Debating the Place of the Human in Cosmology with Brendan Graham Dempsey

After some back and forth in his Facebook group, Brendan was gracious enough to invite me on his Metamodernism podcast to discuss several core ideas, including the nature of scientific inquiry, the role of human experience in understanding the cosmos, and the limitations of mechanistic models in science. We discussed the intersection of philosophy, science, and spirituality, and the need to revisit the dominant mechanistic worldview that emerged from modern science. Brendan and I will be recording part 2 next week to go a bit deeper into what Whitehead means by “prehension” and how this concept makes feeling or some low grade form of nonconscious subjective experience basic for understanding causal processes at every scale.

Key points from the discussion include:

1. Revisiting the Mechanistic Worldview: Both of us acknowledge the need to re-evaluate the Cartesian mechanistic view of science, which often leads to a sense of alienation and a reductionistic view of the cosmos. I suggest that a different approach to science, inheriting from the Romantic tradition (especially Schelling’s Naturphilosophie and Goethe’s scientific method), could be more holistic and inclusive of Nature’s qualitative aspects.
2. Science and Human Experience: I try to emphasize the importance of integrating science with human experience. Truly understanding nature requires taking a participatory approach, where thought and perception are considered intrinsic parts of the scientific process and the natural world itself rather than being seen as separate or peripheral epiphenomena.
3. Role of Models in Science: Brendan raises concerns about the implications of prioritizing human experience over abstract models in scientific inquiry. He questions whether this approach might lead to rejecting well-established scientific theories like the Big Bang or the theory of relativity. Here I argue for a balance where models are used as tools for understanding but are not conflated with reality itself. Model-making is a valuable process productive of instrumental knowledge, or what Owen Barfield referred to as “dashboard knowledge.” But knowing how to manipulate or predict the behavior of various subsets of the natural world is not the same thing as understanding the real causal (indeed, prehensive) processes driving those behaviors. On the Whiteheadian reading, even causality in physics involves a form of experience or feeling, blurring the line between subjectivity and objectivity. These become phases in a process (Whitehead calls this process “concrescence”), rather than dissociated domains or separate substances.

Here’s a link to the article that Brendan quotes from in The Journal for Holistic Science, titled “Goethe and Whitehead: Steps to a Science of Organism.” For those who’d prefer an audio/visual rendering of the ideas articulated in that article, here’s a lecture and animated slide deck I delivered as part of a course on participatory science for Schumacher College:

Stay tuned for part 2!