https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_pnmhbK3glk
Thank you for watching. This YouTube and podcast series is by the Vervecki Foundation, which in addition to supporting my work, also offers courses, practices, workshops, and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes. Welcome everyone to the Cognitive Science Show. This is episode 13 of Transcendent Naturalism. I’m here with my ongoing partner in all of these cognitive science shows, Greg Enriquez, and I’m here with somebody that some of you should recognize from some of the videos. We released a video with Matt and I not that long ago on my channel, and this is Matt Seagal. It’s a really great pleasure to have Matt here. I’m reading and his excellent book right now, Crossing the Threshold. See if that will come into view. There we go, Crossing the Threshold. Great subtitle, Ethereic Imagination in the Post-Contian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead. Excellent book. Matt, my son, and I are actually reading it together, which is a great pleasure, and I’m enjoying the book thoroughly. Welcome, Matt. I’ll turn things over now to Greg. Yeah, I’m really excited to have you here, Matt. Really looking forward to diving in today, and we’ll of course continue this conversation next week as we’ve done. For me, I’ve danced around Whitehead a lot. I’ve danced around the philosophy of the organism. I’m really looking forward to seeing how we weave this in relationship to transcendent naturalism. I thought that it was really coincidental. I put up a post on Utah being endonaturalism, and you shared a link that had enormous number of parallels with that. So welcome. We’re coming off a really cool conversation with Jordan Hall, where we’re talking sort of about the fifth joint point, thinking about tech, the vision of the future, and the kind of wisdom philosophies we need for this. I think Whitehead and the process philosophy that you’re advocating is very congruent with the kinds of reflections we need, and it’s lovely to have you here. Yeah, great to be in dialogue with both of you, and I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. So yeah, glad we’re together. So where do we dive in? Well, I know maybe your reflections on maybe the core argument that maybe in the first four episodes around transcendent naturalism, things like that, and I don’t know where you’ve dipped in and out of some of the other responses that have been made, but what is your response to the argument? What convergences do you have? What divergences do you have from it? And then we just, I’m sure things will catch fire very quickly and we’ll just take it from there. How’s that sound? Yeah, sounds great. So yeah, I’ve watched, I think most of, I may have missed a few episodes here and there, but I’ve watched most of the, was this the second season of the cognitive science show? And I think I consider myself part of this, if you’ll accept me, part of the same effort to articulate a new kind of natural philosophy, let’s call it. And I think bringing in things like information theory, bringing in the complexity sciences, bringing in emergence, obviously, but also some conception of emanation and sort of revitalizing some neoplatonic insights in a contemporary scientific context, I think is quite exciting and an important project that I see myself as, yeah, as I said, engaged in and a partner with both of you in. I will say though that I think I’ve never felt fully comfortable identifying my approach as naturalistic. And that’s not because I want to make reference to something supernatural, but typically naturalism, I mean, we could define it as a methodology, we could define it as a metaphysics, and maybe we can get into the difference there, but either way, as either the method or the metaphysics, the ontology, either both of the ways in which they have been defined in the context of modern Western science, I think has prevented us from affirming something like formal causality or final causality, prevented us from taking more than just some narrow construal of the five senses as granting us access to a real world. I think so there’s a limited form of empiricism that’s been built into the method of doing natural science and a sense in which naturalism would entail a kind of global mechanistic explanation. And so on those construals of what naturalism means, I have felt a bit suffocated and unable to fully adopt the label. Now I think transcendent naturalism is trying to bring in some of these things that traditionally naturalism has forbid or relegated to the supernatural or said that, oh, well, that’s really just part of human consciousness. And that’s kind of this anomalous peripheral thing. We don’t quite know how it emerged, but we don’t need to talk about subjectivity. We don’t need to talk about teleology until this weird consciousness thing emerges. Everything else we can explain naturalistically. And I think whether it’s Utah or this sort of neoplatonic retrieval, I think that kind of naturalism I have more time for. And so then it just becomes a question of the rhetoric, I guess, or the way that we start to bridge with the broader cultural conversation about the meaning of life and the place of the human being in the universe. There’s a certain kind of fundamentalist religion and a certain kind of new age narcissism that I think I would also want to resist, which is why sometimes referring to naturalism and really trying to maintain scientific rigor, that can be really important, not just as a rhetorical move, but as a methodological move. But I also think that, and I don’t necessarily think either you disagree with this, but I think there is something of tremendous value that needs to be inherited from the world religions that we can’t just rebuild from scratch or something in a more rational or scientific way. That just isn’t going to happen. So we have to inherit something. And this new age thing, I’ve heard you speak about this in different contexts more recently, John, as a kind of reaction against a more reductionistic reading of science that also leaves behind the rigor of science and the empirical methodology of science and the importance of justifying one’s knowledge and all these things. It leaves behind what we really can’t leave behind, but these new age movements are reaching for something that I think is valid and important. And so there’s a needle to be thread somewhere here, but I think that’s my general response to the project that I take you two to be engaged in. That was very fantastic. Oh, sorry, go ahead, Greg. I just wanted to say, I think that was a very fair reflection and not only fair and insightful. Right. I think that one of the things that this project… Greg, you’re kind of quiet. Can you get a little closer to your computer? Sure. How’s this for Sam? Is that all right? It’s better. I wonder if your microphone is selected. If you’re trying to use your headphone mic or the computer mic, it might be selected incorrectly. Just a guess. How does that work? Is that better? No? Not working. Worse. Yeah, it’s worse. We can hear some fan or AC in the background or something. It’s fine. I could just… Oh, now we don’t hear anything. Not hearing you at all. Now we don’t hear anything, Greg. Sorry, we opened up a whole can of worms by trying to change the mic. We prodded the imp of the perverse there. Well, while Greg is solving that out, maybe I’ll say something. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. So, Matt, I think that was very charitable. I’d like to perhaps start on one of the places that I think does need more discussion. This is particularly like you said, what is the relationship of inheritance from the legacy religions? Because I agree with you, this is not rejection. This is not repudiation. This is not refutation. That’s not what transcendent naturalism is doing. I know Greg agrees with me about this. Part of what wasn’t brought foregrounded in the core argument I made that actually started originally in Greg’s Consilience Conference, which was amazing, was a lot of the work I’ve been doing in two other areas, three other areas actually that I think might be germane. One, of course, is something I think you’re familiar with. I’ve been talking about different kinds of knowing and that there is a proper role also for a Corban sense of the imaginal, especially when we’re talking about non-propositional kinds of knowing. Then the notion of ritual as imaginal augmentation that allows us to pick up on things that we otherwise would be insensitive to and to come into proper relation. And that what we’re doing with the non-propositional kinds of knowing can be, I think, fairly justifiably argued to be processes of overcoming attentional and affective self-deception and identity formation and the enhancement of connectedness that fall under the name wisdom and overlap with meaning in life. If we have this language of wisdom and meaning cultivation and the imaginal and ritual and they can be properly explained, not explained away, but explained within sort of a four-e cogsci framework. I wonder if that, and I think that is all very consistent with the argument of transcendent naturalism. I suppose what I’m saying is I’m proposing to you that that’s my answer of what we can get from the legacy religions. And the reason why I sort of stop there is because I bump up into the pluralism argument about the vast differences. This is why I’m against sort of easy Huxley and kind of perennialism. Even though Huxley doesn’t really have that if you read the perennial philosophy, he has a much more cautious thing going on. But nevertheless, I find the pluralism argument very powerful, very persuasive, and that you have to drop below the level of propositions to get convergence and also to get enough universal phenomena that you can get a scientific purchase on them. And so I would argue, I’m going to make a little bit stronger argument because I know you’re definitely up to it. So that’s not a concern on my part, which is I’m making a stronger argument that I think that’s all we can get from them because of the pluralism and because of, you know, if you’re going to get some sort of comprehensive ontological grasp on there has to be important invariants across time and culture, et cetera. And so that’s what I would say. And I would say one of the advantages of transcendent naturalism, especially with the notion of strong transcendence, is it gives real teeth and depth to the cultivation of wisdom, the cultivation of character, the realization of meaning, et cetera. Now, and one more point, and I don’t want to put Greg at a disadvantage, but I mean, and I’m only about, I think, 50 pages into your beautiful book. By the way, it’s really good, Matt. It’s really good. Oh, thank you, John. Like, no, seriously, it’s really good. I’m going through a big whitehead phase again, which I do. I dip in and dip out and I’m going through a really big one. But you all, I guess I’m also inviting you to say if this notion of the imaginal, especially the way I’ve tried to enrich it beyond the way Corban has discussed it, is it getting, is it convergent or is it close or is it adjacent to what you mean by etheric imagination and the important role you place it for crossing over the subjective, objective divide over the Kantian guardianship, as you beautifully put it. And so that’s my initial response, but I did interrupt to give Greg time to get his name in. Right. Well, how does this sound now? Is this, is the mic okay now? Yeah, yeah, yeah, much better. I’ll let that, I have definitely lots to pick up on. Let’s let the flow go and let’s have Matt respond to that. Then we can come back to some of my comments about naturalism and where I see this, which of course will be very congruent. Yeah. Thanks, Greg. So I’ll briefly respond to say that I think what I mean by etheric imagination is quite similar to what Corban is doing with the imaginal. I can’t remember if I briefly cite him or not. Maybe I didn’t in the book, but I’m aware of his work. And I think the key, of course, is to make a distinction between fantasy or the imaginary and the imaginal because there’s a ontological heft to this. I don’t want to call it a mere, it’s not a mere concept. It’s not just a percept either. It’s that in between space that I think has real ontological significance and can. And I think what I would say my book is trying to argue for is that there’s an epistemological method that needs to be developed that would allow us to be scientific about imaginal perception, imaginal experience, let’s say. Because again, it’s not quite perception, it’s not quite conceptual. It’s like, where’s the imagination in that? It’s before that distinction. Kant pointing this out in his own way. And so yeah, I think there’s a lot of consistency there. There’s probably some differences because I’m not coming straight out of Corban. I’m coming more out of Steiner, who’s a vexing figure of great value for me in my own work, but also there’s a lot I have no idea what to do with in Steiner’s work. So that’s on the imagination question you raised. But in terms of ritual as what we can recover from the world religions, absolutely. And the non-propositional forms of knowing that ritual allows us to cultivate where I think at their best, these ancient rituals, which in many cases, like what we call, or what the Catholic Church or Christianity has called the Eucharist, mass, etc., has much earlier roots that the ritual the Ur form of that ritual goes very, very deep. And so if you put the world religions in that kind of evolutionary context, cultural evolution, in that context, there’s a more overlap. But also plurality is essential. Maybe this is an even stronger argument for pluralism. I think at this point, to touch religion at all, to be religious at all, has to be in the context of inter-religious dialogue. And not just between people who are committed to one faith, I would even say, as individuals, I think, given our access to this, to the world religions, no one’s just born now in in one little tribe or in one little society, and can just assume that theirs is the only religion. And how could anyone disagree? This is like the only game in time. None of us are in that situation anymore. And so I think there’s a kind of responsibility that each of us has to ourselves become inter-religious, like internal to ourselves, we can hold multiple religious commitments. Right? And so the challenge of religious pluralism is something each person, I think, needs to work out psychologically, psychospiritually. And not everyone is at that place where they can engage in that way. But for those who do have a more, who are raised in a context or later in life, find that they’re called a particular religious tradition. I think to do that authentically and to do it responsibly, you need to be in continual dialogue with those who have other faith commitments. And not just respect their right to have those faith commitments and to be different from you, but to be interested in that difference, because it’s going to reflect back on your own self-understanding. Right? So only in this kind of a context, I think, can religion remain relevant without being dangerous and actually holding us back. But we need it. If we can engage it in this way, I think, because of the way that ritual is a form of knowing that I think allows us to entrain with cosmic rhythms, we’re not going to overcome this alienation by thinking more about it. There’s an actual performance that I think the world religions have allowed us to cultivate generation to generation. And that performance, those ritual performances that nobody quite understands, like, why are we really doing this? It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand why you’re doing it, because it’s the same reason that the sun is rising. Right? And there’s a confusion that can happen there when you understand the symbolism at work in ritual. And you think that, oh, if we don’t do the ritual, the sun won’t rise. Well, no. But when you’re doing ritual, you’re participating in that you’re entrained to that cosmic rhythm. And so that sense that if I stop doing the ritual, the sun actually won’t rise, it makes a little bit more sense. It’s a faulty idea to assume that. But you’re so entrained with that broader cosmic rhythm that you start to think that you are it. Right? And if we can adopt that mode of cognition, that way of knowing, without making that mistake where you literalize it, then I think we can inherit the great value of these ritual practices. That’s beautiful. There’s actually, I’ve been, I had to get my thing fixed, but it’s also the case that I’ve been percolating along with the rhythm of your conversation. And it’s touching me. There’s a lot I want to say about naturalism, but I’ll just be brief in relation. So for me, actually, if you look at the definition, it’s a vague definition. I like that in philosophy. It basically is the sort of one world commitment at its essence. But what I want to argue very clearly is that it’s not committed to a reductive mechanistic worldview. Like naturalism doesn’t commit that. Although many people think that it does, to me, that’s materialism. And actually, that’s an outdated term even than physicalism. I want to replace both materialism and physicalism with naturalism. And this comes to me from my work in Utah and the concept of behavior. And the idea really that what natural science commits to epistemologically, ontologically, metaphysically is behavior, which of course is going to enter into a process philosophy view much more readily. But many people confuse, and indeed, John Watson is guilty of this, starting behaviorism, at least within psychology, and yoking it to a reductive sensory reflex mechanism. But that’s not necessary. In fact, B.F. Skinner splits that off, if you know the history of behaviorism. And he’s a molar behaviorist, not a molecular behaviorist. And he then talks about the behavior of persons. And I would say what we’re doing right here is behavior of persons. And you can’t go from the molar to the molecular in any kind of stepwise fashion because of recursive looping. And ultimately, you talk with a tree of knowledge who’s trying to say, hey, we need a universal natural behaviorism. When we do that in a new big history view, we can place mindedness in the world. When you place mindedness in the world as a sensory motor loop coming off of organisms and then us as cultured persons off of that, you get a totally different metaphysical vibe. And that metaphysical vibe is much more consistent with modern science. And it lets go of the reductive mechanical aspects of naturalism and gives us a universal across the ontological layers and actually corresponding with our scientific epistemology is my argument. So for me, I talk about Utah as an endonatural view. What I mean by that is I want to look inside of naturalism and fix it. It’s broken. The Enlightenment didn’t place us in right relationship to matter in mind. It gave us the Enlightenment gap. We don’t have a coherent philosophy that places subject, object, matter, and mind in right relation. We can now. And with focus on naturalism, I want to respect the edges of that where parapsychology, aliens, all the stuff that would be sort of like, it’s fascinating, I’m agnostic, but I want to get naturalism focus in on correct and out of exactly the kind of limiting metaphysics and this idea that there’s a mind totally separate that can then write formulas and then, but does not need to be reincorporated into the ontological picture. So that I’ll say about naturalism. Then very briefly, let me just add and then I’ll hush up because I could have too much fun with this. This, John’s imaginal ended up being a huge bridging concept for me. And in Utah, it turns out that the imaginal does fill in a gap that I had between the perceptual conceptual and the imaginary. And it yolks that stuff together in a way that what you just talked about makes me want to, I will click on and order your book. I haven’t started that. I’m super excited about that. The last thing I’ll say about religions is, I created this iconic imagery for Utah, this garden. And the ultimate icon of the garden is this elephant sun god. The sun god is from Ra in the Bronze Age. The elephant is from Ganesha into the Axial Age. It rises over the garden. And inside of it is an elephant that comes together, blind men and the elephant, which is also a connection to modern science and looking and then ultimately a meta-modern view of a wholism, a coherent integrated wholism. So when you’re speaking about the interpersonal religious pluralism, that beautifully resonates with my sentiment for how we would rediscover the place of religion going forward. So all of those things were remarkably resonant. And I just appreciated so much of what you were and then given the opportunity to rip off of it. Yeah, lovely thoughts there. I’ll respond briefly to that. So I think the one world emphasis I’m down with, I think, but I wouldn’t want that to mean what there’s a physicist and philosopher whose work I’ve studied closely named Timothy Eastman, also interested in. I’ve read some of Eastman. We’ve read some of Eastman. We did. We read Eastman together. Wonderful. Great. Glad to have that shared context. He distinguishes between actualism and a view of nature, which would also allow for what he calls potentia. And so as long as the one world, like we want to hold the tension between the actual and the potential, but we don’t want to end up in a situation, which is what a kind of crude materialism suggests, where nature is just a bunch of already actualized stuff that gets rearranged. And so as long as one world is a one world wherein what really is a exists is this process of actualization, where for actualization to be a verb form, to be a process means that it’s advancing into novelty. And novelty is not just a rearrangement of preexisting parts. Another way of talking about this would be to say that there are emergent holes, that nature is the process of new holes emerging. And we can understand that monistically. Whitehead’s interesting because he points out that like Leibniz before him, it’s not just monism versus dualism. We can talk about pluralism too, even in an ontological context, not just like cultural pluralism or something, but ontological pluralism where it’s a little like Whitehead’s a monist, but his monism is constantly proliferating at its edges, which every concrescent actual occasion is the universe, he says, incarnating itself as one and adding that new hole back to the many, which in the next moment of concrescence gets unified again. And so you’re in his process philosophy, you’re in this constant movement from the many to the one, the one back into the many. And it’s this iterative cumulative process, which I think is unbroken. And there’s an intimate relationality from moment to moment. There’s not another world, but there is a way in which this world is incomplete and open to something transcendent, perhaps. So maybe transcendent naturalism is actually a great description for a Whiteheadian ontology. I think so, because I think emergence without emanation gives you kinds of species and varieties of epiphenomenalism, which I think are extremely ontologically problematic. And in fact, if it was the case that emergence, and it is not the case, but if it was the case that emergence entailed epiphenomenalism, I would regard that as a motor’s toll ends on the proposal of emergence. So I think emergence without emanation makes no sense. And then I’m very influenced by your Rarrow and the notion that what we’re talking about with emanation, we’re talking about constraints, we’re talking about what you were just talking about. We’re talking about we’re talking about possibility being real and having a shape. I’m obviously speaking metaphorically here, but there’s an organization to possibility. It’s a triangle, John. Yeah, it has a shape to it. And that is, of course, something that I think was very much prefigured by Whitehead in the modern era. But of course, this was also an argument that was made in Neoplatonism classically that there had to be an ordering of the forms, etc. I wanted to say one thing about the imaginal before we completely lose the thread and then tie it back into what we’ve been just talking about, which is this notion of emergence, emanation, and reality realization or reality actualization. I think realization is actually a better term because it doesn’t pin us to actuality. And it carries that note of having an epistemic dimension possible within it. So I’m just offering that as something that maybe is a little bit easier to use as term. I just want to go back and about the imaginal. So Dan Schiappi and I have written a bunch of papers, three about the NASA soldiers, NASA scientists moving the rovers around on Mars. And they do all of these very imaginal things because what they’re actually after in order to before anybody can do the science, they have to get to the state where they can be the rover on Mars. They can get that perspectival seeing as the rover and as if both seeing as if you were the rover on Mars and as if you were the rover, not a human being on Mars. And they do all these very interesting things very naturally. They’ll do things like first of all, they will anthropomorphize the rover, which seems sort of intuitive to us. Like I need to move my arm there and I got to bring my eyes over there. And they’re talking about the cameras and stuff. But they’ll do also the other thing. Brattessi, one of the ethnographers talks about they’ll technomorphize themselves. Like this is a rock and I need to and what they’ll do is they’ll swivel around on the chair as if they’re the rover and twisting their body. And what they’re doing is they’re doing this weird imaginal loop where they’re sort of trying to imaginally take on the way a kid pretends to be Zorro. They’re trying to take on the rover and they’re also trying to humanize the rover in this interactive loop. And then why I’m saying that, Matt, is you get that kind of thing you were pointing to about the entrained with the sunrise. Because we have direct quotes. I can’t do it verbatim, but two or three along the lines of one of these literal rocket scientists, hard-nosed engineers saying, you know, I was in the garden and I was gardening and my right wrist kept getting sort of stuck. And I came into the lab and spirit, ironically the name of one of the rovers, and the spirit, its right wheel kept getting stuck that day. I don’t think there’s any magic, but you know there’s something going on. There’s some kind of sympathetic connection and they’re trying to articulate exactly, I think, what you were putting your finger on. They don’t want to say that there’s a direct causal relation, but they want to say it’s not just a metaphor. There’s some kind of bonding going on there. And what they’re bumping up again and why they laugh is they end up using words they don’t want to use, but that’s because they don’t have words that they can use. And so they’re in this really interesting space. And what’s really interesting about that is the fact that again, this isn’t people being dragged into an indoctrination. This is human beings having to confront a kind of new kind of environment. And they fall into these strategies by nature in order to do the hard-nosed science. It’s not something orthogonal over here that’s being put into them by an indoctrination. And all of this is, I think, relatively non-controversial to say because we literally have the ethnographies. We have multiple ethnographies. You know, we’ve published papers on this. This is how it happens. And so I’m just saying that because I wanted to strengthen your claim about the entrainment. And you can get confused about that. You can think it’s a straight sort of Newtonian linear causation or there’s some kind of weird telepathy or something like that. And then that’s a confusion. But there’s something else going on there about participation and how the imaginal augments your ability to become aware of things and affords you cultivating skills, even skills that are displaced over these vast distances. So I just wanted to give that as a buttressing of your point. But then to the religious point. So the thing that comes up for me is, and I forget who I’m reading, and he was basically making the argument. I think it’s called Introduction to Process Relational Philosophy. Oh, Robert Mezzle? Mezzle. Yes. Thank you. He was making the point. And this is one of the things I want to probe on. And I’m only 30 or 50 pages into that book, too. But he was saying that Whitehead provides this framework. And this really pricked up my ears because as a cognitive scientist, I face scientists who talk at different levels using different language, using different machinery, using different machinery. And Greg, of course, knows this. And that’s why he’s smiling right now because he’s like, yeah, I know. Right. And I talk about like the synoptic integration. And there’s this big part. And so these two points are coming together because we need a language that allows to bridge between these different languages, the language of the neuroscientist, the language of the AI person, the language of the psychologist. And that language has to afford this kind of connectedness that we were just talking about a few minutes ago. Like the synoptic integration needs a language that can properly lead to these identifications across divides like the NASA scientists are doing with the rover. And it’s not noticed they’re not becoming rovers in any literal sense. And this is not to say that Buddhists would become Christians, but that Buddhists could imaginarily be Christians and Christians could imagineally be Buddhist, but they need a language that affords that happening. And he was arguing that Whitehead is actually to look for that. And I wonder what you think about that argument. So sorry, that took a while, but I was trying to draw these two points together and bring it back to you. I think absolutely Whitehead provides a means of translating between the deep intuitions that guide various religions. His goal in a book like Process and Reality, and in other books where he continues to try to elaborate this cosmological scheme, as he calls it, is to provide a set of general categories that everyone, regardless of their faith commitment, would be able to recognize themselves in to some degree. And so for example, in his process theology, he has these twin ultimates, there’s creativity, and then there’s God. And he distinguishes between the two, not because Buddhists are going to be super excited that there’s a God in his metaphysics and be like, okay, yeah, we can accept that. No, usually they don’t. There’s a lot of great comparative literature on this. Maseo Abe, a student of Nishitani, has written on this and is deeply appreciative of the approach to a kind of non-dualism and dependent origination in Whitehead’s work. But ultimately, there’s still a God, so it doesn’t quite work. But this other ultimate of creativity is much more akin to the kind of is much more akin to the kind of emptiness that a Buddhist would want to say the ultimate nature of reality is such as this. So there’s at least something for everyone in Whitehead’s scheme, even if it’s not ultimately going to be satisfying to anyone. Traditional Christians, for example, or Muslims don’t like the idea that God is a creature of creativity. They want an omnipotent head honcho. Whitehead doesn’t give you that, but he gives you a reason for why you might idolatrously think that God is like that, which also for people committed to that view, obviously doesn’t help either. So he can’t satisfy everyone, but I do think the effort is, as he put it in his Victorian early 20th century way, it was an attempt to rationalize religion and to secularize the concept of God’s function in the world, as he put it. He chose to use the G word despite how charged it is because he thinks there is something electric about it, and it has a charge for a reason, and we can’t just avoid the topic. But he’s really, he’s like William James trying to be very empirical about religion and look at about religion and look at religious experience, the experience of human beings across continents in response to something, spirit, mystery, the depths of nature, however you want the ancestors, however you want to refer to what that mystery is. That history of religious human experience is a fact about the universe we inhabit on some level, if human beings are part of it. And so how do we integrate all of it in a scheme that is adequate to it and doesn’t explain any of it away? That would be the way that’s trying to do. Yeah. I think that’s good, but there, and thank you for that. I think that’s very good. But what I’m also seeing, and I mean I’ve seen it before, but I’m seeing it again, that that scheme isn’t just processed in sort of argument, you know, sort of premise by premise argumentation. I’m not saying Whitehead doesn’t make arguments, he makes very careful arguments. But Whitehead also admits that there is this imaginative leap, but it’s not the imaginary. There’s an imaginal, there’s something going on here in which, and this is what I’m sort of asking to tease out a little bit. There’s the imagination is somehow sensitizing us to things that we can’t get just by sort of the incremental progression of an argument. And in that sense, it’s not imaginary, it’s imaginal, it’s affording a kind of knowing. And that seems to also be somehow crucial to the scheme. First of all, is that a fair thing to say about Whitehead? And yeah, I mean, so let’s distinguish traditional naturalism from transcendent naturalism, where traditional naturalism would say, look, we’ve got five senses, and we can make precise measurements through especially the eyes, and we’ve got logic and math, and so let’s combine the two and get the truth about nature. And Whitehead’s saying that picture of what the human cognitive apparatus is, is woefully inadequate and incomplete. We’re more than just the five senses and the brain to speak loosely, right? Our whole bodies are involved in the way that we know, as you were describing earlier. And imagination, I think, is a… Whitehead’s a… He’s coming out of the natural sciences and mathematics, but also romantic poetry. And so imagination for Whitehead is holy. It is the base of our experience and in some sense, the font of our existence, right? In a mystical way. And I’m speaking poetically here, obviously, but I think the romantics were naive in some ways, but in this basic intuition that art and science or poetry and nature are not actually as separable as the Enlightenment may have supposed. I think that’s true and beautiful. It’s not true because it’s beautiful, but the whole romantic point is that you can’t finally tear these two ideals apart, beauty and truth, right? And so imagination becomes an organ of perception or a mode of engaging with reality, with nature, that isn’t finished yet, right? So rather than thinking as traditional naturalism would, that this is the way that the human cognitive apparatus is set up, it’s finished, it’s like this, it’s the senses, it’s intellectual abstraction, logic and math, and let’s create our model of nature based on that. I think imagination and the way that we can cultivate new forms of perception, like these scientists are doing with the rover, as a great example, it means that our capacity to experience is not yet finished and it’s not closed and we can’t prejudge what the limits of empiricism might be, right? Which is why we can do phenomenology of religion in the way that James kind of inaugurates and why we might even be able to think of a kind of science of the mind or spiritual science where through contemplative activities, we’re actually exploring a domain that’s inner or imaginal, but still objective in some way that we can come to have peers who can, through review of one another’s insights, begin to cultivate a real intersubjective sense of grasping something objective, right? And so yeah, for all these reasons, I think understanding relating to imagination as of epistemic and ontological import is crucial. It’s not just for literature and art and music, it’s got scientific and religious significance. I think that one of the things I really like the way you articulated the traditional versus transcendent naturalism there, and I think we should put a footnote in it, no pun intended, but to, you know, John, me and I come back or whatever, I don’t know if you remember this, John, but at some point we were talking and as our systems were syncing up, it went from 4P3R to 6P4R where the other two Ps are primate, which then held your perspectival participatory and procedural knowing, and a person holding your propositional knowing, and then 4R so you get the recursive relevance realization in relation, which then places people in a dialogical and dialogos context. So what I was then, just as I was hearing, is like, yeah, we are really upgrading this sensory logic, you know, logical empirical analytic view of what’s going to deduce and building an onto epistemology of the knower and known and creating a context for that that didn’t exist before, but now when it exists, a much richer picture, in many ways more whiteheading in picture or whiteheads, a founder of this, you know, this moving in this direction. So I deeply appreciated that articulation and was resonating with it. Can I introduce a distinction here that might be helpful? Because I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I studied with University of Central Florida when he was still a professor there, Sean Gallagher. He wrote a book that came out around that time when I was there called How the Body Shapes the Mind, and distinguishes between the body schema, which is, and the body image and the body schema would be more like these sensory motor capacities that are kind of part of our phenotype, part of our physiology, part of our bodies that work automatically without our having to consciously attend to them or monitor them. And the body image would be more about our beliefs and our attitudes and being able to actively exercise imagination so as to inhabit other kinds of bodies. So like what you’re describing that the NASA scientists are doing with the rovers, everybody does this when they get in a car and drive around. Our body image is the extent to which we can through an act of will, begin to inhabit other bodies, let’s say. But that doesn’t mean that our physiology is just something that our imagination can will to be different. And so to think of the imagination as an organ of perception, it’s like it’s the, you know, the Spinoza and I think a lot of the romantics like this distinction between natura naturata and a term naturans, right, where the naturans is the process of realization or the process of growth in nature that’s active and creative and the naturata would be the finished forms, the products rather than the process. And we’re talking about imagination, this is the process out of which through perception, action loops over the course of evolutionary history, it’s the process out of which the physiological sense organs that we have emerged. Right. And so, but once they’ve emerged and taken on physical form, the imagination kind of has to work with them as just stubborn habits that are there. Right. And so there is a, there’s a limit, obviously, to what imagination can allow us to experience and perceive. And it can take a billion years of evolutionary time to fully grow that new organ of perception. Right. But we didn’t just start out with eyes and ears and like the senses that we have, I think, are in some profound resonance with an attunement to something real in the world. Right. And there’s a tendency in Darwinian view to think, well, that’s just, we happen to fall into those sort of sensory niches or whatever, but we could have ended up with totally different senses. And that’s a key inflection point, I think, where we go on that question, the extent to which we could easily end up in like a Donald Hoffman idealism, if we think that the senses that happen to evolve as a result of these action perception loops are totally contingent and just creating some dashboard that allowed us to survive well enough. Or if we think in a more Gertian way, let’s say that, no, the eyes are the way they are because light, in some sense, called them forth. And so there’s some way in which the eyes are sun like is what is how Gerta put it. Right. So it’s not just arbitrary, the senses that we have are microcosmic recapitulations of what was macrocosmic before. Right. And so where we come down on that question, I think changes a lot about what we think science is. I mean, I don’t want to go into Donald Hoffman’s whole view, but I start to wonder how we can even do science. Well, I suppose that’s a claim he’s making. I pose that question directly. You rely on evolutionary theory, and you need that to be true. Right. And then if evolutionary theory is true, you have to rely on geology being true, tectonic forces and then chemistry, and then it builds out tremendously. But I want to also say that, you know, contrary to maybe some of his YouTube appearances, when I was in discussion with Donald, he was very, very humble, very open, very respectful. His papers are very rigorous and well argued. But yeah, so yeah. Well, whereas I do think the argument I’m making has merit, I want to make it clear that I think none of us are characterizing him. Sure. I think there are good arguments at either direction in just pointing out where we go when we think of, you know, body, like the body schema is used to be body image, in a way, is what I’m saying. Right. As the physiology builds. Yeah, I think you got the point already. There’s two ways, and I know we’re getting close to being out of time. And I want to, I want to, I don’t want to tackle the one now, but I want to talk about God. And I want to talk about, you know, this idea of something like reality realization and sharing the same grammar as relevance realization, which I think is something I’d like to explore with you. But I want to come under the other side. And I want to, I want to, and if you need more time for this, I understand. So, because this is a little bit more of a criticism, which is, you know, part of the way, and this is also what came out of the work on the rovers, right? And part of this is the idea that a lot of the way we enhance our perception, put it more like the way we grok the world, because we need a different term. For those of you don’t know it, that’s from Robert Heinlein, stranger to strange land, is through the collective intelligence of distributed cognition. And there’s lots of evidence, you know, that that has its own non-reducible causal power and causal signature. And then, you know, Dan and I put that together with Tom, you know, with Morton’s idea about hyper-objects, that there are things that we, as individuals, can’t perceive, like evolution, like global warming, that you need a, or even navigating a ship, as Hitchens does, his cognition of the wild, you need a system of people distributed across space and time, right, often supplemented by machines and technologies, in order to actually perceive or grok these hyper-objects. And so, and another thing that religions did was they talked about this, they talked about spirits, and they talked about bodies of Christ, and they talked about the Sangha, and it was this dialogical distributed function, and it was given an important role in how people could enter into a proper epistemic and epistemological and ontological relationship to reality. And, you know, absence is not the same thing as negation, I get that, but I’m not seeing that in Whitehead. I’m not seeing the emphasis on the dialogical and the distributed, on the spirits that, you know, to speak a little bit poetically, that can inhabit distributed cognition. And, you know, I do a, I teach a thing called Dialectic Indidia Logos, and the logo sort of shows up. And people naturally start, even dependent, they can come from the most secular background, they start talking about this collective intelligence, this collective flow, and the way it’s disclosing themselves to each other and reality to all of them and to each of them, having a life of its own, and they start talking about it in religious language, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. And so, I think part of the way, and I think this is in a profound sense connected to everything we’re talking about, it’s ritual, it’s imaginal, it’s a way in which religions have pointed out how human beings can rock reality beyond their five senses, that doesn’t necessarily involve magical claims or anything like that. And for all of the brilliance of Whitehead, I don’t see that in anything I’ve read, but you’ve read a lot more than I have, Matt, and I don’t want to make an unfair criticism, I want to, that’s why I wanted to talk to you about it. And I wanted to say, this seems to be an important feature, you know, an epistemological, ontological function of religion, and it really points to the imaginal, it points to ritual, it points to, you know, you know, you know, rocking, pre-ending the world beyond the five senses in profound ways, and it’s integral to the practice of science, we see it with the, you know, with the NASA scientists, that’s one of the things we talked about. And so, I just wanted to hear what, I want to give you an opportunity to like respond to that. Yeah, I mean, I would point you to Whitehead’s concept of societies and his sense of the the way in which it’s through social relationships that experience becomes amplified and eventually conscious. And so, yeah, it’s, he says, every act of experience is a social effort employing the whole universe, I think is basically one of his lines, but he’ll also, when he’s talking about Plato’s Timaeus, talk about Plato’s understanding of these subordinate deities who are the animating principles of different departments of nature, as Whitehead puts it, and he’s trying to capture something like this emergent agency of collectives and swarms with his notion of societies. So, I would say, zoom in on that concept, and I think you’ll get something closer to this idea of distributed cognition. And also, in his discussion of language in modes of thought, and other books, but in modes of thought, in particular, he says something like, that if the creation of the world could be rewritten, we could say on the sixth day, God gave them language, and they became souls, human beings. And language, in context, he had been discussing the history of language as a technology that allows for a kind of shared memory and shared cognition. And first, the oral language, but then written language in particular allows us to so enhance our capacity for cultural memory. And so, he’s thinking in terms of an extended mind or something like distributed cognition. So, I think it’s there in his thought, it’s just maybe it’s not obvious immediately, but it’s something to do with how he thinks of societies of actual occasions. But his jargon can be the price of admission to his cosmos is high, because you have to study and learn the categories and the lingo. Well, that’s why I wanted to talk to you. I didn’t want to make any claims based on ignorance. And I have read some of this, and now that you’ve called it out, I hadn’t grasped it under that aspect, and I hadn’t made that connection. And I think that’s powerful. Because one of the things, and I don’t know if you’re going to come to this in your book, that I find, and you and I sort of bumped up against this last time we were talking, is there, you know, Locke’s and Descartes’ individualism seems to also have been really accentuated by Kant. And I think this was deeply problematic. And I think one of the things Hegel was trying to do was to deeply respond to that. In a powerful fashion. And so I guess I’m just happy to hear that then, because that that lends even more power to the proposal that Whitehead might have a way of talking about, I think, this important aspect of religion as a epistemological engine and a transformational engine. Because this topic, this topic is coming to the fore right now. Because, you know, social media has made agregores and collectivities prominent again, and many people, Jonathan Pageau and others are taking this up as saying, you know, and making use of my work, saying that this is, we’re talking about what the ancient people talked about when they talked about spirits. And we, and again, we don’t have to get into any kind of supernaturalism now to talk about them. Right. And I do need to run here. But I think a good place, a good place to end perhaps, would be to say that, you know, the reason I haven’t ever yet felt comfortable just referring to my approach as naturalistic, or identifying with naturalism is because I would feel just as uncomfortable saying I’m a spiritualist, right, that we should have from spiritualism. But I do think spirit, in some sense, is just as real and important to talk about as nature. We don’t need to conceive of them as in two separate worlds or something, we need to think them together somehow. But I think both of these words still have power. And we need to include them in our conversation about the ultimate nature of reality. Okay, so let’s pick up on that. I’m going to let you go in a sec. Let’s talk about spirits. And we’ll talk about God next time. And hopefully people are going to stick with us because they realize we’re not just sort of drifting into woo here, we’re really going to rest with something profound. And I want to thank both of you and Greg. Greg, I’m just sort of rushing things a little from that. Matt, we always give the person, you’re coming back for another episode, we always give the person the last word. Okay, well, I think I just had it. Okay. All right. Wonderful. We’ll pick this up in a week. Appreciate you both and look forward to next week. Take care. Bye. Bye. Bye.