Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Process Philosophy: From Plato to Whitehead and Beyond

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe In today's episode of Theories of Everything, Curt Jaimungal speaks with Matthew Segall, a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, on the evolution of philosophical thought, linking ancient teachings on consciousness to modern scientific perspectives. We delve into the limitations of contemporary views of reality, paralleling them with the Ptolemaic model, and explore how an awareness of mortality can enrich our understanding of existence. Matthew argues for a shift toward introspection and self-inquiry in a society grappling with existential challenges, emphasizing that confronting mortality can foster a deeper sense of meaning in our lives. New Substack! Follow my personal writings and EARLY ACCESS episodes here: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com LINKED MENTIONED: •⁠ ⁠Matthew’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Footnotes2Plato •⁠ ⁠Matthew’s Diagram of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z1zY39EKbs •⁠ ⁠Matthew’s talk with John Vervaeke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15akhXGHwzo •⁠ ⁠Critique of Pure Reason (book): https://www.amazon.com/Critique-Pure-Reason-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140447474 •⁠ ⁠Critique of Judgement (book): https://www.amazon.com/Critique-Judgement-Immanuel-Kant/dp/1545245673/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= •⁠ ⁠The Phenomenology of Spirit (book): https://www.amazon.com/Georg-Wilhelm-Friedrich-Hegel-Phenomenology/dp/1108730086 •⁠ ⁠1919 Eclipse (paper): https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/epdf/10.1098/rsnr.2020.0040 •⁠ ⁠Einstein/Bergson debate (article): https://www.faena.com/aleph/einstein-vs-bergson-the-struggle-for-time •⁠ ⁠The Principle of Relativity (book): https://www.amazon.com/Principle-Relativity-Alfred-North-Whitehead/dp/1602062188 •⁠ ⁠John Vervaeke’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@johnvervaeke •⁠ ⁠John Vervaeke on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVj1KYGyesI •⁠ ⁠Philip Goff on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmaIBxkqcT4 •⁠ ⁠Sabine Hossenfelder on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3y-Z0pgupg •⁠ ⁠Donald Hoffman on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmieNQH7Q4w •⁠ ⁠Karl Friston on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk4NZorRjCo •⁠ ⁠Iain McGilchrist on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9sBKCd2HD0 •⁠ ⁠Thomas Campbell on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kko-hVA-8IU •⁠ ⁠Noam Chomsky on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch? •⁠ ⁠v=3lcDT_-3v2k&list=PLZ7ikzmc6zlORiRfcaQe8ZdxKxF-e2BCY&index=3 •⁠ ⁠Michael Levin on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8iFtaltX-s&list=PLZ7ikzmc6zlN6E8KrxcYCWQIHg2tfkqvR&index=39 •⁠ ⁠Roger Penrose on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGm505TFMbU&list=PLZ7ikzmc6zlN6E8KrxcYCWQIHg2tfkqvR&index=16 •⁠ ⁠Neil Turok’s lecture on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gwhqmPqRl4&list=PLZ7ikzmc6zlN6E8KrxcYCWQIHg2tfkqvR&index=35 •⁠ ⁠TOE’s Consciousness Iceberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR4cpn8m9i0&ab_channel=TheoriesofEverythingwithCurtJaimungal •⁠ ⁠TOE’s String Theory Iceberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4PdPnQuwjY Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 1:35 The Roots of Process Philosophy 4:47 The Rise of Nominalism 8:26 The Evolution of Substance 11:02 Descartes and the Dualist Divide 21:34 Kant's Copernican Revolution 33:08 The Nature of Knowledge 37:42 Hegel's Dialectic Unfolds 46:18 Schelling's Panpsychism 56:50 Whitehead's Organic Realism 1:22:17 The Bifurcation of Nature 1:31:38 The Emergence of Consciousness 1:38:37 The Nature of Self-Organization 1:53:40 Perspectives on Actuality and Potentiality 2:11:35 The Role of God in Process Philosophy 2:23:55 The Human Experience and Self-Inquiry 2:40:34 Reflections on Mortality and Meaning 2:47:44 The Shift from Substance to Process 2:58:02 Embracing Interconnectedness and Consciousness 3:00:49 The Call for Inner Exploration #science #philosophy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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To live your life backwards from the perspective of death affords you the greatest possibility of living a meaningful life. Matthew Seagal is a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, whose work bridges ancient views on consciousness with modern scientific insights. In this conversation, we trace the development of philosophical thought from Plato and Aristotle's understanding of substance, through Kant's transcendental idealism, nondualism, and of course, Whitehead's process philosophy. We explore fundamental questions about the nature of reality, what is substance, how do universals relate to particulars, and what role does God play in different philosophical systems. My name is Kurt Jaimungal and on this channel I research mathematical physics and philosophy in front of you in podcast form, bridging these disparate subjects and making abstract

concepts digestible while not skimping on nor being afraid of the technicalities. Matt explicates expertly, all while keeping an eye on how these recondite ideas connect to you. That is, how can any of these philosophies have real world implications for how you live your life? The discussion culminates in Matt's vision for how process thinking may help us navigate our present potential civilizational crisis. To understand process philosophy and how it led to Whitehead and then yourself, Matt, it's useful to provide a historical account starting with say Aristotle or even Plato. Actually your channel is named Footnotes to Plato so that may be relevant. Then we move on to Descartes, Kant, Schelling, Hegel for sure. And then finally to

Whitehead and how your views have evolved from Whitehead. Wow okay, whole history of philosophy just to get things warmed up. I think I need to start with Plato though because Aristotle was one of Plato's best students and Whitehead famously says that all of European philosophy can be understood as a series of footnotes to Plato. Plato though was not really a systematic philosopher. He wrote dialogues and in the dialogues he explores different doctrines, but he also explores all of the best refutations of those doctrines. And so Plato was guided by intuitions and as Whitehead says, we should be very careful about disregarding Plato's intuitions. Now the thing is, and all of his dialogues, Plato never really leaves us with a sense of resolution to the problems that he explores.

Famously, most of his dialogues end in aporia, which means a sort of, a limit is reached where reason can't go any further, and often Plato will then share a story or a myth that's supposed to sort of symbolically and imaginatively depict the situation without providing the logical solution. Now Aristotle comes along and wants to, and in fact does inaugurate science, natural science

as we think of it today. He starts to observe and classify and work out syllogistic logic that's, you know, for him was kind of rooted in the grammar of the Greek language. And the way that Aristotle develops his metaphysics is an outgrowth of his understanding of the grammar of the Greek language and the logic that follows from that.

And so this logic that Aristotle develops is a substance property or subject predicate logic. I should say it's a subject predicate logic with a substance property ontology. And that approach works very well for classifying the middle-sized objects of our everyday experience, like tables and chairs and rocks and plants and animals. But as it turns out, as we'll see with the rise of modern science, there was a recovery of the mathematical mode of thought that Plato really championed, that Aristotle was not as proficient in. And there was a realization that this simple account

of what there is in the world in terms of substances with their properties, you know, especially when you get into relativity and quantum theories, it turns out that that's entirely inadequate as an account of what there is and what's going on in the world. But that's to skip ahead a little bit.

But you know, Aristotle really lays down this mode of thought which persisted for basically nearly 2000 years. It was very important for the scholastics in medieval Europe. They continued to think with Aristotle up to the point of the rise of nominalism, important to mention, where there is a break from both Plato and Aristotle's view of the role that form plays in structuring matter,

the role that universals play in allowing us to see and understand sort of networks of connection among particulars. And so a universal, it's a general category that like the color yellow, say, the same color yellow can be involved in multiple particulars, right? Now with the nominalists, what happened is that

the idea of universals was diminished from Plato's conception of universals was was diminished from Plato's conception of universals as existing independently of our minds. For the nominalists, a universal was just a concept that we generalize from many experiences of particulars, right? It's not, it doesn't exist in a different order of being, it's just, it's a name that we give to classify many particulars. So we see many different types of dogs as we grow up and eventually we're able to say, oh, okay, there's this word dog, which can apply to many different particulars.

Let's just quickly define what particulars are or give an example. So for instance, there's some books behind you. We would say that those individual objects are quote unquote particulars, and the platonic view would be there's some object that has the form of book in order for you to identify that as book-like, and it's instantiated, that form is instantiated in each one of those books behind you, whereas the nominalist would say, okay we look at this and then we just give it the name book by looking at the particulars. Right. I mean, a particular is anything you can point out and say this or that. It has a determinate local existence and a place and time. And as soon as we then try to characterize what this is, we're always going to be characterizing it in terms of some set of

universals. Now for the nominalist, those universals are just names that describe aspects of it. They don't have an independent existence, whereas for a platonic realist, those universals have a kind of definiteness that can't simply be reduced to something abstracted from particulars, that there's actually an independent reality to those universals. And this becomes more apparent

when we're doing mathematics, two-ness. Let's just take a very simple example that this notion of two-ness can be exemplified by any number of particulars, you know, two pencils, two dogs, a pencil and a dog, etc. ad infinitum. Two-ness, though, never appears to us as something we can point to as such. We can point to examples of two particulars, right? But there seems to be something ghostly and even otherworldly about this conception of

two-ness and other sorts of more complex mathematical relations don't change the fundamental situation that we find ourselves in our attempts to describe our experience always making reference to both of these elements, right, the particular aspect and the universal aspect. It's important to dwell on this because the rise of nominalism in the medieval period represents a totally new epoch of human thought, where instead of imagining that ideas have this kind of heavenly quality and that there is some kind of intelligence out there in the cosmos that is almost aiding us in our human thinking.

The nominalists are humanizing, you could say, thinking and saying, no, no, these universals are just concepts in your head that you derive from your experience of particulars. And that's a huge change. And it comes with, there were theological reasons for this initially that had to do with not wanting to limit the power of God, right? And so for us nowadays, you know, most materialist, physicalist thinkers are nominalists, and they don't think of nominalism as a theological doctrine that helps preserve the power of God, of an omnipotent God.

But for the medieval nominalists, the idea was if these ideas, these universals have independent existence, say one plus one equals two in some eternal sense, that limits the power of God because God can't make one plus one not equal two in that case. And the nominalists really wanted God to have complete power, even over logical relationships and mathematical relationships that one plus one equals two because God says so. In other words, God's not subject to that. Yeah. So in other words, if there's something that's universal,

then it's objective and timeless, and God can't intervene to change it. And that's the Platonic view. Whereas if everything is, well, not everything, but if large part of everything is subjective, that's quote unquote similar to nominalism. And that means that it's just contingent on us so what we come up with with our concepts with our math etc it still allows God to intervene and change so it doesn't limit God's power. Right, right and so for Plato you know there's a dialogue called the Euthyphro where

he's exploring morality, not numbers. And for Plato, God is good because it's good, rather than the good being good because God says it's good. Right? So, God is subject to the moral and logical order of these universals, of these ideas from the Platonic point of view. Whereas from the nominalist point of view, God decides everything. God's power is what determines that something is good or evil. God's power is what determines

whether 1 plus 1 equals 2 and so on. Now, interesting. When we get to the birth of modern science with René Descartes and Galileo and Isaac Newton, at least for Descartes and Newton, there's still this emphasis on divine power. Descartes, though he was quite a genius, a logician and mathematician, he agreed with the nominalists that God's power is absolute and so, you know, the truths of mathematics are true because God makes them so. And God could even deceive us. God's good, so God wouldn't deceive us, Descartes would say. But God could make, you know, five plus seven equal 15 if God felt like it. But, you know, Descartes is usually thought of as making a sharp break with Aristotle and with the

scholastic tradition that's derived from Aristotle. Descartes totally changes the Aristotelian notion of substance, which for Aristotle, a substance was still something dynamic, something that involved a process of development and growth from a state of potential to actuality. So like an acorn growing into an oak tree would be an example of an Aristotelian substance. And so there's purpose unfolding through a sequence of stages as an entity or a substance becomes more fully itself, right?

That's the Aristotelian concept of substance. Now for Descartes, he's of course a dualist. And so he's splitting reality into two separate kinds of substance, thinking substance, which he identifies with the soul, and extended substance, which he identifies with matter. And part of what Descartes was up to here was motivated by a desire to find some truths between science and religion by articulating a

form of philosophy that Every reasonable person could agree to even if they were Protestant or Catholic They Descartes fought in the 30 years war. It. It was this decades of religious war in Europe, one of the bloodiest wars in history. And he was pursuing this new scientific understanding in the effort to articulate a universal language that would allow for a new kind of cooperation among these European peoples who were warring over religious ideas. And so his idea was that, you know, the soul is for the church and the extended stuff is

for science. And when we're talking about the extended stuff of nature, we have a method and we can all agree about the rationality of nature. We have a method and we can all agree about the rationality of that method. We can use mathematics, the Cartesian coordinate grid, to measure and calculate and make sense of what's going on in that extended realm. And for Descartes, both of these realms are important and he wouldn't be able to define the extended realm without making reference to the soul. Because for Descartes, the only way that these two substances can relate to each other is

through the power of God. God created our soul with these innate ideas that just so happen to line up with the structure of this extended physical world out there, that we have these mathematical ideas whereby we can read and understand the mathematical structure of the natural world. And so this idea, all of the early modern scientists shared this idea that nature is intelligible and that the human being has this intelligence which clicks into place with that intelligibility. And for them to imagine that natural science might be possible and that the universe should be intelligible, that it should have a causal order, presuppose that there was a creator

god and presuppose that there was a creator god and presuppose that there was a rational soul. Now, as we move forward to Kant. Actually, would it be all right if we paused for a moment? So I'd like you to elaborate on substance, since this is a term that's likely to come up repeatedly. It already has and then subsequently from here. So you mentioned that Aristotle thought of a seed growing into a tree as a substance actualizing itself. Does that mean that he thought of a baby growing into a person as a different substance or a storm that starts from a small cloud to become a larger cloud as possessing a different substance. So there was an innumerable amount of substances and then that became collapsed into two substances

under Descartes. What is the definition of substance and what's the difference between the way that Descartes saw it and Aristotle saw it? As you know, on theories of everything, we delve into some of the most reality spiraling concepts from theoretical physics and consciousness to AI and emerging technologies, to stay informed in an ever evolving landscape, I see The Economist as a wellspring of insightful analysis and in-depth reporting on the various topics we explore here and beyond.

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It's an investment into intellectual growth. One that you won't regret. As a listener of Toe, you get a special 20% off discount. Now you can enjoy The Economist and all it has to offer for less. Head over to their website, www.economist.com slash totoe to get started. Thanks for tuning in and now back to our explorations of the mysteries of the universe. And what's the difference between the way that Descartes saw it and Aristotle saw it? Yeah. Substance could be defined as that which requires nothing but itself in order to exist.

And so it's this idea of an isolated thing, more or less. And what Descartes does with his dualism is he severs the purposeful aspect of Aristotle's substance from the, I'll call it the material aspect of it. And so in Aristotle, there's not this sharp division between mind and matter. Aristotle would, when he would talk about the human being, he would describe a sort of fourfold structure that, you know, we have a physical aspect of our being, we have a plant-like aspect of our being, we have an animal-like or sentient aspect of our being. And then we have a rational or we have an intellect.

And if you talk about animals, they don't have the intellect part, but they have the other three, similarly plants. They have the physical and then the nutritive souls. So these are different types of souls that Aristotle would talk about. But all of them had some teleological aspect to them. And so for Aristotle, there's one world and it can be understood in terms of these layers, but all of nature operates according

to certain purposeful principles. And so for Aristotle, why did a heavy body fall? Well, because it wants to be closer to the earth, you know? Whereas with Descartes and, you know, the development of this modern mechanistic cosmology, nature was stripped of purpose. All purpose was lodged inside the human soul. So the human became the only purposeful being in the universe, the only being capable of agency and will.

And for Descartes, the only conscious being. Descartes didn't think that animals had any inner experience and famously or infamously told his students when he was teaching them anatomy, just ignore the squeals and cries of theamously told his students when he was teaching them anatomy just ignore the squeals and cries of the dogs that you're dissecting. That's so sad. It's just like the gears of a machine squeaking, you know.

Oh boy. And this is the danger of philosophers insisting on their system and ignoring all of the facts which might contradict that systematic understanding. And so because of Descartes' dualism, he's like, well, they can't possibly be feeling anything. So I think that's the major difference here is the way in which Aristotle's conception of the universe was still of one world and everything was ordered

in a purposeful way. Whereas for Descartes, only the human soul was purposeful and yeah, maybe he would think of the universe, the material world as designed by God and so in that sense, there's still purpose, but it's a kind of externally imposed purpose or design, you might say. Whereas for Aristotle, the purpose was imminent. It was intrinsic to the beings or the substances that populated the universe. Something I'm interested in,

something people who are listening would be interested in is that, well, what the heck does any of this philosophizing have to do with the real world? Does it have any applications? So that's going to be at the back of the mind of people who are listening. So just keep that in mind. But what you mentioned about Descartes and the squealing of the animals are just like mechanistic grinding of gears. That's an example where philosophy has a concrete direct application. But anyhow, I'd like you to get to Kant. If Kant is the next step from Descartes, and I understand that there are a variety of thinkers that come in between, but we can't cover them all.

Right. Yeah, I'm tempted to say something about the usefulness of philosophy and its application to real life. Please, just briefly. You know, Aristotle starts his metaphysics by talking about wonder. That this peculiar emotion that it might not be unique to human beings. I've seen other higher mammals and even some birds kind of behave in ways that suggest that they're appreciating the sunset or they're just sort of like, I don't know, my cat, I very often catch my cat just staring off into space. I like to think maybe there's some wonder or amazement at the sheer fact of existence going on there.

But I think we can at least say that where animals are wondering, they're sort of participating in something like the spirit of humanity, even if they are not themselves human. And wonder as the origin of philosophy doesn't really have a purpose. You know, it's not simply curiosity about how this or that feature of the world works. It's an emotion of amazement responsive to the sheer fact that anything exists at all. And if that emotion has a use, then it's, I would say,

simply to give us the opportunity to reflect spiritually on our lives and to derive meaning from the fact that we can do that. Now, of course, philosophy does have more pragmatic uses in ethics, in helping us to, you know, systematize all the special sciences. You know, we have so much knowledge nowadays that is articulated and sort of ensconced within these various disciplines. And many scientists can't communicate with other scientists even across the hall from

them because they use their own specialized jargon. And so, you know, one of the uses of philosophy nowadays would be to seek that larger scheme of ideas in terms of which, you know, all of the specializations within physics and within biology and within psychology and sociology can fit together into a coherent picture of the cosmos and of the human place within the cosmos, right? Bet MGM is an official sports betting partner of the National Hockey League

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That's a project I'm working on. But I also want to say that even this insistence on practicality or on utility is itself a philosophical outlook. Absolutely, that's right. Okay, so yeah, and we can come back to that, but moving on to Kant, the major shift here is from thinking of The major shift here is from thinking of philosophy's main role as figuring out what types of things there are, in other words, ontology, and what the categories that we think those things

in terms of, which is more like metaphysics. So Aristotle, Descartes, you know, still doing metaphysics and ontology. What Kant does is say, hey, we should probably think about how we know before we make claims about what we know. And it's not that, you know, there wasn't already reflection upon the process of knowledge itself going all the way back to Plato, epistemology, right? It's not that Kant invents epistemology, but he's the first to make epistemology first philosophy, as it were. In other words, we need to begin with epistemology because Kant was worried that what he called dogmatic metaphysics, that these dogmatic metaphysicians were making claims that they couldn't possibly justify. And he would describe the history of metaphysics as a battlefield, different camps warring against each other,

and there's no real way to adjudicate who's right. Because all metaphysicians, Kant would say, are making claims that go beyond what we have any experience of. They're making claims about super sensible objects like God or the soul or the cosmos as a whole. And what Kant does in his critique of pure reason is he runs through what he calls the antinomies or the antinomies, pronounce it either way. That you can with precise rigorous logic argue both that the cosmos is infinite and uncreated or that it is finite and created. And, you know, he runs through various positions where logic alone cannot give us the right answer. Logic alone leads to, you know, two equally correct but contradictory answers. And so he says, okay, we need to take a step back. And part of what

clued him into the need to take a step back from the old approach to metaphysics was reading the empiricist David Hume, who famously in examining his empirical experiences, you know, we really have no experiential access to something like necessary connection or causality. You know, we see one billiard ball hit another billiard ball, but we don't see causation. It could be that the next time that billiard ball

hits that billiard ball, something totally unexpected happens. And we have no way of knowing in advance if we're gonna base our knowledge on something empirical, David Hume would say. And this idea of necessary connection is core to Newtonian science. And Kant was a scientist before he became a philosopher.

But he was writing books on astronomy and was one of the first to develop the nebular hypothesis But he was writing books on astronomy and was one of the first to develop the nebular hypothesis that Laplace would later continue to develop. And so he took Newtonian physics very seriously and wanted to preserve that. And he read David Hume and realized that there was some serious philosophical work to do at the level of epistemology in order to be able to justify

the sorts of knowledge that Newton was providing to us, like knowledge of universal gravitation. Sure. How is it that empirically, we have no direct access to this necessary connection, and yet mathematically, or through applied mathematics, we can make such precise predictions about how a cannonball will arc or where a planet will be at some point in the future. Our experience of space and time are actually forms of intuition provided by our own minds,

by our own cognitive organization. And so while Hume was still working with this understanding that space and time are out there and we exist within this spatial and temporal arena and we're trying to, through our empirical observations, reconstruct models of what's going on out there in space and time, Kant does what he referred to as the Copernican revolution in philosophy, where he makes this analogy just as Copernicus explained what appeared to be the movements of the sky in terms of the movements of the earth. In other words, it's we as observers who are moving that are causing the heavens to move. Kant

does something similar, but in an epistemological way. Instead of knowledge being construed as the subject coming to conform to objects that are out there, Kant says, no, actually, knowledge has to be understood in terms of the objects conforming to the structure of our subjectivity. And so it's an inversion of the usual picture of what knowledge is, right?

And this might at first sound like Kant's reducing all scientific knowledge to something subjective. It sounds like that. But for him, the structure of space and time are mathematical, right? We can understand the nature of time through arithmetic. We can understand the nature of space through geometry. And for Kant, that was Euclidean geometry. And we can talk about the development of non-Euclidean geometries and whether or not that scrambles Kant's whole point.

It doesn't necessarily, but he was definitely imagining that space is Euclidean. And we also have as minds, as human subjects, we have a set of categories. And for Kant, there were 12 of them. And any of the characteristics that we can assign to the objects of our experience can be broken down ultimately into these 12 categories. And so rather than everything just being merely subjective, as though it's, you know, reality is whatever I want it to be, Kant would say, no, no, every rational human subject has a set of 12 categories

and these forms of intuition of space and time which are mathematically structured. We have this necessary and universal set of innate ideas, in other words, in terms of which all of our experience is going to be structured and filtered and shaped. And so because he's still preserving necessity and universality in our knowledge, even if it's subjective, it's not merely relative, right? Every rational subject should be able to agree about how we measure things in space and time

and how we talk about these 12 categories, how things are related, what a substance is, what is causality and so on. So rather than causality being something we observe, Kant agrees with Hume, we don't observe causality in our sensory experience. Rather causality is a category in terms of which we have to interpret our experience. It's one of the innate ideas that's necessary and universal for all our experience. Is it one of those 12 categories? Yeah. So is math one of the 12 categories as well?

No. So, Kant would think of math in terms of what he called synthetic a priori knowledge. It's a priori in the sense that we don't need empirical experience to know that one plus one equals two. It's just true by virtue of what the symbols mean. But there's a synthetic aspect to it. It's synthetic a priori in the sense that there's a diagrammatic aspect to mathematics.

There's a way in which we have to, you know, to know what a line is, we have to draw it either on paper or in our imagination. And so there's a role, in other words, for imagination in mathematics. It's not purely logical. Kant would say, if you were around, there's no way that AI could ever do mathematics. It can mimic mathematics. But to create, to actually be creative mathematically, there's this intuitive dimension to it.

But it's an intuition that's not through sensory experience. It's a kind of imaginative form of intuition. sensory experience. It's a kind of imaginative form of intuition. And so math isn't simply the manipulation of categories. There's this other element to it that would prevent, I think Kant would argue would prevent computers from actually like computers can calculate of course, but can they, can they invent new mathematics? He would say no because they don't have this intuitive aspect even if they're embodied Well, I mean if they're embodied

meaning if they're basically human or well like robots multimodal I Don't think it would change It would change this this argument unless you personally don't think that or you think Kant won't think that I think Kant wouldn't think it would change this argument unless... You personally don't think that or you think Kant won't think that? I think Kant wouldn't think that. Okay, we'll get to your views shortly.

Don't worry for people who are hanging on for this long through this historical interlude. Okay, so you just mentioned that Kant would say that the object changes itself to the subject or conform itself to the subject or conforms to the subject. I didn't quite understand that. So let's say there's these 12 categories. And it's my understanding that there's also intuition, which isn't a category. I don't quite understand the relationship between those, but we can get to that afterward. So let's say there's these 12 categories that we can understand. The Kant way of viewing the world is instead of thinking what is the

world like such that it can produce a mind as an apple comes out of a tree but rather what is the world like such that we can comprehend it? Is that the shift? Or was what I said first the shift? is from thinking that knowledge is a subject empty of ideas, coming into relationship with objects in the world, and sort of passively accumulating an understanding of how those objects relate to each other. What Kant is saying is that the very notion of an object is determined by the structure of our subjectivity, both our sensory experience in terms of these two basic forms of intuition, he called outer intuition of space and inner intuition of time, that our experience is structured in terms of these two forms

of intuition, and that these 12 categories we have, which are where we're active in our thinking, they're just these logical categories in terms of which we make sense of our experience of space and time, that what we call an object is constructed out of the interplay between these forms of intuition and these categories. Now, the difference between an intuition and a category is simply one way of thinking about it is it's the difference between what we passively receive and what we actively create, right? And so in the categories where we're actively thinking, in the forms of intuition, we're passively receiving the world in those terms. It would be useful if you could outline some categories.

You said there were 12. I don't expect you to have all 12 memorized, but just four of them. Yeah, like necessity and possibility and relation, you know, thinking in terms of, uh, you know, substance would be one. Um, these are, these are the, the bare bones, you know, every, it's, it's, every metaphysics has a set of categories in terms of which all experience can be interpreted, right? And for Kant there are these 12, he's more or less lifting them from Aristotle.

or at least lifting them from Aristotle. And so they're the most abstract terms that we can employ in order to understand the behavior of objects. I see. And all physics presupposes these categories, just like all psychology presupposes these categories for Kant, so they apply universally. But the question for Kant is basically,

what must the mind be such that nature can appear to us in the way that it does? And so he has this, instead of there being an ontological dualism that you get in Descartes between the thinking substance and the extended substance, in Kant, I think we could call it an epistemological dualism between the realm of appearances or phenomena and the realm of things in themselves or noumena, you could say. Kant would claim that, look, when we're doing natural science, we're only talking about

the realm of phenomena. What's going on independent of our own sensory organization and the organization of our understanding, we can't say. We can't say anything about that. So he's preserving the necessity and universality of our scientific knowledge, but he's limiting that knowledge to phenomena. The reason he's doing that is because he knows that Newtonian physics and this mechanistic cosmology that was all the rage at the time,

it was just blowing people's minds that nature was so ordered and that we could understand it. It's that understanding of nature is totally incompatible with human freedom and so human morality and ethics and so Kant needed to have this phenomenal numinal distinction in order to be able to say everything we know scientifically about nature is an appearance and you know, he was worried that if if science could go beyond appearance to tell us how things in themselves operate that that science eventually would be applied to the human being and We would be tempted to explain ourselves in mechanistic terms now. Not only did he think that would be immoral

he he would say that that's just incoherent because knowledge wouldn't be possible if we were just machines. We wouldn't be capable of, we wouldn't be subjects with the inner experience and intellect if we were just machines. And so scientific knowledge for Kant presupposes free conscious agents who can

organize their sensory experience and logically articulate it in terms of these categories. And so for him, whatever human freedom is, it's something numinous. It's something that goes on behind the scenes, behind the phenomenal realm that science can understand. And I should say something about what Kant does in his later critiques.

And so far, I've just been talking about the critique of pure reason, but he also has a critique of judgment. I've just been talking about the critique of pure reason, but he also has a critique of judgment. Critique of pure reason, first edition comes out in 1781 and then second edition in 1787. And then in 1790, he comes out with the critique of judgment and in that book, he's looking at

our aesthetic judgments of what's beautiful and in works of art, but also he's looking at the organic world, the biological world, and the purposefulness we see in the biological world. So in some sense, he's harkening back to Aristotle in this understanding that in the living world, there's an inherent or intrinsic purposefulness that's operative.

And this is where Kant begins to move beyond just a simple epistemological dualism between phenomena and things themselves because he would say that Newtonian physics or this idea of mechanism applies universally except in the case of living organisms where there's a different, he would say a different kind of causality is operative in even the simplest living organisms rather than there being cause effect in a linear relationship. In organisms things get circular and all of a sudden, the idea of wholeness becomes relevant. And so in a living organism, and he says,

even in a single blade of grass, there's a way in which the parts are producing one another for the sake of a whole. You don't see that in mechanistic systems. Mechanistic systems have parts and they might have a design that puts those parts together so as to perform a function, but the parts aren't producing one another for the sake of the whole and their purpose is external. It's imposed on those parts by a designer.

Whereas in the living world, the purpose seems to emanate from within as it were. And Kant says, oh, it's almost as though in the living world, this freedom that he initially thought was only present in human beings is beginning to sort of flicker at least, even in the simplest living organisms. And so it's this insight into the difference between an organic living being and mechanism

that begins to lead Kant beyond this simple dichotomy between phenomena and numina, and this dichotomy between human freedom and the mechanism of nature. And it's this critique of judgment that gives rise to German idealism and German romanticism. I think Schelling would be the next thinker to talk about. Okay, so let's get to this. Let's get to Schelling now. Yeah. So Schelling was still a teenager reading Kant and studying and collaborating with one

of the first sort of Kantian philosophers named Fichte and it's important to introduce Fichte here because he helps understand the polarity at play here. So let me actually talk a little bit about Johann Gottlieb Fichte first. Please. Can you spell that last name? Yeah F-I-C-H-T-E and I've been told by German speakers it's better to pronounce it like Fichte, but that's probably not even correct because Fichte can sound a little bit too much like the F word in German. So, but he was, Fichte was a very fiery personality,

very choleric and was really enchanted with Kant because of the way in which Kant championed freedom. And you have to understand the political situation in Europe at this time. The French Revolution was exploding and Germany is right next door and it's still being ruled by princes and has this more or less feudal system. These young people, including Schelling and Schelling's friend Hegel and Fichte were very taken by this energy, but they had to be careful, right, because they didn't want to be labeled like enemies of the state. But Fikta was really energized by Khan's

insistence on freedom and that all of philosophy basically spills out from the freedom of the eye or the ego. And so for Fichte, he really runs with Kant's idea that knowledge is something produced by the subject and that all objects must conform to the organization of our subjectivity. And while Kant was trying to hold a balance between, in his own terms, empirical realism and transcendental idealism, Kant didn't like just being referred to as an idealist, that he thinks everything's in the mind. That's not Kant's position. He does think that there's a realm of things in themselves out there that are real, independent of our mind. We just can't say anything about them. Yeah.

So is it then a misnomer to call it transcendental idealism for Kant? Is it just a historical coincidence that it's called that? Or that's the way he called it? No, he called it that. But he always would say I, he would say I am an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist. And so- I see, one of those stuck. Right. Exactly, and Kant was misunderstood by his first reviewers

as just being an idealist and sought to really clarify this. And initially, Kant was quite impressed by Fichte's understanding of his philosophy, but Fichte went to an extreme in the idealist direction and said that basically everything is a construct of our eye, of the ego, and that the whole of nature is just, it sort of emanates from the power, the freedom of the eye. And for FICTA, this led to a certain kind of program for humanity,

which would be to turn everything that resists our agency, like the material world, to turn it into ourselves, as it were, to transform the world into the self which what does that mean it it's basically what's happened we've transformed the earth into a machine to serve our interests as human beings right there's no more natural world untouched by human hands by the human will everything has been put into service, put into the service of humanity, right? I see.

Through the process of industrialization and technologization. Talking about the consequences of philosophy. Exactly. Exactly. So initially, Schelling was a student of Fichte's. I mean, Kant was all the rage for young people, and Fichte was considered to be the leading Kantian as Schelling was finishing up seminary. But Schelling also had this other set of influences,

a kind of appreciation for the natural world as basically the body of God. He had had some relationships to some important teachers and family, friends who were pietist nature mystics and conceived of the universe, the physical world in terms of what the German is Geist Liebligkeit, which is to say that the physical world is the body of God, right? And so Schelling wasn't willing to just say that nature is an appearance in the mind and nature is just there for the human being to remake in its own image. Would they say that nature, that the physical aspect of nature is the body of God or a part of the body of God?

And also what's the relationship between this and Spinoza with the universe as God? Yeah, this would be the idea that Schelling is working with would be more like pan-N theism rather than simply Spinoza's pan-theism. So it's not an identification of God in nature. It's saying that God has a bodily aspect. God is not just pure spirit, and this is a sort of incarnational understanding of the divine, a sort of form of Christian, esoteric Christianity, let's say, where this core process of incarnation really takes center stage. But God is not simply reducible to the physical. Right? So whereas Spinoza would say, God or nature, call it what you want. That's what the physical world is, is this one,

for Spinoza, it's one substance. For Schelling and those who are influencing him, there is still something about the divine that transcends the physical world. But the physical world is not separate from God, it is God's body. Got it. So what Schelling does is building on what Kant recognized about the nature of organisms in that third critique of judgment.

Schelling basically wants to apply that cosmologically and say, oh, okay, the whole universe is such an organism where all of the parts that made appear separate are actually involved in this process of self-organization. And so the universe as a whole is a system wherein the parts which compose it are producing one another for the sake of that hole and So he would you know this the universe for shelling is not just physical. It also has a soul

there's a world soul which is the cosmic organism and What shelling wants to do is? Put another an additional twist on the Kantian inversion. So Kant's already turned things inside out. And Schelling ups the ante and turns things inside out again, not to bring us back to the prior state of dogmatic metaphysics, but to go through and beyond Kant. And so where Kant's question was, what must the human mind be such that nature appears to us in the way that it does, right?

Schelling asks what must nature be such that mind could have emerged from it, such that human consciousness could have emerged from it, right? Interesting. And so he wants to say, okay, we know that conscious human agency is real, where did it come from? And Schelling develops, you know, one of the earliest evolutionary cosmologies, but unlike a materialist's understanding of cosmic evolution where you start with inanimate matter or fields or plasma or whatever you want to call it that has no mind, Schelling would say, you're never going to get conscious human agency at the far end of this evolutionary process unless there was something like it already present from the beginning.

And so he's a kind of panpsychist. It was like his answer to the heart problem. You hear this today. So it was like his answer to the hard problem. You hear this today. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of the ideas that, and no offense to my academic colleagues, but a lot of the ideas that we bat around today and continue to argue about, they're very old. The conversation has not changed in hundreds of years. Despite how much neuroscience has advanced, the philosophical questions remain unchanged from a few hundred years ago,

and probably even all the way back to Plato in some sense, though paradigms have shifted, and we don't live in Aristotle's universe anymore, but still a lot of the problems continue to vex us, and it's why it's so important to know the history of philosophy so we don't continually reinvent the wheel. But yeah, Schelling is thinking in terms of emergence and dynamic self-organization and seeing the history of the universe as a series of stages where these processes of self-organization are going more and more intense with each level. And so he wants to describe this history in terms of polarities. And so, you know, the original polarity between gravity and light is very

important for him. And then the polarity between electricity and magnetism, which he's thinking about conceptually, not mathematically, but he has an influence on Faraday, who influences Maxwell who develops electromagnetic theory and gets the math ironed out. Conceptually, Schelling was the one who sort of planted those seeds, right, to think about electricity and magnetism as related forces, which there was some hint of, you know, in the early 1800s, but it hadn't been,

he helped to work that connection out conceptually. And so, you know, Schelling wants to understand the whole history of the universe as this evolutionary process where originally what he would call spirit or we could just think of as mind consciousness was hidden and in seed form. And just as Aristotle would describe the process of actualization, that seed took root and grew and eventually flowered as the human being. And human history is a kind of Odyssey as we, you know, move in spiral like fashion one step forward or maybe two steps forward, one step back,

trying to wake up to our true nature as, well, as gods in a sense. And so nature is unconscious spirit and humanity should become conscious spirit. That would be, you know, in general terms, the big picture that Schelling is putting forward for us. This sounds like it then extends into the new age. Yeah, I mean, German Romanticism is definitely one of the main influences on

what becomes New Age spirituality. It's a little, you know, the German idealists and romantics were a bit headier, more intellectual than perhaps most people involved in the New Age are. But yeah, it was in the early 1800s, all of these new sciences are being developed from everything from geology in a sense of deep time to chemistry, electricity. These were all being developed and so Schelling was thinking about all these ideas in the context of these paradigm shifts in the natural sciences.

And the New Age re-emerges again, building on some of those ideas in the 20th century, when there were another series of big paradigm shifts in physics with quantum theory and relativity and so on. And so it's easy to make fun of the woo and all of the ways in which the New Age stuff can get ungrounded and pseudoscientific and whatnot, but it's an expression of the human desire to integrate our natural scientific knowledge with our own spiritual self-understanding and striving, right? And you could do that in better or worse ways,

but I think the impulse there is valid. Okay, so now would be a great time to talk about Whitehead or Hegel and then Whitehead. Ah, Hegel. Schelling and Hegel are very close. They were close friends. Schelling and Hegel are very close. They were close friends. But Schelling was less, he was less interested in coming up with a finished final system and that became the source of their major dispute. Schelling... Well in some sense that

sounds to hearken back to Plato, where you said that the dialogues end in a poria. Right. That's a very good point. There's a similarity between Plato and Schelling and Aristotle and Hegel, right? In the sense that Plato was constantly beginning again, letting these intuitions guide him as far as they would take him and then he would leave off and start following a new intuition. Schelling developed, at least began, maybe five or six different systems in the course

of his life. He was constantly beginning again and started philosophizing. He got his first teaching position at the University of Vienna as a 22-year-izing. I mean, he got his first teaching position at the University of Vienna as a 22 year old, I believe, maybe 23. And Hegel was still a private tutor for some rich family until his late thirties when he finishes his first major book, The Phenomenology of Spirit.

So Hegel was a late bloomer. Interesting. Schelling was, they would say in German, a wunderkind, like wonder kid. He was just right out of the gate. He was brilliant and became famous. Hegel was meditating, contemplating, working out his ideas in quiet behind the scenes. And then in 1806, he finishes the Phenomenology of Spirit and he talks, without naming Schelling, he seems to be criticizing Schelling's followers. That's what Hegel told Schelling in a letter,

because Schelling was like, people might think you're criticizing me if you don't clarify this. And Hegel wrote in a letter and said, oh, of course, I'm just talking about your some of your stupid followers, not you. But the criticism was, was, has to do with this quip about a kind of monism, where, as Hegel put it, it would be like a night in which all cows are black, which is to say there's no difference anywhere and it becomes like you know in our pursuit of oneness and nondualism it's it's too easy to just erase all difference and like we need an explanation for difference and this is

where Hegel's dialectic and this process of negation becomes so important to maintain difference and antithesis as a key moment in not only the process of our knowing, but the process of reality. Now, as it turns out, this quip about the night in which all cows are black is actually an analogy Schelling himself uses a few years earlier in a journal article.

And so many historians of philosophy would say, oh, Hegel is dismissing Schelling's philosophy there, but no, he's borrowing Schelling's own analogy. And so we don't want to think of them necessarily as at odds with each other, though it's true after Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is published, he and Schelling don't talk again for almost 20 years. So the misunderstanding isn't just among historians of philosophy, they also misunderstood each other. And there are other things that happened. Schelling's wife died and he got very sad and didn't publish anymore after 1809.

But what Hegel is trying to do in the Phenomenology of Spirit is show how human knowledge works itself out through a series of aporias, you could say, and he wants to begin in that text with just our normal sensory experience of the world, and show how through a just normal train of reflection on what we see and how we know about what we see, we can move from what he calls sense certainty or just basic empiricism, through a spiral of development to come to recognize that actually, there is one absolute mind and what we thought of as just our sensory experience of particulars of its own accord through this dialectical process of negation ends up being a pathway to absolute knowledge where the subject and the object are no longer separate but become unified but not in an

easy way where boundaries are just dissolved but through a process of very rigorous dialectical logic that you know I have a 20-minute video that draws this as a cartoon that people can watch if they want to see some more of the details and that itself is just a bare bones sketch. I can't hope in our dialogue here to lay out the stages of Hegel's dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit. in the phenomenology of spirit, but what Hegel ends up claiming is that through this dialectical process he has basically recapitulated the entire history of philosophy and arrived at its end, and that the end of philosophy is the working out of all the possible ideas that we might have about the human being and the world and

how they relate. And so in effect, Hegel seems to have imagined that he brought history to an end, at least in the ideal realm, if not in actual fact. There were maybe still some wars to be fought to get everyone to accept this final absolute system. But he didn't think there was anything more to be said philosophically and in fact claimed that he was no longer a philosopher. In other words, no longer a lover of wisdom. He had become wise. Hmm.

Do you believe that to be the natural conclusion of his own philosophy? He called it a science of wisdom. And so it's not just love of wisdom anymore, which is a slightly humbler way of relating to wisdom. You don't claim to have it or to be wise. You're just in love with this mystery of the possibility of being wise. But Hegel identifies himself with the sage, the wise one. Now there are other readings of Hegel, very generative readings of Hegel, but I think if we're going to understand the difference between Schelling and Hegel, for

Schelling it was creativity and freedom that were the be-all and end-all. Whereas Hegel really wanted a sense of rational finality, totalizing system. Shelling would always refer to my system of philosophy, not the system of philosophy because he, there's something proto existential about Shelling's approach here where, you know, philosophy is something that each of us must make our own. Thomas Campbell with my big toe has that as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Personally, I relate more to that,

though I relate more to Schelling's approach here. But Hegel is a genius. There's no question about it. Every time I go back and read Hegel, I see that he does have a pretty good rebuttal to most of the criticisms that one might throw at him. There's a funny line by the 20th century philosopher,

Foucault, Michel Foucault, who wanted to be able to think beyond Hegel and not get stuck just recapitulating Hegel's ideas. But he says, we have to be very careful thinking that we haveitulating Hegel's ideas, but he says we have to be very careful thinking that we have finally escaped Hegel because very often what happens is we turn the next corner and see he's standing there waiting for us laughing. So this logic of negation that Hegel perfects where every thesis calls forth its own antithesis, which then overcomes itself to arrive at a higher synthesis, which is then just a new thesis for the next negation.

He's in a way inviting his own opposition. He's inviting the negation of his own philosophy because he's provided the logic by which that negation can then be overcome. So can you get beyond Hegel? It's hard. Footnotes to Hegel is what Foucault's channel would be. Right.

And, you know, Hegel's philosophy, it's interesting how influential it was. I mean, you wouldn't have Marx without Hegel, even if Marx, as Marx put it, Hegel was trying to walk around on his head and Marx stood Hegel on his feet, which is to say, oh, all this spiritual stuff about Geist and whatever ignores material conditions,

and that's the real driver of history. But Marx is basically taking Hegel's master-slave dialectic, which I encourage people to read about if they're not familiar with it, and applying it to world history and recognizing the plight of the proletariat and the way in which, as Hegel originally articulated it, the slave, the one who submits to the power of the master so as to preserve their life but as mere life, actually becomes more self-conscious than the master because it's the slave that's learning how to work

with the natural world, gaining all of these skills, and it's the slave that's able to recognize the injustice of the situation, whereas the master just kind of gets skills and it's the slave that's able to recognize the injustice of the situation whereas the master just kind of gets lazy and fat and doesn't know how to take care of themselves. And so this is the master-slave dialectic is an example of how this overcoming of an antithesis to give rise to a new synthesis occurs. And Marx applies that to world history and was instrumental in instigating,

inspiring many revolutions and continues to be influential for better or worse. If whether you're a Marxist or not, it's clear that there was a major influence here that stems directly from Hegel's philosophy. I'm curious, just a moment about Marx. Yeah. So would it be possible then if what Marx did was take Hegel and then apply Hegel, can you then apply Hegel to Marx and say that there needs to be some antithesis of Marx

itself such that you justify whatever is anti-Marx and that's actually the true reality and then 100 years from now we anti that and so on. Yeah, and in large part that's what's going on with thinkers like Slavoj Žižek. There There is a renaissance among academic philosophers, contemporary philosophers, going back to German idealism and looking again at some of the problems that they were dealing with. Not only Hegel, but Schelling as well and Fichte as well. Because the political situation today and the cultural situation today is not all that different. The antithesis between freedom and nature or freedom and mechanism, I think, is very much still a hot topic nowadays. And these thinkers really worked through the dialectic in search of some higher harmony between these opposites.

And is freedom assumed to be an unbridled good that we should strive for? Or do people make the case that you should enslave yourself or restrict yourself? Well, I mean, Hegel had a lot to say about how the French Revolution, in championing certain kind of freedom, initially a certain kind of reason. I mean, the revolutionaries invented a new calendar, you know, and they really wanted to start on year zero and now we're not subject to these superstitions anymore. We're just a purely rational society

based on equality of individuals and so on. But Hegel points out how this extreme emphasis on freedom ended up leading to the reign of terror and a kind of ideological absolutism where, as we still say nowadays, the left started eating itself. Everyone was a potential traitor and not being loyal to the kind and needed to be guillotined. And so Hegel was worried about, I guess you could say the balance between reason, which would be something universal that we're all subject to, and individual freedom. Because individual freedom without that allegiance to universal reason can become, yeah, ungrounded

and just act on whims and desires and be kind of selfish. You know, I see what happened with the French Revolution where your friends could be your enemies as the practical, like so Marx took Hegel and made him practical, I see what the French Revolution did was take the Cartesian skepticism and make it practical, where everything must be doubted and everything could be deceiving you. And then saying, well, you could be deceiving me. There's mistrust everywhere.

Right. Yeah, that's it. I like that connection. That makes sense. Okay, let's talk about Whitehead, please. Sure. So, Whitehead, you know, begins his career, well, I should say as a high schooler, he was quite a rugby player. If folks Google it, they can find some pictures of him as a teenager looking quite fierce as a rugby player. He was a star at the Sherbourne School in England. And then he goes to Cambridge and studies mathematics and excels and and excels and becomes a professor there, teaches mathematics for 25 years at Cambridge and it's during that time that Bertrand Russell was one of his students and very quickly became a collaborator. They of course wrote the Principia

Mathematica together trying to provide a logical foundation for mathematics as part of what was called the Logicist Project. That was both a great success in that it inaugurated a kind of new analytic method in philosophy using symbolic logic and predicate logic, But it was also kind of failure because as it turns out, logically proving that one plus one equals two leads to a number of paradoxes which weren't formalized for a few more decades until Gödel came along and showed why the project couldn't succeed with his incompleteness theorems. Russell was devastated by the failure of that project. Whitehead was liberated by that.

And what I mean by that is he recognized that there were metaphysical issues that needed to be explored before we could even understand what logic was and how logic was possible. Just as the Principia project was wrapping up, I mean, there was three volumes, the final one in 1913, there was supposed to be a fourth volume on geometry. The first three were more looking at arithmetic. But it was right around that time that relativity theory begins to take root.

Einstein had already published his theory of special relativity. And through the 1910s, Whitehead became increasingly interested in the application of mathematics to physics and began giving presenting papers in the Aristotelian Society on the nature of space and time and at that point the philosophers were convinced that relativity was very suggestive of an idealist point of view that put mind at the center of everything and Whitehead resisted that.

He wanted a realistic interpretation of relativity. He was present in 1919 at the Royal Society meeting where Arthur Eddington revealed the photographic plates of the eclipse that proved that general relativity, that Einstein's predictions about how light would be warped by the mass of the sun, Whitehead was present at that meeting and this really drew him more deeply into philosophy, into the philosophy of science

and eventually into metaphysics proper. And he actually met with and had some debate with Einstein, not publicly, they met at a party at Lord Haldane's house in London in 1922. Einstein had recently been in a more public debate with the French philosopher Henri Barxon about the nature of time. That debate is quite famous now. Several books have been written about it. And Whitehead had similar concerns to Berkson, but also had some subtler concerns about the epistemological coherence of Einstein's understanding of general relativity. And I'll

just briefly try to lay that out because I think you'll find it and your audience will find it very interesting. Whitehead actually develops his own tensor equations, his own alternative theory of general relativity in a 1922 book called The Principle of Relativity where he does away with the idea of curved space or curved space-time because his concern was if space-time is understood to be warped by masses, if we're gonna make accurate measurements of deep space, well, we're first going to need to know where those intervening masses are. But the problem is we can't know where they are until we measure them.

But we can't be sure our ruler is straight. So how do we even begin to measure? So he would say, general relativity as Einstein has formulated, puts us in a situation where we first have to know everything before we can know anything. And part of the issue here is he thought Einstein was collapsing the geometry of space-time and the physics of gravitation.

And for Whitehead, space-time is not something tangible. It's an abstract field of potential, if you want. And we can understand that geometrically, but there needs to be a principle of uniformity when we understand the structure of spacetime if we want to have accurate measurements. And if you collapse that geometric structure with the physics of gravitation such that randomly arrayed masses are going to be warping the very uniformity of space-time, it starts to create, it creates this epistemological paradox where we can't know if our ruler is straight, to put it simply.

Now, I'm sure that raises all sorts of issues for you as someone with such a great knowledge of physics, but that was one of Whitehead's criticisms. And he develops his own tensor equations, as I said, which for many years were empirically equivalent to Einstein's equations. Now there's some controversy and dispute about whether more recent measurements have shown that there is an empirical divergence and that Einstein's are more accurate. However, just as we can adjust the free parameters

of Einstein's equations, we could adjust Whitehead's equations to bring them into line with it. But Whitehead thought, yeah, we don't need to imagine space-time itself as curved, right? So this is one of his contributions. Eddington took a look at his math and said, oh yeah, this makes this works. But Einstein has been remembered as the one who explained what gravitation is. Yeah. So there are other formulations of GR, general relativity, that don't involve curvature,

that involve something called torsion and or that involve something called non-matricity. Whiteheads was non-matricity, meaning that your ruler, as you mentioned, can change as you move along in space. Whereas Einstein said no, your vector, if you have a vector, it just stays the same along as you get parallel transported. But there are problems with other formulations when you combine them with matter, with fermions. So that's the tricky part. So they have the same predictions in the vacuum equations. Vacuum meaning that there's no matter. But there are ways you can combine them with matter, but then they're more tricky. Right.

Just to be clear. So there. Right. Just to be clear. So there are three parameters, to be clear. There's curvature, there's torsion. These are all technical, and then there's non-metricity. Torsion is slightly more difficult to explain. Torsion measures the asymmetry of something. So technically it's the failure of a parallelogram to close. And I do talk about this more in case people are interested in the string theory iceberg.

It will be on screen and in the description. But how about we get back to philosophy? So in the early 1920s, in addition to trying to iron out these disagreements with Einstein, Whitehead develops a new philosophy of nature, where he's critical of what he calls the bifurcation of nature. And going back to Galileo, and this is a point that Philip Goff has made in some of his work

as well, there was this methodological split between primary characteristics, all the stuff that can be measured objectively, you know, mass and dimensionality and whatnot. And then secondary characteristics, which would be all of the subjective qualities that for Galileo would just be added by the perceptual organs of living beings. And for science's purposes, that secondary stuff can be left out science is interested in the primary characteristics um Whitehead thinks that methodologically that worked well enough it allowed science to advance but um it leaves us in a rather odd situation where we have these two different domains, what he called the conjecture, which is the way that science models the primary characteristics,

and the dream, which is how we actually experience the world in terms of colors and sense and qualities. Why did I wanted to bring these two back together and say, look, science is the study of nature. What is nature? Nature is everything that we are aware of in perception. And that includes the redness of the sunset as much as the electromagnetic waves by which the physicist might want to understand that radiation.

Redness is not just subjective projection onto nature, it is part of nature. It's not that the redness is say, you know, in the sun or in the rose, it's a relational quality, but nonetheless, nature is made of relationships. And when we're doing science, we're studying the patterns that in here in our perceptual experience. Okay. Right. He doesn't want us to say, start trying to pick and choose what's in the mind and what's in nature, just science is the study of the perceptual field and

the relational patterns that allow us to build models and make predictions about what we might expect to perceive next. And so in this early phase of his philosophical work, he's doing philosophy of science and he's saying, look, if science is the study of nature and nature is what we are aware of in perception, that means that mind or consciousness is not something that science can actually study.

Science presupposes mind and consciousness. So let me see if I follow that. Nature is awareness plus perception. What we are aware of in perception. So nature is what appears to us in perception. And embedded in perception is then a perceiver. And so if science is the study of nature, then we are assuming a perceiver. We're assuming a subject already and the subject has embedded in that mind. So we're assuming mind. Okay, I get it.

Right. mind. So we're assuming mind. Okay, I get it. Right. Right. Science presupposes that there is a knowing mind. And this is a point that, you know, Kant makes as well. This is kind of what this term transcendental means. It's not the same as transcendent. Kant would say that natural science has certain transcendental means. It's not the same as transcendent. Kant would say that natural science has certain transcendental conditions of possibility.

And Whitehead agrees with that. What that means is that there are certain things that natural science has to assume but can't prove in its own terms. For example, the unity of nature. Kant would say that the unity of nature is a transcendental idea that guides scientific research. The very notion of a law presupposes

that the phenomena of nature are ordered in a systematic way, such that we can discover these universal principles, these laws that apply everywhere. Now, I want to not quite sure about, because let's say there is disunity in nature, then it just could be that it's in another universe that's causally disconnected from us and it follows different laws or doesn't follow any law. So the unity of nature seems to me to be the unity of our perceptions of nature or the observable universe or something like that.

Not necessarily that nature itself is unified. Well, remember, constantly talking about the phenomenal world, not the world of things in themselves and so. Okay, the talking about the phenomenal world, not the world of things in themselves. And so, uh, okay. The unity of the phenomenal. Yeah, maybe, maybe there are, it could be that there's a, it could be that there's a disunity of nature, but if we're going to have science, we have to presuppose unity or there's no sense to be made of a law. Okay.

Right. And so, Kant's limiting natural scientific knowledge to the phenomenal world, to the way that nature appears to our mind. And for our mind to make sense of nature as a system with laws, it needs to be unified. It needs to be one system. That's not to say that beyond the phenomenal realm there might not be other universes. It's just we can't say anything scientific about that.

You would say. Science for Kant means it's systematic, necessary, universal knowledge. And I think this is where contemporary physicists like to talk all the time about other universes and the multiverse and many worlds and so on. And from Kant's point of view, they're doing metaphysics and like bad, bad metaphysics because all of that's way beyond anything we can experience or become aware of in perception. Right? And so philosophically, Kant would say all of this talk, like theoretical physics has become, has just gone off the rails, he would say. He would be, I think, pretty good buddies with the Sabine Haassenfelder in that critique of where theoretical physics has gone, that it's become metaphysics in an ungrounded sense.

I see. Like how Kant was critiquing other metaphysicians for speaking about what's unknowable, we have no way to decide it, and then he's saying, well, let's start with what's knowable. And by the way, I'm saying knowable, not noble. Yeah. That's a similar critique that could be laid out much of the abstractions in theoretical physics today. Right.

So, Whitehead's agreeing with Kant that science has certain transcendental conditions, that there are minds capable of knowing transcendental condition of science, that nature is intelligible. And so in this early philosophy of science work, Whitehead's trying to dissolve this bifurcation of nature so that we don't imagine that science is just trying to describe to us a world of mechanical matter in motion, devoid of any quality, devoid of color and scent and texture

and all this stuff that makes our life meaningful and valuable. But at this point, he's not bringing mind into the picture. He's not trying to do metaphysics and talk about the place of mind in nature. He's just saying natural science presupposes that there is mind. At least in the scientists, you know, doing the science. And you know later he'll say, one of my favorite lines is he says that scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject of study. This agency for Whitehead is just a, it's a hardcore common sense presupposition and without it we couldn't have science.

And so for a scientist to start claiming like, oh, we're just lumbering robots allowing our genes to make copies of themselves or that we're fully deterministic consciousness is an illusion. Like, all of that sort of talk undermines the possibility of science from this point of view. It's like pulling the rug out from under your feet. But Whitehead doesn't really try to elaborate on the place of mind in the physical world until later. in the physical world until later. He's invited to Harvard in 1924 and starts teaching philosophy for the first time. Before that, he had taught math, he had taught astronomy.

Harvard invites him to teach philosophy and he'd been wanting an opportunity to work out some of his metaphysical ideas. And so in his first semester at Harvard, he ends up giving a series of lectures that became Science and the Modern World, his 1925 book, where he both gives a history of science and mathematics and begins to elaborate

what he calls his organic realism. And so just like Schelling drew on and expanded upon what Kant had articulated in the critique of judgment about the nature of self-organization, Whitehead begins to develop this idea of organism or self-organization as the basis for a new cosmology and wants to understand these scientific objects like atoms as self-organizing systems,

which are in effect, tiny organisms. And just as organisms at the biological scale seem to have some degree of agency and interiority, he would say every self-organizing system in nature all the way down the scale has some degree of minimal agency and interiority or experience. Now the experience of an atom and the agency of an atom is so minimal that we can devise mathematical laws to predict the behavior of those atoms with very high precision. There's very little in the way of free choice at that scale.

Nonetheless, it seems, at least on some interpretations of quantum theory, there's not complete determinism. There is, moment by moment, an integration of what's already been actualized in the past with what remains possible in the future. And so part of what Whitehead's already doing in science in the modern world is, you know, quantum physics hadn't been fully worked out yet, but he's aware that there are certain features of Newtonian mechanics that no longer are true. For example, simple location, the idea that a bit of matter can be, its location can be understood independent of all other bits of matter. There's no more absolute space and similarly there seems to be some kind of non-local entanglement.

So he's trying to understand the physical world without presupposing simple location and without presupposing that there could be any meaning given to the idea of nature at an instant. It would seem that it takes a certain duration for even a photon to fully manifest as a photon. And so the idea that nature could be reconstructed out of freeze frames, instantaneous slices, for why that no longer makes any sense. And so this is why he starts to think in terms of process, in terms of events.

And rather than thinking in terms of substances, where you remember a substance is defined as that which requires nothing but itself in order to exist, for Whitehead, there is no such thing in the world. Everything is bound up in a nexus of relations and relationality becomes ultimate. There are entities which come into relationship, but every entity, actual entity in his terms, is itself a nexus of relations. And all relations for Whitehead are experiential, which is to say, instead of thinking of cause and effect as just a mechanical process, it's really something more like cause and affect,

if you will. It feels like causal transmission feels like something. And so moment by moment, these actual entities, whether we're talking about events occurring at the atomic scale or events occurring at the level of our psychological experience, we are feeling conformally with the past and we are feeling a kind of field of possibilities available to us in the next moment and integrating the feeling of the past with the feeling of possibility and some decision is being made as to what we are going to become next. Right? And so at the smallest, simplest scale, that's a largely deterministic process, almost deterministic, but not fully. There's always some degree of possibility.

And at the human scale, you know, we have almost infinite imaginative freedom. I mean, we can't sprout wings and fly in the next moment, but at least at the level of our stream of consciousness, we can imagine almost anything. And our consciousness can become quite untethered from our past environment, even if in terms of our bodies and how we engage the world metabolically and physiologically, we're bound to conform all relationships to our past. We still have a very high degree of freedom

to, in Whitehead's terms, ingress alternatives moment by moment. And so his metaphysics, his understanding of the way that mind and nature can be integrated has a lot to do with how quantum physics brings potentiality back into the picture. Whereas in Newtonian mechanics, we could imagine nature is just the sum total of already actualized particles, you know, colliding in absolute space. Contemporary physics has forced us to make room for potentiality and there's a lot of confusion about how potentiality and actuality relate, which leads to like the many worlds interpretation where every possible pathway in the wave function, say, is actualized in some other universe,

because there's a refusal in that case, I would say, in the case of many worlds, to acknowledge this distinction between actuality and potentiality, and just say, no, it's all, every one of them is actualized. And Whitehead say, no, there's a difference, there's an ontological difference between the actual and the potential.

And we need to find a way of thinking that allows us to hold the two intention. And that mind, one way of understanding what mind is, and I'm just in the most general sense, mind, consciousness, experience, is this process of integration of the actual with the possible and the decision that is made about which possibility to actualize, moment by moment by moment. So let's imagine the world as a network and then there are nodes and then there are edges those edges are the relations and I assume those edges have directions in order For it to have a causal relation

Okay, then you're saying that any one of these nodes has Access to the past of what's happened before and it uses this in order to come up with a decision about the future Now does it have access to every single element of the past or is there some limit to it? Is it localized in some manner? It's localized in the sense that it has its own perspective on the past but Whitehead would say the entirety of the past is flowing into each of these nodes or actual occasions in his terms moment by moment. And that's just a function of the uniformity of nature. Everything is connected. Now, obviously there are more important and less important features of the past that are going to be determining

what happens in the present, but nothing is forgotten. So this network of actual occasions, is this something that is embedded in a higher space or is it just that is what exists? That is what exists and actually Whitehead would say space and time are emergent from the relations among these actual occasions and so it's it's it would be more akin to you know the way that like in relational interpretations of quantum mechanics that you know space-time is emergent from quantum events that's so space-time is kind of secondary. It's it's the way that these occasions relate to each other rather than being a pre existing domain within which these actual occasions

relate. What's a precedent occasion? What's a what? A precedent occasion. A precedent? So what I mean is, okay, so you have an actual occasion and then you have precedence to it. So you have something here that's influenced this guy here. Right. So in order for this to even know about this guy, so this is the guy that is currently going to make a decision and this is something akin to the past, one of the elements that it's using.

Does it have to go through each one of the intervening objects in order to reach out to it? Yeah. Why did I say that? He says, the world is a medium for the transmission of feelings and so, you know, there are these historical roots of occasions of experience. I'm using all of his phraseology here. And what each present occasion is feeling, when it's feeling it's the preceding occasions,

those prior occasions are no longer experiencing. They've perished. They've become, they've transitioned from subjective immediacy, Whitehead would say, to objective immortality. And so, in the present, we're always in the present, we're always experiencing the now, but there's also history. And history is composed of prior experiences which have transitioned from subjective immediacy to objective immortality to then become influences on the next moment of experience. Is there a common now that you and I share, such that we can make a time slice between

you and I and say, okay, we're at the same moment simultaneously. I mean, strictly speaking, because of relativity, no. I mean, it takes a certain amount of time for, you know, the energy that is being realized in you now to transmit itself to me. And of course it's complicated by the fact that we're, this is a reconstructed image of you being sent through who knows how many servers across

the world or at least across the North American continent. But if you were sitting here in front of me, I know there would still be a bit of a delay. Whitehead says that contemporary occasions occur in causal independence of one another, which is why there's some elbow room in the universe. If there wasn't that delay, there could be no individual creativity for each occasion. It would just be one unbroken flow of causality. But there is this delay.

The world is a medium for the transmission of feelings or causal influences. Yet there's still what Whitehead would call a unison of becoming because you and I share a common environment. There's a common background. We're both on a planet moving at roughly the same speed through the solar system, and yeah, I mean, for all intents and purposes, we can feel like we're present with one another

in the moment, even if from a physical and metaphysical point of view, there is a delay in the transmission of feelings from me to you and you to me. But in that transmission of feelings, like your past experiences, from Wynand's point of view, as they perish and are transmitted to me, then become part of me. Right? So we're both, we have some degree of independence, but we're also profoundly interrelated because

what you feel in one present moment is then transmitted to me for me to feel in a subsequent moment of my stream of consciousness. And so there's a deep intimacy there. This sounds like it's incoherent mysticism, but in some sense this is already in physics, because every single thing in your causal past has influenced you. So the difference here is that we're using the term feeling. Now let's say you are there in California and you're angry, so you yell. Okay, that causes a small vibration in your walls and then that comes to me a few seconds

later or half a second later or what have you, depending on wherever we are in the world, in a minute fashion. So your anger influenced me via the vibrations that came to me. But then when you say that your feelings become a part of me, it sounds like what you're saying is that slight anger that you had or major anger, whatever, becomes a part of me and I carry it in some Jungian sense like generational trauma. But the physics way of understanding that would just be those become vibrations later that influence you and those could have been, you could have been stomping around in joy and it would have been the same vibration.

So explain to me or justify the use of feeling here. Yeah. I mean, Whitehead's trying to make an analogy between energy vectors and feeling tones and say that you know the energetic intensity measured in physics is akin to the agitations of experience that we know subjectively. So he's a kind of panpsychist or pan-experientialist. And this has to do with overcoming the bifurcation of nature. And it's a weird way of speaking initially. Metaphysics is really, like all sciences,

it has its instruments that it uses to experiment. In the case of metaphysics, the instrument is language itself. And so we're experimenting with new ways of speaking that hopefully, if we're doing it right, elucidate our experience, allow us to bring more coherence to our experience. And yeah, of course, initially it's going to sound incoherent or you're making category errors, but in metaphysics we're trying to invent new categories. But the idea here would be to try to find a way of overcoming this old Cartesian split between extended matter and motion and the agitations of the inner life of a soul, the emotions and thoughts and feelings,

the sense of will or effort, like all of these things that normally we say are not part of nature. Whitehead wants to say, well, maybe they are. And what sort of language can we use to talk about, say, energy that wouldn't force us to say, energy that wouldn't force us to avoid mixing any of these subjective qualities with it, but instead recognize that energy itself could also have an interior dimension that's something like a pulse of emotion. different vibratory frequencies of energy carry different emotional tones, right? I mean, artists and interior designers know quite well the way that different colors affect us emotionally,

often unconsciously, but there's a clear relationship, between our subjective experience and the quality of the light around us. Just to give one example of these sorts of connections. But just because I'm angry in one moment doesn't mean that as those feelings are transferred to you that you're going to be angry as well. Because you, your organism, your physiology is a complex filter of your experience and there's a lot going on already in you before the feelings that I'm having get transmitted to you. And so you're not just subject to whatever emotion I'm streaming out at you.

You know, you can respond creatively to it or you could respond empathically to it and really feel what I'm feeling, but you're not automatically going to be shaped and determined by whatever feelings I'm putting out there. But you know, there's a way in which this can sound quite bizarre. But you know, there's another philosopher who's quite similar to Whitehead named Charles Saunders-Purce, also a mathematician.

And he has this wonderful statement where he says, you know, when I'm in dialogue with an intimate friend and, you know, we know that we're communicating clearly and sharing the same sense of excitement about an idea, he says, am I not just as much in his brain as I am in mine? And you might say, oh, that's just a sort of interesting poetic way of speaking. But if we do want to get rid of these old ideas of simple location, not only for the simple location of a material particle, but also the simple location of a mind. If we're gonna think more in terms of fields, let's say,

then to avoid the bifurcation of nature, it's not just, you know, fields of, you know, electromagnetic radiation and energy, but common fields of feeling as well. And so there's a constant shifting back and forth in Whitehead's work from the terminology of physics to the terminology of psychology and aesthetics and an attempt to find some set of categories

which would allow us to generalize beyond the special application in physics or the special application in psychology to understand the universe in terms of one set of categories which isn't dualistic, which doesn't sever mind from matter but allows us to see that this is a mind imbued universe. Would you say that it's pluralistic? So that it's not monistic nor is it dualistic, but it's manyistic? Yeah. Yeah, it's pluralistic.

What that means in the case of Whitehead's ontology is that the universe is made of perspectives. And so maybe we should call it a pluriverse. Now usually when we think of a perspective, it's a perspective on something. Say, oh, that there's a bunch of different subjective perspectives on one objective world. This is more radical than that. This is saying the universe is composed, or the pluriverse is composed of actual occasions of experience. The experience of each actual occasion is always a perspective taken upon other actual

occasions which have already perished and are in its past. And the universe is constantly growing as new occasions of experience emerge. And so there is no world out there independent of the perspectives of actual occasions. It's perspectives all the way down. Right? And new perspectives are always emerging. And so it's pluralistic in that sense. And it's quite radical to try to wrap your head around that because what is not being said here is that the universe is just a fragmented pile

of separate perspectives. Because each of these perspectives integrates everything in its past. But then, as each actual occasion, so an actual occasion arises and perishes, right? These are sort of momentary drops of experience, Whitehead says. or sort of momentary drops of experience, Whitehead says. It arises out of the nexus of the past, ingresses or integrates that past with some set of possibilities, and then perishes to become food for the next occasion of experience, let's say. Now, the unity of the universe is achieved moment by moment as the entirety of the past is integrated into each new occasion. And

yet as each new occasion reaches its decision as to how to integrate that past with some degree of possibility, it perishes and then itself becomes part of the past for the next occasion. Right? So there's both a process of unification that's always underway and a process of pluralization that prevents the universe from ever finishing and becoming just one. So it's a perspective of other perceivers. So it's a perspective of perspectives. Rather than you're getting perspectives on the objective world. It's like a network where each one of these nodes is itself an experiencer or has experienced in the past.

And if we say it has experienced in the past, that's what you meant when you said it's dead in a sense. Is that correct or no? That's correct. So this sounds similar to two different concepts. One is the monad, when you keep mentioning that each one of these guys has in it all of the rest, at least from the past. That sounds similar to Leibniz's monad.

So I want you to distinguish it to compare contrast. And then number two, it sounds also akin to a network of conscious agents. The epitome is Donald Hoffman. Although Donald Hoffman has memoryless dynamics. So it wouldn't necessarily have the memory of all that happened in the past because he has Markovian dynamics. But anyhow, the point is that I want you to compare and contrast with Leibniz's monad and Donald Hoffman's theories, please. Yeah, this is very similar to Leibniz's monadology, with the difference being that Leibniz is

still thinking in those old Aristotelian categories of substance and property. And so for Leibniz, he described his monads as windowless. And the monads only relate to other monads because they've been set in a pre-established harmony by God. Labnitz's monads don't actually causally interact with one another. Each monad has a sort of movie reel as it were pre-installed in it that plays out in perfect harmony with everything happening around it even though there's no causal interaction going on. And it's kind of a it's kind of an absurd picture but logically it works. The monadology is

beautiful as a logical scheme. But what Whitehead is doing is his actual occasions are not windowless, which is to say they're not closed off to causal relationship. They're almost all window. And there is no pre-established harmony. Whitehead does have a God, but god is another actual entity that's subject to the same categories and has a special role to play only in that Whitehead's god is the first entity, which sort of sets the base note for other entities to then enter into a call and response with, or it's a very musical picture. But Whitehead's actual occasions are, as we've been discussing, causally open to the influence of the past. And Whitehead's actual occasions are also momentary, whereas Labnitz's monads are eternal. Let me jump in here for a moment.

So you said windowless. And at first what I was visualizing was something like a sphere with holes in it, and these holes don't have windows so you get direct access. So that's what I thought you meant when you said windowless. But you mean you mean they're actually closed in Leibniz's case. No light gets in. Yeah. I see. Okay.

So I was like, oh, how does that make sense? Because it sounds like if there are no windows, if your car has no windows, there's so much more wind and light coming in. I understand them. Yeah. Yeah. That's windowless is wind and light coming in. I understand them. Yeah, yeah. That's windowless. I think Labnitz uses that phrase. I understand.

And number two, if God was the progenitor, the first actual occasion, maybe Whitehead doesn't want to reserve actual occasion to refer to God the first instance of a node. Maybe not. I don't know. Doesn't matter. The point is that if God was the first one and then what gives rise is, eventually gives rise to us, that sounds like Whitehead is saying Nietzsche's God is dead because everything that was in the past you analogize to being dead. So is God dead in Whiteheadian terms or no? Well, the idea of an omnipotent creator God is dead for sure.

Whitehead's not trying to, he's not talking about that kind of a God. So the God that Nisha doesn't believe in, Whitehead also doesn't believe in. Whitehead's God is an actual entity, and so you're actually intuiting something important. He refers to actual entities and actual occasions as synonymous for the most part, but to call God an actual occasion would be to suggest that God has a history and for Whitehead, God doesn't have a history. That's why God's the first entity. So God is an actual entity, not an actual occasion, strictly speaking. And are we actual entities and not actual occasions? Usually we would be referred to as being composed of actual occasions of experience.

There's another category in Whitehead Scheme, a society of actual occasions. And so our bodies are actually societies of occasions. We're not a single actual occasion as a human body. We're a whole society of actual occasions inheriting certain shared characteristics moment by moment. But we don't need to get into that quite yet. Let's stick to the Whitehead's theology here. God's, God as an actual entity is in a process of concrescence. I haven't introduced this term concrescence. It's just Whitehead's word for the process that gives rise to an actual occasion. And concrescence has phases. So would it be analogized to the edge or no?

The edge? You could say it's what establishes the edges of an occasion of experience, yeah. In the case of God, the concrescence is everlasting. Whereas in the case of all finite actual occasions, the concrescence completes itself and occasion arises and perishes. God's concrescence is ongoing. So God is constantly establishing new edges? Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.

God has no edge. When I say edge, I'm thinking in terms of a graph. Like you have nodes and you have edges that connect those. And the nodes are in my picture, actual occasions. Although sometimes apparently they can be called actual entities depending on something else, which I'm not clear about yet, but I'm sure you'll explain it soon. You can have collections of these nodes and that becomes a, well, we are composed of these actual occasions. So I imagine some subset of this large graph is people or a person.

And then you also mentioned there's societies, but we have to put that aside because we're introducing too many new pieces of terminology. Conquestions, we haven't got to pre-hench and yet. Actual occasions, temporal thickness we haven't gotten to. Societies and God and so on. Well, Whitehead's God. So when I said is God establishing new edges, what I mean to say is if you were to imagine nodes on a graph and then there are edges that connect these nodes, the bringing forth

of new edges, God is constantly doing, but then some of these entities, they perish and can no longer establish new edges. Is that correct or correct my incorrectness, please? Yeah. For the record, I'm an extremely visual thinker. Extremely visual. That's why I'm giving this example.

So, when we think of God as an actual entity, I think it's best to imagine that in a way we are inside of that divine entity. God is not somewhere else out there or even back there in time, God's concrescence is everlasting. It's happening now. It is, in a sense, eternally present. And what that eternal divine presence does, what its function is, is to help mediate for each finite actual occasion, to mediate between our experience of the actualized past and infinite possibility. So Whitehead's claim is that basically he needs what could be called a divine function in his metaphysics to provide each finite actual occasion

with a sense of relevant possibility. function in his metaphysics to provide each finite actual occasion with relevant, a sense of relevant possibility. He thinks we need some, there needs to be something in the nature of things which orders those possibilities as relevant to our unique situation moment by moment. And he actually points back to Aristotle here, who he believes was the last metaphysician to articulate an idea of God that was free of any religious motivations that Aristotle was just reasoning.

And for Aristotle, it was, well, what's the first mover? Where did motion come from? And so his God becomes the unmoved mover, the prime mover. Whitehead says, you know, we don't have that problem in physics anymore, but we have an analogous problem, which is how did infinite possibility give rise to anything, to any finite actuality. And he thinks God is the concept that would allow us to offer some explanation for that. That transition from, I mean, you could say infinite possibility is kind of akin to nothing. It's kind of a chaos. How does a transition occur whereby we get finite actualities. God plays that role for Whitehead as a mediator between actuality and possibility, giving some definite order to this realm of possibilities, which he also calls the realm of eternal objects or Platonic forms if you want. And so, you know, we're back to where we started two hours ago, talking about realism and nominalism.

Whitehead's a realist. There's an infinite realm of Platonic forms that gives some structure to possibility, and God's role is to filter those possibilities so that each finite actual occasion has some sense of what's relevant to its own experience. Okay, there's so much I want to touch on here, but I want to get to how your views have taken Whitehead further, because I imagine you don't agree with every single thing Whitehead has said. And I also want you to talk about why it's called process philosophy because surprisingly throughout this entire conversation, I think the word process only came up once. So why don't you define what process philosophy is and then

also your views of Whitehead and where you've taken it. Yeah. So, it's true that we haven't mentioned process much, and actually before he gave the title process in reality to his magnum opus, Whitehead considered calling it extension in reality. I'll explain why in a minute, but to say that his ontology or his view of reality is rooted in process is to say rather than what you would have in a substance ontology where the world is made of things which have some kind of isolated separate existence and that existence in a substance ontology would be fully present at an instant such that you would know what the nature of a thing is even

in a freeze frame. For Whitehead, reality instead is made of events and it's events in an interlocking relational nexus or network where in order to understand what one of the nodes in that network is you're always going to be making reference to its relations to other nodes and you mentioned the term pre-ension. Prehension is a neologism Whitehead comes up with to describe the nature of relationships. The way that one node relates to all the other nodes in its past is through pre-hensions. And pre-hension is sort of like this process of transmission whereby what's already occurred in the past can then flow into a novel present, a synonym for pre-hension would be feeling.

Oh wait, just a moment, because I want to be clear on this, sorry. Pre-hension is the ability for what's in the past to influence you or is the process of what's in the past influencing you? Pre-hension is how the presently-concressing actual occasion appropriates its past. Strictly speaking, that's physical prehension. There are two types of prehension. Physical prehension is how a currently-concressing actual occasion is incorporating what has come before it. It's the transition of the already actualized past or perished occasions of experience that

have, they've already died in a sense. They then are pre-ended by the currently-concressing occasion of experience. Again, that's physical pre-ension, which has to do with a kind of causal relationship to the past. There's also conceptual prehension, which is how we feel possibilities or we feel eternal objects, which are all of the alternatives that haven't yet been actualized in the past. And every actual occasion is a synthesis of its physical prehensions of the past and its conceptual prehensions of what's possible in light of that past. And the role that God is playing in that is, again, to help guide,

as it were, the conceptual prehensions of every actual occasion. Because if we were exposed to the full infinite array of possibilities, why did his ideas that will we just be overwhelmed and we wouldn't know what to do next? It's not that God determines what happens next. It's that there's a certain, God values the realm of possibility in a certain way and we feel conceptually and physically we feel that value and it helps to lure us toward a decision that would contribute to the enhancement of that value. That's the basic idea. Okay I know that we are about to get to where you stand however I want to ensure that there aren't many gaps so that people don't have to jump

too far in order to reach where you are. You mentioned this term infinite possibilities a few times. So when you say this, or when Whitehead says this, is he saying infinite possibilities as in all possibilities, or does he just mean unbounded? Hmm Say more about what you mean what the difference would be so a function for instance can be unbounded because it goes to infinity like It's a mapping from the real numbers to the real numbers such that any number you can think of, you can find an f of x that is greater than that number for some x.

Okay, but yet, so that's an unbounded function. It goes off to infinity. But yet, I just described this function, you can start drawing a part of it, and at no point does that function make your cat come on your lap or make you do the Macarena or make this door open and close. So it's unbounded but it's not everything. Yeah, yeah. Because everything would include somehow making this door open, making you do the Macarena,

making your cat become a dog. Yeah, so it's all possibilities. Okay. Yeah. So now, if it's all possibilities, then wouldn't there also be the case inside all possibilities of not being overwhelmed by all possibilities Within the class of all possibilities, there's the possibility of not being overwhelmed by the rest of the possibilities Yeah, I think yes that is a possibility and I think, yes, that is a possibility. And I think actually, so Whitehead's ultimate principle is not God, his ultimate is creativity. And God is the first creature of creativity.

And so in a sense, what you just described is what God is. God is this sort of contingently emergent feature of creativity that then feeds back on creativity so as to limit possibility. And Whitehead admits that that makes God somewhat like the ultimate irrationality, but also the ground for all reasons. Okay, I need to think more about this because it seems like I thought what was being said was that God limits a person because a person cannot be exposed to all possibilities or

they'll be overwhelmed. But it also sounds like if you were to be exposed to all possibilities, you wouldn't be overwhelmed because included in one of those possibilities in this huge set of all possibilities is the ability to not be overwhelmed by all possibilities. So if the reason for limitation was to shield you from chaos because you wouldn't know what to do with yourself for some reason. Perhaps they didn't understand the reason for the imposition of a limitation.

Let me know if I'm being unclear. No, I'm probably being unclear. I think metaphysics is difficult precisely because we're trying to speak about the most general ideas that it's possible for the human minds to comprehend, and it's not clear we do fully comprehend. And so, you know, the relationship between the finite and the infinite has been discussed for thousands of years. And you know, there's a way of construing that as a dichotomy. There's also a way of understanding that actually the true infinite contains the finite, which I think is another way of saying that infinite possibility also contains the

possibility of there being a limit to possibility. And what I was trying to say is, and I had never thought of it quite that way before, but that's basically Whitehead's account of why there is a God is that infinite possibility contains the possibility of there being a limit. And as soon as that limit is actualized, you get the first actual entity that then immediately ramifies into this universe of a plurality of actual occasions in a nexus of relations to one another. It's an account of the creation of an actual universe or pluriverse as profoundly contingent. And yet that original contingency subsequently becomes the ground for becomes the, subsequently becomes the ground for any intelligibility that we might as human beings be able to win, any any rationality that we might be able to

to garner and to harness, right? And so what begins as contingent becomes necessary for us as the products of that contingency. I think this would be a great point. Just one more stepping stone prior to getting to your current worldview or Veltan Schaum, if we're going to use these German words, which is one I'm fond of. It's a good one. So Free Will. Free Will, I was watching this conversation with you and John Vervecky.

Shout out to John. I'll put a link to his channel as well as that particular podcast on screen. But I was disappointed because the title said free will. And I was so looking forward to hearing you expound on free will as it relates to process philosophy and Whitehead and so on. Because it sounds like it comports with it. And I know that John Vervecky is not a fan of Free Will, but at least not libertarian Free Will.

So I listened to all of it and not once was Free Will mentioned, yet it was mentioned in the title. And then I just searched the transcript because I'm thinking, did I miss it? And no, it wasn't mentioned. So I don't know who titled that video. I have a bone to pick with that person. I'm just going to pick my bone with John because he's a friend and I think that... It probably wasn't Sean. I think he has help. Well, I'd rather just pick the bone with John than his marketer because congenial combativeness is

less fun among strangers than colleagues. Anyhow, so please tell me about free will and then I would like to hear about what is your current Veltan Shaan. Well, obviously our will is constrained. It's constrained by the types, the type of organism that we are. It's constrained by our psychological development. It's constrained in any number of ways. And yet, that feeling of effort that we all have and the feeling of regret that we all have or guilt that we all have, it's a reflection of the fact that we feel, at least, like we have some ability to make decisions and to take action and to direct our own behavior. you know, making like physically detectable changes.

I think we are still afforded some degree of freedom, but it's limited. When it comes to our thinking activity, when it comes to our imagination, there's quite a bit of freedom there. Now, obviously with training and contemplative practice, we gain more of an ability to direct the flow of our thoughts and it might seem that for a lot of us

who came of age in the internet age, we're easily distracted and don't always feel like we have control over our thoughts. But nonetheless, I think it would be hard to find somebody who totally denied the fact that they experienced some degree of agency in their own thinking activity. And so do I believe in free will? degree of agency in their own thinking activity. And so do I believe in free will?

I believe, I think that we have a direct from that thinking activity to the motivation of certain actions that we might take in the world. And there are all sorts of ways that we might become blocked in that action, whether it's depression or drug addiction or, I mean, hell, maybe we're in prison and wrongly accused of a crime and we can't, you know. Right. We're not free in a very literal sense. But I think we should try to avoid this easy dichotomy between either we're free or we're determined.

It's like, well, we have constrained freedom. Yeah. Well, I think almost anyone who says that we have libertarian free will would say that it's not all possibilities that you can choose from so that you can become a butterfly in two seconds if you just believed hard enough. So this constrained possibilities, which just, well, do you have freedom to choose among any of those possibilities? And is it only in mental space?

Because does the mental space not impinge on the physical? Oh, yeah. I mean, they're different size of the same coin. It's just that there's a greater intensity of freedom in the mental pole of our experience, say, than in the physical pole of our experience. And I think the human will is very mysterious and to a large extent unconscious. We do things all the time, we have no idea why we did them. And we reflect on it later and maybe we tell a story like,

oh yeah, I decided to do that, but did you? Did you really? Mm-hmm, right. And so, whether or not our will is free very much depends on the cultivation of our own attention to it. Mm-hmm. it and the strengthening of the degree to which we can bring awareness to something that's generally asleep or that we are asleep to. We have all sorts of motivations that we didn't decide to have that shape our actions. And so freedom is a journey.

It's something we have to cultivate, but we have the potential to become more and more free. Interesting. So let me draw one more parallel. So you said that some factors that we're asleep to, and that reminds me of factors we're unconscious of, and Jung had this phrase that as soon as you can bring what's unconscious to what's conscious then you're Individuated or you maybe some people would say more free and so that sounds like what you're saying as well Yeah, that's right if you know to the extent that

We repress these aspects of ourselves we become subject to what we've repressed. We're determined by it. Whereas if we can bring more consciousness to it, that complex, that tangle in the flow of psychic energy becomes something that we can then freely engage with and work with. It's not that we thereby gain control over it entirely, but it becomes no longer an impediment to our freedom, but an instrument that might afford us the opportunity for freedom. We begin to be able to work with these aspects of

ourself instead of just being determined by them. Okay, so there are a plurality of subjects I'd love to talk to you about to use a pun here, but I want the audience to know you and this has been a two and a half hour lead-up to where you are in your journey and how you see the world. You know, I'm so often asked to talk about Whitehead's ideas, to talk about Schelling's ideas. And I think as an academic philosopher, that's my job. I'm 38 years old right now. I definitely have my own view of things, but I'm also quite humble about my influences.

But I would say what's most important for me at this moment is really understanding like what the hell is the human being? And putting our scientific knowledge, putting our spiritual aspirations, putting our artistic appreciations and our political strivings, like all these different domains that we tend to focus our attention on in the context of this question, what is the human being? Because I think to the extent that we remain a mystery to ourselves, and I mean both individually and as a species, then do we really know, can we really know nature scientifically?

Can we really know the divine? Can we really take one step into the world until we've understood ourselves. And I think contemporary culture, at least in the Western world, has become so distracted by the technological applications of our tremendous scientific knowledge, and so distracted by the economic payoffs of the capitalist market economy that we've lost track of what really matters. We've lost track of the source of all of our values and I don't have an answer to this question, what is the human being? for a new kind of inquiry that would give rise to a new kind of civilization that would be

rooted more in a process of self-inquiry and lifelong discovery where we don't take ourselves for granted anymore, but recognize not only is the world a mystery, but I am a mystery to myself. And I think it might provide a reorientation such that every civilization You know, every civilization has had philosophers and spiritual teachers who have tried to orient us in this way. But for the most part, what's driven civilization is this desire to expand outward, to conquer, to control. And we've reached the stage now where there's nothing more to colonize

on the earth. I know some of our favorite billionaires are trying to go continue to expand and colonize other planets. Maybe they'll succeed. I think it's a little more difficult than a lot of people Realized to actually do that But I don't know if that course of Civilization Can succeed anymore, I think we need to turn inward and begin to explore the interior

depths of our own consciousness. Because Jung was quite hip to this. He died in 63, I believe, but he lived long enough to recognize that, of course course we have the threat of nuclear war and we have all sorts of powerful technologies by which we could destroy ourselves. But for Jung, the real danger was not these technologies, the danger was ourselves and our lack of understanding of the human psyche. And so for me, yeah, a lot of my enquiries is into the nature of the human being and that maybe, you know, we can really only understand the universe through the human being. And I mean, in some sense, that's obvious.

Our perspective will always be a human perspective. But I think until we've grappled with this fundamental mystery, then the world itself will, all of our knowledge of nature and the universe will remain incomplete in some sense and will continue to be distracted by the pursuit of a kind of power and a kind of pleasure that is ultimately going to be unsatisfying. And I have a sense that, you know, when we have that last, we take that last breath before we die

and reflect on our lives that we'll really wish we weren't, you know, chasing pleasure and power and money. We'll really wish that we had spent more time contemplating the nature of our own existence and the mystery of being alive. contemplating the nature of our own existence and the mystery of being alive. And there are untold adventures to be had exploring that domain. And I think for a civilization to emerge out of the ashes of this one, we might be more fulfilled if we orient around these inner values and this inner exploration rather

than continuing with this outer expansive exploration because exploration because the last thing I'll say is I really have a strong sense and a powerful suspicion that our current understanding of the physical world as this you know gargantuan space mostly empty is just as short-sighted as the Ptolemaic conception of the solar system was, you know, 500 years ago. And that we are on the verge of a transformation in our Veldensang that will clue us into the fact that no matter how large that outer space may seem to us, it pales in comparison to the depths of the interiority of our own consciousness.

And so, a lot of materialists will say, oh, we're just some slime on a rock orbiting a, you know, middle-sized star in a half-ray galaxy or whatever, because we're so dwarfed by these infinite spaces. But I think with a slight reorientation in our sense of perspective, all of that hardly matters and doesn't make us insignificant

at all because after all, we're the ones that think that we know all of that. And we've discussed over the course of these few hours a series of inversions which have occurred in the history of philosophy. And I think we're on the verge of another one that will reorient us to thinking of human consciousness not just as a little blip inside of this gigantic cosmos but to bring more parity to the relationship between cosmos and consciousness. That actually consciousness has a far more important role to play in this universe than we might suspect if we imagine that we're just some slime growing on the edge of a rock in this infinite expanse of empty space.

Firstly, that's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that with me. Jung's idea of psychological wellbeing was heavily based on the individual. So rather than you focusing on society, you focus on yourself and your family and society in that order, something akin to that. Now, when you said that you're interested in the human being,

I'm interested if you are interested in Matt, or if you abstract away to the human being. So when you're sitting and you're philosophizing and you're ruminating, what are you thinking about? Are you actually decontextualizing to the point of saying the human being, quote unquote. Or are you also trying to understand who is it that you are, Matt? Well, it's both. I think there's a way in which that which is most intimate and personal for each of

us actually opens out into what's most universal. You see this in great works of art, you know, where a novelist or, you know, any kind of artist gives expression to something that is so personal and seemingly idiosyncratic and bizarre, but actually everyone can really connect with it because we feel that that person is being authentic. And even if we don't share that idiosyncratic thing with them, we can still recognize that inner weirdness that we all feel about the sheer fact that we exist. And when someone exposes themselves fully, it's like we just feel that connection with them

and say like, thank you, I feel more human now. My background is in math, physics, and filmmaking. And so in screenwriting, there's an adage which says the more personal the pain, the more general. And the more general the pain, the less personal it is. So I concur and I hope to

bring some of that to this podcast as well. So often, especially in longer conversations like with Ian McGillchrist or Karl Friston and so on, I get quite personal and even you're getting quite personal now. And so I'm a fan. I do believe there's something to this adage. And if you try and speak in these cliched generalities, it doesn't resonate with people. So anyhow, please tell us about your personal opinion. Hopefully people can get through the first two hours of this conversation about

the most general statements one can make about the universe and metaphysics and get to the kernel of it in this last however much time. But you mentioned Jung and the emphasis on the individual and you're absolutely right about that. But Jung would also say that the deeper we go into our own individuality, the more we start to enter back into the collective, the collective unconscious. Which for Jung was not just the collective unconscious of our species, of all humanity,

but the collective unconscious of all of life. And indeed, later in his career, he was recognizing the ways in which the depths of the psyche open out into the cosmos. And this is where his ideas of synchronicity come into play, that there is some profound relationship between the inner depths of the psyche and the outer expanses of the cosmos. And so, you know, I think his point there was, let us be very careful not to rush into various social movements, political movements when what's really happening is we're projecting our own personal psychological complexes onto the world and we have unresolved issues that we're blaming other people or we're blaming big abstractions, you know, we're blaming capitalism, it's all capitalism's fault,

which is what is what is capitalism exactly? And, you know, we can have a whole debates about various political economies and how the system should be run. But if if if we're having those debates, especially when we start to get really heated and, you know, we have a phenomenon unfolding right now in the US where somebody murders a CEO and everybody's like cheering him on. He's become a folk hero. And I get the anger and the frustration.

But at the same time, when we start to justify vigilante, you know, vigilantism and murder, we're stepping away from the individual as the locus of ultimate value. Individual souls, individual psyches are, I would say, the locus of ultimate value. And as soon as you allow a soul to become a means to whatever your ideological end is, such that you're willing to murder that person. I no longer know what the basis for this ideal of justice that you might claim to be fighting for is. Justice, you know, this is a platonic perspective, but like unless there are, unless souls are the locus of value that we're trying to seek justice for, then I'm not sure how you could fight for justice if you're willing to just murder individuals and pursue.

It's like your ideal of justice has become too abstract. You've lost the plot, as it were. And so, this is why we need to seek some balance here. Like I'm not saying politics is a distraction or something. So, you know, this is why we need to seek some balance here. Like I'm not saying politics is a distraction or something, but we need to not neglect our own individual psyche and not imagine that, you know, fall into this trap of thinking, oh, well well if only the good people were in charge everything would be fine Then we just need to kill off the bad people

Because that's the projection of evil Onto those people over there, and I think we really need to recognize that that evil lives potentially in each of us And if we're gonna overcome evil start at home start with yourself us and if we're going to overcome evil, start at home, start with yourself. All of the greatest crimes of history are a result of the projection of evil onto those people over there. And watching current events unfold, it's like, gosh, we haven't learned a damn thing. So what have you learned? You see this, it's a little blurry, but there's this painting behind me of Socrates.

It's a French painter from the 1800s. Jacques-Louis David. David, yeah, exactly. It's actually from 1987, which is the same year as the second edition of The Critique of Pure Reason. Nice. So I thought you would be a fan of that. Nice.

Awesome. Thank you for that. It's a depiction of the Platonic dialogue, the Phaedo, which comes after the apology when Athens sentences Socrates to death for corrupting the youth and not believing in the gods of the Athenian state. Socrates is actually offered exile instead of execution, but he's like, I'm not afraid to die. And you know, he felt a deep connection to his polis and accepted the judgment of his peers even though he thought that they were wrong and he knew that history would judge them poorly.

But he was ready to die. He was an old man. And so this painting depicts all of his students sort of in tears, like Socrates, just leave. Like, why are you doing, why are you killing yourself? And he's like, have I taught you nothing? Like, the soul is immortal. And so he's content to drink the hemlock

and says in this dialogue, Plato has him say, that all philosophy is preparation for dying. And, right, one way of cutting through all the distractions of life is to remember that you and everyone you love is going to die. This is not a possibility. this is not a maybe, this is absolutely certain. And to live your life backwards from the perspective of death affords you the greatest possibility of living a meaningful life, right?

Because it's in that final moment before that transition. And I do imagine it as a transition, not just as an end, but I don't know. But it's in that moment that everything becomes condensed and the meaning that might be extracted from life becomes as salient as it could be. And if you consider the values of our contemporary civilization, it couldn't be further from

this. We want to avoid death at all costs. We have a cult of youth and we want to not look at this inevitability. And so we live in denial for the most part. And we just want to accumulate goods and wealth and power, and you don't get to take any of that with you. All right. And so whether or not death is a transition or just an end, I think there's tremendous meaning to be reflected from staring it in the face

and not being afraid of death like it's something terrible. It's actually the source of all the meaning that we might have in life. And again, I think that's part of putting the human being, the mystery of human existence back at the center of all of our inquiry. We are mortal and yet we have this intuition of immortality. We don't know what happens when we die, but it seems to radiate profundity, you know, just to imagine what that moment might be. And I, you know, for me, me, when people ask, how did you get interested in philosophy? I often tell the story of being a seven year old

jumping on the bed as my mom was talking on the phone with a friend of hers. And I just realized, she was perfectly healthy at the time, but I just realized, oh my God, my mom's gonna die one day. And I just broke down in tears and I couldn't handle that as a seven year old.

And it was like two weeks of crying off and on until I realized that I was gonna die too. And my relationship to my own death wasn't sad. It wasn't a cause for crying hysterically. It was instead just profoundly mysterious to me. I couldn't understand how it could be possible. And then I started thinking about the fact that I was born and I don't really remember being born. I just seem to have always been alive.

And so to project ahead towards death, it's like maybe this isn't just a linear thing. All these creatures which have come before us over four billion years, that we exist today is a function of the fact that countless individual members of various species of organisms that are our ancestors have survived and achieved something and we're inheriting all of that. We should be grateful for that. Similarly, presumably there will be a future and what we achieve in the present will be inherited

by those future beings and if we can situate ourselves in that longer timeline instead of thinking, oh, all that matters is this body and when it dies, that's it, I'm out. Again, I think this is the basis, the ethical basis for a very different type of civilization that yeah, my my belt and shong would would prefer. Yeah, Matt.

Thank you so much for spending three hours with me. It's been a real pleasure, Kurt. Yeah. And I feel like we just scratched the surface. And I can keep going and going. I know you got to get going and I got to get going as well, but I appreciate it and we'll have to do this again. Sounds great, Kurt.

Yeah. Thank you for everything you do and look forward to future dialogues. I've been watching your channel for quite a number of years now and learned a lot from you and from your guests. Don't go anywhere just yet. Now I have a recap of today's episode brought to you by The Economist. Just as The Economist brings clarity to complex concepts, we're doing the same with our new AI-powered episode recap.

Here's a concise summary of the key insights from today's podcast. All right, diving deep today with Matt Siegel on process philosophy, courtesy of Kurt Jemungel, and theories of everything. You guys know Kurt, right? Doesn't mess around, really gets into the weeds. And process philosophy,

it's not just some light philosophical pondering. Oh no, this is heavy stuff. Rethinking how we see, well, everything. Reality, consciousness, the whole shebang. I think what's really cool about this conversation is how Kurt, with his physics background, keeps pushing Matt on these radical ideas. You can really feel the tension,

like two different worlds colliding. But to get the full impact, we need some context, right? Like how did we even get to this point where we need to rethink reality? Right, let's rewind, think back to the OG philosophers, Aristotle and all that. Aristotle with his ideas about substance and fixed properties, that's been the dominant worldview

for centuries, right? Yeah, it's shaped science, religion, that idea that the world is made up of separate things, each with its own essence, like a cat is a cat because of its catness. Makes sense on the surface, but then you have guys like, what was it, nominalism coming along? Nominalism, yeah. They started poking holes in that, saying maybe those universal categories like catness

are just names we give to things, not some fundamental truth about the universe. So it's all just human labeling. That's a bit unsettling, isn't it? Definitely shakes things up. And then you've got Descartes coming along and splitting everything into mind and matter. Descartes, talk about game changer. His ideas had a huge impact, but also

some pretty questionable consequences, like how we treat animals. For sure. Seeing animals as just machines because they don't have the same kind of mind as humans. Rough stuff. But it shows how these philosophical ideas have real world implications.

But okay, we can't talk about process philosophy without mentioning the big kahuna, Kant. Oh yeah, Kant, hold on tight, because this is where things get really trippy. He basically turned everything upside down, didn't he? Totally, instead of asking, what is the world? He asked, what must our minds be like to even understand the world? So he shifted the focus from the outside world to the inner world of the mind. Exactly. His Copernican revolution saying our minds actually structure

our experience of reality. We're not just passively observing, we're shaping it with our categories of understanding. Whoa, that's a lot to wrap your head around. So there's like a gap between how the world really is and how we perceive it. That's the phenomenal and numinal distinction. The world in itself versus the world as we experience it. And we can never fully grasp the world in itself because our minds are always in the way shaping things. Like looking through tinted glasses, you never see the true colors.

Kinda, but it makes you realize that objectivity is a lot more complicated than we usually think. Okay, my brain is already starting to hurt. But wait, wasn't there someone who tried to apply Kant's ideas to the entire universe? You're thinking of Schelling. He took that mind-blowing stuff and said, hey, what if the whole cosmos works like that? So instead of a clockwork universe, he saw something more dynamic. Way more dynamic.

He envisioned this universe in constant evolution, self-organizing through these polarities like gravity and light. Like a cosmic dance, always changing, never static. Beautiful imagery, right. And he even flirted with panpsychism, the idea that some form of mind might be present in everything. Wait, hold up.

So my coffee mug has feelings. It's a radical idea. But it makes sense if you see the universe as this interconnected dynamic whole. I'm going to need a bigger coffee mug for this. But where does Hegel fit into all of this? Wasn't he the guy who thought he had it all figured out with his dialectic?

Hegel, oh, man, ambitious guy. His dialectic thesis, antithesis, synthesis. He saw it as the engine of reality, driving everything forward. Like a cosmic argument, always moving towards some higher truth. Exactly. And not just ideas, history too. He saw the whole of human history as this unfolding dialectical process. Wow.

But even with all that, Hagel was still stuck in that substance-based view, wasn't he? Yeah, he was. It's Whitehead who really takes the leap into a fully process-oriented worldview. Okay, finally we get to Whitehead. Yeah. The guy, right?

Yeah. The father of process philosophy. The one and only. And he came to philosophy from math and physics, which is interesting. Yeah, I bet that gave him a different perspective. Didn't he have some issues with how science separates subjective experience from objective reality?

Big time. He called it the bifurcation of nature and said it's a big mistake. Nature is everything we experience, the redness of a rose, the scent of pine, not just these cold hard facts that science focuses on. So he's saying we need to bring the richness of experience back into our understanding of the world. Absolutely. And here comes the kicker. He said the world isn't made of static things,

but of events. Actual occasions, he called them. Momentary bursts of experience, feeling, influencing each other. So instead of a universe of nouns, it's a universe of verbs, constantly changing and becoming. You got it. And those of a universe of nouns, it's a universe of verbs, constantly changing and becoming. You got it.

And those processes aren't just mechanical, they're experiential. He actually said the universe is a medium for the transmission of feelings. Whoa, feelings. Now we're really getting into the deep end here. I know, right? It's mind blowing stuff.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. All right, so we left off with this idea of the universe as a network of feeling these actual occasions constantly influencing each other. Pretty wild stuff, right? Yeah, my brain's still trying to catch up. But it's interesting how Kurt really digs into this with Matt Seagal.

Like, what does it actually mean for reality to be a process? Yeah, Kurt doesn't let him get away with just fancy words. He wants the concrete implications. Which is what we all want, right? How does this change the way we see the world? Exactly. And Matt emphasizes how different it is from this substance-based thinking that's dominated for so long.

He's saying we need to shift from nouns to verbs, from static things to dynamic processes. Okay, I'm starting to get the picture. It's not about what things are, but about how they're constantly becoming. Right, everything is in flux, and this is where that idea of prehension comes in. It's how those actual occasions connect and influence each other. We touched on that, but it's a tough one. It's not just cause and effect like billiard balls. It's more like dot experiential.

Yeah, that's the key. Even at the most basic level, there's an element of experiencing, of being affected by the world around you. Whitehead even calls it a kind of feeling. Okay, wait, my coffee cup is feeling something when I pick it up. Well, maybe not feeling like we do with emotions and all that, but the idea is that there's a kind of proto-consciousness, a basic awareness woven into reality itself. Whoa, that's a lot to process. I bet Kurt had some questions about that. Oh, absolutely. He jumps right in asking about those infinite possibilities that process philosophy talks about. Does Matt really mean all possibilities? Like,

could I suddenly turn into a giraffe? Huh, that's what I was wondering too. It sounds pretty out there. Yeah, it gets to the heart of how we understand possibility and even randomness. And this is where the conversation gets really interesting because it leads into a discussion of God. God, I thought process philosophy was all about like, immanence and interconnectedness. It is, but it reimagines God's role. Instead of the all-powerful creator, Whitehead sees God more as a cosmic DJ, a curator of

possibilities. So, God's not pulling the strings, but more like setting the stage, shaping the overall flow of experience. That's a great way to put it. And Matt even suggests that this divine function isn't separate from the universe, it's like an emergent property of creativity itself. Okay, my brain is officially doing backflips now. But you know, Kurt couldn't resist bringing up the big one, the elephant in the room, free will.

Of course, it's the classic philosophical problem. If everything is so interconnected and influencing each other, how can we possibly have genuine freedom of choice? Yeah, doesn't process philosophy just turn us into puppets? Matt acknowledges that our choices are definitely constrained by our biology, our past, all sorts of choice. Yeah, doesn't process philosophy just turn us into puppets? Matt acknowledges that our choices are definitely constrained by our biology, our past, all sorts of factors. But he insists that we still experience a sense of agency, especially in our mental lives. So it's not about having unlimited

freedom, but about becoming more aware of the factors that shape our choices, like recognizing the currents we're swimming in. Exactly, and the more we understand those currents, the more skillfully we can navigate them. He connects us to Jung's idea of individuation, that process of integrating the unconscious parts of ourselves. So instead of being ruled by unconscious forces, we become conscious participants in our own lives. That's the idea. It's a journey of self-discovery and cultivation. And then Kurt does what he does best and brings it back to the personal. What does it actually mean to live

in a process-oriented universe? That's the real question, right? And Matt, to his credit, admits he doesn't have all the answers. He's still figuring it out himself. But he's passionate about this question of what it means to be human. That's something we can all relate to, right? Trying to make sense of our own existence.

Totally. And Matt suggests that understanding ourselves is the key to understanding everything else. Until we grapple with that mystery, all our knowledge of the universe will always be incomplete. It's like you saying the most important journey is inward, not outward. Exactly. And he really challenges this idea that humanity is insignificant, just a speck of dust in a vast cosmos. He points out that it's our consciousness, our ability to wonder and understand, that makes the universe meaningful in the first place.

So we're not just passive observers. We're active participants in the cosmic drama. And that's why he emphasizes the shift from external conquest to inner exploration. It's about self-discovery, not just accumulating stuff or conquering nature. It's like a call to action, a reorientation of our whole civilization.

It is, and he connects this to the idea of mortality. Facing our own finitude rather than denying it can actually give our lives more meaning and urgency. Wow, that's deep. It's like by embracing our mortality, we become more alive in the present moment. He even shares a personal story about how his own fascination with philosophy

was sparked by confronting the inevitability of death. It's a reminder that these big ideas aren't just abstract concepts, they're rooted in our lived experiences. I love that, it brings it all back down to earth. Wow, this has been quite a journey. We've covered so much ground Process philosophy consciousness God free will and it all seems to point toward this shift in perspective this move away from a purely

Materialistic view of reality. It's about recognizing the interconnectedness of everything the inherent creativity of the universe and the profound significance of our own consciousness. But Matt saves one final mind-bender for the end, something that really challenges our assumptions about the cosmos. So remember how we've been talking about the shift, you know, from focusing on the external world to exploring the inner world? Well, Matt takes it even further and says our picture of the universe with all that vast empty space, might be totally skewed. Skewed how? You mean like our maps of the cosmos are wrong?

Not exactly. He's saying it's more like we're still stuck in a kind of cosmic egocentrism. Cosmic egocentrism? Catchy. What does that even mean? Think about it. We're still judging importance based on physical size.

Like, oh, the universe is huge-y-y and we're just tiny little specks, so we must be insignificant. I see what you mean. Kind of like how people used to think Earth was the center of the universe. Exactly. And Matt's saying maybe we're doing

the same thing with consciousness. We're assuming the physical realm is all there is, so we miss the vastness of what's happening inside. Hold on. So you're saying the real frontier isn't outer space, but inner space. That's the idea What if the inner depths of our consciousness are actually more significant than all those galaxies and nebulae?

It's like flipping the script on materialism. So instead of consciousness being a product of the material world. It's actually the foundation That's the radical proposition. Yeah, and he challenges those who say oh the foundation. That's the radical proposition. Yeah. And he challenges those who say, oh, humans are just a cosmic accident. Yeah, you hear that a lot these days. They can be pretty depressing. But Matt points out, like, who's even having those thoughts? Who's looking out at this vast universe and feeling small? It's our consciousness that allows us to grasp the immensity of it all. I never thought of it that way. It's like the very act of contemplating the universe reveals the importance of consciousness. Exactly. It's like the very act of contemplating the universe reveals the importance of consciousness Exactly without consciousness the universe would just be well meaningless

I'm starting to see how all these threads we've been pulling on process philosophy consciousness the nature of God They all lead to this shift in perspective. It's about moving beyond this materialistic reductionist view that's dominated for so long. And embracing something more holistic, more interconnected, recognizing the richness of experience, the mystery of consciousness, the creativity inherent in the universe itself. It's a pretty inspiring vision, actually. It is, but it's not just a nice idea.

Matt ends with a real call to action. He says we need to reorient our civilization around inner exploration. Make self-discovery the priority instead of just chasing material wealth and power. That's it. And he sees this as essential for dealing with the huge challenges we're facing, you know? Climate change, social inequality, all that.

Makes sense. If we're all just focused on ourselves in our own little bubble, we're not gonna solve these global problems. Exactly. And it's gotta start with a shift in consciousness, a recognition of our interconnectedness. And he connects this to the idea of mortality.

Mortality, as in facing the fact that we're all gonna die. Not exactly a cheery topic. No, but he makes a really interesting point. He says facing our own finitude instead of running from it can give our lives more meaning and urgency. It helps us focus on what really matters. So it's not about living forever, it's about making the most of the time we have. Exactly. And this isn't just some abstract theory for Matt. He actually shared a personal story about how thinking about death as a kid sparked his whole fascination with philosophy. So it's like a personal journey, not just an intellectual exercise.

That's what makes it so powerful, and I think that's what this whole conversation with Kurt is all about. It's about grappling with these big questions, these fundamental mysteries of existence, and it's not about finding all the answers, it's about the journey itself. And maybe, through that journey, we can start to create a better world. More compassionate, more sustainable, more in tune with the universe and ourselves. It's a lot to think about for sure. Definitely. If the universe is truly this dynamic web of feeling, this interconnected dance of experience, what role do you want to play? That's the question we're all left with.

New update! Start Started a sub stack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts as well as some other mathematical details. Much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything. It's not on Patreon. Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future.

Several people ask me, hey Kurt, you've spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy, and consciousness. What are your thoughts? While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. Also thank you to our partner, The Economist. Firstly thank you for watching, thank you for listening. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself,

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