https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=FHkIi1KZ_qk
So welcome to Voices with Bravachy. I’m joined by, well, this colleague. We have worked together, but it’s somebody I want to get to know more. I keep intersecting with his work, and that’s Matt Segal. So welcome, Matt. Thanks, John. Great to dialogue with you. I’ve really enjoyed your work on YouTube, and yes, getting to be on a committee together to supervise a dissertation on, I guess it’s that student’s, now doctor’s work was focused on participatory theory, which is one of the places that we interact and intersect. But yeah, so I’ve been enjoying, I think the first time I saw you in dialogue on YouTube with someone was a Rebel Wisdom interview between you and Ian McGilchrist. Right. Yes. That was wonderful. I enjoyed that thoroughly. Yeah. I think I was just really resonant, I mean, with both of you guys, but particularly it just struck me that there are a lot of ways that we are concerned with the same problems and trying to work within academia to bridge it with worlds, contemplative spiritual types of worlds and practices that maybe don’t have a home yet in academia, though the doors are opening and more connections are being made. So yeah, I’m an assistant professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in a program called Philosophy Cosmology and Consciousness. Which sounds like an amazing program. I envy you. That sounds like just a wonderful program to be in. It’s a lot of fun, and I teach courses on German Idealism and Process Philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead, but also other philosophers who directly or indirectly have influenced by Whitehead or who adopt a broadly process-oriented view. I’m teaching a course this fall on American philosophy, so it’s the first time I’m teaching that subject, but that tradition, pragmatism, William James Dewey, and Perce are very important for me as well. But as an undergrad, I studied cognitive science at the University of Central Florida with professors like Mason Cash and Sean Gallagher. Gallagher studied with Francesco Varela, was colleagues with him, and so I got into philosophy of mind and cognitive science, but then Sean Gallagher introduced me to phenomenology and Varela’s work and Evan Thompson and the significance of phenomenology for understanding the mind. There’s what’s called a cognitivist paradigm and a computationalist paradigm that looks at the mind in one way. The cognitive science department at UCF was mainly focused there, but Sean Gallagher was bringing this other phenomenological dimension, and I was very interested in that and started reading Husserl and Merleau-Ponty and Varela’s work and Evan Thompson’s work and learning about the inactive perspective, which I think can easily be, I think it’s helpful when we’re doing cognitive science and epistemology and when we’re trying to understand the biological basis of mind. But what interested me about inactivism was how does it deal with ontological and cosmological questions, and there’s not much really within the inactivist paradigm about those questions. It’s more like they’re bracketed, which is a typical phenomenological move, and so I got interested more in Whitehead because I was like, oh, here’s the cosmology and the ontology, maybe that’s the ontological basis of mind, places in the inactivist paradigm and autopoetic biology. It grounds it ontologically. It’s like process ontology provides for the missing ontology in inactivism, and I’ve been talking to Evan Thompson about this for a while, and he’s slowly but surely, I think, moving towards a more Whiteheadian perspective. Oh, it’d be great if the three of us spoke. I mean, Evan’s a colleague and friend of mine, and it would be great for the three of us to speak together sometime. We should probably try and set that up. That sounds like a really interesting triangle for discussion. I would love that, yeah. But so, you know, Whitehead has been really influential for me, but also Jorge Ferrer is a colleague of mine at CIS. Right. I would like to meet him, by the way. That’s another tri-log we could do. Yes, that sounds fantastic. He’s in Spain right now because CIS has been virtualized. He teaches online anyway. But yeah, his participatory theory and participatory study or approach to religion and spirituality allowed me to see how there’s a different way of getting at the science, religion, or science spirituality culture war that doesn’t require that, A, they be at war, or even B, that they’re sort of like non-overlapping magisteria or whatever, but that actually at a deeper level, there’s this participatory way of knowing that is essential for science and also for religion. Yes. And we get into more dogmatic forms of either materialism or some kind of creationism or fundamentalism when we stop consciously, when we lose conscious awareness of that participatory dimension of our knowledge. Yeah. So that’s sort of the, my influences where I’m coming from and clearly, you know, we have a lot of overlaps and I guess, you know, I, what I would love to talk to you about and whatever else you want to talk about is great too is what you think about these, the cosmological and ontological questions and metaphysical questions that from an activist or participatory perspective, do we need to say more, say as an activist, do we need to say more about the cosmological backdrop or context of this approach? That’s very good. I was just talking to Jordan Hall about this. We were talking about, you know, a reinventio. I’ve taken this term from Kerry, who did a really wonderful book on Augustine’s invention of the inner self, but he said the word he wanted to use with the Latin word inventio, which means both to discover and to make. It stands on that. And so we were talking about sort of the reinventio of rationality and how once we, once we move it out of the computational algorithmic Cartesian paradigm, it starts to move into something that starts to overlap with virtue ethics and with a sense of reverence and et cetera. But this general question also came up because he made the point that there’s a code, there’s a co-definition between that model of rationality and a model of the world as fundamentally lacking in creativity. And he made the criticism, he said, the ontology admits this moment of absolute creativity at the beginning and then no, no ontological creativity for the rest. And we talked about how Whitehead sort of bounced off of that project because ultimately the failure, for good DeLian reasons, the failure of that whole project. And then he turns to a metaphysics, as you know, in which creativity goes, it’s not, you have to hear that. Well, you know, I’m speaking to the people watching that it’s a much more ontological notion than we usually use that word. People hear creativity and think it’s something like a psychological capacity. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Whitehead meant it metaphysically and it’s not, it’s impersonal creativity. It’s not the creativity of a genius. No, no, not that. So I want to explore that with you because I’ve been abiding interest in Whitehead and I’ve read a lot of the books. I have to confess, I could not get through process and reality. It was very, and I’ve read some pretty tough nuts, but that’s a very hard book, but I’ve read a lot of the, you know, religion in the making and a lot of his other work. So, and you mentioned the religion in the making in the video I watched, but the thing that, to get back to Jordan’s point and to answer your question is, he said, but if you shift into an ontology in which there is genuine novelty in some sense and there’s genuine complexification in some sense, then he says then correspondingly that model of rationality also has to be given up. And we were talking about how the two things, they have to sort of be given up in tandem. They have to be given up in concert. Like you have to reinvent your both, if you’ll allow me these really contested words, there’s a reinvent you of both reality and rationality, and they have to be reinvented together. And so I think the question you pose to me is directly pertinent. The question is, does insofar, and I would argue this, that insofar as for insofar as for E cognitive science, I think explicitly, right, undermines the Cartesian conception of cognition, that of course strongly entails that it undermines the Cartesian conception of rationality. And then correspondingly, it is obligated to reinvent you the conception of reality. So because I, those two have to be reconfigured in a coordinated fashion. So I think your question is directly pertinent and relevant. I think, I think there’s, I don’t want to make it sound like a moral obligation, but there’s at least an epistemic obligation on people in for E. cogsi. I sometimes stick in a 50, but because I think the notion of acceptation is really important, but whatever for E. cogsi, I think there is an epistemic obligation on them to get into the ontology. And there’s also historical precedent. I mean, so Dreyfus is one of the Godfather figures of for E. cogsi, and he comes out of the Heideggerian tradition explicitly, directly, repeatedly. And of course, Heidegger’s project is the project of extending phenomenology into fundamental ontology. And so I, for both historical reasons and epistemic reasons, I think your question is directly pertinent. And it is a bit of, you know, it’s a bit of, I don’t know what to call it, a question, a concern, why more people haven’t taken that up. And so I’d be very happy for the reasons I’ve just reviewed to talk to you about this. I think, I think that question is very strongly motivated. Yeah, that’s wonderful. I love what you’re saying framing this in terms of reinventing the relationship between reality and reason, or how we conceive of these two. And yes, exactly that the for EA or inactive just short critique of Cartesian rationality and the Cartesian conception of mind, strongly implies that the Cartesian conception of matter that’s based on that conception of mind also has to go. Exactly. And once you do that, you know, there are places in, so Varela wrote a paper, I think it was the last one he published with Andreas Weber, Life After Kant. I haven’t read that. Oh, it’s, it’s, it’s a, I think it’s a crucial paper. He begins by, by quoting Whitehead at the beginning, something about a conflict of doctrines is an opportunity. And, and he goes on to use some Whiteheadian language about the subject poll that emerges in the context of an autopoetic organism. Subject poll being drawn from Whitehead’s process ontology. And Varela ends up arguing that our conception of at least living matter, and again, the paper is titled Life After Kant. So he’s engaging with Kant’s critique of judgment. And the study of teleology in self organ, what Kant uses the term self organizing, yeah, and Varela ends up saying, look, this type of self organization associated with life cannot be understood mechanistically. And it is purposeful. It’s a form of imminent teleology and Kant is also making all these distinctions already in 1790. But Varela is going back to Kant and saying, look, he was right, we can’t understand this mechanistically. And he’s, he just hints that we probably need a new ontology, a new understanding of what nature is in order to make sense of this. In his, you know, Merle Ponte was saying this too, in the 60s, right before he died, drawing on Whitehead, drawing on Bergson, drawing on Schelling. And so we need a new conception of matter. And physics already kind of gave it to us. They call it energy. But energy, if we just let physics tell us about energy, it’s mathematical equations. And it’s like, what are these, what’s the content of these equations? Right. Because it’s, otherwise, it’s a very strange, it’s the strange idealism of contemporary physics, where it’s like, ultimately, it all rests on these mathematical equations, formulas. Yeah. And so the Whitehead’s point is like, what did these form, what is the content of them? And so he says, you know, energy vectors are, he calls them feeling vectors. And there’s a primitive form of, he calls it prehension. Yep. It goes on even at the quantum level. And that he thinks that new conception of what matter is, or what energy is, allows us to understand the emergence of everything else that came in the course of evolution, including stars and galaxies, including living cells, multicellular plants, complex animals, language using mammals. It makes sense in the context of a pan-experiential cosmology that Whitehead articulates, whereas the old material that Descartes defined, even though modern science got rid of his disembodied soul, it kept the extended matter in motion. Yeah. You can’t explain the emergence of consciousness, I would argue, if you keep that old ontology of matter. And the whole inactive paradigm and phenomenology and Heidegger and Murly-Ponty seems to be, there was, Heidegger was less inclined to engage with the sciences, but Murly-Ponty was more inclined and obviously the inactivists are more inclined to engage with neuroscience. But there’s this bracketing when it gets to these ontological questions that for me doesn’t go far enough. There’s an unwillingness to make positive statements about nature, that nature is, as Whitehead says, that nature has value and interiority to some degree all the way down. Because that’s, I mean, obviously materialists dismiss that, but I think a lot of, in conversation with Evan, for him that’s too much of a speculative claim. Yes. But I’m saying in order to have a coherent cosmology, cosmology is not a positive science. We have lots of measurements that the ancients didn’t have, but it’s going to be speculative because we can’t step outside of it. We’re in it, we’re in the midst of it. So we’re always, I would say cosmology is always endo-cosmology. We’re within the thing, we are an expression of the very order that we’re trying to understand. This gets back to the reason reality entanglement that you were talking about. Right, that’s very good. Nora Bateson has a term for that. She calls it warm data, that we’re always enmeshed in the warm data. And that she argues that we need, and this is what I agree with her, we need a more dialogical notion of reasoning and rationality, which is also, by the way, emerging in cognitive science, the work of my friend, Greg Enriquez, and the work of Mercy and Sperber and others, and all this increasing work that we actually even argumentatively, we reason better in distributed cognition rather than in monological cognition. So that’s something that feels sort of whiteheadian to me. But let’s, I mean, I would want to anyway, because I have so much respect and affection for Evan. Let’s give him his view in the sense of, let’s say for many people, and Evan is not some hand-fisted physicalist or anything like that. So sensitive, reflective, deeply insightful, thoughtful guy. So he represents at least a prima facie response to the whiteheadian move. I’m not going to say we’re going to end up there, but can I suggest one thing? Because there’s one group of thinkers that I think do do the ontological move. And so the pivotal figure for that, and she’s not given enough credit, I think, is, I don’t know if you’ve read Alicia Guerrero’s work, and dynamic in action. I’m familiar with it, but I haven’t read it yet, no. Yeah. And so, and she starts from the same point you just started from, when the Varela and Weber? Weber? I think it’s Weber because he’s German. Ah, okay. Varela and Weber, okay. Namely Kant and the problem of, you know, the tree and the self-organizing of the organism. And what Guerrero argues is that we have to actually make an ontological revision. And there are two kind of significant ones she proposes. And the reason why I’m putting this up is that I see Evan sort of committed to at least something like this, and that might give us a way of building some common ground. So that’s a suggestion I have. And so, you know, Guerrero talks about, and this isn’t just ontology because she points out it’s being presupposed when we try and explain action, including cognitive action. She makes a distinction between causes and constraints, and she introduces this notion of constraint as something already being used, but not explicated within existing science. And then she argues that it can be fruitfully re-understood as a bringing back into ontology of Aristotle’s notion of formal cause. Right? Yeah. I just want to say briefly, what’s funny is I haven’t read her book, but I’ve read Terence Deacon’s book, and he was accused of kind of lifting some ideas without… Yeah, with evidence. I’ve seen some of the slides. Yeah. So I’m familiar with your terms that you’re describing because I’ve read his book. Yeah. I don’t know what to do about Deacon. I mean, yeah, I mean, when she sent out that email where he said, you know, I’ve never met you, and she’s got him and her talking, and the slide from her presentation is behind the two of them, and it’s got some of this terminology on it. It’s like, wow. So yeah. But that’s, you know, let’s put aside academic gossip. That’s why I focus on your arrow because I think it overwhelmingly has precedence. So the difference is also, she does something that’s a little bit, although she invokes Aristotle’s formal cause, she also seems to be challenging. Now, this is something I’m more drawing from her that I couldn’t give you like a sentence that explicitly says this, but this is the notion of real possibility, which again, and this is something we might want to talk about with respect to Whitehead because this is an area where I’m sort of, you know, wrestling with Whitehead a bit, but Uriaro argues that the West has privileged actuality over possibility and has rendered actuality as virtually synonymous with reality. And then this is very problematic because the practice of the science actually presupposes real possibility. One clear example, you know, conservation of energy requires that potential energy is a real thing, right? Because the conservation, that’s the only way you can preserve the, it can’t be that it’s only an abstract thing, it has to be a real thing, or else the conservation is not really happening, etc. And so you have those kinds of arguments. And so to my mind, whether or not she’s right, that’s another thing, but what I see her doing is I see her trying to argue from science and from cognitive science, especially from inactive cognitive science, dynamical systems cognitive science, for a fundamental revision to, you know, some of the core building blocks of the ontology, bringing back, because the Cartesian notion of matter is bound up with the reduction of all the causes to efficient causation, right? And then that’s what destroys human morphism too, right? And the formal causation. And it of course, Descartes, from the whole Aristotelian tradition on, he gives priority to, to actuality, I think to the point of equating realness with actuality. And in the background here, I know Herrero and a lot of complexity theorists don’t go there, but in the background here, at least for Descartes was a theological issue. Yes, yes. He didn’t, you know, his model of nature as extended mechanism, he was, he was kind of saying, I don’t know how God does it. That’d be blasphemous for me to claim to know how God does it. But we can use the mathematics that God gave us to describe it this way, you know, and as science advanced from that point forward, they took his analytical tools and left the theological move behind and equated the modeling with the way nature actually is. Descartes wasn’t saying that’s how it actually is. He was still, and I think had a foot in the ancient tradition of saving the appearances. The door to a reduction of the human mathematical model to the way that the ontology of the physical world actually is, because that’s the direction later scientists went, just getting rid of the idea that, that actually God and the human nature and the human mind are both, for Descartes, they’re expressions of God. I mean, there’s one infinite substance. Spinoza was a little clearer on this point. Yes, I think so. But anyways, there’s a theological issue behind the scenes here that gets left out of the conversation in modern science. And I get why, but it’s also important when we do start to reimagine or reinvent the relationship between reason and reality that we don’t, we don’t, we don’t pretend like it’s a purely secular sort of. Oh, I agree. I think that’s profoundly right. I think, I mean, I think, I mean, I think one of the things I was talking with Jordan about is the idea that, you know, the notion when you, when you moved, and here’s where the pragmatists, I think, are helpful. When you move to a view of reality, not as fundamentally unchanging, but as having some genuine novelty, creativity, whatever word we want to put on it in its fundamental ontology. And I think there are good arguments for making that move, by the way. Then your notion of rationality is going to be, right, not one of trying to, not the algorithmic machine that finds the final fixed picture. It’s going to be like what’s emphasized in James. It’s going to be, right, a reliable adaptivity to a environment that is in a fundamental sense changing. And then if that’s the case, then I would argue two things come out of that. Give me a second, Matt, because I’m going to return to your point. Two things are going to come out of that, right? You’re going to, you’re going to, you’re going to put a premium on reliable abilities to overcome self-deception and reliable abilities to enter into right relationship with that environment. And so I think you’re starting to now get into the realm of virtue properly understood. And then a virtue that is going to, I would argue is going to be central to that. And here’s, I’m making use of Woodruff’s idea, is the virtue of reverence, because reverence is, like, it’s on the, it’s cognitively, right, it has to do with awe and wonder and insight. And as a cognitive scientist, you know, and as a psychologist, the insight machinery is the same machinery by which you realize your own self-deception, because that’s what really a moment of insight is, right? You realize that you’ve misframed things. But awe is also a, is an experience of humiliation, not in our current senses of the word, but in the older sense of the word, the sense that you, right, you have to undergo transformation, you have to accommodate yourself, you have to conform yourself to a reality that is demanding on you because it exceeds your grasp in some sense. That’s what the experience of awe is, at least psychologically speaking. And I think of reverence as that virtue that plugs us into awe in the right way, so that we are always open to, we’re reliably open to dealing with self-deception and reliably open to reconforming to a reality that continually, continues to transcend us. And so the odd thing here, and see, this is very odd, is that the notion of rationality as sort of this aspirational adaptivity carries with it a commitment to the cultivation of the virtue of reverence. But then I put it to Jordan, I said, but reverence requires a metaphysics, right, that will call it forth. You can’t just, if you’re in, and so the standard worldview is not one for which people properly can experience reverence. They’ll have fragmented moments here and there, right? And so I think if you’re allowing me to stretch the word theology, I’m giving an argument for why I think there’s, if what we’re talking about is a mutual reconceptualization, reconfiguration, even redesign of rationality and reality, then that in our ontology, which can evoke reverence, is actually central to that reconfiguration in a proper fashion. So I don’t think you can leave the theological out of this reconfiguration for that reason. What do you think of that? I mean, I think it’s great. I think it’s very similar to the argument Whitehead makes in the beginning of Science in the Modern World about how European science emerges out of a particular theological context in which the human being, let’s say like Descartes, has faith in his own reason that it is capable of knowing the world in some important sense, and that without that faith in the rationality of nature, science can never get off the ground. And that faith itself, we can’t prove in advance that nature is intelligible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have to assume it and then engage as if it were true in order to have it confirmed in what we discover. And that faith, you know, now we have scientific positions, I mean, I would say they’re philosophical positions, but like, eliminative materialism, where it’s as if the possibility of scientific knowledge isn’t really something that’s questioned. It’s just we have scientific knowledge, and this is what it reveals to us that there’s just a bunch of matter in motion, and our brain is just a complicated piece of material. And we have a word like consciousness that really just indicates a series of behaviors that we follow from its utterance or whatever. And I think that we follow from its utterance or whatever. And I think that ends, you know, when you lose the ground of reverence, and I’m not, you know, I’m sure Paul and Patricia Churchland have reverence, you know, they’re searching for an ethical ground in the context of eliminative metaphysics. And so they’re aware of the issue. And they want to, you know, they’re, I’m sure they’re virtuous people, but I’m not dispersing anybody’s character. I’m talking about the metaphysical framework. Yeah, go ahead. Exactly. Likewise. But I think the framework has implications, and that, you know, when we adopt a view of the physical universe that says it’s a deterministic mechanism, even if we don’t direct, you know, like someone like Richard Dawkins doesn’t make direct claims. I mean, he still thinks human beings are free. We can rebel against our selfish genes and have morality and have law and have politics. But metaphysically, it’s not clear how that’s possible. Whitehead calls this the bifurcation of nature. Yes. Yes. And I think that that view of what the universe is has, it has psychological implications and sociological implications, and they’re not good. Yes. Yeah. Go ahead on that. I mean, I like that. I like, like, I think that line of argument makes sense to me. So, and I mean, and there is a move within epistemology even to bring in, you know, there’s virtue epistemology, right? That, and when we’re talking about knowledge, we’re talking more about a virtuous process that puts us into reliable right relationship rather than, you know, some sort of, you know, algorithmic method or something like that, or something in which we’ve got, you know, certainty about our propositional claims. Again, it’s very pragmatic in that sense. Right. So, but is there, I mean, if, if, if, like, so this is one of the things that intrigues me about neo-Platonism and why I keep returning to it. And I know that Whitehead has a long, a deep association with the Platonic tradition. Yeah. So is, you know, because I won’t repeat this argument, but I’ve got arguments out there that I think one of the central functions, maybe the central function of cognition, at least of our general intelligence, is a capacity I call relevance realization and how it’s deeper than the propositional. And I think the metaphysical pole, I think relevance realization is an affordance relationship. It’s between the organism and the environment. But if you’ll allow me, the metaphysical pole, the metaphysical correspondent, although I’m not offering a correspondence theory of truth, to relevance realization is intelligibility. And the neo-Platonists, they sort of, they take, you know, falling from promenades, they take intelligibility as the thing they’re going to build their ontology from. Right. Rather than presupposing it and building an ontology, they do what you just suggested a moment ago. They ask the question of how is science possible and how does reality have to be? And we keep, you and I are dancing around this question. Right. And so what occurs to me though is, you know, given what we just said, one of the things that we’re introducing is kind of, we’re introducing something like a dynamic intelligibility, unlike the neo-Platonic static. Right. I mean, there’s the emanation and the return, but you know what I mean. It’s like that being is ultimately static. Now, I think, yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. Well, I’m just going to turn it as a question to you. One way I’ve tried, and it might be a misunderstanding. One way I’ve tried to understand Whitehead is to try and get an ontology that accounts for a dynamic intelligibility. And intelligibility, right, I’m using it the way he uses it. Right. That something, because, you know, an ontology that allows me to explain my experience of the work of art and my understanding of the scientific theory. I’m talking about intelligibility broadly construed. That’s why I pointed it to, you know, the fundamental ability of relevance realization to make sense. Like, you know, like Evan’s sense making idea. It’s in that family. Is that a fair take on it? I think so. I think so. I think reading Whitehead as a neo-Platonist is an essential interpretive approach to even being able to grasp what he’s trying to say. Good, good, good. And, but he’s not an emanationist. No, no. I mean, oh, this is interesting. A thing that came up in our dissertation defense that we were part of was the, you brought it up, the emanationist versus emergentist. Yeah. And that, I think, I think we were all in somewhat agreement that there’s a kind of both ands going on here. Yes. That’s why I’m deeply influenced by Erigina. Because in Erigina, the emergence and the emanation and the model and the theology, they are completely interpenetrating and inter-reporting. Sorry, I interrupted you, but go, please go. No, that’s fine. That’s fine. What I see Whitehead doing is, you know, the Platonist’s emanationist scheme from, you know, the one through the levels down to matter. Yeah. On some readings, and I think a close reading of the NEADs shows that Platonists already had a sense of this, but it’s not as though this is a dualism between matter and the one. No, no. Matter, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist. Yeah, yeah. But it’s there as a pole. And what Whitehead allows us to see more clearly, and again, it’s not like this is necessarily in conflict with Platonists. It’s just- No, no, please go. But Whitehead would say, I kind of drew it here as you were talking, you know, I don’t know if you can see this. Oh, no. It’s a green screen. I think it’s important enough to see the graphic. I’m just going to turn off my background for a second. So it’s the lemniscate where, you know, the one emanates into matter, but matter is itself also possessed of potential. Yeah, yeah. And evolves back towards the one, or emerges back towards the one, or evolves through a series of emergent, you know, the world soul, intellect, and so on, back to the one. And what Whitehead is saying is that these two poles are, he tries to integrate them in a conception of creativity, which is for him, it’s the universal of universals. It’s the ultimate category of his scheme, even more ultimate than God. God’s a creature of creativity. And so I think we can read Whitehead as a neoplatonist, as long as we’re clear that he’s not an emanationist as Platonists was. And he’s also dynamic, right? And then because of the creativity. Now that’s where he’s more like Erigina, or Merah, right? Yeah, because Erigina’s universal, that’s the correct way of putting it. Because Erigina sees creation as the category that supersedes and also rounds both emanation and emergence, or emanation and return. So there’s a deep similarity there. Yeah, I think there’s a sort of heterodox lineage that runs through Western thought. Yeah, yeah. Erigina would be part of it, the, you know, like, Yamblichus and Proclus and, you know, Agrippa, and then the whole like, occult tradition through the Renaissance. And, you know, Descartes was searching for the Rosicrucians and trying to like, at some degree, I mean, Descartes and Newton, all those guys, way weirder than thought. Well, then we thought of the scientific origin story makes it seem. Yeah. But like, you know, if you look at Kepler, he was Galileo too, they were astrologers. Newton’s an alchemist. I don’t want to get into the occult necessarily, but I think there’s a way in which there’s a heterodox lineage through Western thought that tends to be participatory, it tends to be panpsychist in some way or another. You know, in the modern period, it’s like, you know, Bruno’s, Giodaro Bruno is part of this tradition, Ladinus is part of this, Schelling, I think. And Whitehead’s, I think, in that lineage. Right. It’s a rendering that avoids some of the typical thought mistakes, I think, that the Western philosophical tradition tends to get criticized for like dualism or the sense of disembodied rationality or whatever. We can’t, you know, Western philosophy is complex, right? And there’s, I’m just pointing out that there’s this other tradition that’s in some ways still ahead of us, or that we’re inheriting it. And, you know, but not that the cognitive sciences aren’t advancing this domain of inquiry in an exciting way. I think they are. But I think you’re right that there’s more. I’m trying to draw out connections because, okay, so first of all, thank you for the agreement, because then that affords me making a move, which is, you know, tapping into the work of Arthur versus Lewis, who, you know, he argues that, you know, the neoplatonic tradition is the spiritual cognitive grammar of the West. I love that. Yeah, yeah. And so if the figure of Whitehead is somebody whose philosophy is giving us a dynamic neoplatonism, one that will allow us to reconfigure, reinventio, you know, reality and reason in a coordinated fashion, it also would afford a way of reinventio and recovering that spiritual tradition that has been running through the heterodox that you’ve just mentioned, that, you know, a dynamic neoplatonism could be a way of reinventio the cognitive cultural grammar, cultural cognitive grammar of spirituality that’s been running through the West. Is that because I heard something like that, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t misreading or reading into you. I heard that something like that coming out of the video that you did for the future Faces of Spirit, I heard something like that. Is that is that fair? Definitely, because yes, definitely. There’s a neoplatonist. I mean, I’m, my blog is called Footnotes to Plato, you know, right, right, right, drawing from Whitehead. And that’s definitely where I situate myself. But there’s a, there’s another typical reading, misreading of Plato, I would say that imagines him as like, a dualist, and he’s got this ideal world up there, and then just the world of appearances down here. And it’s like, I don’t think that you can read a dialogue like the symposium and end up believing that Whitehead that Plato is some kind of a dualist. Yeah, I agree with that. So there’s, we need to read Plato more carefully. And I think Whitehead, and to some extent, is preserving the notion of platonic forms, or he calls them eternal objects, which alongside actual occasions are the two most like important categories in his scheme. And one way of thinking of them is eternal objects are potentials and actual occasions are actualities. And concrescence is the growing together of both of these two poles of reality. But Whitehead’s use of the notion of platonic forms is almost inverted, in the sense that whereas you do get the sense in Plato, that the forms have some kind of preeminent reality. He’s leaning more in the emanationist direction in that sense, whereas Whitehead is saying the forms are, he says, deficient in actuality, and that he has an ontological principle, which for him says that outside of actual occasions, there’s nothing. The only reason for anything is going to be an actual occasion. And that eternal objects, he says, ingress into actual occasions, but the agency is with the actual occasions. It’s not the forms that have preeminent reality, and that the world of experience is some pale imitation or copy. The forms don’t actually exist until they ingress in the context of an occasion of experience. But they’re real without existing or being actual. I was going to say, because they’re eternal. Which they’re eternal, they’re potentials. And so Whitehead does bring back in this notion of a formal causality, but as a source of possibility that’s not yet actualized. And this again is that there’s a theological background here. The Western tradition tends to imagine God as pure act, pure activity, no passivity, no potential in God. And Whitehead’s like, well, God has both poles. Yeah, because I’m very also deeply influenced by the Kyoto school and the Shittanian religion and nothingness. And one of the Shittanian’s critique was the West’s reduction of realness to actuality has really hamstrung its ability to respond to the problem of nihilism, because there can be no positive reading to emptiness. Whereas the East has, the Daote Chan, is the space inside the cup that makes the cup useful. And those kinds of metaphors. He argues that potentiality is actually given also a problematic, I would say, preeminence in the Eastern traditions. And it strikes me that if we could somehow get it right about the relationship between them, if we had a notion of realness, especially if dynamic intelligibility and real novelty that somehow could integrate, give equal preeminence or equality of that, I guess, equal reverence, maybe is the word I wanted, to actuality as a ground of realness and to possibility as a ground of realness. I think that would go a long way, because I think religion and nothingness is one of the great books. And I think his argument about the fact that Nietzsche was ultimately bound into a metaphysics that equated actuality with realness, that he couldn’t go through the greatest, he couldn’t go through the greatest that of all, the doubt that flips and allows you to see the emptiness is actually the ground of possibility as what is most real. What do you think about that as a proposal? Again, Nishatani is a philosopher I’ve only read about. There’s a philosopher named Jason Worth that writes a lot on Schelling. And he writes some books. He has a book where he compares Nishatani and Schelling. So I know Nishatani in that context. And I agree, I love what you’re saying about how the West responds to nothing, and it doesn’t really have a positive role for it to play or to emptiness. And I think that that’s crucial. And I wanted to go somewhere else with that, but I’ve lost it. Take a moment, Matt. There’s no rush. Yeah. I don’t know that fire is coming. Yeah, well, Nietzsche, I’ve written a little bit comparing him, at least his late writings on will to power and he starts to articulate, and he may have been losing his mind at this point, but he starts to articulate an ontology that’s based on power and perspective, sometimes called perspectivism. That’s very similar to Whitehead’s in some ways, where he, Nietzsche says something like, look, it’s not that there’s no meaning, it’s that there’s too much meaning in effect. In other words, there’s too many perspectives vying for one another to dominate and win out as the perspective that that’s truly meaningful. So he’s like, his nihilism there is like not, it’s not that there’s nothing, it’s that we need a more, we’ve lost an orientation amidst the plurality of meaning that can guide us towards more valuable and virtuous modes of existence, I guess. And because the old religious setup was collapsing as capitalism and secularism rolled in and Nietzsche lost his mind, you know, Nietzsche lost his mind, I think, as a result of losing that orientation, recognizing nihilism, but again, it’s like his last semi-coherent writing is pointing out that it’s not that there’s no meaning, it’s that there’s too much. Yeah, so that’s interesting, because that’s kind of like the issue of a combinatorial explosion of available information. Yeah. And I think there’s something deeply right about that. So the idea of emptiness is, I think, reconcilable with that, because the idea of emptiness is also like it’s intertwined with the notion of the interpenetration of everything with everything else, right? It’s, but the idea, I’m just wondering if there’s a way of bringing back Nishantani’s critique of saying, yeah, but what would be needed, right, wouldn’t be like the solution to Nietzsche’s problem of too many perspectives isn’t one perspective dominating all the perspectives. It has to be something that’s transpos… if you’ll allow me to, the neologism here, it’s transprospectable and therefore gives a ground in terms of which perspectives can be judged and evaluated, right? And then that’s still where I think Nietzsche, you know, if you stare too long into the abyss, it begins to stare back into you. I think that’s still where there’s an abysmal element in Nietzsche, because he couldn’t ask the question of what is the ground from which the perspectives emerge. This takes us back to this point we were before of asking what is it about reality that makes a multiplicity of perspectives, makes this kind of complex and innovative intelligibility possible for us? Yeah. Well, so it almost seems like the modern mind and the postmodern mind, Nietzsche, let’s say as an exemplar, is in a sense suffering as a result of the loss of this transcendent source of orientation, like God as a parent, who’s going to make sure it’s all, you know, God designed this whole thing, if you’re good, it’s going to be okay. Right, right. We lost that. Yes, we did. And the initial response to that could be like anger, almost. And you get this in the sort of reactionary atheism that has kind of died down more recently, but several years, you know, there’s the whole Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Hitchens and Dawkins and those guys, but there’s an anger that that God doesn’t exist anymore. And there’s an anger at the people that still believe in it, because it’s like, it’s almost like unfair that we don’t have that. But I think the move to get beyond this nihilism of being angry that we don’t have a God, the Father, to like make sure it’s all going to be okay. The move is to see in emptiness a source of creativity and see that it’s not that we can’t relate to something like God anymore. It’s that we’re responsible for enacting that dimension of reality. Yeah, well put. Well, we’re involved in it. And if we don’t, it’s like, you know, anthropologists will point out that many primal peoples will view ritual as sort of symbolic. I mean, they don’t view it as symbolic enactment themselves. That’s the anthropological view from the outside, but that they feel like if they stopped performing the ritual, the universe would fall to pieces. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and for a modern person. Yeah, yeah. Well, the modern person will be like, well, that’s bullshit. It’s obviously not going to fall apart if you don’t pray to this, you know, the sun’s going to keep rising even if you don’t, you know, bow to it in reverence every morning. And yet, there’s a deeper way in which we lose touch with the meaning of the sunrise if we’re not irreverential as we take in that spectacle. Yeah, that’s bullshit. Something does collapse. Yes. The conduit that connects our consciousness to its cosmic ground gets severed. Yes. And then we need to take responsibility for god-making, you know. Yeah. I don’t mean that in a purely socially constructivist sense or anything. I mean it like we have a biological instinct for god-making that is what allows us to form societies and complex civilizations. And we’ve lost that. And so, yeah, the thing’s collapsing. And this has happened before. It’s not new. But theology is important and religion is important. It’s just, there are different metaphysical contexts within which to interpret what it is. And if we’ve lost the old notion of a transcendent god, it doesn’t mean there’s not some function that god can play. And Whitehead, I just want to share a quote from Whitehead and then I’ll want to hear what you think about this. Please. But Whitehead says, in process and reality, and I don’t know if you got this far, but he says, one of the most important functions for philosophy in the modern world is to secularize the function of god in our ontology. And I think a lot of my work is rooted in that call that Whitehead made. Yeah. He attempted to do it and I don’t think his process theology is ultimately fully, I don’t know, I don’t know if it’s a good thing to do it. It’s coherent even, but it’s at least a sketch of the direction we need to move in to hold opposites and polar tension and recognize the potentiality in god and not just the actuality. That’s, I think that’s beautiful. I really like how you put that. So I wanted, I wonder then, so I mentioned earlier on that I sometimes want to add a fifth E because I predict it’s going to come into more prominence in cognitive science, especially because of the, I think, ground breaking work being done by Michael Anderson and beyond, of Phenology and Dehaene and others, and the circuit reuse hypothesis. And this is the idea that the brain is sort of an exacted machine, that what it does is it can take circuitry that evolved for one function and then exact it, right? Because every entity has not only its intended effects, it has side effects and it’s possible to find a configuration of the side effects that are also functional in another environment. And so evolution typically doesn’t work from scratch. And then if you adopt a model, which I argue if you are at other elsewhere, that you need to see cognition as something deeply analogous to evolution in which it’s dynamically introducing variation and then putting selective pressure on it, etc. Then it makes sense to think about a cognitive version of acceptation. A biological, cultural example is my tongue, right? It evolved for poison detection and mastication, but it’s been exacted for speech. Most organisms who have tongues don’t have speech, right? But it’s been exacted. Is it possible that, so this is wildly speculative, but we’re playing in an adventure of ideas, right? And Whitehead talks about the airplane has to take flight, but it has to be able to land again. So hopefully it’ll help you. I’m very comfortable in my armchair, so let’s go. I’m wondering, because you talked about that, we have, it’s the Augustan notion, right? That we have this sort of god function. And I agree with you. I take that very seriously. And I’m wondering if one of the jobs of the reworking in our ontology, the reinventio of reason and rationality, is to afford an acceptation of that function in a way that now fits the context that we are in. That that’s part of what that ontology should be doing. Because part of the meaning crisis, another way of understanding the meaning crisis, is that function is hungry within us, and it can’t find a place to operate. And what the demographics show, like with the rise of the nuns, is these people aren’t sort of Dawkins, you know, atheists. No, no, no. That hunger is expressing itself in all kinds of autodidactic, fragmentary, often weird metaphysics, and small-scale, narcissistically-based religions, the religion of me, and things like that, of which I’m quite critical. So I don’t think that function can go unaddressed. But as you’ve indicated, I think, you know, we can simply return, because you mentioned like literalisms and fundamentalisms are also problematic in profound way. So could it be that one of the functions, that this, one of the design features, one of the things we demand from this ontology in order to, you know, pragmatically evaluate it as good, is that it can afford an acceptation of that God function so it is now adaptively engaged again, once again, for individuals and for collections of individuals. What do you think of that as a proposal? Yeah, I love that. You know, I, my familiarity with this notion of acceptation comes mostly from reading Stuart Kaufman. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And the exploration of the adjacent possible and, yeah, yeah. The last big Whitehead conference, I went to to Kaufman and Terence Deacon were at the table when I was presenting on the paper on Whitehead’s view of the evolution of religion. And the two of them got into an interesting argument after I was supposed to be getting questions, but they were arguing with each other instead. But so, yeah, I love that perspective. And I think one of the ways that I would look at this is to say that, you know, human beings as the evolution of religion unfolded through these phases of initially just like ritual, you know, dancing and singing around a fire, gradually taking on the forms of myth and narrative and symbol that get elaborated in fascinating ways. And for most of our species history, this was done in a kind of tribalized context. There weren’t any universal religions until the Axial Age. Right. Start to get a more theoretical elaboration upon the ritual practice and symbolic elaboration and mythic narrative around the rituals. And then it’s as if it’s one way that I like to imagine this whole process is like, it’s as if this human consciousness is being sort of sheltered and grown within an increasingly elaborate and thick shell. And like it climaxes in, I mean, all of the world, but to use the example of in like the Christian and Islamic and Judaic traditions, like these monumental temple structures and cathedrals. And I mean, there were temples before that too, but it’s almost like we’re growing a shell around ourselves. And at some point in modern Europe, we sort of, our consciousness got big enough to break out of that shell. Yeah. And we, all of our development cognitively and ethically to the point where modern science was born was sheltered by this religious context. Yes. But then what that religious context gave birth to broke from the shell. And now we’re like naked without any of the ritual symbolic narrative context that gave birth to us. And we have some surrogate shell terrain that technology affords and communication media now have completely almost re-encapsulated us within a new kind of shell that’s not rooted in like virtue or deliberate contemplative practice or anything like that. It’s rooted in consumer capitalism, but we can’t avoid the way that this shell grows around our consciousness to shape the way the values of our society and gives us a sense of orientation amidst the cosmogenesis that we emerge from. And I feel like your work is an attempt to say, whoa, wait a minute, we need to re-engage with some of those wisdom traditions in the context of our modern scientific knowledge and technological capacity. And if we can bring these two together and integrate the insight of modern science, the power of modern technology with the wisdom of these traditions, and there’s a whole global monopoly of options that are intimately, there’s an evolutionary process that ties all the religions together, I would say. I’m not a perennialist in the sense that I think there’s one original revelation and all the religions are like different paths up the mountain. I take Jorge’s perspective, Jorge Ferrer’s perspective on rather than the mountain with many paths, it’s an ocean with many shores. But yeah, so that’s kind of how I see it. It’s like we can’t avoid building this shell around ourselves to give us a sense of orientation and protection from an otherwise chaotic world. And religion used to serve that function and we need to find a way of becoming reverential again in a scientific context in the midst of an evolutionary and evolving universe. Yeah, that’s very well said. Very well said, man. That’s very well said. Thanks. That was very good. Well, this seems like a nice place to close, but we’re not finished. I would like it. I’m inviting you to further discussion with me. I’d like to continue doing some voices with Raviky with you. And I was serious about it. It’d be great if you and I and Evan had a conversation. Yeah. I and Ferrer had a conversation. I would like all of that. Well, that sounds great to me. I’d be glad to come back and chat with you. How about this? I’ll email Jorge and you can reach out to Evan and we’ll see if we can arrange those two Right. trilogues. So let’s do this as our order of operations. Let’s see. You and I have one more one-on-one because I feel like we’re just ending for time reasons here. I’d like to, I’d like to, there’s a lot more in your thinking I’d like to unpack and explore. Because I feel like of the video, I’ve maybe touched on one or two of the points that I wanted to talk about. And I want to read more of your work. You sent me, I think one paper, but maybe sending me that one that provoked all the controversy between Kaufman and Deakin. That would be, that’d be great. I’d like to read a bit more of your work. So I’ll reach out to Evan. You reach out to Jorge. But let’s also set up a time when you and I can do another one. I’ll get more deeply into your work. And then we can unpack it a bit more because I found what we did today very rich. I hope you did too. Yes, I did. Yes. I think one avenue, here’s a proposal. One thing I’d like to talk to you about, because I mentioned it earlier, but I think this, this, this Whiteheadian model, you know, where the, the, the, the, the two are folding into each other in that creativity and the polarity of it. I think that’s very consonant with a dialogical model of reason. And I’d like to explore, because that would be a way of getting, you know, a deeper conformity between, you know, the reinvential of rationality and the reinvential of reality. And I think that, you know, and the model that again, I have in mind is Eric Gina’s model about the dialectic isn’t only a way of unfolding, you know, human rationality, it is actually sort of the grammar of, of, of, of God and of reality. So I’d like to explore that with you if you think, if you think that’s an interesting proposal. That sounds great. I’ll, I’ll, I’ll go back and reread my Eric Gina’s because it’s been a while and that’ll be fun. Right. And so, and then hopefully after that, you know, you and I and Evan, you and I and Jorge could meet and we’d have a nice little sort of series on this right now. So I want to thank you. I really, I really enjoyed, I already, like when I met you, when we were co-supervising, well, I wasn’t a supervisor, but you know, I was in the area committee or whatever I was. But yeah, I already like your presence, you have a way, I’m trying to make this very clear. You have a way of being present that is gentle without being flimsy or being sort of soft. And I find that commendable. There’s a richness, there’s a resiliency, but there’s no, there’s, there’s no sort of ruthless self-promotion or I just, I, given what we’ve talked about earlier, I think it’s important to recognize epistemic virtue. I pointed out, and I think you’re exemplifying it in a wonderful way. So in addition to the really rich content of the discussion, your manner of presentation is also something I think that’s exemplary and I wanted to call that out and thank you for that. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that very much, John. That’s very meaningful to hear. And you know, I’ve had great teachers, so. Yeah, it shows, it really shows. Virtue ethics requires that you have people you can model yourself on in relationship to, so yeah. Great. Well, thank you so much. And I very much look forward to our next dialogue. Me too. Thank you so much, Matt.