidu - Instagram: https://instagram.com/drtevinnaidu- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/drtevinnaidu=============================Disclaimer: The information provided on this channel is for educational purposes only. The content is shared in the spirit of open discourse and does not constitute, nor does it substitute, professional or medical advice. We do not accept any liability for any loss or damage incurred from you acting or not acting as a result of listening/watching any of our contents. You acknowledge that you use the information provided at your own risk. Listeners/viewers are advised to conduct their own research and consult with their own experts in the respective fields.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Well, what is the scientific method?
We observe stuff with our sensesor extensions with technological
instrumentation, and then we measure as precisely as we can
what we're observing. And then we can translate that
into mathematics and build models to make predictions.
And the better the predictions, the more confident we are that
the model is reflecting something real out there in

(00:20):
nature. That's all fine and good, and
the scientific method is very powerful.
But the deeper question is not just a sort of epistemological
or methodological question. It's a question of the
cosmological conditions that make conscious agents capable of
science possible. Matt, I've focused this podcast

(00:45):
around your paper, Physics Within the Bounds of Feeling
Alone, and wonderful paper. Beautiful read, really enjoyed
it. I really like the way you're
able to tell such a deep philosophical story and and one
of the questions I often ask guests on the show is to do
that. It's to start off by giving me a
brief philosophical history of the mind body problem.

(01:06):
It's a tough question because itall comes down to their
understanding of it all. But from your side, if you had
to give me a summary of your understanding of the mind body
problem and it's history, what story would you tell?
Well, we should probably go backto the ancient Greeks, though I

(01:28):
think even prior to what's oftenthought of as the birth of
Western philosophy. And in ancient Greece, we could
think just in terms of the more or less animist worldview that
many primal peoples on every continent held.
Which which obviously did not separate mind and body, but saw

(01:51):
what what we now call mind as permeating the living and and
even the what we would call the non living world.
Though I think for the primal imagination there was nothing
that was non living in some sense for this earlier phase of
of human beings in this earlier stage of the evolution of

(02:15):
consciousness. It wasn't life that was
mysterious to them. It was death, right.
And so one of the distinguishingfeatures of human beings, though
it's it's apparent that other species also recognize death,
but human beings seem to build up really elaborate cultural
rituals around death. It's a mystery to us if, if the

(02:36):
universe seems pervaded by life,the fact that our body should
decay and the at least visible tangible presence of a person
should disappear, that that was a problem for these primal
peoples. If you Fast forward, though,
I'll come back to the ancient Greeks in a second.
But if you Fast forward to say, the modern period and the rise

(02:59):
of this kind of mechanistic science out of out of Western
Europe, all of a sudden it's notdeath that's mysterious anymore.
Death becomes the rule and life becomes a mystery in need of
explanation. So something clearly shifted
over the course of, of human prehistorian history.
And I think if we go back to theancient Greeks, before Socrates

(03:25):
and Plato and Aristotle, you hadwhat were called the physio
logo, these philosophers who tried to understand nature in
terms of some kind of elemental principle.
Either everything's all fire, everything's water, or
everything's air. And there wasn't yet a a real
distinct sense of that elementalpower at the base of nature

(03:48):
being devoid of mind. It was an expression of mind in
a sense, you know, and the ancients would have a sense of
the, the humors of the body corresponding to the elements of
nature. And so there was this deep sense
of resonance between interior experience, qualitative
experience, and the the tangibleexternal kind of extended world.

(04:14):
In Plato, in in a dialogue like the Timaeus, you begin to see
what we would nowadays call dualism starting to emerge.
Though I wouldn't say Plato is simply a dualist.
It's, it's more like in his dialogues he's exploring and
dramatizing a whole variety of different positions, one of
which is dualism. So in the Timaeus, his
cosmological and cosmagonical dialogue, you've got the noose

(04:37):
or the intellect or the demiurgeshaping the receptacle or what
we could just call materiality according to the model of these
eternal forms. And so you're starting to get
this separation between mind andbody, right?
Active mind that's providing theform, and then passive

(04:58):
materiality that's just receiving that imprint.
And then Aristotle, this gets systematized into a kind of
account of what he calls hylomorphism, or what has since
been called hylomorphism, where you again, you have form and
matter coming into a composite relationship.

(05:20):
You never get one without the other really an Aristotle.
And so again, we're not quite tothe stage of a radical dualism
between mind and body yet. That doesn't happen.
I'll skip a couple thousand years and just go to say,
Descartes. The sense of a dualism between
thinking activity or errascogitans and and extended

(05:42):
matter gets codified and reifiedby Rene Descartes and the rest
of modern philosophy is a struggle to come to terms with
that separation. Some go in the more materialist
direction, others go in the moreidealist direction.
But both those positions in the modern period after Descartes

(06:03):
are very much, yeah, following in his wake, accepting the
premises of his of his mind, body dualism and just trying to
either side with mind as more fundamental or matter as more
fundamental. And so, you know, really in
contemporary consciousness studies and cognitive science
and neuroscience, what what getscalled the hard problem of

(06:27):
consciousness. And some people don't accept
that framing because they're just more materialists and think
there isn't a real problem there.
But all of these debates in our time, I think are very much just
rehash, rehashing the same problems that these early modern
philosophers from Descartes through Spinoza and live Nets
we're dealing with. We haven't actually made much

(06:50):
progress. We're still very much living in
the shadow of Descartes, I thinkin terms of the contemporary
scientific attempt to understandthe mind body problem and
resolve it. So taking this larger view of of
the development of the issue, I think is very important because
when you do put modern scientific understandings of

(07:12):
nature and the attempt to scientifically understand
consciousness in the broader sweep of history, you see how
actually rare and abnormal is this little stretch of history
over the last few 100 years compared to 10s of thousands of
years where, you know, animism was the basic assumption of

(07:33):
every group of human beings across the planet.
So that's basically how I see it.
It's, it's, it's a beautiful story and I think it's to me one
of the best topics to explore. And I think you, you share the
same passion with it. What I did was for your paper, I
broke this down into 5 chapters.Hopefully we can get through all
of them. If not, there's always time for

(07:55):
around 2:00. But I think let's start off with
what I called chapter 1, critiquing physicalism and its
limitations. Your paper critiques
contemporary physicalism that still operates within AI.
Think what you called a Cartesian Cantian dualism, if I
recall correctly. But how does this bifurcation

(08:15):
limit our understanding of reality?
Well, it creates A framework where in our attempt to we're,
we're attempting to understand nature as though we as the
knower weren't part of it. And that's more of an implicit
assumption because obviously, you know, I pick on Sean

(08:36):
Carroll, the physicist in that particular article.
But many physicalists and materialists, of course, would
say, well, the human mind is part of nature, no doubt about
it. It evolved like any other.
We evolved like any other species of of animal.
But when it comes to scientific explanation, there's still this

(08:56):
sort of view from nowhere assumption that we don't need to
account for the conditions of possibility of scientific
knowledge itself. Let me let me unpack what that
means. Obviously scientists who do a
little bit of philosophy of science will have some
epistemological account of, you know, how it is that scientific

(09:17):
knowledge is possible in terms of well, what is the scientific
method? We observe stuff with our senses
or extensions via technical withtechnological instrumentation,
and then we measure as preciselyas we can what we're observing.
And then we can translate that into mathematics and build
models to make predictions. And the better the predictions,

(09:38):
the more likely the the more confident we are that the model
is reflecting something real outthere in nature.
That's all fine and good, and the scientific method is very
powerful, but the deeper question is not just a sort of
epistemological or methodological question.
It's it's a question of the cosmological conditions that

(10:00):
make conscious agents capable ofscience possible, right.
And so the way that I frame it in that article, I'm borrowing,
you know, some ideas from Friedrich Schelling, who's
thinking in the aftermath of Kant and, you know, asking this
question, what must, if we say the mind emerges from nature,

(10:22):
OK, but what must nature be suchthat mind could emerge from it?
And Shelling finds it incredible, impossible to to
believe that nature could have been fundamentally devoid of
anything like mind, but that there must have been somehow

(10:43):
nature must have been seeded with mind already from the get
go. And the process of evolution is
a kind of a growth of that seed into the flower or the fruit of,
of conscious agency. And science then is, you know,
it might sound kind of trite or cute or whatever, but, you know,

(11:05):
science becomes the universe's way of knowing itself.
Even Carl Sagan would would phrase it that way.
And, you know, putting science back into and scientific
knowledge back into nature, I think is, is a far more radical
proposition than if the flippantattitude that physicalists have
that, Oh yes, of course mind emerges from and evolves out of

(11:27):
nature. If you really want to ground
science in nature, that actuallyrequires us to view nature in a
certain way right before we evenbegin to scientifically
investigate it. We have to view nature as having
been capable of producing us. And I don't think enough
consideration is given to the implications of that way of

(11:48):
framing the problem. Was there any particular reason
you chose Sean Carroll to have this conversation with him in
the paper? I was curious.
Well, among physicists, he's actually far more conversant
with some of the major issues inphilosophy related to philosophy

(12:11):
of physics and philosophy of mind.
And, you know, he's willing to engage philosophers in, in
dialogue and he's very respectful of philosophy.
I I disagree with him philosophically.
But nonetheless, he felt like a,a worthy sparring partner, as it
were. And I've actually heard from
someone who was at a conference that he did, I think in New York

(12:34):
with Philip Goff a couple of years ago, who printed out this
article and gave it to Sean Carroll.
I haven't heard from from Sean. I don't expect to, but it's
possible he read it and was was not convinced, but I figured he
would be a good sparring partner.
Yeah. Do you think that because I
think Sean is a many worlds theorist, if, if if I'm not

(12:57):
mistaken, do you find the many worlds theorist versus those
with Copenhagen views, the ones that many worlds are a little
bit more open minded to these philosophical discussions or or
the reverse, this is just. Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure I
find many, the many worlds interpretation to be
metaphysically extravagant in the extreme.

(13:18):
I mean, talk about ontological overflow and chucking Occam's
razor. I mean, Sean would say, well,
we're just saying the wave function is reality.
That is Occam's razor. But ontologically speaking, to
multiply infinitely many other worlds in order to claim that
you're offering a rational explanation of, of quantum
physics to me is I mean, it's it's it's like bad metaphysics

(13:43):
to me. I, I don't, not that I would
affirm, you know, whatever the standard interpretation of the
quantum of the Copenhagen, the standard Copenhagen
interpretation, I'm not necessarily wanting to affirm
that. I've actually been more
attracted recently to the transactional interpretation as
developed by Ruth Kastner. Had a conversation with her

(14:05):
about that a few weeks ago where, you know, we don't need
to go too deep into this, but the idea of unitarity,
maintaining unitarity is what's motivating the many worlds
interpretation. I think that the wave function
never collapses really, whereas the transactional interpretation
says no, we should take our everyday experience of one world

(14:25):
line seriously and understand quantum physics to be describing
a field of possibility that opens up between measurements.
But, you know, reality is, is this continual oscillation
between actualization, opening out new potentialities, which
then only one actuality, one possibility, rather gets

(14:51):
actualized. And so there's a constant break
of unitarity in our actual experience and in the actual
unfolding of the world. But yeah, all that's to say, I
find many worlds to be singularly unconvincing as an
interpretation of quantum physics.
I think it's rather absurd actually, No offense to Sean

(15:12):
Carroll or or any followers of Everett.
I mean, it's a in terms of an abstract way of trying to
resolve a conceptual problem, it's great.
But when you try to bring that back into dialogue with our
experience of the world and the presuppositions of the of
conscious agency, which again, if we're not conscious agents

(15:32):
making decisions to actualize certain possibilities and to not
actualize others, then I don't know how science is even
possible. It's, it's, it's crazy.
I was meant to chat to Ruth Kestner on the day after we
initially were meant to speak, but due to technical
difficulties for those listening, Matt and I had a bit
of a trouble, a bit of an issue last week.

(15:53):
Anyway, for for any any physicist or physicalist, let's
say that makes the claim that subjective experience is simply
an illusion produced by the brain, let's say.
What do you think is the strongest counter argument to
this point? How would you address this as a
main counter argument? What would be your go to?

(16:15):
Well, I mean, strangely enough, I'm tempted to go back to
Descartes and lean on the strength of his methodology
here. I mean, in his Meditations on
1st Philosophy, you know, he he makes the compelling
phenomenological case that, you know, we know what we know best
is our own subjective experience.

(16:37):
And you know, he goes through this exercise of doubting
everything that our senses tell us about the world and even
doubting everything that we think we know intellectually.
You know, he says, not only could I be deceived about my
sensory experience of the world out there, you know, the people
he's looking out his window at people walking on the street in

(16:59):
their coats and hats is like, those could be automatons.
I don't know for sure. My, my, I could be dreaming and
all of this is imagined. But even logical propositions,
mathematical equations, you know, he says I could be
deceived that 5 + 5 = 10. I mean, maybe, maybe that's not

(17:20):
true and I only think it's true,but this demon is, is deceiving
even my very cognitive process. But the one thing he says I
could not doubt would be my own capacity to doubt my own
thinking activity. You know, he says in
Meditations, I think I am and the syllogistic form of it, I
think therefore I am comes later.

(17:41):
But this acquaintance, this, this intuitive access that we
have to our own thinking activity is I, I agree with
Descartes. It's, it's really the, the, the
one feature of our experience that we can be most certain of.
And so like Descartes, I would say scientific, the scientific

(18:03):
method, scientific rationality, scientific empiricism, science
as such flows out of our capacity as thinking beings,
right. And so if if that is just an
illusion, if our subjectivity isan illusion, well then so is
science, So is scientific knowledge.
There is no such thing as knowledge if subjectivity is an
illusion. And so it's quite a a sort of

(18:27):
pulling the rug out from under oneself type of maneuver to both
want to affirm scientific knowledge, say a reductionistic
understanding of the brain and that the mind is just the
activity of the brain. That is a performative self
contradiction. In a way.
You're undermining your, your very cognitive and epistemic

(18:51):
capacity to make that claim whenyou deny that mind has any
reality beyond just neurochemistry.
Right. If we can know the neurochemical
correlates, roughly speaking, ofconsciousness, it's because our
consciousness is capable of knowing that.
I mean, what is knowledge if notan expression of the reality of

(19:12):
our subjective experience? Knowledge has to, you know,
knowledge can't just be reduced to, you know, vibrating
molecules in the synapses of ourneurons.
It's, it's, it's a phenomenological activity in
knowing right. And so we, we have to be very I,
I think science scientists should be more cautious about

(19:35):
dismissing subjective experience, lest they saw the
branch off that they're perched on.
Have you, have you found that your exploration within this
field, this anti scientism approach, leads people to
believe you're just anti science?
Yeah, it's unfortunate. I get that a lot.

(19:56):
I'm I love science. Yeah, my son happens to me as a
doctor. Just people just think I'm non
medical because I explore these consciousness topics.
But it's, it's heartbreaking when people think that they
don't really understand the depth I think of the
conversation. It's a very anti scientific
attitude to take like, you know,allowed to criticize specific

(20:17):
forms of or, or specific scientific claims.
And, and I think it's also a matter of respecting the sort of
division of Labor, but the proper division of Labor between
philosophy and science. And there's this attitude that
we don't need philosophy anymore.
That's the scientistic attitude.And so those with this more

(20:39):
scientistic approach, of course,are going to refer to anyone
raising philosophical questions about science as anti science
because, you know, if if you were properly scientific, you
would realize that philosophy isof no use anymore.
We've already answered all of the philosophical questions.

(21:00):
Science has replaced philosophy would be the the attitude.
And I think that's just, I thinkthat's just dead wrong.
There are so many questions thatcannot be answered by empirical
means, right? And, and science itself as a
method is, is floating on top ofa philosophical substructure, as

(21:21):
it were, right? Like science and all of its
successes and and advances, is, is just the very top of the
iceberg. And below that or is is is a
deep history of philosophical reflection and justification
that Kate needs to be continually reworked and

(21:42):
addressed as we make new scientific discoveries.
And so there is an interplay anda conversation, a mutual
transformation of science and philosophy, but we're always
going to need to be asking philosophical questions that
don't have straightforward scientific answers.
Well, at this point, let's let'smove on to the paper again.
You and I labeled the second chapter Pan Experientialism and

(22:05):
Organic Realism. Whitehead's organic realism
contrasts with mechanistic materialism.
How does how does it change the way we think about causality and
the relationship between mind and matter in general?
So Whitehead introduces this term prehension, which is such a

(22:29):
crucial concept in his philosophy of Organism, and it
has to do with causality, but italso has to do with perception
and memory. In some sense, he's trying to
come up with 11 concept that canexplain various facets of

(22:52):
reality to us. I mean, since David Hume
challenged the idea of necessaryconnection in nature, and, you
know, as an empiricist, he said we don't have any experiential
justification for this idea of necessary connection.

(23:13):
And, you know, Kant read this and says famously that this
awoke, he says, this awoke me from my dogmatic slumber.
And Kant has to then say, Oh, well, we can't do science
without causality, so it must bean A priori category that we
must interpret our experience interms of.
But the thing with Hume is in his own account of why we are

(23:36):
not aware of causality, that allwe see is, you know, 1 billiard
ball hit another billiard ball and the response of the second
billiard ball to the force of the first.
You know, we think we know what's going to happen, but it's
not a necessary connection. It's just because of our own
psychological habits are memories of having witnessed

(23:58):
similar events in the past, we assume.
And if they're inductive generalization, we know what's
going to happen next, but we don't actually know with any
certainty. But the thing that Whitehead
does that's so brilliant in reading Hume very carefully is
Hume actually admits that we do have direct experience of
causality when he says that we see with our eyes, we hear with

(24:20):
our ears this witness, Whiteheadrefers to it as the witness of
the body that, you know, when you flick on a light switch in a
dark room and your eyes blink, that is direct experience of
causal efficacy, right? And so bodily feeling for
Whitehead becomes the kind of prototype of causal transmission

(24:43):
throughout nature because he says, look, our our living
bodies are part of nature. They're just as much a part of
the environment as anything elsethere, the mountain, a cloud, a
river. And So what we feel
subjectively, so to speak, as the transmission of feeling
through our bodies, emotion and,and pain and pleasure.

(25:05):
This must be in some sense analogous to how causality
operates in in the rest of, of nature, whether it's living
nature or just physics and and chemistry.
That prehension for Whitehead is, I mean, it's synonymous with
the closest synonym. Synonym would just be feeling,
right, that the causal transmission through nature is

(25:27):
actually the transmission of feelings from what he would say
is 1 occasion of experience to the next.
And most of the enduring bodies that we see in the world around
us, you know, tables and, and chairs and trees and other
organisms, our own bodies are actually what he would call
societies of these occasions of experience.

(25:50):
And the way that a enduring bodymaintains its form over time is
by transmitting and repeating the same sorts of feelings over
and over again or definite characteristics over and over
again. And so you get this very
different picture of the naturalworld that is stitched together

(26:13):
by these these drops of experience that inherit from one
another via prehension, which isagain a kind of transmission of
feeling or even emotion. So Whitehead thinks that the
most primitive form of of transaction in nature is

(26:36):
actually emotion, blind emotion.He says it's not self, it's not
conscious self reflection upon an emotional state.
It's just the rush of emotion. And so not only does this put
feeling back into nature, it also puts aim and purpose back
into nature, right? So it's not just the motion of
bodies, it's the there's an emotional current that's drawing

(27:02):
things forward to achieve certain goals.
And Wyatt doesn't think that these goals are imposed from
outside by some kind of designer, their goals that arise
from the desires of of organismsthemselves, right.
So it's you could say it's it's Whitehead is deploying an yet

(27:23):
another example of this old Hermetic maxim, you know, as
above, so below, as below, so above.
But in some sense as within, so without.
And that's not really, you know,just Whitehead drawing on some,
you know, ancient occult philosophical idea or something.
I mean, you can understand Newton's approach to universal

(27:46):
gravitation as as abiding by thesame harmonic maxim, right?
This is this is rooted deeply inscience and when it's just
applying it more thoroughly, right?
At some point you suggest a well, you suggest that physics
must incorporate experience intoits models.
So I had the first thought that came to my mind was how would or

(28:08):
what would physics that fully embraces a pan experientialism
look like? Like like what would that be?
Is that something we could comprehend or prehend?
I mean, it, it wouldn't necessarily look all that
different. I what would be different would

(28:29):
be our philosophical interpretation of all of these
physical models that we have instead of thinking that, you
know, based on Einstein's general relativity that
space-time really was this four dimensional manifold or fabric,

(28:52):
we would say, OK, that's a model.
And ultimately what's, what's real and what's concrete is, is
going to need to be our experiential encounter with
so-called space-time. And you know, for Whitehead, the

(29:12):
kind of geometry that we use to understand the physical world is
somewhat a matter of convention.We're trying with geometry.
We're always trying to make measurements.
And depending on our purposes, one kind of measurement will be
more valuable to us. So that then another kind of
measurement. The the fallacy of misplaced

(29:34):
concreteness, as he understands it, is, is what happens when we
forget that whichever form of measurement we've chosen is an
abstraction and we, we, we mistakenly concretize it and
think, oh, that's the way naturereally is.
And, and so, you know, physics is, and science, natural science

(29:55):
is always going to be in the business of making models and
testing models, throwing them upagainst reality and seeing how
and where they break and then fixing them and trying again.
And that's tremendously useful. But I think to take a pan
experientialist view of the universe, it isn't so much

(30:16):
change the everyday practice of natural science.
I mean, it might raise certain ethical issues that would would
steer us away from certain kindsof experiments because, you
know, we're dealing with beings that can feel what we're doing
to them. But I think overall science
would remain a kind of model building enterprise, but there
it would be situated within a broader philosophy of nature

(30:39):
wherein we recognize the difference between abstract
models and concrete reality. And that in, in the most
concrete sense, the universe would be understood to be more
like an Organism. And every scientific discipline
and scientific model is dissecting that Organism and
taking a little slice of it, dyeing it and freezing it and
sticking it under a microscope. And of course, we can learn a

(31:01):
lot through those sorts of methods of of, you know,
reductionism, more or less, but that's a methodology and not an
ontology. And so the problem is mistaking
one for the other. And so, you know, Whitehead's
proposal here, where the philosophy of Organism is, is

(31:21):
not trying to tell scientists doing their work that they need
to to totally change everything about their methodology.
It's just step back and recognize the larger context
here, and don't mistake the abstractions of your special
science for the nature of concrete reality itself.
I think at some point that sort of links to White Ed's idea of

(31:45):
propositional feelings, because this is sort of going to reshape
the way we think of models in reality.
Would you like to unpack that a little?
Yeah, so, you know, White Ed's he, he worked with Bertrand
Russell on the Perkypa Mathematica and they both really
advanced this logic and developed propositional

(32:10):
functions that, you know, reallyopened up a whole new form of,
of inquiry into the structure ofthinking, the structure of
language and and the structure of mathematics.
But famously the logicist project fails.
Girdle proves why formally in inthe early 1930s with his

(32:33):
incompleteness theorems. And even before Girdle,
Whitehead was aware of the limitations of the attempt to,
in a way, reduce all of mathematics to formal logical
sort of deductions without the need for any intuitive leaps.

(32:57):
That turned out not to work. And so Whitehead's left with a
real desire to put, to take logic as far as it can go.
But he's recognizing that logicians have been so obsessed
with the true truth value of, of, of propositions, of logical
propositions that they've neglected the way that

(33:19):
propositions function in the real world.
And So what Whitehead ends up doing is he's generalizing the
idea of a proposition beyond just a linguistic statement that
a logician might judge as true or false.
And instead propositions become these entities.
He he would refer to them as hybrid entities that are

(33:42):
somewhere between actuality and possibility.
Propositions refer to actuality,but they refer to possibilities
that are latent in actuality. And he would say that I think
all, at least all living organisms have the capacity to
feel propositions. And now again, just to

(34:05):
reiterate, these are not linguistic anymore.
Why did would say our language and the structure of the the
grammar of various languages is an expression of the fact that
there are propositional feelingsat work deeper in our, in our
biology. And so any Organism that can
intend in the sense of a phenomenological intentionality,

(34:27):
an object is in some sense feeling a proposition, right?
Because it's, it's noticing there's an entity out there that
I am directing my attention toward.
And that entity may have certainqualities.
And each proposition is attributing certain qualities to
that entity. Whitehead would refer to the the

(34:47):
logical subject of a propositionand then the predicative
pattern. The logical subject is always
other actual entities in the environment of the prehending
entity or actual occasion, and the predicative pattern would be
what he calls eternal objects. I'm laying out the technical
details here in case anyone's a super nerd.
But, you know, the idea here is that propositions allow

(35:12):
organisms to both relate to the real world and to consider novel
possibilities about that world. And these propositions
themselves can propagate throughthe generations of organisms.
And as new propositions enter into the world, they they change
that world, right? And so Whitehead will say it's

(35:33):
more important that a proposition be interesting, that
that'd be true right now. He adds that of course, a true
proposition tends to be more interesting, but but not always.
And it's the fact that propositions can enter into the
experience of an Organism and then become part of the world as
a result of how they affect the behavior of that Organism that

(35:54):
allows novelty to enter the world.
If, if we could only consider true propositions, our
experience would always just conform to the past, right?
And so truth as a conformal relationship to what has already
occurred would leave us right where we started, right?
But the fact that we can ingressnovel propositions allows for a

(36:17):
kind of evolutionary process. We can test out new
possibilities, and if they work,the world has changed.
Something new becomes true that wasn't true before, right?
So there's a lot to this theory of propositions, but hopefully
that gives people a sense for the basic picture.
If there's anything further you'd like to unpack then feel

(36:37):
free. Probably good for now.
They can read the paper if they want more of the details.
I'll I'll link down below. Tell me Matt, if if feeling is
integrate integral, sorry to thestructure of reality.
Does this suggest? I think I've asked a few people
this before, but does this suggest that consciousness is

(37:00):
sort of a fundamental force of of reality, similar to gravity
or electromagnetism? What?
How do we view this from this perspective?
So Whitehead actually thinks consciousness as such is
somewhat peripheral and derivative from a more primary
form of experience. This is a stumbling block often

(37:22):
for folks to think of non conscious forms of experience,
but that's what Whitehead is asking us to do.
He wants to reserve the term consciousness for a particularly
complex form of experience. He actually says that again,
I'll give the technical account.He he offers that consciousness

(37:43):
is the subjective form of a propositional feeling.
And propositional feelings, likeI said, are are really only
active in in the world at the level of living organisms.
It's not that there isn't feeling in the physical and, and
chemical levels of reality, but it's, it's not yet propositional
in form, properly speaking. And so it's not yet conscious.

(38:08):
And So what, what a proposition allows, again, right, is this
contrast between actuality and possibility, consciousness
similarly, similarly for Whitehead, it's all about the
feeling of negation, he says, Which is to say we become
conscious to the degree that we're not only aware of what is
what we're factually perceiving,but we're also aware of what

(38:28):
could be perceived but is not being perceived.
So we're aware of the knot of the negative and that absence is
the space in which conscious andself-conscious experience
arises. Most occasions of experience,
including our own day-to-day andday to night, when you

(38:48):
especially consider sleep, most of our experience is not
conscious, but it's still experience.
You know, we wake up from a dream and we weren't conscious
in the dream, but we remember having experienced something in
the dream, right? And so I think similarly, when
we're driving a car and we're talking to a friend in the
passenger seat, we're not actually consciously attending

(39:08):
moment by moment to the road. And in some sense, if we're
overly conscious of of every little manoeuvre we're making on
the road, we're probably an anxious driver and not very
safe, right? And so there's this deeper level
of experience that's very much aware of what's going on, but
isn't self reflective about it. Flow states, you know, so there
are plenty of examples that I think helped bring home this

(39:30):
distinction White is making. And so for him, it's not
consciousness that goes all the way down.
It is this, this more basic formof feeling or experience or
emotion. And so that's a subtle
distinction, but I think it helps avoid the charge of like
anthropomorphism or something that White is just saying this

(39:52):
high level human consciousness is somehow metaphysically
fundamental. He's not saying that often
though. These words get used in
different ways. And so when a lot of
panpsychists who are coming at the this approach from a non
white headian perspective say consciousness goes all the way
down, they might in the end meansomething similar to this more

(40:13):
basic form of experience. So it might just be a verbal
dispute. But I think these distinctions
do carry some conceptual weight.What do you think about it,
Matt? How do you perceive
consciousness? What do you think?
What are your thoughts on this? Well, I mean, I, I wouldn't want

(40:33):
to, I, I do think I am a kind oftheist.
I, I, you know, a pan and theistor pan Gen. theist.
And to put the, the, the, the idea of Genesis and evolution
into that God world relationship.
And so on some level, I, I wouldwant to understand the divine as
a conscious being, but I think that consciousness, even the

(41:02):
divine consciousness is evolvingand, and learning in the course
of cosmogenesis. And so I guess in some ways
that's not all that different from a kind of cosmos psychism,
you know, where instead of thinking of a bunch of little

(41:23):
consciousnesses that might add up to bigger consciousness like
our own, there's, there's one consciousness that somehow
divides itself. And I think, you know, I'm not
entirely comfortable with eitherof those pictures, but
nonetheless, I do think that there is a, a kind of divine

(41:47):
consciousness within which all of us and all of the universe
exists as an expression of that consciousness.
And so if we're going to talk about photons and electrons and
atoms and these physical particles and the fields that

(42:09):
they are excitations within as in some sense experiential,
though not conscious, that doesn't mean that all of that
isn't taking place within some kind of megamind or, or world
soul, if you want, right? So I wouldn't want to fully deny
that consciousness is somehow very close to the ultimate

(42:30):
nature of reality. Have these always been your
views or do you feel that over the years the influence of
Whitehead, your religion, etcetera have changed it and
reshaped it in any ways? Or have this has this been
pretty much where you've been for quite some time?

(42:51):
My views have developed over thelast, you know, since I started
philosophizing in any sense the last 20 years now, I guess I
think I was initially more inclined towards this like
Buddhist attitude, say in my in my late teens and early 20s.

(43:11):
This Buddhist attitude of, you know, metaphysics might be
interesting, but let's focus more on alleviating suffering
and becoming better people. And I, I still think that that's
important, but I, I just, I caught the speculative bug and I
really wanted to know the answers to some of these, some
of these questions, You know, whereas in my late teens, I

(43:33):
thought, oh, this whole enlightenment thing sounds good.
It can't be that hard. Let's give it a try.
Turned out that life is messy and difficult.
And I, you know, we can still strive to be better, more
integrated people, but the idea of just, you know, killing my
ego and, and waking up one day and his enlightened being seemed

(43:54):
less realistic as I got a littleolder.
And so these deeper metaphysicalquestions became more
interesting to me. And I did discover Whitehead
pretty early, like 20/22/23. I started reading him.
And you know, as much as I've tried to find places where I, I

(44:14):
feel his scheme is inadequate, I, I, I really haven't been able
to, to find anything more convincing.
And so Whitehead has been very influential for me for, for
quite a while now and really shapes the, the structure of my
thought. So I've been pretty consistent,

(44:36):
I think for, for a while. And I mean, the evidence is out
there. I've been making YouTube videos
forever. So anyone who wants to check to
see if I've made any major shifts, I don't think so though.
I'll I'll put a link to the channel as well because it's
really enjoyable. The Do you think that a pan
experientialist view is can allow for a scientifically

(45:00):
coherent notion of free will? I think so.
I mean, White Ed's approach to pan experientialism implies that
there's at least a modicum of create creative self, creative

(45:24):
activity present at every scale in nature.
And so there's no determinism inhis universe.
There's creative evolution, there's creative advance, and
certainly there are more conformal, repetitive types of
activity in in nature. That's why there is order in the

(45:47):
world. That's why we can develop in
physics and chemistry laws, though strictly speaking, in a
white Hedian cosmology, laws aremore like habits.
But, you know, gravity is of is a widespread ancient habit
that's very unlikely to change anytime soon.

(46:11):
But nonetheless, it's a habit which has been acquired by the
universe over the course of billions of years of cosmic
evolution. And, and so at the level of, you
know, conscious animals like us,I think it's very clear that the
capacity to make decisions that do not conform simply with the

(46:34):
patterns of the past is that that's evident.
It's it's part of what learning is all about and whether or not
a a decision can be termed free in any ultimate sense.
You know there's always going tobe a tension between the
conditions provided by the past and the possibilities open for

(46:59):
realization in the future. We are constrained by by the
past. We're constrained by our
Physiology, but this in the sameway that, you know, we can think
of, say, our physiological constraints as holding us back,
they're also affordances that, that provide us with an

(47:24):
opportunity to, to, to freely decide to do certain things.
And so, you know, we, we inheritnot only limitations on our
freedom, but we inherit capacities for making free
decisions. I think the fact that animals

(47:45):
evolved nervous systems is as a way of not just reacting to
stimuli, but responding to stimuli, which is to say, on the
basis of what has been learned over the course of a lifetime,
animals with with nervous systems can can perform novel

(48:10):
functions. And you know, when you bring
consciousness into play here, it's as if what consciousness
adds to this more basic form of experience is like a dilation of
time wherein alternative possibilities can be considered
before responding to, you know, whatever our perception is is

(48:31):
giving us from the environment. And so a conscious human being
has this imaginative capacity toexplore various possibilities
and, and to even develop motivations by considering
certain images. And you know, there's, there's

(48:53):
not just a direct, direct connection between an image that
we're considering and an action that we take.
We have to have like the willpower to act on on an image
or an idea. And so there are several, you

(49:14):
know, it's making a free decision is not necessarily the
easy, it's not necessarily the easiest thing in the world to
do, But I nonetheless, I think there is a pathway for us to do
so. And it's, again, it's a kind of
hardcore common sense presupposition that we have
agency. We value the truth.
That's a that's a conscious decision that that we make as

(49:39):
scientifically inclined minds, you know.
And so if we don't have any freedom, again, I don't know
that we can take science seriously anymore.
Like science presupposes conscious agency.
Yeah. Overall, what what it seems like
to me is that your work seems tobe trying to unify scientific

(50:02):
rigor with lived experience. And ultimately, how do you see
this? Well, how can we do this in the
best way possible? I mean, how can philosophers and
scientists collaborate to break down these barriers and and make
this more interdisciplinary? Is that what partly footnotes to

(50:23):
Plato's for or to work in general?
Is that an attempt in itself? And what else do you think we
could do? Because that's also
fundamentally what I'm doing. Yeah.
So if we look at, you know, the last century and a half of the
way that science has developed as a profession, I think it's

(50:43):
it's there are many ways in which the professionalization of
science has led to more rigor and more precision and the
development of journals with jargons that allow for this
really deep penetration into theever more specialized modes of
inquiry and all that's importantand valuable.

(51:03):
But at the same time, this professionalization has created
a culture of competition for funding, for prestige.
And the thing about science, youknow, in its origins, it, it was
something that, you know, there weren't yet university

(51:26):
departments where you got slotted into to do a specific
kind of research. People like Newton or Darwin,
you know, they were, they're exploring based on where their
imagination drew them. And you know, I think I know
Darwin was maybe Newton was too sort of independently wealthy.
And so of course funding wasn't an issue.

(51:48):
But as science becomes more and more professionalized, it gets
Co opted by other values, economic values, military
values. I mean, military funding was
already a factor in the the birth of science in the 17th
century. I mean, Galileo and Descartes
were working on Ballistics to pay the bills.
They were, you know, Galileo andand Kepler and those guys were

(52:11):
also doing astrology to pay the bills.
But that's another matter. The history of science is way
more interesting than most people let on.
But in any event, I think one way to improve the the
collaborative spirit among scientists themselves and among
scientists and philosophers is to remember that knowledge is
part of the Commons. And I think science has been

(52:34):
really Co opted and and and harmed by the capture, by being
captured by market forces and being captured by government and
militaristic aims. And as well and into we, we
really need to shift into a different understanding of what
knowledge is to break it free ofthis competitive market type of

(53:00):
attitude where, you know, it's all about making sure my lab is
the best and I get all the credit and I get all the funding
and we're going to defeat our competitors.
How are we going to advance when, when that's the motivation
this leads to, you know, actually diverging from the, the

(53:21):
value of truth to fudge the numbers a little bit to maybe
get a little bit more funding and prestige.
You know, you, you see that happening.
If we can shift to a more collaborative approach to the
production of knowledge. And I this has a lot to do with
shifting of the, the funding structure to think of it, you

(53:43):
know, more as gift money. That would be funding research
rather than money from some corporation that has a specific
end in mind. Like, look, we put a lot of
money into this drug. You better design a study so
that it works, you know, rather than in an open minded way,
exploring different forms of medicine without the profit mode

(54:03):
of driving at all, which obviously distorts things.
And so I think this, yeah, this professionalization of science
and philosophy which has occurred over the last 150 years
or so, while it did bring some benefits, has actually
fragmented knowledge and distorted it, right, because of

(54:24):
these other motivations that have come into the picture.
How does your address existential concerns,
existential dread in a world where the scientific mainstream
view is that of a cold dead in different universe?

(54:45):
Yeah, well, I think this scientific materialist view like
this sort of heroic atheism is motivating enough for some
people like like Shawn Carroll, Richard Dawkins, like there's
this, this attitude. Jacques Minogue would talk about
us as sort of like lonely gypsies on a mode of dust in

(55:08):
some random place at the edge ofthe Galaxy.
It that that attitude of being alone in a meaningless world and
nonetheless like soldiering on it.
For some people that is a sourceof meaning.
It's a kind of narrative that get that that motivates them.
And it's in its own way a kind of myth, another version of the

(55:32):
hero's journey. And so I understand how it
functions, but I think it only functions because it has that
mythic structure to it. But it's it's still that myth.
Though it can be a source of meaning for some, I think it's
still alienating. I think it inevitably

(55:53):
disconnects us from deeper sources of meaning, but we end
up having to say that we make upour own meaning.
And you know, I, I pick on Sean Carroll a little bit because he
thinks that it's a little easierto make up our own meaning than
it actually is. I think we very few of us are

(56:15):
satisfied just thinking that allof our values are subjective
preferences. And, and actually, if we, you
know, consider this politically,if you're her kind of secular
atheist and a political liberal,you would say, well, the values
of liberalism, like classical liberalism, like, you know,

(56:37):
human rights and freedom of speech and all this, you know,
we all reasonable people agree and have that preference that we
should protect these rights. And it turns out that that
might, that subjective preference as a, as a basis for
these rights might not actually be all that secure as we see in
our current world. You know, without any deeper
anchor for these values, they'revery easily uprooted and, and

(57:01):
replaced by those with beliefs in what are what's been called
the strong gods. You know, in this Nietzschean
sense that, you know, there, there are these, these elemental
powers that are, are the source for human values.
And that while we do play a participatory role as human

(57:25):
beings, nonetheless our values are sourced more deeply in our
biology if we're going to just be materialist about it.
But also, I think in a Whiteheadian sense, beyond just
our biology and these sort sort of Darwinian drives, there are
these deeper cosmic values. You know, Nietzsche would think
of it in terms of the will to power.

(57:46):
And there's not, there's something similar in Whitehead.
But for Whitehead, power is always the power, the power of
composition. There's it's, it's this power
for Whitehead is rooted in an aesthetic desire to, to compose,
experience in a way that makes it more beautiful or intensely

(58:07):
beautiful. And so, you know, I think we're
better served by recognizing that our human values are
actually derivative from deeper,the deeper values of life, the
deeper values of evolution, Britlarge and that these aren't just

(58:29):
negative values in the sense that it's just the struggle for
existence then. And and this the those with the
the most brutal, you know, values to encourage strength
and, you know, being the best warrior or whatever that those

(58:50):
are the only values that end up pointing out.
No, I think there are more delicate values too that that we
inherit from these deeper cosmicprocesses that are more geared
towards again, beauty and and subtlety and compassion and
wisdom and love and so on. And that these aren't just human
constructs. These are actually why they're

(59:13):
even are human beings that the fact that the human being
evolved as a, as a conscious agent, capable of scientific
knowledge, capable of, capable, not always actualizing, but
capable of wisdom and love and compassion and so on.
I think that's evidence of the fact that, you know, the
universe has these more deeply rooted tendencies in it, right?

(59:37):
And so I, I, I don't know that it's ultimately responsible for
scientists and, and intellectuals who themselves
have been able to find meaning in, in one of these materialist
stories by virtue of the heroismthat it affords them as like
little drops of meaning in a soulless world.

(59:58):
I think it's irresponsible to try to push that on the average
person because the average person who's not, you know, who
doesn't have a life whereby A narrative about being involved
in the production of scientific knowledge and so on can can be
enough to motivate them and givethem meaning.
I think it actually really puts us in a, in a dangerous

(01:00:19):
situation culturally, nihilism. And, you know, Nietzsche warned
us what would happen if if nihilism took root and became
widespread. And that was the 20th century.
And and you know, quarter into the 21st century, we're still
dealing with the same problem, Ithink.
What do you think is the biggestmisconception about your work?

(01:00:41):
Oh, but at least about the way people perceive your work.
Well, I think you hit on something earlier when, you
know, you said people tend to view this isn't as anti
scientific. That's not at all my my
intention. I don't think it's borne out

(01:01:02):
when you consider the work that I have done trying to support
the advance of science and the find better justifications
actually for science to save science from its own self
annihilation and its own performative, the performative
self contradictions of scientismthat undermines its own

(01:01:25):
conditions of possibility. I think, you know, people who
are more religious in a traditional way will criticize
me for not having the right understanding of God.
And just as, you know, people with a more materialist or

(01:01:47):
atheist bent will criticize me for, you know, the irrational
belief in any kind of a God. And so it depends, you know, the
biggest misconception depends onwhere, where the other person is
coming from. I, I often think of myself as an
integrative philosopher. I'm, I'm trying to find the

(01:02:08):
middle path between various extremes.
I think in some ways everybody is right about something.
And so there's something to learn from every position and
from every, every view. And I, I wouldn't want to be too
quick to dismiss alternatives. But I think whenever we're

(01:02:31):
whenever we find ourselves in a situation of having to explain
away inconvenient facts, we knowthat we're we're caught in some
kind of extreme ideological viewor an imbalanced perspective.
And so, yeah, I mean, I guess the biggest misconception is

(01:02:53):
that is that I'm just trying to invent a view of the universe
that brings me comfort. Whereas, you know, I often say

(01:03:16):
like the pan experientialist or pan psychist view is, is
actually not comforting at all. It's kind of frightening to
imagine that the world is imbuedwith sentience and and that it's
not just me looking at the world, but the world is looking
back. I mean, it's it's kind of
unsettling. It's not comforting.

(01:03:37):
I have to say it does, you know,put us back in an ecology of a,
a, a world that's more like an ecology of organisms than it is
just a collection of, of objects.
But like literally ecology, thatmeans, you know, there are
predators out there who might want to eat us.
And so I think the world that I'm describing is not simply one

(01:04:00):
where I would feel more comfortable, but it is one where
I would feel more meaningful. Well, Speaking of meaning, if if
you had to take this view to itsMax, it's telos, teleology of
the universe, meaning, purpose. Where does it head for you?

(01:04:24):
I don't know in particular whereit's headed, but you know, this
is an interesting difference between a thinker like Whitehead
and the Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Terre des Chardin, whose
work I also love. But I'm I'm less comfortable
with his almost deterministic view of where evolution is

(01:04:47):
headed, that it's, it seems to him, almost inevitable that the
evolution of life on Earth wouldhave culminated in thought or in
the conscious human being, whichthen it's this new threshold of
evolution. He refers, Tayard refers to the
human being as a new Kingdom of life, not just a new species.

(01:05:09):
And the human is really bringingforth what he calls the nose
fear or the layer of mind aroundthe planet.
And that evolution then continues towards what he refers
to as Christogenesis and the arise, the emergence of the
Omega Point, which for him almost like pierces through
space-time and unifies life and mind with with the divine.

(01:05:31):
And that you know, for him there's this inevitable
curvature of the evolutionary process toward this Omega point.
And I admit it's a it's a beautiful and compelling vision,
but I'm not sure that there's that much determination to this
process. Whitehead is more open-ended

(01:05:54):
about where evolution is going, but he would say, and I, I'm, I
think more inclined to agree with Whitehead's perspective
here that there's a, there's a general telos towards more
beauty, where beauty is the capacity to hold more diversity
and harmony, right to, to, to bring together what, what might

(01:06:18):
otherwise be conflicts into contrasts.
And so the universe is, is moving always towards more
intense expressions of beauty, of aesthetic enjoyment.
And with the capacity for more aesthetic enjoyment also comes
the capacity for more pain and suffering, right?

(01:06:38):
But it seems as though the possibility of of joy and deeper
beauty is worth it despite the risks of of greater pain and
suffering otherwise, like why would the evolution of life on
earth produced more and more sensitive creatures capable of

(01:07:00):
more and more existential dread?You know, like as the downside
to being such highly organized and sensitive creatures, It
seems that the joy and the and the the experience of beauty
afforded by our very sensitive type of organization again, is,
is worth it despite the downsides.
And so that general tendency towards more complexity, more

(01:07:23):
capacity to experience beauty, seems to me to be at least
providing A trajectory without their having to be a definite
and the point that we will reachno matter what.
Have you ever considered renaming your channel footnotes
to Whitehead? I mean, in some sense, because

(01:07:48):
that's a quote from Whitehead, it's kind of already there for
those in the know who know wherethat girl comes from.
But, you know, Whitehead says he's really only adapting
Plato's view in light of modern science.
And that, you know, in some sense Plato laid out all, of all

(01:08:11):
of the problematics, all of the approaches to perennial
problems, some solutions that heoffers, but then he also
critiques his own solutions. You know, in the, in the, in the
dialogues, you get all of these great doctrines and the best
refutations of those doctrines. And so, you know, in in many

(01:08:32):
ways Whitehead's already returning to Plato, but in the
spirit of Plato himself, you know, in open-ended inquiry and
not becoming dogmatically attached to any particular
doctrine, but just trying to again integrate the variety of,
of, of facts with the, the most inclusive theoretical

(01:08:56):
interpretations of those facts. Schilling, Whited.
Kent, Great philosophers, Plato.Who else would you recommend for
the average listener viewer to make sure they read before they
leave this world? Well, I, I find Ralph Waldo

(01:09:19):
Emerson to be quite edifying in the Platonist lineage and he's
such a wonderful essayist who can convey the, the deepest
insights of not just the, the tradition of Western philosophy,
but Indian philosophy as well ina, in an idiom that, at least

(01:09:44):
for an English speaker, I think is quite accessible and
beautiful. Everyone should read Nietzsche
just to understand our, our predicament.
And it's very important to confront nihilism and not bypass
that. And so any re enchantment

(01:10:06):
project or attempt to revitalizea meaningful connection to to
the cosmic process has to come after nihilism, not before.
We can't retreat from the confrontation with, you know,
what Nietzsche is describing. Yeah.

(01:10:30):
Who else else would I say? I mean, it's good to read some
some poetry. Rilke and Holderlin and
Wordsworth and Shelley and Whitman.
These are all important for me. And I don't read much fiction.

(01:10:54):
I'm, I'm often reading science and philosophy books, but I do,
I do read poetry as often as I can because I think it keeps
language, it keeps my language fresh.
It helps me avoid becoming overly formalist in, you know,
finding jargon and sticking withit forever.

(01:11:16):
I, I think there's a way of writing philosophy where you can
get locked into particular formulations and then they just
become these mantras that gradually lose their meaning.
And then on the other hand, people might complain, oh, but
you're, you're so slippery. You're constantly describing it
in different ways. And like, I'm not even sure what
you mean because you never say it the same twice.

(01:11:37):
It's like, well, the concepts I'm trying to direct your
attention to you are not identical to the words that I'm
using to direct you. And so learning to think is, I
think, is a poetic process because you find out gradually
the deeper you go into this conceptual territory, that in

(01:11:58):
different moments of life and with different audiences in
different contexts, it is best to use different words to
describe the same concepts, right?
And that way you avoid ever collapsing the two and imagining
that concepts are just words because I don't think they are.
I can't tell you what they are because I could only use words

(01:12:20):
to do so. But I think there is some kind
of a tension there between whatever a concept is and and
the linguistic formulations we use to to convey them.
So poetry is important to keep our language fluid, I think.
I think that your work's incredible, it's enjoyable to
watch, your channel's great and every year as a guest has been

(01:12:43):
such a pleasure. But I would be remiss if I don't
mention though that we were meant to chats.
I think a few months ago and dueto my recent move, unfortunately
several technical issues happened and to postpone a
couple of interviews, but one ofthose was not just ours, but our
group interview for Mind at Large, Peter Shusted use.
We spoke about this, this concept, this huge conference

(01:13:06):
that's happening in December. Hope we can actually going to
attend as well. But what can you tell me about
this Mind at Large? What's going on here?
What are you guys up to? Give us some info, Give us the
deets. Yeah.
No, I can, I can spill some of the beans on that.
So myself and Peter and the goodfolks at the Center for process

(01:13:31):
studies, Andrew Davis and AndrewSchwartz as well as Alex Gomez
Marin from the the Perry Center and others were assembling a
larger team. We're planning this multi year
project that will be, you know, primarily a series of
conferences. I think we have 3 in mind and we

(01:13:53):
want to, we want to tell a storyover the course of of three
years in these conferences describing, you know, first of
all, how did we get here to, to this inflection point where we
have more knowledge of the universe than ever before?
And yet was it Steven Weinberg who said the more we know about
the universe, the less meaningless it, the less

(01:14:15):
meaningful it seems? Why?
Why is that? Why is that the story that we
have ended up telling as our knowledge of the universe has
increased? Why wouldn't we tell a different
kind of story where we're amazedby the fact that the universe is
intelligible at all and that we're capable of decoding?
It's it's, it's structure, it's logical physical structure.

(01:14:40):
And so we want to understand howwe got here, and we want to
explore the variety of alternatives to materialism that
are all the sudden back on the table, various forms of
idealism, various forms of panpsychism and animism.
Vitalism is cool again in some form.
And so we want to create a forumwhere all of these alternatives

(01:15:00):
can come together with whoever among the materialists and
physicalists is willing to join us to, you know, hold down the
Fort, as it were, against a lot of challenge and opposition, But
in a, you know, a friendly, collaborative, collegiate way.
We, we want to convene these conversations to try to, you

(01:15:22):
know, create the the menu basically for the 21st century
of philosophical options. Because it's very clear that at
least the organizers, myself andthe other organizers of this
project feel that materialism ison the back foot right now.
And so we want to seize the moment as it were, and bring to

(01:15:42):
greater public awareness some ofthe alternatives which I think
have actually a scientific justification and philosophical
basis. And we're not trying to tilt the
scales towards one or one position or the other of these
alternatives, but we really wantto do a just allow for an

(01:16:05):
open-ended inquiry. And so there will be conferences
where we're even considering sort of documentary that might
come out of this that tells the story in a compelling way.
So we've got a little bit of funding, we're looking for more,
but it's, it's going to happen. It's happening.
So I hope you're going to be a part of it as well.
Yeah, I am. I tell Peter if he needs any

(01:16:26):
help at all, my own body solution.
We're here to help. I'm here to I'm I'm, I'm
probably going to attend. So looking forward to tonight
and I can't wait to to see this.And I think the one important
thing that you said there is, isthe alternatives, because it
shows that there's a lack of a personal attempt to try and put
your own view forward, which is great because while you might be

(01:16:48):
saying you're going anti materialist, it's great that you
guys are going to all be exploring different and diverse
views about this, which I think is pretty cool and always a
great sign. So yeah, Matt, thanks.
This has been such a pleasure tochat to you man.
Yeah, likewise, Kevin. Great, Great questions.
Glad we could finally make it work.
Me too. It's been it's been a long time
coming, but I'm hoping this year's hopefully we see each

(01:17:09):
other soon in person and all youguys because I think I've been
interacting with you guys for solong and now I give shouted to
you, I think it's time to meet some of you guys in person.
I'm all the way in Cape Town, soit's so far away.
It's your morning, it's my night, so.
Yeah. Well, the idea is, I think we're
thinking we might have one conference in California, one in
New York, and then one in your hemisphere somewhere, if not in

(01:17:32):
Africa, at least in Europe. Well, if, if the closer the
better, but I'll, I'll, I'll make my way either way.
So I'm looking forward to any final words.
Matt, anything you feel like youneed to say before we leave or
you are you happy with everything?
I would just say trust your experience.
And, you know, so much of what we've discussed is just about

(01:17:54):
this dilemma we found ourselves in, where certain abstract forms
of of modelling and and reasoning have alienated us from
our own direct to experience an encounter with the universe.
And I think the way forward is to go back to our direct
encounter with the world and then build out from there more

(01:18:14):
carefully and less than a rush to predict and control, but with
rather the intention to come into deeper relationship with
that world.