https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=1RO5fnvgo4M
So welcome everyone to Voices with Reveki. I’m very happy to be joined again by Matt Segal. He’s been on Voices before. And so Matt, I’m going to ask you to once again, reintroduce yourself, let everybody know who you are, where you’re coming from a little bit and then, you know, why we’re talking again right now. Yeah, thanks, John. Great to be back with you. Yeah, I’m a philosophy professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. I teach in a program called philosophy, cosmology and consciousness, very interdisciplinary. I kind of like to hang out in the space between the sciences and, you know, religion and culture broadly construed to try to, you know, find ways of weaving the world back together again after, you know, these two very important spheres of meaning and value and truth and goodness and beauty and all of that have been so severed as part of the meaning crisis that you talk so much about. And so I don’t remember if I reached out. Well, I did reach out in the form of a video response to a conversation you recently had with Bernardo Castrop on the Theory of Everything channel. This great channel with really long form and I do mean long form conversations with people interested in theories of everything. And I was really excited by, you know, both the manner of the exchange that you had with Bernardo, you know, in terms of the form you were exemplifying of how disagreement can be mutually productive, I think, of deepening insight, not only for you two, I’m sure, but for everyone listening. And Bernardo also deserves a lot of credit for that. I just like he like he was good faith, theologos partner. That’s how I would describe him. Right. Right. And it’s just very clear that, you know, both of you are interested in pursuing the truth. And that’s always going to be a dialogical pursuit, I think. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I am really excited about the opportunity, you know, with you today to just deepen into some of what came up in that exchange, you know, in relationship to emergence. What you’re referring to as emanation, drawing upon the sort of neoplatonic tradition. And, and, you know, I come at a lot of these problems and questions from a process philosophical perspective, you know, building on Alfred North Whitehead, and I think a lineage of thought, I mean, we could go all the way back to the Greeks, pre Socratic’s like Heraclitus, but, you know, really, I think the German idealist Friedrich Schelling exemplifies a mode of thought that Whitehead picks up in the 20th century and kind of updates based on the new scientific paradigms that emerged. And, and so, you know, when we think about the emergence of these different levels of organization in nature, from physics through, you know, chemistry and biology into psychology and spirituality, I think about this, you know, from a, I think it has to be called a panpsychist perspective, generally, though, there are reasons that that term might be misleading. And, you know, we could get into better terms for it, perhaps, but basically the idea that, you know, most generally stated, there’s no such thing as matter without mind and no such thing as mind without matter. And that these categories need to be understood in order to maintain coherence in our thought, they need to be understood in relationship to one another, rather than in either a reductive way, or a overly holistic way, which maybe would be a critique, I might love you at Bernardo, but so yeah, I mean, that’s kind of the context for me coming to this conversation. Yeah, so just to situate things for viewers a little bit, Bernardo, clearly and explicitly, he’s done it in videos, he did it in the discussion, wants to distinguish his position from panpsychism, he explicitly says that, and he does consider his position ultimately a form of reductionism, although I think it’s a very mitigated reductionism, and that’s something he and I were sort of playing around with. I’ve also heard you, and I’ve heard other people describe Whitehead’s position as pan-experientialism rather than panpsychism, and I was very intrigued about that, I’ve been always very intrigued about Whitehead’s notion of prehension, which I think may help make the proposal more plausible to people, if we unpack that a little bit first. But first, before I do that, I just want to recommend people go, I’ll put the links here in the description, and go see Matt’s commentary, because I want to also commend Matt on the manner of his presentation, as well as the matter, as he’s done for the work that I’m doing, and the work I’ve done with Bernardo. There’s a gentleness, an openness, and humility that is integrated with a clear and firm presentation of a particular viewpoint, and what its advantages are, but although it was technically a monologue, it was presented in a manner that was inviting dialogue, and so I was both impressed by the manner and by the content. I take, Matt and I have talked before, we’ve even briefly worked together, co-supervising somebody, I take Matt’s work very seriously, and the last conversation we had was genuine dialogue for me. I’m deeply interested, I always have been in Whitehead, I think my view is becoming more and more Whiteheadian as it progresses, I think that was coming out a bit in the dialogue with Bernardo, but as your own tweet handle, footnotes to Plato, Whitehead is very much in the platonic neoplatonic tradition, at least he saw himself that way, and I see a lot of similarities between Whitehead and somebody who I think of as the culmination of the neoplatonic tradition of dialectic into dialogus, which is John Scudus-Erejina, and I see the increasing similarities between them. Of course, Whitehead is much more accommodating and incorporating of modern science, but I think in the end, I think the starting points are very similar, so maybe I could say a bit about that and then I’ll pause and then I’ll give you an equally lengthy time to respond. So I take the key idea, and I strongly recommend Pearl’s book on metaphysics, the classical tradition, thinking being that the key proposal of the platonic and especially the neoplatonic tradition is that if we want to look for the basis of our judgments of realness, we should look to intelligibility, that intelligibility is ultimately the primary place we should be looking for an explanation of our sense of realness that is justifiable, so it’s not just a psychological thing, it’s potentially also an epistemological basis, and I take it and you know I’ve been reading this excellent book, I recommend it to people, Returning to Reality, Christian Platonism for our time by Paul Tyson, and one of the things I’m interested in about Christian Platonism is the integration of the pursuit of the logos and the pursuit of the agape that was sort of unique in one sense to the Christian Platonism. You find important similarities I think within Sufism where the notion of the love of God and the beloved and the logos, the platonic tradition, are integrated. All that being said, I just wanted to plug Tyson’s book because I think it’s a really good book, and I disagree with his total take on it, but one of the points he makes, he doesn’t quite make this, but it’s inspired by, he zeros in on intelligibility and then he goes through and he says notice the relationship between information and knowledge and knowledge and wisdom, right, it says like there is no such thing as knowledge without information, but knowledge is not reducible to information. It’s a difference in kind, and then he says, and of course if you pay very careful attention, especially to the platonic tradition, you know, wisdom depends on knowledge, but it’s not reducible to knowledge, and so what he says is you have a causal dependence downward, and then he says an ontological, I don’t think that’s quite the right word, I would say you have something like a causal dependence downward, he says mechanical, which I guess he also means causal, and then I think you have a normative dependence upward, and to me that seems to be like that that core feature of intelligibility is simultaneously this bottom-up dependence and this top-down dependence, and that’s what I’m trying, and I see this in Erogena, I see that if we’re really trying to be true to and be in right relationship, not just epistemically but existentially, right relationship to intelligibility and therefore realness, we have to acknowledge both the causal emergence and the normative emanation, and this goes back to an argument made a long time ago by Katz in the metaphysical meaning, where he says we seem to be caught between these two symmetrical problems, the emergentist can account for the causation, but can’t account for the normativity, and the emanationist can account for the normativity, but can’t account for the causal efficacy, and my reflection on Bernardo, he was invoking parsimony, but I think there’s actually a symmetry here, he’s right to point out that most of the arguments for emergence are arguments by analogy, and ultimately the analogy fails exactly where we need it to work, and I think that’s an important point, and that’s why everybody who talks about emergence wrestles with strong versus weak emergence, etc. I think, and this goes back I think ultimately to Katz, there’s an equal problem for emanation, right, which is how do you get the differentiation and a differentiation that gives the causal power of the world, and so what Bernardo proposes I think is he proposes a process of dissociation, and then he offers I think an equally weak analogy, which is well we know about dissociation within consciousness, and something like that’s going on, the problem is the dissociation he needs is a dissociation that’s going to produce an independently external world, other minds, materiality, and that is not what we’re getting in the psychological examples of dissociation that he’s making use of. I’m not saying his position is worse than mine, I’m saying in fact I’m making a different argument, I’m making a meta argument that the emergentist and the emanationist face equally like directly symmetrical problems, and that for me therefore we should drive a meta conclusion that we need a bipolar account that is actually more authentically responsive to what we find in intelligibility, which is the causal dependence bottom up and the normative dependence top down. So that’s sort of, sorry that’s fast and I know I just dumped a lot on you, but that’s sort of my, that’s my, I don’t want to say my initial, that’s my sort of current reflective response to the conversation I had with Bernardo. Yeah I love that, thanks for those book recommendations as well, I didn’t know about those, but I’ll have to check those out. So I love this the symmetry you’re pointing out between the problems faced by the emanationists and by the emergentist. Within the literature in analytic philosophy of mind related to panpsychism, there’s this issue of the constitutive panpsychists who think mind can be atomized and that little minds add up to big minds, and somehow that solves the problem of where consciousness comes from. They face what’s called the combination problem, how do parts become holes basically, whereas the, there’s another form of, I guess it’s another form of panpsychism called cosmo-psychism where the idea is well actually there’s only one mind and the problem becomes, well how does one mind become many, how does the one become many, and in some ways I think Bernardo’s position is similar to a form of cosmo-psychism. Yeah he seemed most happy when I was relating to him in that manner, from that perspective. Right, there’s a cosmic consciousness that somehow gets these knots in itself, and I think that sort of a view is no less or more plausible than the emergentist view. Whether you’re talking about a materialist emergentist view, well maybe the materialist emergentist view where the parts are completely lacking in any any experience or mind, and then somehow emerge into conscious beings at our scale, that seems to me not only implausible but impossible. A constitutive panpsychist who thinks of particles as described by I guess the favorite scientific model of the day have an intrinsic aspect which is mind-like. It seems more plausible that that sort of a substrate could give rise to conscious animals like us, but this combination problem is analytically quite difficult to resolve, particularly in a substance ontology, because if you start with separate substances it’s not at all clear how you can arrive at larger substances which include them and but transcend them. Yeah, now I think there’s clearly a need for some sort of a dialectical move here to incorporate what is insightful about each position but not get locked into this either or type of type of a scenario, and I think this is where the question of intelligibility becomes interesting. You know I think you and I would probably agree in wanting to critique, you know, obviously like crude forms of materialism, because you know if science is possible that means that there are intelligent creatures who can observe and record and reflect upon what they have observed and experiment and come up with hypothetical models and test them, and so if there is intelligence in the universe which makes science possible then clearly that implies some things about that universe. Yes, it implies that it is presupposes. Yes, science can’t do anything to demonstrate this. Science has to presuppose it as actually possible or else it will fall prey to an irremovable kind of absolute skepticism, I would argue. Yeah, you know Whitehead has a pithy way of summarizing the situation and I believe it’s in his little book The Function of Reason. He says scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject of study. He’s got a number of lines like that that just point out the absurdity of forgetting what’s taken for granted or presupposed in the whole scientific enterprise, and so if the universe is intelligible I think that implies that science is always going to need a metaphysics which provides for its possibility and which also gives us a sense of the wider context within which something like science even makes sense, and that’s that context within which science makes sense I think is where religion and spirituality or even just things like wisdom become relevant, and the other thing I wanted to speak with you today about is your understanding of relevance, realization, and how that might relate to a kind of Whiteheadian view which would allow us to bring together the emanationist and the emergentist pictures and to do so, I mean, at the broadest level possible. I mean we’re talking about like a cosmological principle here ultimately, and from Whitehead’s point of view if you’re going to talk about the order and intelligibility of the universe as a whole you’re basically doing theology too, and which is a neoplatonic way, right, right, what is the source of the intelligibility, and so there are better and worse ways to engage in such a theological discussion. I think there are a lot of academics and intellectuals who would say as soon as you bring in the theological you are already not only stepping outside of the scope of science but in fact in conflict with science, and I think given what we’ve already said about intelligibility that’s a wrong-headed way of looking at the issue. Yeah, yeah, you get people engaging in other performative contradictions, the kind of things that Whitehead liked to point out, you know, people saying things like, you know, philosophy has no value, which is a philosophical statement, like it’s just a performative contradiction, so yeah, I totally agree with you on that. I don’t know if you saw the discussion I have with Jonathan Pagel around this. I haven’t yet. Yeah, so I mean, so I ended, and then there’s an ongoing discussion that I’m having with JP Marceau who’s, you know, basically a Christian panpsychist, although he’s moving more, much more in the direction of sort of neoplatonism integrated with relevance realization, which is really interesting, so there’s basically, you know, and then Paul VanderKlay is in this discussion too, and Mary Cohen, but there was a crux issue that came in. It’s always good to talk to Jonathan. I hope someday you get to talk to him. I’d like to. I’ll try and set that up, but because I was basically, like, because I was saying to JP in one conversation, I said, well, one of the problems I have, because the discussion at that point wasn’t specifically on panpsychism. It was next door to it around the theism, non-theism distinction, and I was proposing non-theism as something that tries to transcend the shared presuppositions of atheism and theism, and then I was trying to say that, you know, theism seems to require, and you know, and I’m open to debate and discussion on this, as I was with JP, but you know, at least how I was taught it, I think that’s fair to me at least, theism seems to presuppose something about, you know, the overmind of some panpsychisms that is, you know, very much a cognitive agent, that it’s appropriate to talk about God, for lack of a better reference, as a kind of cognitive agent, and then I said, that’s what I find problematic, and I said, because I made an extensive argument, which I still stand by, that I think relevance realization is the criterion of the cognitive. In order to be a cognitive agent, the system is doing relevance realization, and I said, I’m willing to quite, you know, I’ll follow Evan Thompson, I’m willing to, and even one of my students, Alex Dugetovic, I’m willing to follow that way down to the paramecium, right, because I think, but I think once you step outside of autopoetic systems into merely self-organizing, or just linear Newtonian processes, I don’t think relevance realization has a locus, because, so I said, that’s, that was the problem I had, and then I said, I also don’t see it on, like, a sort of superhuman level. I did say, and JP and I had a good conversation, that groups of people, distributed cognition, can display intelligence that supersedes that, I acknowledge that, but then, sorry, this is a long preamble, but Jonathan pointed out to me, and he said, and he made, I don’t, he made an argument that sounds surprisingly whiteheadian to me, which is why I’m not taken back in the sense that Jonathan doesn’t make good arguments, because he does. I was like, oh, I didn’t expect that, because he said, well, he said, don’t you think there’s something like relevance realization going on at an ontological level, right, and it wasn’t quite clear, and it sort of, I sort of had to tease it out, it was very much a dialogical process of getting clear, but what he was trying to say is, well, you know, and this sounded like whitehead to me, you know, there’s all of these possibilities, and then every moment, one of them is being actually selected, and then that puts a constraint on the next set of possibilities, and he would do it, and he said, isn’t there something about intelligibility, and this sounds like Regina, too, right, isn’t there something about intelligibility that’s also deeply analogous to relevance realization, and I thought, wow, that was really, really cool. This is just a long preamble to say, I’m very interested in the idea that we can talk about, I’m sorry, I’m struggling for a language room, Matt, we can talk about something in the realization of intelligibility that not just corresponds, but that forms a conformity relationship with the relevance realization that we attribute to cognitive agents. That, to me, seems like something viable, but I’m not quite sure how that fits into this other thing, where I see relevance realization not dropping below the level of living things, so that’s sort of, I’m trying to give you the gist of where am I thinking, I’m really interested in this notion of prehension as some way in which there’s a responsiveness and a selection. I’ve been reading some of Harmon’s stuff, I know there’s two, I don’t know how much competition there is within the streams of speculative realism between the Whiteheadian and the object-oriented people, but he also seems to have this weird thing where, you know, things are sort of selecting each other’s ways of being in the world and things like that. Sorry, I was giving you more of a problem than a response, but that’s where my thinking is at right now. Yeah, well, I mean, I’m taking notes over here because there’s a lot of things that I hope we can circle back on. Erugina and, you know, well, maybe, where to start, I think, well, let me just respond to, you know, Graham Harmon and speculative realism. Harmon’s work, I think, is so refreshing, and, you know, most of the talks he’s giving nowadays aren’t really even to philosophers, they’re to artists and designers and, you know, people out there making things, and so it’s clearly an applicable philosophy that, and ontology that he’s developed, which is really wonderful, I think, in terms of making philosophy relevant to more than just other philosophers. But Harmon clearly is influenced by Whitehead, and in many of his books praises Whitehead for sort of thinking beyond the correlational circle or this sort of Kantian mode of, you know, only considering the world in terms of the ways humans have access to it, and he thinks Whitehead, you know, was one of the few in the 20th century to really push back against that sort of enclosure. That seems fair to me. You know Whitehead better than I do, but that seems fair to me about Whitehead. Do you find that a fair assessment? Oh yeah, I mean, you know, there might be a sort of easy, off-the-cuff criticism of panpsychism that it’s anthropomorphic, and that it’s, you know, projecting human capacities indiscriminately onto everything, but when we understand what Whitehead means by experience and pre-hension, which, you know, maybe we should go there next, I think it’s clear that for Whitehead, first of all, most of our experience is not conscious. You know, very seldom do we actually achieve that kind of consciousness or self-consciousness or meta-consciousness, however we want to get at it, a kind of reflective, you know, self-reflective awareness. It’s very rare in the universe, it’s very rare even in our species. Most of our experience is below the threshold of what we would call consciousness, and in Whitehead’s universe, yeah, consciousness is pretty peripheral. He’s not really that concerned with it. I think he has a profound account of what consciousness is and how it arises, but for the most part, the universe is vectors of energy which are, yes, realizing some form of aesthetic experience, which is to say that energy vectors are akin to blind emotion for Whitehead, and as the universe complexifies, these pre-hensions or these feelings are able to fold back on themselves and generate what he calls contrasts, and so when you get enough feelings contrasted with other feelings and a hierarchy of feeling which develops, something like the law of complexity consciousness that Therade Chardon wrote about so poetically in the Human Phenomenon, you get this hierarchy of feeling which in very complex organisms with nervous systems start to produce things like representation and judgment and a capacity for greater decision making which has to do with considering as yet unrealized possibilities that are relevant to the present, to the situation that an organism finds itself in, and so pre-hension, maybe we should unpack this term for Whitehead. Yeah, that would be helpful and because I know I am sensitive to the fact I’m not going to jump on you with any sort of simplistic anthropomorphism critique. I know you’re trying to, I mean we’re struggling against vocabulary here, we’re struggling against 400 years in which that vocabulary has been sort of rigidly stipulated that when I’m saying feeling, I’m describing a Cartesian state within a mental substance or something like that, and I get that you’re trying not, you’re not using it that way, but I want to be careful because to be fair to a lot of people who might be listening to that, that’s what they’re naturally going to fall into when they hear these terms. So yeah, we could maybe, because I like the term pre-hension precisely because it does, I’m not saying they’re identical, but it doesn’t come with the same baggage, so there’s a little bit more openness and move to move around with. We’re not in such a tight semantic prison, so maybe if we started there, that would be helpful. Right, so I think the best place to start is to consider what we mean by efficient causality, right? On the face of it, the most mechanical of the forms of causality that Aristotle listed for us, how is it that the past becomes present? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What’s actually going on there? And in considering this problem, Whitehead was, you know, I think when, at least in Britain, when Einstein’s, you know, special and general theory were first being considered by physicists and mathematicians, he was one of the few who could really grasp it. And he wanted to understand causality in such a way that, unlike Einstein, who famously in his debate with Bergson, you know, was somewhat dismissive of the relevance of human experience to physics, and in Whitehead’s terms, Einstein very much wanted to police this bifurcation of nature into the physical causes, on the one hand, which we don’t actually experience, we just have a model or a conjecture about how that works in the form of a mathematical model. And then on the other hand, the other side of this bifurcation would be the subjective qualities, all the secondary characteristics, the things added by the organism or the mind that are not actually in nature, they’re in the mind. And for Whitehead, this bifurcation creates all sorts of incoherent problems or conclusions really for modern philosophy. And so in understanding causality, Whitehead wanted to undo this bifurcation and- Oh, right. Yeah, right. That’s a good way of framing this. To find a way. Yeah. So, you know, and this is what he does in his book, The Concept of Nature in 1920, where he says, look, the electric waves by which the physicist would understand the radiance of the sunset needs to somehow cohere with the beauty and the color and the warmth that the poet would describe in their poems. And so he ends up saying that science needs to be redefined as the study of what we are aware of in perception without discriminating between what is in nature and what is in the mind. Because as we were saying earlier, in terms of intelligibility, science presupposes knowledge. Yes. And not explain knowledge. It’s a different problem for metaphysics and philosophy. Maybe cognitive science has a role there too, as a border between, you know, natural science as such and the philosophical issue of what knowledge is. But for science, what we’re doing is observing phenomena as they arise in our perception and looking for systematic relationships among them. And in that sense, this problem of, you know, what is subjective and what is objective, again, becomes it’s a metaphysical problem. We don’t need to solve it to do science. And it’s, I think, a brilliant way of demarcating, you know, these disciplines. And it, I think, prevents us from getting into all sorts of unproductive arguments about, you know, who has authority to make declarations about the nature of being or reality. Science is extremely valuable because it applies, when it’s at its best, mathematical precision to the systematic study of phenomena and how phenomena metamorphose, how they move through different forms and patterns and rhythms. And, you know, studying what we are aware of in perception is all we need to understand the highly predictive models that have, you know, been so successful in the natural sciences. We don’t need to make this split between a conjectured cause that would be behind, not only behind our conscious awareness, but in our perception, but that would even be imperceivable in principle. I think if any of our hypotheses are positing something that is in principle unperceivable, then we’re starting to lose touch with, I think, the empirical basis of science or that empirical basis that science should have. And so now, to get back to prehension, this is Whitehead’s term that is, it’s sort of an amphibious term. It’s trying to do work both in terms of understanding physical causality or the way that the past persists in the present, or that the past somehow transfers something of relevance to the present. And also, to understand the emotional, the physical, the psychological, the aesthetic side of reality. And, you know, for Whitehead, prehension is basically his account of how the past perishes and is taken up by an emerging present. And he describes physical and mental prehensions, or physical and conceptual prehensions, he also calls them, where for the most part in the inorganic world, physical prehension is dominant in the sense that what’s happening is the present is repeating the past. It’s inheriting the feelings of the past and enjoying them again in the present. And this is like a wavelength of light, right? You’ve got your vibratory rhythm, it’s pretty consistent over time, or you’ve got the vibratory rhythm of an atom of hydrogen, in the last billions of years, more or less unchanged, unless some very rare high energy event splits it apart. And when nature becomes more complex, you start to get conceptual prehensions, which are not totally absent, even in the simplest forms of physical process. Because if it was totally absent, then atoms would never, you know, become stars and stars, like there’s clearly some creativity being realized, even in the inorganic realm, though it’s attenuated relative to the biological realm. But what starts to happen as complexity increases is the capacity for conceptual prehension, which rather than feeling the past feels as yet unrealized possibilities. Conceptual prehensions are more about the lore of the future of what could be. And this is why Whitehead is a Platonist, right? He finds it necessary to make reference to a realm of definite possibilities. He calls them eternal objects, they’re photonic forms. Though in Whitehead’s cosmology, the forms are deficient in actuality. And what has preeminence for him is actual experience. Whereas in some of Plato’s dialogues, you get the sense that the forms are what’s really real, and the actual embodied universe is kind of pale imitation. I think there are other readings of Plato that push against that. But Whitehead’s clear that the ideas are deficient in actuality and in fact are, and this is part of his theology, in some ways yearning for actualization. And that it’s that yearning that tilts the universe toward greater complexity, which is a movement towards greater intensity of experience. And where intensity of experience has to do with the contrast achieved between physical prehension inheriting the past and conceptual prehension imagining what’s possible given that past and meeting in the present. Okay, so this has been very helpful. There’s some really interesting connections. So you made some important connections between prehension and causation. And then you rightfully put that causation is ultimately a temporal relation. And we’re talking about some relationship between past, present, and future when we’re talking about causation. And we forget that because we tend to think of cause as almost like some stuff that’s out there in the world. It’s inherently, and what I’m hearing you, and I hadn’t quite thought of this, although I should have perhaps, but this is to praise you not to condemn me, that one of the issues we’re trying to, one of the, I mean, so, I mean, Aristotle clearly thought, and I think Plato does too, but Aristotle explicitly thought, there’s deep connections between causation, all the causation, of course, but even with mechanical or efficient causation and intelligibility. That’s why we even have the because as our explanatory indicator. We’re going to try and to get at the intelligibility of something is also to get at the ways in which it is and in the ways in which it is knowable, et cetera. And so I get that connection. But what I heard you introducing that reminds me much more of Christian Platonism than Aristotelian Platonism is this notion of creativity and the notion that we can make a distinction between a kind of relationship between the past and the present that is, and I’m reminded here of the nomological nature of science. It depends on repeatability, replication. And so if we’re looking, if you’ll allow me, if this is okay for you, we’re looking through a nomological lens, we’re going to look for the patterns that demonstrate that kind of dominance by the past within causation. Is that okay so far? Yes. But there’s another way, there’s another glasses we could put on, if you’ll allow me my favorite metaphor, which would allow us to see, no, but there are patterns, there are temporal patterns in which there is a contrast against that repetition of the past. There’s the opening up of the future where more and more options, and I would even point to the way evolution has that, when you talk about pre-adaptations and Owen Gilbert’s recent work on natural reward in addition to natural selection as one of the drivers. So, and I get that, I get how, and it’s clear when you move to the paramecium, the paramecium is not simply replicating the past, the paramecium is trying to open up options, it’s trying to keep options open and then it’s trying to select from the future, not just replicate the past, and in fact that’s a defining feature of learning as opposed to just some sort of raw. So there, you can put on one set of glasses and you can see a temporal relation of causation that is repetitive and then you can put on another lens and you can see temporal processes of causation as creative. Is that a good take on what you’ve said so far or am I reducing it away or am I simplifying and losing some gravy? That should be fine. No, I mean that’s a great summary of what’s important in this notion of causality, yeah, the past, the future, habit, and novelty as these two poles of that process. And then, and the point is, but in both the future-oriented creativity and the past-oriented replication, there is, right, there is, because I’m trying to get at the pre-henship because it, you know, it’s, I like it because it, you know, it goes to words like comprehension, what are, you know, about intelligibility, but it also means to, you know, to grasp, to take hold of, to pre-hand, but there’s some grasping relation, I’m trying, I’m struggling here too, there’s some grasping relationship between the past, the present, and the future that is being, that underwrites all of these, right, all of this causal, both the past-oriented and the future-oriented. Is that the common denominator? Is that a correct way of understanding it? Yeah, definitely. It might be helpful, you know, to talk about what Whitehead was, who he was drawing on. He was a very close reader and admirer of the psychology of William James, and James’s notion of drops of experience and the sort of substantive and sort of transitional moments of our flow of consciousness, you know, he just, James described it as, in terms of the flight of a bird, you know, maybe extending the platonic metaphor, the aviary a bit and saying that, you know, birds will perch on a branch and then they’ll take flight to another branch and that our consciousness is in this way, both it has punctual and transitional phases, and that this is reflected in the structure of our language and our grammar and, you know, so Whitehead’s building on James’s psychology and thinking of consciousness in this way. It’s not just a continuous flow, there’s lots of flow, but there are also these discrete moments of realization, right, which arise and perish, and so this Jamesian psychology is one part of it, but Whitehead’s also looking at quantum physics, right, and, you know, understanding that here again there’s an example of discontinuity in the way that energy flows, so there’s both continuity and discontinuity, and so the question is, how do you, you know, resolve the tension between what might at first appear like a contradiction, and, you know, prehension is again part of his attempt to do this. Is prehension a way of trying to sort of dialectically apprehend continuity and discontinuity together? Because I see causation as requiring both continuity and discontinuity. Exactly. Right, right, because if you have no continuity, you just, you have arbitrary randomness, and if you have just, right, and if you have just continuity, then you have just, you don’t have time, you don’t have the essence of time, which is at the core of causation. Is that apparent? Because I’m thinking, I think I remember Whitehead criticizing, and Brooks on this too, you know, that, you know, you get all of Zeno’s paradoxes if you try and go for just continuity with time and space, and then etc. So is that correct, that prehension is basically saying, look, you can’t reduce one of these to the other, you can’t, they’re bound together inseparably. Yes. Yeah. Okay, I’m following this well. That’s good, that’s good. Right, yeah, so this is, so Whitehead is a process philosopher, right, and but he describes two types of process. One is the process of concrescence, which is the creation of a new fact, you know, it’s the growing together of the many facts of the past into a new, unified perspective on the universe, which arises and perishes, contributing itself back as one of the many to be prehended and concresced by the next moment that arises. And this isn’t just a serial process, I mean, it’s happening. It’s also happening vertically, ontologically. And so this is very analogous, right, to, you know, to relevance realization, and even to the unfolding of intelligibility, right, because the way, right, you know, even, you know, even information and knowledge require that kind of, somehow the past comes into this that then feeds into something beyond. Right, right. And, you know, so I want to get back to the conversation about theology, because it’s relevant here in terms of these scales of concrescence. I mean, when Whitehead brings in his concept of God, and it is a concept, it’s not meant to be necessarily something that we rush to or that we arrive at as a result of inherited religious scripture or, or even religious and spiritual emotions, it can serve that function later, but Whitehead is primarily concerned with the metaphysical and conceptual function of God in his cosmology. You could say that God is the original concrescence, the primordial concrescence of the universe as a whole, as it arises out of creativity. It’s just analogous to, you know, sort of Spinoza’s idea of the face of the universe, which is, you know, there’s nature, natureing, and there’s nature being natured. And although we have to talk about it temporally, he means obviously under the eye of eternity, right, there’s the, well, to use maybe our language, there’s the original interpenetration of emanation and emergence. Is it? Yes. Yeah, okay. I think, yeah, the analogy to Spinoza is apt. It’s, I think for Whitehead, though, he, as he says himself, he’s more of a pluralist than a monist. Right. Yeah. Since that adding this, so, I mean, Spinoza already acknowledged the, you know, the naturons, the natureing that was, you know, how the infinite substance expresses itself, I suppose. And, but ultimately, for Spinoza, the eternal infinite substance was conceived of as already having realized all the possibilities. Yes, yes, yes. And in Whitehead’s process philosophy, creativity is given even more, you know, emphasis in the sense that the universe and God, which are not two but not one either, they’re becoming new in each moment. Yes, there’s kind of a reciprocal opening between them to use my language. Right. So let me get, let’s do the theology now because I’m very interested in it. I mean, after I do, after Socrates, which is the next big series, which has been delayed by one year because of COVID, but that’s been great for me because I’ve been allowed to practice a lot more and study a lot more. So I’ll take that as a gift. But after that, I want to do the God beyond the God of theism. I want to take a look at the history of what I call non-theism. So I want to talk about that because I hear some, I read some books, oh, I can’t remember the name, where they say that I’ve seen Whitehead described equally as a theist and a non-theist and never an atheist, of course, I don’t know, because of the invoking God. So I want to talk to you about that. But you said something here that struck me. So there’s a thing in classic, you know, Platinian, Neoplatonism, which is you have the one, and then the first expression is, you know, the intelligibility of the noose, which was the mind of God, which I see is very analogous to Whitehead’s God. And then there’s, right, and then there’s sukkhe, the way that then unfolds in time, right. And so there’s been a long-standing tradition, especially in this, you know, this history of Christian Platonism of, and the Neoplatonists gave us the term hypostasis, which was mistranslated, I think, by the term person in the Trinity. It’s not a good translation of hypostasis, right, but that’s what we’ve got stuck with. And that’s tended to infect or affect, maybe I should be more neutral. It’s skewed us towards a personalistic kind of theism, which, right, it is not maybe even justifiable historically. I heard what you were describing as, right, describing something analogous to the noose, and that therefore not the ultimate reality. It sounded to me like creativity is the ultimate reality, and then God is like the first creation. Is that okay to say? I know, I’m trying to use a term. I don’t want to, I don’t mean like an artifact. I want, you know, the concrete. What’s the, like, the first concrescence you said? It’s somehow the first, right? The first creature of creativity is God. I mean, Whitehead pretty much says exactly that. Yeah, okay, so that’s God is a creature. Okay, so I’m not, so many people, I can hear, I mean, I could hear many people both within the neoplatonic tradition, the neoplatonic Christian tradition, the Islamic tradition, saying, wait, wait, wait, by God, you know, I think of, and so by God, I mean, what is ultimate, the ultimate reality? And what you’re pointing to isn’t God. You may be pointing to a god or something like that, and neoplatonism does that. It has, you know, the one, and then it has all the heneds, or heneds, however you want to pronounce it, all the gods, but the one itself is the ultimate reality. And so, yeah, so what do you, what do you say about that? Should we be calling that God, or should we be calling the creativity God, or, because it seems like what’s happening there is two aspects of the traditional use of God have been pulled apart, the ultimate reality, and then the thing that holds the basis of intelligibility. And that strikes me as very analogous to neoplatonism. Yeah, I mean, it’s, ultimately, I think we could look at this in terms of the mystery of the Trinity, which is not just a Christian mystery, I mean, yes, in other religions as well, that God can only be approached, or one of the seemingly most symbolically rich ways of approaching this issue is in terms of the Trinity, where, yeah, creativity is traditionally an aspect of the divine. But, you know, let’s go at it from the Hindu version of this Trinity, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, right, the creator, preserver, and destroyer. You could say that the one, or the creator, Brahma, for Whitehead, that’s creativity. Right, right. Whereas, the noose and the world soul are these two poles of what Whitehead calls God, the primordial pole, which is like the noose and the consequent pole, which is like the world soul. Right, yeah. Now, but the thing that differentiates Whitehead from this sort of emanationist scheme is that, you know, Whitehead says that creativity is just as much akin to matter as it is to the one. Yeah, yeah, and the idea that a genuinely bipolar view of God, right? I say dipolar so that we avoid the psychological. Oh, right, I’ll adopt that. Yeah, sure, the genuinely dipolar. Yeah, very good, very good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, a lot of traditional theists are not happy with Whitehead’s theology. You know, process theologians published books, and I’m forgetting the author, but the process theologian published a book called The Impotence of God. And there’s a whole form of spiritual practice and orientation that comes along with a view of the divine or God as not omnipotent. And that, yes, there is, we could say in Whitehead, there’s room for a personal God, which has to do with more with the consequent nature of God. But it’s not the sort of personal God that it would make sense to pray to, to ask for things. Right. Because God in Whitehead’s cosmology is just as subject to creativity as the rest of us. God is a creature of creativity. But as the primordial concrescence, or the first creature, you could say God is on the one hand, the fellow sufferer who understands because everything we go through, God goes through. And God is also though the goad to novelty. God is the lure that, you know, Whitehead says in Religion in the Making that God holds up a mirror to each creature to reflect its own greatness. Which is to say, God says to each creature, this is what is possible for you in this moment. There’s an aspirational vector to God, right? Yes. Right. Not just a providential nature, there’s an aspirational nature. Right. So is there a special, I mean, you invoke the Trinity. Is there some, I mean, and this is also the case for the noose in neoplatonism with respect to the one, right? The noose is the way in which the one can sort of step out of itself to look back on itself. And so they have a participatory identity. There’s not really two things. And I think you said something like that, that there’s not really two things between God and creativity. They’re not one, but they’re not two. Is that also, am I understanding that correctly? Yeah. I mean, the thing about creativity is that while you could think of it abstractly as unconditioned potential, it is, its nature is so as to immediately condition itself. Right. And that initial condition of creativity is God. Right. Right. Right. Right. So, but there’s a sense that the creativity is an inexhaustible source for creatures and creations. Is that fair? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s fair. I was, it’s an inexhaustible source. And I was trying to map Whitehead’s scheme onto the Hindu Trinity. But it seems to me that Brahma and Shiva are both aspects of creativity, actually. Yeah. Where Whitehead’s God is more like Vishnu, a preserver. But Whitehead also describes God as kind of a trickster in the sense that sometimes to instigate novelty in the world, you know, the divine might trigger what we would perceive as evil in the context of social norms, in the forms of organization that have been achieved. In order to move to a higher form of organization, you need there to be occasions of experience that will break from just inhabiting, inheriting the habits of the past. And sometimes a few occasions doing something different will unravel the organization that has been achieved. Because it’s always risky to, you know, bring more creativity into the world. And so God plays the role sometimes of destroyer, I guess, because God’s more interested, Whitehead says, in intensity of experience than in social harmony. So that when I mean, two things come to mind there. One is, this reminds me of the growing, it’s coming to be almost a consensus. And this comes out of the conversation I had with Brett Anderson about integrating relevance realization and predictive processing theory together about how self organizing criticality, I mean, is now coming to be seen as, you know, maybe the pattern of creativity, if to maybe bridge there, that systems organized, they stabilized, then they go critical, that criticality affords a reorganization. That’s definitely what cognition is doing. And that’s, and for me, that’s another one of those deep resonances between if reality, both ontologically and even ecologically, isn’t unfolding in a self organizing criticality and our cognition, and then ultimately, our consciousness is also unfolding in that way, there’s at least a deep continuity there and a deep, a deep, a deep basis for participatory knowing that we know by sharing and being, not just by representing some aspect of the world. And to me that that I like, I’m very happy to go that far, I guess, I’ll say. Yeah, well, this is an interesting place, maybe to bring up this distinction that I make between intentionality as it is understood in cognitive science and in Husserlian phenomenology, where there’s a sort of representational relationship that’s described, whereby a subject is directed at objects and forms a idea of the object in a sort of language of thought of some kind or a symbolic language. Whitehead’s concept of prehension or prehensionality, let’s call it to bring it into contrast with intentionality, is a non-representational process whereby the perished past actually enters into and becomes synthesized with the present. And so we are feeling the feelings of the past, it’s participatory. Yeah, yeah. And so I think that’s the more, not that there is no representation for, I think, especially language using organisms, we can still talk in those terms, but the more I think biologically grounded and for Whitehead ultimately physically grounded, causally relevant way of talking about this is in terms of prehension, whereby the past is actually entering into us and we are in mutual resonance with the world and so don’t need to represent it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re already there, you know, it’s already in us. So that’s lining up with a lot of moves. And I mean, this came out in some of that when we were co-supervising the thesis, you know, a lot of moves in 4E cognitive science, talking about how important aspects of consciousness and cognition are non-representational in nature. And I make, and I, so this is also why I’m excited about it. I think relevance realization, because I explicitly argue that it has to be sub-representational, sub-semantic, sub-syntactic, that it is ultimately prehensive in nature and not representational in nature. And then I try to get this, you know, through participatory knowing and you can see important analogs or at least maybe species of the same genus where they talk about dynamical coupling and coupling is, and they’re invoking, you know, the marriage, two things becoming one and, right. So there’s a lot of hap, there’s a lot happening, you know, started by Francisco Varela and by Evan Thompson and, you know, Van Gelder and it’s just been expanding. That’s giving us language whereby we can now go and talk about this non-representational way of relating to the world. So let me ask maybe a provocative question. Here’s why I still feel that there’s a divide, although I feel we’re very close on a lot of things, you know, even at the ontological or the cosmological level. So I can see like talking about sort of events and how they come in and I can see, I guess, well, maybe I’d be afraid to answer the question rather than making it as a claim. There’s still to me to seems to be a significant difference in kind between the paramecium and the tornado, that there’s something new there. And I’m willing to say we need something that is deeply continuous, like the tornado is self-organizing, there’s the prehensive aspect, it’s coupled to its environment, it’s disclosing aspects of the environment, there’s affordances opening up, there’s also a lot of stuff that’s needed for being a living thing is already present, but there seems to be a difference. And I know Bernardo and I disagreed on this and I’m not quite sure about the nature of the disagreement. I think there has to be, I think sufficient differences of degree become differences of kind or you fall into Sorites paradoxes, like you fall into the paradox while removing one hair doesn’t make me bald, so I can just keep removing hair and I’ll never be bald, which of course is a false argument. So I take it that in order to avoid Sorites paradoxes, you have to acknowledge that enough differences of degree, and I can’t give you an algorithm because nobody has been able to, but enough differences of degree make a difference in kind. And so I see a difference in kind between the tornado and the paramecium and that’s what I’m struggling with right now. How do I preserve, or maybe you think I shouldn’t preserve, but how do I preserve a recognition and ultimately a moral responsibility? This is another problem I had with what Bernardo was saying. I feel that there is a difference in kind because I feel I have a moral responsibility to living things that I don’t have to rocks, and then I have a moral responsibility to self-reflective rational agents that I don’t have to merely living things. And that seems to be something that there’s been a considerable amount of consensus around. And the problem I have with an ontology that doesn’t recognize those ontological differences is it doesn’t justify the difference in moral responsiveness. Was that clear as a concern? Oh yeah, totally. And you know, I think Whitehead does try to expand the definition of organism. I mean, he calls it the philosophy of organism, and he tries to expand that to forms of, for him, society takes on a technical meaning. A society is a group of actual occasions of experience which are inheriting some form reliably, and that form allows you to distinguish that society as a society, distinct but not separate from its environment. The universe is a nested series of societies of societies, and so for him, an organism is a certain kind of society that has an enduring pattern that is realized. And he would say that when protons and electrons and neutrons first formed a relationship with one another to give rise to an atom, that that atom is an organism, and it maintains- Because it persists itself? It has like a spinosa canadus? Yes, and so stars, galaxies, these are non-biological examples of organisms. Now, a tornado or a hurricane, a whirlpool present interesting problems for this view because the question is, well, is that an organism? And it’s a more or less enduring society, you know, and it’s self-organizing, but it seems to lack the kind of autonomy that we would want to preserve for an organism in the fullest sense, but I don’t know, I see gradients here rather than sharp cuts in being. But it’s a perennial problem, and I don’t have a good solution for it. Like, how do we demarcate holes in nature? There’s always going to be a Russian doll effect of some kind where there are holes within holes that are parts for that larger hole, but themselves also seem to display hole-like capacities, you know. But I don’t see a- I’m not convinced that we need to say that there’s something radically new that appears with the first cellular biological life form. I think that cellular form of organization in a more generic sense is pervasive, you know, that’s how nature does it. And yes, biological life on planet Earth is clearly quite novel, but it’s not out of character when you look at the rest of the universe in terms of how it tends to organize in these cellular ways. I mean, you know, I try to develop an analogy between cellular life, biological life, and galactic organization in a sense that there is actually a pretty, and astrophysicists understand this quite well now, a pretty remarkable feedback loop that the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies establish when they are related to the star formation and the star formation. And that’s really, you know, a sort of deep knowledge whereby the rate of star formation is regulated when, you know, too much matter starts to get sucked into the black hole, it will explode and disperse out that material and that wave of energy seeds new stars and it regulates, you know, the life cycle of a there’s a certain period after which new star formation ceases. And so I think that the analogies here are strong enough to justify more of a continuity in our understanding of the modes of organization that the universe falls into or is lured into. I mean, we can look at it both ways. And so, you know, but I’m also, you know, I’m collaborating with an astrobiologist named Bruce Dahmer who’s working on an origin of life hypothesis, and he’s very interested in whitehead, but also thinks life is the emergence of biology is probably pretty improbable in terms of the chemistry and the astrophysics of what’s required. And so he and I are continuing that dialogue and I might be, you know, who knows in a few months time pulled over to your side of this question. But, you know, for now, I think the analogies are just too pervasive to deny the organic nature of the universe at all levels. Well, fair enough. And the fact that you’re open, I didn’t know what to make because I need to see the original research where Bernardo was talking about, you know, that there’s a neuron-like structure to super galaxies. I don’t quite know. And you made a comment about that. I don’t quite know what to do with that analogy. Yeah, I wouldn’t personally lean on that for metaphysics and ontology because it’s just unclear, you know, whether that’s just an accident or something deeper. Well, this is one of the, I mean, this is one of the deep problems and this is one of the problems that sort of goes into the discussion between theism and non-theism. I mean, I think Nelson Goodman’s argument that there’s no algorithm for similarity judgments. There cannot be. They presuppose relevance realizations. Right, because I make you, you’re familiar with the arguments and people who’ve watched any of my work note. And so I don’t think there’s a similarity there that can be positive independent of our judgments about what’s relevant or important, which is of course also the case for science. So I’m not making a criticism that just devastates a metaphysics and leaves science untouched. It applies all across the board. But that’s, I think where people tend to go theism or non-theism is, you know, if the universe was genuinely sort of ontologically similar, it would mean, and I think this is where Hicks comes in from, it would be inherently ambiguous. We could find indefinite numbers of identities between two things and indefinite numbers of dissimilarities between two things, which I think is the case. I think you can make that a very strong case. And so that’s why he argues for a kind of non-theism ultimately, because you can’t resolve the issue about how much it’s like a person and how much it’s not, because it’s going to shift on what you consider the relevant or important features of personhood. But don’t we resolve that issue every moment of our… Well, we do, and we do it with relevance realization. And that’s the point I’m trying to make. And so you can’t point to, you can’t, like Goodman’s point is you can’t say similarities over there, right? Those things are similar and those two things are dissimilar. What you have to do is you have to say, I’m judging those two things as more identical. I’m judging these things as more… And so it’s always that relation you have to be bringing in. So it’s a relevance realization. It’s inherently what I would call, it’s a prototypical instance of something that’s transjective. It’s not just there in the world. It’s not just you imposing something on the blank canvas of the world. Okay. So I don’t know where… I’m glad, I mean, I respect that about you. You state your position, you’re open to that the analogy may shift around as different things become more relevant or apparent to you. And I think that’s totally legitimate. There was one dimension of what I said though, that I still want to hear a response from, because I mean, I agree with Whitehead about, we have to take the full gamut of our experience into account. And an important part of that experience is again, not just our aesthetic or epistemic responsiveness, it’s our moral responsiveness. And we do seem to make these difference in kind judgments about things from a moral standpoint. I have no hesitation of walking on a rock that I would completely not do even for an insect. Like if I can avoid killing an insect, I’ll avoid killing an insect. Like sometimes I can’t and that’s, I’m driving my car. I’m not going to be able to know the insects I might kill, but if I can, I avoid it. And this is not an odd thing. We make these distinctions all the time. Like, you know, and so we will put people in prison if they kill another human being. We’ll even subject them to prison now if they kill animals under certain circumstances. Maybe they chop down a tree, but usually that’s bound up with somebody owning the tree. But we don’t care about, we don’t do anything to people if they break a rock, or they go out there and just going to, that rock over there, I’m just going to destroy it and pulverize it. Okay, we don’t care. Nobody gives more, right? I’m being obviously, you know. Unless it’s a statue that is of great value to a particular sector of the population or something. Exactly, exactly. But then again, that’s because of the human’s wanton. Yeah, so you see what I’m trying to get at? I’m trying to say, yeah, I get what you’re saying. I get the analogies and I’m open about it. I am genuinely open because I think my argument commits me to that. But I mean, in addition to the epistemic and the aesthetic, there is the moral dimension to our experience and it seems to definitively, we disagree about where and when, but we don’t disagree that it should. It demarcates between different kinds of beings in a very significant way. Yeah, and I think from a Whiteheadian point of view, we can still make these value judgments based on the intensity of experience that we deem to be present in a given. Okay, so that’s what I’m going to be. Can you unpack that a bit more? That’s the key move then. Great. Yeah, well, so Whitehead says life is robbery, but the robber needs justification. And so we know even if we’re a vegetarian that we have to kill life in order to sustain our own lives. But we make the judgment that vegetables, as Alan Watts said, don’t scream as loud as cows. Do plants have sentience? It seems pretty clear that they do. Do they experience suffering and pain to the extent that mammals and birds and fish even seem to at least exhibit the behavior, which would suggest that they’re feeling pain. And we seem to have the, I don’t know if it’s mirror neurons or some other physiological resonance with animals that makes us feel like, don’t do that. We just feel, and it’s moral, but it’s also aesthetic, I think. There’s a kind of resonance between beings. Yeah, that’s true. And for Whitehead, aesthetics becomes first philosophy in many ways, and morality and truth even are subsets of aesthetics for him. We can get more into the implications of that, but in this case, it’s a matter of making a determination, which is not logical or cognitive in the sense that we could invent a detector that would tell us, I ask more pain is present in this being than in that being. It’s more of a feeling that we have that comes naturally to most of us if we are healthy, where we can distinguish between those beings that really deserve moral consideration or more moral consideration and other beings who deserve less or different kind, perhaps, of moral consideration. And so maybe the kind difference comes in here when we try to make these moral demarcations. Even if ontologically, it’s messier than that, there’s probably more of a gradient here because even vegetables are organ, they’re alive, and we wouldn’t necessarily want to, if we had the power, destroy a galaxy. Maybe we don’t think a galaxy is alive, but we know that it shelters a form of order, which who knows how many planets in a given galaxy have intelligent life on them, right? And so we wouldn’t go about stomping out galaxies, again, if we somehow have the ability to do that, because we recognize that this is the house for higher forms of order that could arise. And so I think there are different ways to make these distinctions about what forms of order, what systems, what modes of organization are deserving of moral consideration and which are not. Environmental and ecological ethics, there’s all sorts of questions about whether the species is the important category that deserves moral concern or whether it’s the individual members of the species or whether it’s a whole ecosystem. So I think these are always going to be fraught issues, though at an aesthetic level, I think we empathize with certain kinds of beings because in a sense, we resonate interior to interior with beings who are more like us and a sort of empathic circuit is established whereby we just feel that we shouldn’t harm them. Not that that circuit can’t be broken and of course there are plenty of people for who don’t know, they become cut off from that. So yeah, I think it’s a tricky issue, but even in a white headian cosmos, we can still make these distinctions. Okay, that’s important. So I’m trying to just get clear. I’m trying to get, is the intensity of the experience our ability to resonate with it or is it an ontological feature of the event? The intensity of the experience is an ontological feature of the occasion in question. The occasion, okay, sorry. An event for white had distinguishes between events and occasions. An event is more like, what he says, a network or a nexus of occasions. So event is a slightly more inclusive category. An occasion is what congresses and forms a unity. And so intensity for white head would be a function of how much what is actualized and what remains potential are integrated. So how much can a given occasion of experience dip into what Stu Kaufman calls the adjacent possible and realize relevant, you could say it’s a matter of relevance realization. Yeah, so the intensity depends on the degree of the capacity for relevance realization, which in white headian terms would be how far am I able to, from the present, inheriting the past, how far am I able to dip into what’s possible for me to realize, not just in the next moment, which would be more limited, but even in the deeper future. Because for white head, certain occasions of experience are part of not just personally ordered societies or historical roots, but even what he would call soul, he would start to employ that category. In some animals and human beings, we have a sense of our soul life. And when we’re 14, we could think about what we want to be doing when we’re 30 years old and we pursue a life path in an attempt to realize that if we’re really mature 14 year olds. So if I can use the analogy, there are sort of, and I’ll use a theological term, there’s kairos moments. There’s moments that are deeply pregnant for their ability to intervene on the shape of the future. And then there are moments that don’t have that same sort of kairotic potential. I’m trying to use this as an analogy. So is the intensity something that’s sort of more like a kairos, that this occasion, right, you know, gathers more of the past and affords more of the future than this occasion over here. And therefore, in terms of sort of, it’s interesting because it feels like the ontology has, you know, the universe has getting sort of an optimal grip on itself, a causal optimal grip on itself. Like those occasions that sort of best project the future, project the past through the present into the future. And so for Whitehead, there are differences then. There are some occasions that are much more kairotic than others, and they therefore are, just intrinsically more valuable, or is that the idea? They realize more value and are therefore more valuable to the subsequent occasions which inherit them. I guess. So that brings me to, I guess, one of the points where, I’m loving the way this conversation is going, just brings me to one of the biggest differences in this, again, in the Tyson book. And, you know, we, you know, post-cont and post-human content, the is-ought and all that stuff, even though I think, you know, what’s his name, Casebeer and others have really challenged the is-ought distinction. Putnam’s done that too. But we still take it as, let’s, I think this is a historically fair claim. Modernity has defined itself in terms of an exhaustive and complete distinction between fact and value. I think that’s a defining feature of modernity. And in that sense, Whitehead is not modern. He’s not postmodern, I’m not saying that, and he’s not ancient, but he’s, I don’t know, maybe he’s metamodern since people are playing with that term right now. Because I understand it, and you just invoked it there, that for Whitehead, right, value does not depend on the judgment of sort of conscious agents. Is that a, so you agree? Yeah, okay. He says, Whitehead says, we have no right to deface the value experience, which is the very essence of the universe. So humans don’t provide value to the rest of the universe. We inherit value from that universe and are ourselves capable of realizing especially intense value in response to what we’ve inherited. But, you know, we’re not the sole centers of value, yeah, or nor is just life either. And that’s very similar to Harmon, and even Morton, especially Morton seems to be arguing something similar to that. To make value a purely correlational thing is something that they’re collectively railing against. So can you unpack that a little bit more? What would be the, I mean, because obviously there’s big names attached to that. Like I say, you know, for me, you know, this is a Kantian distinction, and right, this is a defining feature of modernity. Science relies on this in its public face. We only talk about the facts. Everybody else talks about the values. Science is value neutral. Of course, most philosophers and historians of science will tell you that’s kind of garbage. But nevertheless, I want to, so I, right, but I want to hear what you have to, like you and speaking on behalf of Whitehead, etc., have to say about that. So how would Whitehead basically justify overthrowing that Kantian dichotomy that has become so pervasive that it’s become, until very recently, unquestioned within the framework of modernity? Whitehead, part of his protest against the bifurcation of nature is a protest against what he calls vacuous actuality, or, you know, the conception of facts as though they exist independently of interest, the interest of an observer, or facts that don’t have some value for themselves. So for Whitehead, yeah, the fact value distinction goes out the window, because to realize itself as a fact, an occasion of experience must also have some value. It must be enjoying value and conveying value. And so it just sort of follows naturally from a pan-experientialist ontology. Now this usually value we think of in moral terms. Yeah, more aesthetic. Right. And so for Whitehead, this is primarily an aesthetic thing, whereby, you know, the realization of a fact implies some form of aesthetic realization, whereby, you know, to be a discrete fact, the past has to have been, the manifold of the past has to have been inherited and integrated in some way into a unit, a quantum of fact. And this is a process that for Whitehead doesn’t occur passively. It’s an activity. And that in order for… Is it a selectivity? Because this is what Jonathan was sort of pushing me towards, that there’s a selectivity. And wherever there’s selectivity, there’s some kind of valuation going on. Is that… It’s the selectivity. Yeah, I mean, it’s a question of how something definite sort of precipitates out of a field of infinite potential. And to get something definite, you’re going to need to select among the possibilities. And what Whitehead would say is that most of those possibilities have to be negatively pre-hended, which doesn’t mean they’re erased or zapped out of being. They’re inherited as not felt, which is to… It’s kind of like they’re ignored, but they still leave a scar in the sense that, you know, what it is to be a particular fact is not to be all the other things that could have occurred. And the meaning of the fact as a discrete entity is… The ruling in and the ruling out, the ruling in and the ruling out, that’s presupposed by any scientific endeavor. Yes. And so, I mean, but there’s two ways to look at this, right? Whitehead both wants to say that for a fact to be realized in far off empty space somewhere, there’s got to be some enjoyment of that experience, which has unified all of what’s possible streaming in from the past and all of what’s already been actualized in the past into a discrete unit, and that that unit must be present to itself in some way, even if there’s not a scientist out there to observe it. But from the perspective of scientific investigation and methodology, I mean, it seems pretty clear, given the sociology of science and science and technology studies, you know, Bruno Latour is a big name here, right? It’s that without interest, without some interest, the facts, no facts will disclose themselves. Yeah. I make similar arguments about relevance realization being sort of the normativity that makes all our other judgments, including our epistemic judgments, possible. And of course, and of course, and let’s be clear, you know, truth is a value. Right. Yes. Right. Right. And so to talk about science being value free while it pursues the truth is oxymoronic. There has to be something inherently valuable about the truth that, well, it’s valuable to us, but why is it valuable to us, etc, etc. Mm hmm. But so, but the thing that I’m getting close to, like, I don’t know, I’m like, I’m really appreciating, I’m not quite in agreement, but I’m like, I’m enjoying it and taking it seriously, is this idea of a selectional process within the ontology of creativity itself. I’m trying to play in your ballpark as much as possible and how that’s analogous to relevance realization and that that selectivity has something therefore strongly analogous to cognitive valuation. If you’ll allow me to make a distinction, like you don’t think the, you know, the water molecule forming out in, you know, in deep space is experiencing anything like what I’m experiencing right now. But there’s some sense in which it has, like, you know, Spinoza’s canadus, it’s selecting out of all the possibilities and it’s preserving itself in some active manner that is analogous to value. What we call explicit, maybe self-reflective valuing is, there’s at least a strong functional analogy with the way the water molecule is, like, selecting from the possibilities and preserving itself. Is that, am I correct? Yeah, exactly. And this follows from the move away from a substance ontology where, you know, before quantum theory we could easily imagine matter as just mutely persisting through time and empty space. But now when we think of a water molecule, there’s a certain vibratory frequency and in a way not that dissimilar to, you know, how, like, Descartes thought, and many theologians used to think that God has to recreate the universe in each moment. Yeah, yeah, very much. I was thinking that. The molecule to persist and endure needs to, you know, really make a decision in each moment, which for Whitehead involves God but is not determined by God, to inherit its form and continue to vibrate with that frequency. It’s not a foregone conclusion that that will just happen sort of, you know, without any activity to maintain it. And so it’s a process that continues to realize itself from moment to moment by inheriting and enjoying an aesthetic vibe, you know. And so, yeah, there’s something it is like to be a water molecule. It’s not like what it is to be a conscious human being, but it is some aesthetic enjoyment of a vibrational pattern, you know, and it’s kind of a musical thing, I guess. Whitehead is a musical ontology and, you know, whatever, it’s a very it’s a mostly an audible note to us. We can’t hear or really perceive a single water molecule, but you get enough of them together and it’s quite a beautiful symphony. Yeah, that’s very poetic. I like the poesis and the logos being woven together by you there. That’s a bit much appreciated. Yeah, so it was something that was coming up about that for me. Let me just see if I can recover it. I like what you said about, yeah, there’s something like what it’s like to be watered from the water’s perspective, if you allow me to put it that way. Yeah, so what was coming up for me, I recalled it now, is, you know, there’s this problem, you know, one of the classic problems reductionism faces is, you know, Ned Block’s, you know, cruncher problem. The only thing that ends up being real is your bottom level ontology and then what you’re going to fall down to if you go down quantum is you’re going to fall into probability waves and then what’s often missing is what’s mysterious is the selection process amongst the field of infinite, you know, possibilities that are then somehow selected into probabilities because probability is a modification of possibility, right, and how that occurs and then how out of the probability is what is selected as a quantum event. So there is a lot of hand waving around the selection or it’s just stipulated it just happens in a completely non-intelligible fashion, which I find an abandonment. But if the point of the reduction was to give me an intelligibility and then I get down to what’s supposed to ground it and what you do is say, oh, there’s no intelligibility here. I find that that’s just a self-refuting position to take. So I think you’re putting your finger, I’m trying to actually buttress your point, I think you’re putting your finger on, right, that even our sort of most hard-nosed science is bumping into these issues, if you’ll allow me, of ontological selection, right, and what Whitehead is trying to foreground that in his notion of create, in his notions, sorry, in his notions of creativity and God. He’s trying to give us an ontology of the, that appropriately grounds and foregrounds ontological selection. That’s what I’m hearing you say right now. Yeah, and you know, there’s great work being done on this by physicists, quantum theorists, building on Whitehead, people like Michael Epperson and Timothy Eastman and… I think I ordered his book, I think. Doesn’t he have a new book out? Yes, Untying the Gordian Knot, which is looking at all these issues of how the relationship between quantum theory and the macroscopic worlds can be worked out in an intelligible way. Can be worked out in an intelligible way. And what all of these theorists, Elias Zephyrus is the other co-author with Epperson of a great book on quantum theory building on Whitehead, and what they’re trying to work out is a reading of what Whitehead described in terms of the phases of concrescence as analogous to, and not just a loose analogy, but like a technical account of, you could say, a decoherence interpretation of quantum theory, which is one of the, I don’t know how many dozen or so different interpretations of quantum theory. I mean, there are more than that, but the more predominant ones, there’s like a dozen, which is the idea that in some sense, the wave function collapses itself by observing itself, and so it gets rid of this quantum woo temptation to say that consciousness is somehow responsible for making the moon appear in the position that it does, because it’s inviting consideration of a sort of pan-experiential cosmos where that realm of potential is constantly being moved from pure possibility to greater probability to actualization of some definite fact by the universe itself, because there’s observation going on at all levels all the time to different degrees. This was Plotinus’s notion that everything is contemplating, but then he goes on to say, but by contemplation, I don’t mean what you experience in time and space, I mean blah, and he makes an ontological contemplation, but very much, and it’s so amazing how a lot of that stuff has come back almost with a vengeance, and a lot of these ideas are now being taken very seriously again in a way that they were dismissed for centuries. It’s very exciting times, actually. I think of where one of the places where Bernardo and I agreed is that we’re not going to get out of the various messes we’re in with our existing ontology. I like to quote the police, the rock group. You’re probably too young for the police, but… Well, I know them. Okay. There is no political solution, right? There’s that ultimately, although there’ll be political ramifications, this is something that we’ve got to fundamentally change our ontology, and again, not just theory people talking. We have to change our ontology, and I think Whitehead and James would both agree with this. We have to change our ontology in a way that makes a real difference to real people living real lives, and that’s the only way we’re going to get out of this mess, I think. Yeah, and to be honest, I would be happy if more scientists were just interested in having the conversation about ontology and metaphysics, because I’ve gone to a few attempts at an interdisciplinary conference to bring philosophers and physicists and biologists into the dialogue, and it just doesn’t happen. The response I often get from physicists when I try to wax Whitehead in about the meaning of what they’re discovering is that that’s not what we do. Basically, they repeat Bohr’s statement that physics tells us what we can say about nature, not what nature is, and that they’re just less interested in asking the question, because the methods that they’re used to using, which are very precise and quantitative, don’t give them any purchase on these questions. And so I guess because it’s more speculative, they’re less willing to put their necks out to make any claims about it, which I get professionally. I’m not quite as tolerant and kind as you are, but I find that disingenuous, because they’re quite willing to make pronouncements about philosophy, right? They’re quite willing to make speculative claims about multiple universes and multiple worlds. All the while claiming they’re doing science. Yes, right, and then when you say, well, here’s the justification, and here’s the mathematical formula, and you say, why would I believe that an abstract mathematical formula justifies something? Why does the math fit the universe? Oh, well, it just does. I think it’s just a paradigmatic claim in the Cunion sense. This is not how our exemplars talk, and so we don’t talk this way either. But you’re pumping up against, you need to talk about it. The way you’re trying to integrate relativity, cosmological relativistic facts with quantum facts is you’re just talking this language, and you don’t want to admit it. And the fact there’s a problem that information disappears in black holes, and that’s something, and that can’t be right, because that would make the past unintelligible and inaccessible to us. And it’s like, right, you’re really concerned with intelligibility. Why don’t you step back and reflect on that’s what you’re actually doing. The fact that you want to make information, or the proposal is to make information another ontological primitive tells you something fundamentally is going on. At least that’s what I would say if I was to get into an argument with them. Right. Yeah. I mean, so there’s that issue with the disingenuousness of physicists sometimes, but I also often am finding myself warning my philosophy students against treating the current paradigms in science as this sort of grab bag for justifying whatever sort of ontological idea. Oh, of course, of course, I didn’t mean to convey that. I didn’t know. I’m not saying you are. I’m just, I’m bringing out the other side of this, which is that, in a way, amplifying your point, which is that contemporary physical cosmology is just a Rube Goldberg machine of models patched on top of models, which all presuppose one another. And yeah, there are some tenuous links to some empirical studies, experiments and particle colliders and telescope and whatever. There’s data, but the amount of speculation going on to establish these models, like what we call the Big Bang theory, is really like 12 or 15 different models sort of tenuously linked to one another. And if one of those models turns out to have been wrong or new data comes in that changes it, the whole thing is destabilized. And so the way that science is communicated is often like, we now know that this whole picture, and I’m not denying the beauty of the inflationary model. It’s just, I feel, and Whitehead said this 100 years ago, that in some ways, cosmology as a science and in large part physics and astrophysics has entered an epicyclic phase of theoretical development. When we start positing things like dark matter and dark energy that supposedly is 96% of the mass energy in the universe and only 4% is what we know as in terms of the standard model of particle physics, that seems to me to be a huge ad hoc addition to fudge the equation so that the old theories keep working. And it seems to me that we’re just waiting for a new Copernicus. I agree. And other people have pointed out that in terms of theoretical innovations that would be at the level of what we had with Einstein and things like that. You know, physics hasn’t done anything. They’ve tried multiple times, but there hasn’t been anything for 40 or 50 years. That’s why it would, when my students come to me, because I mean, I have my foot in both worlds. I’m also a scientist. I run experiments and do stuff like that, right? And I care about science and I love science. Well, yes. I do run experiments. I mean, I have my prism here and I like to repeat these experiments on color, but I don’t have a lab or anything. Well, I mean, the demarcation problems there anyways, that we can’t give a definitive way of demarcating science from one side. I was just saying, I do a lot of the prototypical things that scientists are supposed to do and I love doing them and other people seem to value them. That’s all I’m saying. But when my students come to me and they say, well, what science should I go in? I say go into biology rather than physics, because biology is way more, the theoretical innovation that’s happening in biology right now, especially the work, maybe you’re going to different conferences than me, but anyways, the discussions between the philosophers of biology and the theoretical biologists are quite like the work that’s being done, challenging the grand synthesis, people like Dennis Walsh, my colleague at U of T, or like I said, Owen Gilbert, proposing natural reward, the discussion of the evolution of evolvability as opposed to just the evolution of traits. These are powerful theoretical innovations and they’re fruitful. They’re being taken up into cognitive science and powerfully generating new insights and ideas. They’re all the marks of what Lakatos calls as a progressive research program rather than a degenerative one. Whereas I see, and I’m going to get, physicists are going to hate me, but what I see is what Lakatos criticized astrology for. You’re getting theory after theory after theory after theory after theory. Oh, it’s string, no, quantum gravity, no, blah, blah, blah, and it’s like, whoa, and that’s what you’re gesturing with the epicycles. It’s like, wow, you’re losing the distinction between what you’re doing in astrology if all you’re doing is generating theories that last for like 10 years as a fad and then another theory and another, and there’s no sense of progress. One just disappears and another one replaces it. And yeah, and like you said, when you’re making postulates like multiple worlds, multiple universes, dark energy, dark matter, these look ad hoc. And that’s again, Lakatos is clear on this. You can’t say there’s an algorithm, but you start to get worried when this starts to be the pervasive feature of a discipline. Yeah, right. And I think you’re right that biology is a very exciting discipline right now, but I also think there’s a need for more dialogue across the disciplinary boundaries between or boundaries between biology, chemistry, and physics. There are plenty of biologists that are presupposing a mechanistic physical oncology, but there’s also a lot of that being presupposed, I think, in terms of how we think about what drives the evolutionary process as though, and I know a lot of biologists push back against this, and I’m not sure where the center of gravity is in biology now, but for a while, with the popularity of someone like Dawkins or Daniel Dennett that’s offering some perspectives as a philosopher of biology, there’s a sense that the organism doesn’t even show up. It’s more just differential selection of genes. And in a way, it’s almost reducing biology to chemistry. As long as you have a chemical that can reliably reproduce itself, that’s supposed to be explanatory of speciation and everything. And I think putting the organism back at the center of biology is a really important thing to do because organisms have agency. Yeah, I could be wrong in predicting the future course of science is always very dangerous, but I predict that’s where the center of gravity is going to shift to. That’s what’s happening. Those are the people I’m talking to and the ideas that are gaining traction. Like I said, the idea of the agency of the organism and the innovativeness factor of evolution is now being foregrounded much more than the pure replication factor. Yeah, that’s good to hear that that’s your sense. I mean, I see plenty of signs that that’s happening, and the whole autopoetic paradigm was a big initiator of some of that. And I think, yeah, it’s encouraging to see that shift happening. But I do think, for me, I’m really interested in the cosmological context of all these special disciplines of science. So what does the shift to the organism as the locus of concern and the causal agent in biology mean for the rest of our understanding of nature? And so it raises questions of the origin of life and how that occurs and how rare that might be in the universe. You know, and I was talking to my friend Bruce Dahmer about this, who’s working on the origins of life, and he thinks it’s pretty chemically improbable, but the universe is big enough that there could be plenty of examples of it having emerged. But it could be down to the level of not just a planet the right distance from the sun made of the right stuff, but that even a satellite like a moon is required. Oh, yeah. Keep the tectonic plates going and keep the core molten so that a magnetic field is produced and like most of the asteroids and right protect us from the asteroids. And so all the variables required, it starts to add up into a pretty long list of things that are got to be there in place before life can even be combinatorially possible in terms of the chemistry on the surface of the planet. And so, you know, and I think in a Whiteheadian cosmos, there’s plenty of room for contingency. And while there are, while, you know, Whitehead’s bringing teleology back into our picture of nature, it’s not the kind of, you know, pre-designed teleology or imposed design from some transcendent intellect. So it’s unlike the noose in that sense, maybe. It’s more like, in a way, so much purpose and so many aims that the future course of the universe is unpredictable. I mean, it depends what sorts of relationships are established and interests become shared among all these agents, vying for, you know, vying for their aims to be realized in the future. And so you get a real, like, vast ecosystem of desire that is struggling, but also cooperating to realize more and deeper forms of organization, which correlates with the intensity of experience. So, you know, it puts agency back into the evolutionary process, not only at the biological level of organisms, you know, but for Whitehead, those aims are also operative in the astrophysical environments. So I think, well, we should probably wrap up soon, but I do think that what’s clearly happening, and one of my grad students, well, he’s now got his PhD, he wrote his thesis, but what’s happening is basically Alex Djardjevic, is that we used to locate agency pretty much anthropocentrically once we hit modernity, right? But now how high up and how far down agency goes is now much more of an open question. So I think that’s making people, how can I say this? It’s making Whitehead more plausible than he was perhaps 20 years ago. Yeah, yeah. I mean, a final word on that and then I can wrap up. I can’t believe it’s been two hours already. A lot of fun. But the Whiteheadian theologian, John Cobb Jr., he says, he frames modernity this way on this question that after Darwin pointed out that in the early 20th century, and made it plausible to see human beings as another species of animal that emerged through a process of selection, modern people were left with a choice between two alternatives, either, and Darwin assumed Newtonian physics, so either human beings are actually more machine-like than we realized because we’re continuous with the rest of nature, which is in some ways a giant clockwork, or nature is more in soul than we thought it was because here we humans are with our desires and intentions and values and meaning and purpose and that must in some way be continuous with the rest of nature and if it’s emerged out of it, then panpsychism becomes more plausible. So it’s like after Darwin, there’s really no more room for a dualism and we have to decide one way or the other and I actually think eliminative materialists are more consistent and I think their position is more defensible, at least because they’re willing to bite this bullet. I think they choose the wrong alternative, but I’m more interested in arguing with them than I am with emergentists who are somehow in the middle and want to say that all value and meaning and consciousness can appear at some point when organization reaches a certain place, a phase of complexity, because I think that’s avoiding the real bifurcation here, different kind of bifurcation, where post-Darwin if we’re going to see the human being as a part of this universe, as an animal that has resulted from this evolutionary process, then that tells us our immediate experience of what it is to be alive counts as evidence that I think should tell us something about where we came from. I was well said, that’s a good place. Let’s do this again. I’d love to. It’s wonderful. So please send me any links you’d like for me to put in the description so that people can reach you and yeah, let’s try and set up some conversations with you and some of my conversational partners because I think you have some pretty wonderful things to say. I could see you talking to Jonathan and to Paul VanderKlay and it being a wonderful conversation. Again, it’s not just the matter of what you’re saying, it’s the manner that’s very, very conducive. So thank you very much. I hope we do this again. Likewise, John. Thanks. Appreciate it.