First, here’s a clip of Iain McGilchrist’s impromptu remarks on the opening night of our “Metaphysics and the Matter With Things” conference (which happened to be Good Friday).
Next, my welcome and opening comments about the conference (partial transcript to follow):
Welcome to CIIS. I’m Matt Segall. I’m an associate professor here in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program. I’m curious, how many of you are here at CIIS for the first time? OK. How many of you are from outside of California? Anyone from overseas? Okay, well, welcome. You’ve come a long way. We really appreciate it. This, as Andrew [Davis] has said, has been a few years in the making. A lot goes on behind the scenes, but it’s been remarkably serendipitous.
Something is the matter. And we’ve gathered this weekend to attempt to address it. It happens to be Good Friday. Iain humorously reminded us of that. But for many, it’s a day of mourning, of crucifixion, but also of great and transformative sacrifice. And it’s not an inappropriate context for our conference. Our world is suffering. Nations are at war with more threatening to join the fray. Earth itself is convulsing. A mass extinction of species is well underway, the sixth great mass extinction in Earth’s history. Human civilization is teetering on the edge. You might say on one side there are transhuman delusions and on the other side reactionary tribalisms, and so many more issues that we are facing. We’re losing our way. We’re threatened by other lies, nationalism, materialism, the list goes on. But who are we? We, who are we? This is a quote that Iain begins his book with from Plotinus, the Enneads. We probably know no more about ourselves today than in Plotinus’ time thousands of years ago. Why is that?
Whatever we are, we’re more than Americans or Brits, more than a gender or race. We’re more than a pack of neurons hallucinating its way through a make-believe world. As Iain himself has made very clear, while his books are about the brain, the brain permits consciousness. It does not create consciousness. The brain is a portal and not a producer. We are more than our brains. And so it is not just a matter of becoming more right-brained, but of becoming more human.
We’ve assembled an all-star team of neuroscientists and psychologists, of physicists and biologists, philosophers, artists, theologians. This is an all-hands-on-deck situation. And Iain’s work demands this kind of inter- or even transdisciplinary engagement. Our conference speakers will attempt to look through the lenses that Iain has fashioned, and they’ll also be looking through lenses of their own crafting, in an attempt to perceive some ways forward.
We may not have an easy answer as to why there is something rather than nothing. But we do know that our existence matters. We all feel it, even if we can’t yet or may never be able to fully articulate why it matters. But the fact that we feel something is the matter already signals that some ideal alternative is possible. And this alternative is beckoning to us from beyond what’s given.
So we know we, this, matters. We also know for certain, and it’s perhaps the only thing we know for certain, that none of us is making it out of this life alive. And yet we make meaning anyway. We must. All of you are here, I assume, because you’ve been influenced by Iain’s work and because you’re striving for what William James called Something More. And I’m grateful to each of you for joining this effort. This is a collaborative conversational conference. We will have ample time for your contributions this weekend.
Iain’s offering us a diagnosis. All civilizations rise and fall, but this time may be different. The wave of progress has grown higher and more massive, making our world more interconnected and more fragile than ever before. And we still have a chance. I know Iain well enough to know he’s actually optimistic. The diagnosis that Iain has made suggests that the evil we face is not out there. It’s not those other people. It’s in ourselves. We must remember who we are.
We are currently editing the conference recordings (including the opening remarks Iain delivered on Friday night, as well as all the dialogue between sessions). These will be released in full to those who registered (whether in-person or online) in the coming weeks.
Finally, here is my presentation during the Philosophy and Aesthetics session on Saturday, March 30. My title is “In Defense of Truth as Participation: A Process Philosophical Proposal.”
Here’s a rough transcript of my remarks (h/t to Kent Bye for this!):
All right. So my talk is on truth in defense of truth as participation. It’s a proposal, a process philosophical proposal. You’ll note if you’ve seen the program, the schedule that Carolyn who’s going last, her talk is titled in defense of fiction, but we’ve conferred in advance and actually they’re both totally compatible with one another. And that should become clear. I’m often referred to and called a Whiteheadian philosopher, but having studied Whitehead for almost two decades, I know I look young, but I’ve been at this for a while. I think that would really disappoint Whitehead that there was such a thing as a Whiteheadian. I’m not resistant to process philosopher as a title, and I obviously do love Whitehead’s thought, but I think, yeah, to be pigeonholed in that way is something that I resist. I remember Cornel West once, who I love to hear lecture, talked about the narrow specializations that academic philosophers get into, and he loves Whitehead too, but he said, a Whiteheadian, how narrow? And I was like, oh, that hit me. So process philosopher, please. Thank you. Ian’s The Matter With Things, two volumes, each about eight pounds each. Volume one, The Ways to Truth. Volume two, What Then Is True? And so I couldn’t help but, there they are. I couldn’t help but really try to zoom in and zoom out in one gesture on this topic of truth, and I’m going to do so from a process philosophical point of view. But before we even get into the topic, it’s important to remember what Rabbi Jacob Agus says here that he in quotes in Chapter 10, truth is a noun only to God. To men and women, truth is really best known as an adverb, truly. So as a way of setting the scene here, sure, as a way of setting the scene here, I wanna quote Whitehead. So we get a sense for truth and the partiality of our perspective upon truth, right? So he says, philosophy has to rescue the facts as they are from the facts as they appear. We view the sky at noon on a fine day. It is blue. flooded by the light of the sun. The direct fact of observation is the sun as the sole origin of light and the bare heavens. The sky is blue. True statement, right? Whitehead continues. Conceive the myth of Adam and Eve in the garden on the first day of human life. They watched the sunset, the stars appear. And lo, creation widened to man’s view. The excess of light He concludes, discloses facts and also conceals them. So we are finite creatures. This is a defense of truth. And yet as finite creatures, we can only ever have a partial perspective on the capital T truth, right? We know truly. Who can hold the truth? for us, right? You, you, me? No, no, we can’t hold the truth with a capital T as individuals. We must all hold it together. All of the partial perspectives together. And who are we all together? And not just human beings in a pan experientialist sense, Who are we all together? Well, Whitehead had a word for that. It’s been around for a while. He called it God. Whitehead’s God is not some kind of divine dictator. He even denies that God is a creator. God, for Whitehead, is a creature, the first creature of what he calls creativity, but nonetheless a creature. So rather than creator, I would say for Whitehead, God is a Relator with a capital R. God is the Relator. And I have to add here, if Mike is listening, you know, similarly, what does one cell know of truth, of the truth of our whole bodies? And what can all cells know together? Well, they know us, our consciousness, which literally means knowing together. And so we can see this analogy playing out. Michael made that analogy earlier between the music of the brain, this neural symphony, and the human being immersed in the music of the spheres. So this is a very different approach to theology and also to truth. And I think it might at first seem odd why, I would immediately go to theology in order to understand this concept of truth, because in our day and age, we think of truth as something scientific. And in science, you don’t make reference to the G word. Footnotes to Plato. Whitehead’s comment is sometimes misquoted to make it sound a little stronger than it is. He says, the safest general characterization of the history of European philosophy is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. And then he goes on to make another qualifying statement, but it’s often just quoted as all of philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. But Tritha’s participation is certainly a platonic idea. And the way that Whitehead articulates this is he says that the things which are temporal, that’s us, arise by their participation in the things which are eternal, that’s also us. Temporal actualities and eternal potentialities are mediated by this primordial divine entity. God as the relator between actuality and potentiality, or God as the ideal realization of potentialities, per Whitehead, constitutes the reason why we should be able to even do metaphysics at all, whether we try to do so propositionally or musically. whether we try to do so by letting the implicit remain implicit, showing and not telling, or whether we try, as he did, to write a 350-page book, Process and Reality, to spell out the eight categories of existence and the 27 categories of explanation. Is it 26 or 27? It’s, as Ian knows, difficult to comprehend. Whitehead, the logician, he had two hemispheres and he uses them both But the fact that there could even be such a thing as metaphysics for Whitehead suggests that there is this ground, this divine ground, this ideal realization of potentialities. And again, though for Whitehead, his process theology is such that we have to let go of the idea of God as a creator. God does not create the world, but Whitehead says by the patient operation, of the overpowering rationality of conceptual harmonization, God functions as the poet of the world with tender patience, luring the world process toward ever deeper forms of truth, beauty, and goodness. So if, and when we as finite creatures know the truth, we do so by partaking in this divine reality, in this divine relation. And in a creative, Cosmos, the thing is that the truth is never finished. You cannot state the truth once and for all. The truth is always becoming enriched by every new fact which emerges in the history of the world. Each new perspective, as it concresces, is his term, and I’ll get into that. We’re gonna do a very quick introduction to Whitehead’s account of what concrescence is. It’s the production of novelty, to use the simplest phrase. But with each concrescence, with each emergent fact and value, because for Whitehead, that’s two ways of describing the same thing. New truths are coming into the world. New propositions are coming into the world. And for Whitehead, a proposition is not just at the top of that stack that John Vervaeke has described for us. He describes propositions as feelings which propagate through the world far below the level of our verbal human consciousness. And in fact, what we try to verbalize as a proposition is almost, no, not almost, never, containing the entirety of the subtlety of the propositional feeling that we’re actually trying to refer to with a sentence in English or even in mathematics. So I’m summarizing Whitehead here in this first bullet point where he says that truth is nothing more nor less than how the partial experiences of the many creatures of the physical world find adequate expression within the divine nature which far from being frozen for all time, evolves in its relationship to the evolving world. And so when we think about truth, we need to go beyond just the scientific account of the facts, which is absolutely essential. We gotta get the facts right, but science itself is the expression of a value, is the expression of a, as Whitehead says in this third bullet point, of a religious value, of religious interest, right? Philosophy frees itself from the taint of ineffectiveness, he says, and attains its chief importance by fusing religion and science into one rational scheme of thought. The demand for an intellectual justification of brute experience has been the motive power in the advance of science. In this sense, scientific interest is only a variant form of religious interest. Any survey of the scientific devotion to truth as an ideal will confirm this statement. Now, in the modern period, science and religion have gone their separate ways. And philosophy has given up on the attempt for the most part to fuse the two. Polemic is the name of the game in most philosophy departments when it comes to adjudicating the relationship between science and religion. In his 1920 book, The Concept of Nature, Whitehead articulates what he called the bifurcation of nature. And this was one of the major moments when in the 17th century, the modern scientific method was brought forth and articulated. All of the scientists who did articulate it were deists and they wouldn’t have even imagined that the world might be rationally explainable and mathematically explainable if it had not been designed by an all powerful deity. I mean, there was a direct connection for Newton, even for Galileo, for Descartes that science is possible because the world is divinely ordered and our mind has been divinely created so as to know that order. And there are certainly problems with the way that they formulated that, but we should never forget as a matter of historical development, that science comes out of this scholastic theological philosophy that imagined there’s an intelligible ground to nature. We would not have had science and mechanistic reductionism if it didn’t come out of this origin, right? But Whitehead sees the problem here, this bifurcation of nature. It’s not the same as Descartes’ dualism between the thinking substance and the extended substance. It’s a bit subtler than that. At this point, Whitehead wasn’t yet doing metaphysics, right? This is the concept of nature, 1920. Process and reality is 1929. He’s still in England in 1920, and he’s thinking about the philosophy of science and the way that science generally splits our experience of the world in two. There’s the world described by mathematical physicists, which is a kind of mere conjecture. And then there’s the world described by nature poets and the world of our everyday experience, which has colors and sense and sounds. The world described by physics is merely mathematical. It has no value. It has no qualitative texture. Whitehead writes, what I’m essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which insofar as they are real are real in different senses. One reality would be the entities such as electrons, which are the study of speculative physics. This would be the reality which is there for knowledge. Although on this theory, it is never known. For what is known is the other sort of reality, which is the bioplay of the mind. Thus there would be two natures, one, the conjecture, the other, the dream. So the bi-play of the mind is all the qualitative richness of the world described by Wordsworth. And the reality, which is therefore knowledge, but never known because all we really know is our subjective little perspective that the romantics tried to glorify, but that the scientific perspective says is merely a secondary, a set of secondary characteristics projected by our organism. Nature out there is just matter in motion, but even in a more advanced physics, it’s just a formula, a formula describing a transition and it’s transition in no reason of, we don’t know what, we don’t even know what matter is anymore. And so how did these two realities fit together? They’re both real in some sense, but the way that the modern scientific project was inaugurated split them and it forgot that it had done so. What happens to truth after this bifurcation? Well, Whitehead describes what he calls the sensationalist doctrine. And it’s this understanding of all knowledge of the external world arising solely through the mediation of private sensations of our eyes, our ears. You’ve probably heard of qualia in the philosophy of mind. This is an idea shared by empiricists like Hume, rationalists like Descartes, and even transcendentalists like Kant, who tried to bring empiricism and rationalism together in some sense. There’s this assumption that the human mind knows about the world through the outward facing senses. And so what this amounts to, and Hume’s analysis especially, is that all experience of the external world is derived from and reducible to the isolated sensory impressions of bare universals, redness, circularity, et cetera, a tone, music, provided by the five sense organs. Thus perception and cognition are cut off from the real causal transactions of the world. So causality becomes a major problem, right? If all we experience are these sense impressions, Hume pointed out, we have no evidence for necessary connection in nature, no evidence for causality. And so how is science even possible? So for Hume, what this meant is that causality is but a figment of our imagination. It’s a function of our habits of perception and our customary associations of our impressions. And for human idea, is not a form as Plato had it, but it’s a faded impression. And even for Kant, causality, not a habit, but it’s an a priori category, appended to, added to what is otherwise a chaotic swarm of sensations, a necessary condition, he would say, of any cognizable experience. So for Hume, causation is just a psychological association, has no purchase on the real world, and for Kant, It’s a category that we must apply to our experience, but we shouldn’t, if we’re careful Kantians, and it turns out even Kant himself slipped up here, we shouldn’t be applying causality to a world out there independent of our minds. So what is the mind then? It’s in the business only of fabricating an inner picture of the world. It’s leaving reality itself unknowable. And so we end up in a position where we’re describing our experience as this secondary phenomenon of representations built up of sensory impressions. And we can’t say what the actual entities might be behind the veil that’s shrouding us from them. So this is a screenshot of a YouTube thumbnail from a channel called Big Think and is reality real? They interview people like Donald Hoffman and Bernardo Castro and in different ways, they all suggest that reality isn’t real. What does that mean? Well, it means that we make it up in our heads more or less. But Whitehead points out the problem here because all the while, while Hume said that causality is just psychological association, science went about producing instrumental knowledge that has transformed everything that we do. The technology works, and that’s always the defense when scientists wanna do table-banging defenses of realism. They say, well, it works. But epistemologically and philosophically, there’s a problem here, and let me read what Whitehead says. The modern doctrine, the sensationalist doctrine I was describing, raises a great difficulty in the interpretation of modern science for all exact observation is made in private psychological fields. Right. We see something because it is light reaches our retina and goes to the back of the brain and it’s a representation is created. This is all happening inside the skull and Whitehead jokes in science in the modern world is 1925 He says, some people express themselves as though brains and nerves and sense organs are the only real things in an entirely imaginary world. He continues in this quote here from Process and Reality, all exact observation is made in private psychological fields. It is then no use talking about instruments and laboratories and physical energy. What is really being observed are narrow bands of color sense and the private psychological space of color vision. The impressions of sensation which collectively form this entirely private experience, he quotes Hume, arise in the soul from unknown causes. The spectroscope is a myth. The radiant energy is a myth. The observer’s eye is a myth. The observer’s brain is a myth. And the observer’s record of his experiment on a sheet of paper is a myth. And he means myth in the pejorative sense of lie. He’s not a Jungian. He’s not speaking Jungian or Campbellian here. When some months later, he reads his notes to a learned society, he has a new visual experience of black marks on a white background in a new private psychological field. And again, these experiences arise in his soul from unknown causes. It is merely custom, which leads him to connect his earlier with his later experiences. So philosophically, that’s the situation that we’re in if we take this sensationalist doctrine that the only points of contact we have with the external world or through the five basic senses. Now, Ian quotes Erwin Chargaff, a biochemist quite often in his books. And Chargaff says that the wise scientists will be aware of the eternal predicament that between him and the world, there always is the barrier of the human brain. And I add here, yes, and every barrier is also a means of contact. And so the question is, how does Whitehead restore contact And he develops a theory of perception where what the philosophical tradition has thought of as our only point of contact with the world, which isn’t actually a form of contact, it’s always a representational simulation through the five senses. Whitehead calls that presentational immediacy. And he admits it’s essential for making accurate measurements of the natural world as it exists in any given moment of our experience. Then there’s this other mode of perception that he calls causal efficacy. Whereas Hume and Kant and other modern philosophers, Kant said that, well, causality must be a category we add to experience. And Hume says, oh, it’s just a habit that we build up through various experiences. But Whitehead says, wait a minute, Hume, you said we see with our eyes. And Hume says, we see with our eyes, the billiard ball hit the other billiard ball and nowhere do we see necessary connection. But Whitehead reminds him, you just said we see with our eyes. We have a direct feeling of causal transmission in our own living bodies. That’s causal efficacy. And Whitehead points out that all modern philosophers have been obsessed with their visual experience and they have disdained their visceral experience. And his is a philosophy of emotion we heard earlier. It’s a philosophy of feeling. Oh, I’m aware that this was a video and that’s not gonna work. Guess we don’t get to learn about concrescence in 30 seconds. This is a diagram of concrescence, not animated. The basic process is the past growing together, the many finished actualities of the past grow together into a new subjective perspective. And then as soon as that subjective perspective that has turned the conflicting array of objects in its past into some new harmonization brought conflicts into contrasts. It is an aesthetic satisfaction is achieved, which immediately then perishes. And that subjective perspective becomes what Whitehead calls a superject. And it gifts itself to the future. It’s made some new value of the past that then it hands off to the future. And there’s a transition between concrescences. And those transitions are feelings. And this happens from the quantum scale on up for Whitehead. And he brings forth this novel category or concept of prehension, right? And prehension is this process of feeling whereby the past grows together into a new subjective perspective, right? And we have physical prehensions of the past, which can be conformal if we repeat what has just occurred, or they can be non-conformal when some creativity enters and we adjust what we’ve received from the past. move up the scale of complexity in nature, the capacity for adjustment, which Whitehead would also call mind, gradually intensifies. And so the novelty that can be introduced by any given concrescence increases if you’re talking about the concrescences occurring in the nervous system of a dolphin or a human being versus the molecules that compose a rock. And with this concept of prehension, the problems Whitehead says of efficient causation and of knowledge receive a common explanation. What does he mean by that? It means that this, the causal transmission of feelings through nature are of the same kind as our own understanding, which Whitehead says is a form of feeling itself. It’s a form of feeling, of feeling, of feeling, a whole hierarchy of feelings that’s organized by our very complex bodies. But in terms of, the metaphysical principles at play, there is no difference between the causal transmission through the inorganic world and the feeling of what we call knowledge and consciousness in ourselves. Now, he’s not saying that consciousness goes all the way down. Consciousness is this very special form of feeling that involves a comparison between the actually given past and a possibility And again, as organisms become more complex, they can enter into that space of possibility to adjust what they’re receiving from the past to explore alternatives. But it’s all feeling, right? And we’ll talk about physical feelings, inheriting from the past and conceptual feelings where we’re drawing on possibilities. I need to wrap up here. So he says this transference of feeling affects a partial identification of cause with effect, right? Conformal feelings. It’s not a mere representation of the cause. This process of prehensive unification I’m very quickly trying to describe to you is the cumulation of the universe and not a stage play about it. Physical feelings embody the reproductive character of nature and also the objective immortality of the past. Everything that happens is inherited by the next moment. Each moment of our experience includes the entirety of the universe which has come before us. And don’t worry, you don’t have to remember all of that inside your head. It’s there, everywhere, right? Memory is non-local. And so the take home here is that for Whitehead, the world itself is a medium for the transmission of feelings. Truth is a conformal feeling, feeling what was real then and there and what appears here and now. So the proposal here is that contrary to Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus published in 1922, I believe, who said that the world is just the totality of facts, Contrary to this claim, in Whitehead’s view, the world is also composed of an infinity of forms. It’s not just a totality of facts. And what is a form? A form is a possibility. So the world, in other words, is pregnant with possibilities. Whatever has actually occurred is haloed by up a number of unrealized potentials. We prehend, which could be a synonym for perceive, remember, think, not just what is, but what could be. The actual and the possible are held in relation by each moment of experience. So whether we’re doing science, whether we’re enraptured in some mystical experience, communing with the divine, our human finitude is going to prevent us from apprehending the truth in its entirety. And this isn’t just a function of our biological and psychological limitations. It’s also because of our spiritual freedom to influence what may yet become true. The truth is a process. Even God doesn’t know what’s going to happen next in Whitehead’s process theology. And so we are participants in making true what may not yet be true. So in this process view, the cosmos itself is an incomplete open-ended cosmogenesis rather than a fixed order. We are incapable of any final apprehension of ultimate truth because human beings as much as God and the world as a whole remain unfinished and bound up in this reciprocal co-creative process. And I wanna leave us with this, one of the applications, implications of this, the McGilchrist wager. which is building on Pascal’s wager, which you’ve all probably heard before, but with the McGilchrist version of this, rather than having to decide between the two propositions, either God exists or doesn’t exist. And, you know, Pascal says it would be better if we just assume that God does exist because if it ends up not being true, well, then we die and disappear forever. But if we don’t believe in it does end up being true, then well, from Pascal’s point of view, we end up burning in hell. This is not that kind of theology. There’s also this possibility that Pascal didn’t consider with just these two binary propositions, God is or God is not, right? It could be that the truth or falsity of divine existence depends in some way on our own dispositional attitude toward the proposition. So what if God is not prior, but consequent to faith? What if God is not prior, but consequent to faith? So faith then is not a belief in this or that proposition. It’s a way of affirmatively comporting ourselves to the mystery of being alive. So the McGill-Christ wager, as Ian himself puts it, is that if the nature of reality is not already fixed, but rather evolving, participatory, reverberative, it is both rational and important to open our minds and our hearts to the divine in order to bring whatever it is evermore into existence. And so we use this word, God, but we should never assume we know what it means beyond our capacity to enter ever more deeply into relationship with one another and with this creative process. And so we don’t need to oppose religious or spiritual faith to some rational commitment to the truth. It may be that knowing anything truly, whether in science or in other domains of human experience, presupposes this dispositional trust that this living reality may be responsive to our epistemic intuitions and to our ethical intentions. Thank you for your attention.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?