Below is a rough transcript of my dialogue with Sam.
Sam: Do you mind just giving a definition? What is mechanistic materialism?
Matt: Mechanistic philosophy emerges in the 16th and 17th centuries in Western Europe and it’s really a rather sharp divergence from the sort of worldview that had characterized human societies for thousands of years on every continent, which would be a more animist understanding that nature is alive, imbued with some sort of spiritual power and that human beings participate in that power. Then this mechanistic philosophy arises in the modern period in Europe as part of the Scientific Revolution on the basis of the idea that the human being, the human soul, and maybe the human spirit are made of a different kind of stuff and are separate from nature. Scientists in this period in the 16th and 17th century are gradually articulating this dualism, and they put spirit to the side, they put the human mind, human consciousness to one side, and what’s left is this material world of extended matter in motion. As Descartes famously articulates it, we have these mathematical ideas which give us the capacity to clearly and distinctly map the motions of the measurable masses of the observable world around us. He, in mathematics, pulls off this amazing trick of connecting geometry to algebra and, as a result, the mathematical imagination is supercharged and you start to get the ability to do what Newton eventually does and then Hamilton and all these other scientists that give us this ability to mathematically map motion in what we call space and time. That mechanistic approach was dominant and so powerful and transformative for several hundred years. Then about a century ago, it ran into some walls and that decision a few hundred years earlier to separate off mind, put it over here, and just study matter ended up being inadequate to account for quantum phenomena, to account for even relativity, or even electromagnetism. These new discoveries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries really changed the mechanistic assumptions that science had been making and we’re still trying to catch up with that today.
It turns out that there’s more than matter in motion. Newton’s equations of gravity can tell you how the trajectory of the apple falling from the tree is describable according to the same equations as the motions of the planets around the sun, but he can’t tell you how the apple got up there in the first place. So, there’s more than matter in motion. There’s also, at least on this planet, living organisms that seem to have a kind of agency and animacy. They seem to display a kind of whole-to-part causality that’s not evident in the non-biological world, in the inorganic world of physics. It seems that we have a harder time coming up with mathematical equations that predict how even something as simple as a bacterial colony is going to behave, much less a complex animal with a nervous system or a human being with a language embedded in a social system. We can’t mathematically model these things with the level of… I mean, we can use statistics but even physics is statistical and that’s a whole other story. It’s part of this transition out of mechanism. But so, life is a huge problem for the mechanistic understanding and then another big problem is consciousness. The mechanistic picture of the universe as particles or fields interacting for no purpose cannot, it seems to me, explain why there should be a conscious, intelligent scientist who knows all this stuff about the fields. It seems like the picture of the universe given to us by scientific materialism and this mechanistic world picture makes our own existence as intelligent agents who do science totally improbable. We simply should not be here if the universe is really just a machine. So that’s another big problem.
Sam: Maybe we could enter a little bit into the philosophy of organism. How might this model or philosophy plug up some of those holes and better explain those issues that mechanistic materialism could not explain?
Matt: I think we can really lean on what should be the core values and methodological principles of science itself, namely empiricism. Let’s really be empirical and radically so. Pay attention to our experience as closely as we can and really start with the fact that we exist as conscious, intelligent agents. It’s the most basic fact about our existence, it’s the thing we’re most intimately familiar with. Our understanding of the nature of the universe should begin with that, the fact that we exist as conscious agents. From there, we ask the sort of question, “what must the universe be like such that creatures like us would evolve?” The universe seems to be something more like a kind of developing embryo or an organism that’s evolving. We as scientists are attempting in some sense to become conscious of what the universe has been doing unconsciously. An organic science is a science which takes very seriously the fact that our attempt to know the universe is recursively also the universe’s attempt to know itself. That can be stated in a really trivial sense and be kind of mundane and cliche, but another way of talking about it would be an organic cosmology suggests a participatory epistemology so that you recognize that whatever we think energy is, part of how we define it must include the possibility that it can become conscious in the form of the organized molecules that compose our bodies and that allow us to think and to compose equations about energy.
Another thing that happens when you switch to an organic cosmology instead of a mechanistic cosmology is that there’s no conflict between science and religion anymore. You start to realize that we exist by the grace of this larger life process that is the cosmos as a whole. In some sense, we are derivative from it, but we’re derivative in a sense that’s sort of fractal. We can both know and understand the nature of this fractal process that we’re embedded within and we can feel connected to and empowered by that connection, spiritually rooted in actual experiential contact with what we call the divine, an experience we should expect our religions to be able to elicit in us. So, I think it really helps us with that conflict that’s so typical of the modern period between science and religion.
I don’t like to get too attached to isms, but there do seem to be four basic ontological possibilities that are on the table right now for understanding life, the universe, and everything. There’s physicalism or materialism, which is the mechanistic view we’ve been talking about. Then there’s dualism, where you just accept that there’s physical stuff and then there’s this other stuff that runs in parallel to it. No idea how they connect, but there you have it. Then there’s idealism, where instead of reducing everything down to matter, you reduce everything up to mind. Then the fourth position would be panpsychism, which is this view that contemporary analytic philosophers like Galen Strawson and Philip Goff defend, because this problem I outlined briefly earlier, that consciousness has no place in a materialistic universe, is so striking and so shocking and so embarrassing that a lot of philosophers are saying maybe we should consider this panpsychism thing to put the universe back together again, to understand how there could be mind in this universe that physics can tell us a lot about, but unless we insert it at the very beginning, we have no way of accounting for why there should be this consciousness thing.
Of those four possibilities, I certainly think the latter two, idealism and panpsychism, are what we should be focusing on. That’s where the debate should be. That’s where the real progress is to be made, in ironing out what really is the place of mind in nature if we accept that we can’t reduce it. If we accept that matter and mind must somehow be different faces or phases of the same process and we don’t want to accept dualism, then it’s either some kind of absolute idealism, which is admittedly rather compelling, or this panpsychist view, which is more organic and realist. I hesitate here because I’m going to talk about Alfred North Whitehead. He doesn’t call himself a panpsychist, but I think you can interpret his philosophy that way. Sometimes he’s called a panexperientialist instead. He’s an “organic realist,” not an idealist, because he really wants us to be able to accept that there is a mental pole to reality, but there’s also a physical pole. That physical pole is not just reducible to mind. There really is something in excess of the mental, the ideal, the psychological. There’s something that resists dissolution into mind and he really wants to maintain that polarity. I think there’s something important and valuable in that. Panpsychism seems to me to be an actually more moderate position that avoids the inflationary excesses of idealism and the deflationary excesses of materialism.
A good entry point into panexperientialism is to talk about what subjectivity and objectivity end up looking like in Whitehead’s process philosophy, because he’ll still use those terms, but rather than the subject being a separate substance that exists “inside” in this inner dimension and objects being this external sort of material stuff out there, and never the two shall meet, what Whitehead suggests is that we put these two terms into a temporal relationship as phases in a process. He has this term, it’s actually a Latin term, he doesn’t invent it, but he brings it into English: Concrescence. It’s the process whereby a new moment arises and achieves a new perspective on the universe and then gifts itself to the future. What’s going on in that process of concrescence is a metamorphosis from the objectivity of the already actualized past, where you have what Whitehead would call many objective data or an objective datum, let’s say. All of that data that’s built up over the course of the historical becoming of the universe grows together into a new subject. For Whitehead, subjectivity is something that emerges out of objectivity, which is the reverse of the idealist who wants to say, “no, no, no, the subject is first, objectivity is an appearance that arises within the subject.” Whitehead is saying subjects arise out of the growing together of these objects, which the subject feels and unifies. But as soon as that subject emerges and has this new perspective on the past, it perishes, it dies. It becomes what he calls a superject. So concrescence, then, is this process where the objects from the past grow together into a new subject, which then itself perishes to become a superject, launching itself into the future. But that superject is then an object for the next round of concrescence to receive and produce a new subject, a novel perspective, which is a little bit different because it includes this last perspective that was just added. So subject and object become phases in a process that is cyclical, iterative, and cumulative. Rather than having two totally different types of things, substances, subject-object, mind-matter, you have a process where mind is passing into matter and matter is passing back into mind, and a kind of learning process takes place as a result of the tension and the resistance that builds up between the two.
The whole history of philosophy is influential on Whitehead. He’s a very close reader of Plato and Aristotle, and there are a lot of precursors in their thought to what he’s suggesting. I think there’s a whole sort of secret lineage of panpsychist process philosophy running through the Western tradition and probably the Islamic tradition too. I don’t know it as well, but I know there’s a way in which this heterodox tradition has run through, I know it better in the West, through figures like Leibniz and before Leibniz, Giordano Bruno, and a little before Bruno, Nicholas of Cusa. There’s a real lineage there, and Schelling in the 18th and 19th centuries. Whitehead’s part of that lineage. It’s still struggling for a fair hearing, but I think our civilization has reached a crisis moment where we’re really starting to take stock, and these ideas are becoming more and more relevant and popular.
Sam: Let’s take an occasion of experience. Let’s use me as an example. I would be technically an occasion of experience, right, as a human being? Would that be correct in conceptualizing?
Matt: If what you mean by “I” is your consciousness in some moment of your life-history, you are an actual occasion. If you mean by “I” your personality that is sort of growing and developing over the course of your life, Whitehead would call that a nexusof occasions. It’s a series of experiences, moment by moment, related in a lineage or historical route, and you have an intimate memory of the prior occasions that are part of the stream that is you. So there’s two levels of analysis here. An actual occasion would be you in the present moment. In some sense, you’re always in the present moment, so you’re always an actual occasion becoming. Concrescence is like that cresting wave of the present that’s always arising and crashing, but also never arising and crashing because we’re always in the now. It’s kind of mystical, an eternal process. Concrescence is Whitehead’s attempt to describe a mystical experience, I’m convinced, in a very analytical way that lets you derive physics and biology and psychology from it. You see these two different possibilities here. You in this moment versus you as a stream of becoming.
Sam: So we have these physical prehensions, which is essentially ordinary physics, everything from the past or memory, kind of pushing the past into the present. That’s my personality, which comes from my environment, my childhood, my biology. We could go into, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the work of Robert Sapolsky? He is definitely a physicalist, but he maps out the physical realm super well using empiricism. He says milliseconds before the neurotransmitters in your brain are affecting me now, the hormones, seconds before, the type of food, my biology, the way my nervous system has been laid out and structured through my childhood, the psychological interaction between me and my parents, that psychological inheritance, my genes that come from my lineage, evolution, you go all the way back into cosmogenesis. Is that a correct way of looking at physical prehension and how it’s pushing or affecting my actual occasion or me?
Matt: Yeah, the physical pole is stubborn fact. It’s the stuff that you can’t not feel. It just hits you and you can’t not but respond to it. I think if all there was in the process of concrescence, if the only ingredient in each moment of our experience was a physical pole, Sapolsky would be totally right. We’d be absolutely determined.
Sam: This is essentially we can call it the realm of cause and effect, right?
Matt: Sure. Efficient causation in terms of Aristotle’s causes.
Sam: Okay. Then we have conceptual prehensions, which extend from present into potentialities of the future. From what I understand, the physical prehensions, obviously there are infinite possibilities I could choose from, but the physical prehensions kind of create a box or limit the amount of conceptual prehensions that I could have in this actual occasion before I perish and reach the superject phase. Is that correct in kind of conceptualizing conceptual prehensions?
Matt: Yeah, the physical pole is going to give you some sense of relevance. It’s going to constrain the possibilities relevant to you in that moment that can be conceptually prehended. The physical pole is really important for limiting how our mental pole taps into that field of possibilities because the possibilities are infinite. Without the physical pole to constrain us, we would be quite confused and overwhelmed.
Sam: I guess what comes to mind is an analogy of a boat. We could think of an engine and the gasoline propelling it forward, which would be the physical prehension, and perhaps the conscious being steering the boat left and right would be analogous to the mental pole or conceptual prehension. It’s being propelled and we’re steering. Is that a good analogy?
Matt: Well, let’s throw in the wind. Let’s imagine a sailboat. The wind also, you could say the engine, but the wind too is the physical pole. Your ability to manipulate the sails and perform a tack motion—the mental pole as Whitehead describes it has this capacity to divert the flow of energy from the physical pole. Just in the same way that a sailboat can actually use the wind to move in a different direction, the mental pole can explore alternatives to what the physical pole is trying to push it to do. It’s still in some sense feeding on the past because it has to.
Sam: Interesting. Then there’s one that I really want to discuss that I don’t understand fully. It’s hybrid prehensions. Hybrid prehensions, I’ve seen you in a couple of videos mention that it’s when I can come in contact, my conceptual mental pole comes in contact with another actual occasion’s mental pole. Is that what hybrid prehension is?
Matt: Yeah. It’s when we touch mind to mind. It’s a mind meld, basically. Whitehead even says this is kind of like telepathy, but he means, he’s basically saying that what we think of as abnormal and sort of parapsychological or whatever is actually totally normal, especially in the case of our experience of our own past and of other human beings, but also other animals, and some people can feel this also with plants. When you can resonate inside to inside with another being, that’s hybrid prehension.
Sam: Yeah, that resonates very deeply in my own subjective experience, like connecting deeply, not just with people but with plants and nature. Like you’re saying, even just any kind of self-organizing system. This is a conjecture on my part: do you think perhaps a reason why nature is so blissful or can create this transcendental, peaceful, blissful experience for a lot of people is because you’re surrounded by a matrix of dense actual occasions who have their own conceptual prehensions, as opposed to being in a city where there aren’t a lot of self-organizing systems, like a streetlamp, for example, is not itself a self-organizing actual occasion, but the atoms within it would be considered actual occasions. It might not be as dense or that mental prehension might not be as concentrated as opposed to me being in a forest and having life all around me and having these strong psychological, physiological effects on me. Again, this is a jump, but what do you think about that? Is that too much of a stretch?
Matt: No, not at all. I think of the importance of architecture and design. There’s actually an American architect, Christopher Alexander, who studied Whitehead’s cosmology and was influenced by it and realized that human beings can build their environments as either living environments that mimic the organic world in some sense, or we can build dead environments where, not only are they dead, but they are deadening to us as well. There’s a way of organizing the physical world that Christopher Alexander would say is able to bring forth life. Human beings can do that with our architecture. We can create what he calls “living centers,” which is the way that in mosques or in cathedrals, we’re able to create these altars or these shrines, these places that make us feel contained and amplify a deep vibratory signature that brings us more into life. We’ve somehow forgotten this art and we’ve let ourselves create environments that are deadly. This is part of the shift in our understanding of the nature of matter. It’s not just dead stuff. When we treat it like dead stuff and just concrete, that can give it whatever shape that’s cheapest and most efficient, instead of realizing that we are either making this earth more alive or we’re not. We’re killing it with every building that we construct. We don’t take that responsibility seriously enough because we don’t know any better or we haven’t known any better, at least in the modern West, for a few hundred years.
Sam: Hybrid prehension, to me, sounds a lot like love, this powerful experience that we humans are so pulled by. If you listen to any kind of song or piece of art, 90% of the time it’s going to be about love or a loss of love. This powerful emotion, in a materialist model, is just considered a byproduct of mammalian parent bonding. It’s some accident that happened late in evolution, and now here we are loving each other, and it’s infected by romanticism, and it’s all fake, and it’s all whatever it is. It’s this random byproduct. From a panpsychist view, love, especially when you have love towards a mother, when it’s very concentrated, maybe towards a romantic partner, is fundamental to the universe, but also is this, I guess, transcendent experience. Is that correct in your eyes, or would you agree with that?
Matt: Earlier when I was talking about how organic science would place our own conscious experience at the center and we begin with that, we should take our most important emotions seriously as providing insight into the deepest nature of the universe. Rather than thinking of love as something that just appears when limbic systems evolve and it’s just to get us to mate more, to continue the Darwinian algorithm, we can see love as analogous to the fundamental physical forces driving the organization of the universe, like gravity, and also like light and warmth. These are expressions of love at the deepest level. Our human sense of love and longing and desire, eros, this is not anomalous. It didn’t just pop into the universe a few million years ago. It’s why limbic systems evolved, to harness and feed on that cosmic love that was there already, to enhance and amplify it for our mammalian consciousness. I’m reversing where the creative power lies. Love created our limbic systems and our emotional capacity, not the other way around.
Sam: Not the other way around, yeah. You mentioned in your book, I’ll quote some of your writing here, “The vibratory pattern of the atoms composing a molecule signals a primitive feeling of sympathy, i.e., feeling the feeling in another and feeling conformally with another.” That’s what we’re describing here, the same thing, right?
Matt: Yeah, sympathetic feeling, sympathetic resonance.
Sam: Another one here, you say, “Thus, what appear as wavelengths and vibrations to infrared spectrometers, for the molecular occasion in question, is felt as pulses of emotion.” The whole universe is just what we describe again in ordinary physics as emotion, attraction, and repulsion. Perhaps attraction in this case would be a primordial substrate of what we call love. As this attraction manifests itself in more complex organisms such as us, it can concentrate and we can describe it more and perhaps magnify that experience more. Would you agree with that? I’m really going off on a leg here. I’m taking your readings and I’m conjecturing and kind of…
Matt: No, I think that’s right. Plato said that it’s friendship that keeps the planets in their orbits. Dante has that famous line about the love that moves the sun and other stars. It’s easy to dismiss this as just wishful thinking and anthropomorphism. I think actually the real anthropomorphic view is mechanizing the whole cosmos because the machine is a human invention. The universe is not our invention. The universe has a life of its own and we’re expressions of that cosmic life. I think the panpsychist angle is actually being more respectful of our cosmic origins than the mechanistic view. In that sense, it’s less anthropocentric and anthropomorphic to view love this way as part of what has been, it’s just as much active in luring the hydrogen atoms together to create the first stars as it is in helping human beings propagate our species and make meaning in our lives.
Sam: Yeah, and I don’t know about you, but subjectively contrasting a story of dead, inert matter and purposelessness, I used to kind of be in line with that type of thinking and it took a toll on my mental health. It just didn’t feel good saying and believing those things. This paradigm, I’ll tell you what, it just makes me feel really good and excited. I’m not sure if Whitehead describes this subjective mental health part. I don’t think he does, right? He kind of just explores more the metaphysical.
Matt: He hints at the consequences of materialistic views for our human psychological health. He hints at it, but he doesn’t explore that in any depth.
Sam: Has that been your experience, if you don’t mind me asking? What is your contrast? I think I’ve seen one of your videos, you used to be more of an atheist, traditional materialist, right? You transitioned…
Matt: As a 15-year-old, I kind of had an early phase in my teens as an atheist, rationalist, materialist, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking kind of guy.
Sam: How was that transition, if you don’t mind me asking?
Matt: I think this is a very important point. Rupert Sheldrake makes this point, the mental health point. Now, I don’t want to accuse people who have a physicalist view or materialist view of having a mental illness. I don’t think that’s what I would want to say, but I do think that the social cultural consequences of a materialist worldview are severe. There are ecological consequences, too, because if you treat the living community of life on this planet as a machine or just resources to be used for the benefit of the human economy, if you don’t recognize the fragility of life, you’re going to destroy it, and we are. There are ecological consequences and there are social consequences. I think the meaninglessness of the human situation that is presented by a modern materialist outlook is soul-crushing. People are driven to addiction, to drugs, to commitment free sex, to any kind of ideology that gives them some shallow sense of belonging. The whole conspiracy pandemic has got us all constructing our own little version of history. This desperate clutching after some source of meaning is not unrelated, because we don’t have any other deep sense of connection to a meaningful cosmic story. I think it’s a real emergency, actually. It is a mental health crisis, a meaning crisis, as John Vervaeke would call it. It’s a big deal. It’s important. These ideas have more than just theoretical value. It’s more than just, “is this true or false?” It is also: “is this good and beautiful?” We need that as human beings. Meaning is just as important to our survival as food.
Sam: Definitely. I want to go back to the cumulative phases of feeling with concrescence of an actual occasion. This process, an actual occasion, with a physical pole, a conceptual pole, and then it reaches satisfaction and turns into a superject, which is essentially death. Is that what superject is referring to or analogous to? Do all occasions achieve satisfaction or only some of them?
Matt: Every occasion will reach satisfaction. It’s just that some satisfactions will be more intense than others.
Sam: The superject then reaches objective immortality, which is to be used by the concrescence of subsequent actual occasions. It becomes this self-generating, iterative, recycling process where we use this quote, “The many become one and are increased by one.” This is the same as the idea that the whole is larger than the sum of its parts. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Is that the same phrase said in a different way?
Matt: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts and the whole, in Whitehead’s sense, is always going to be incomplete, because each part contains the whole and each moment of concrescence is a new “holon,” if you want. It’s a new whole and also a new part emerging, adding itself to the prior whole. It is a growing whole. It’s an open whole. It’s not a finished whole. It’s not a complete whole. That’s what accumulation means. That’s what the many become one and are increased by one means. There’s always another one. There’s this coincidence of opposites. For Whitehead, when you really get down to the relationship between the one and the many, you can’t but have some kind of paradox or dialectical process whereby they play off each other.
Sam: I’ll throw out this quote, “It marks for Whitehead the primary miracle of creation whereby the dry bones of the past are clothed again in the flesh of renewed purpose and zest for life. It is the miracle whereby actual occasions perpetually perish and yet live ever more, forever more.” I can’t help but think, you were talking about this endless process. Let’s start at the very extremes of time. Let’s start at cosmogenesis. Cosmogenesis, from what I understand, the birth of matter for the very first time, doesn’t that mean that the actual occasion at that very first moment in time did not have any physical prehension? It was all conceptual prehension. How can an actual occasion turn into a superject and reach satisfaction with pure conceptual prehension? Does that kind of mean that the conceptual prehension is perhaps more primary than physical prehension?
Matt: That’s a very good question and you’ve kind of backed your way into Whitehead’s theology because what you’re describing is the primordial nature of God. The only difference, Whitehead would say, between God as an actual entity and any other finite occasion of experience is that God’s concrescence occurs in the reverse order. The mental or the conceptual pole comes first because, as you’re saying, there’s no history yet. In this primordial conceptual prehension of pure possibility, God has no history. Whitehead thinks that this primordial conceptual prehension of the realm of possibility is necessary because it gives a standard of value for the rest of the becoming of the universe to compare itself to. You might think, “I thought this was a process philosophy?! Now we’ve got this eternal form at the beginning of cosmogenesis that sets this genetic code almost, that everything else has to respond to?” In some sense, yeah. Whitehead is a neoplatonist of sorts and there is this divine intellect, this source of intelligibility and order. The thing is, the way that Whitehead avoids just having that static eternal God as a divine mind is he has this other pole of God. There’s the opposite extreme here if you want, which is not the primordial but the consequent nature of God. It’s God’s physical pole. It’s God feeling with the world, becoming in sympathy with it. It’s God’s suffering with all the finite occasions, experiencing how they take up that original urge, that original Eros or desire that the primordial nature launched into pure possibility. God’s conceptual prehension, with no physical prehension from the already existing past, is totally free; but Whitehead would say it’s also totally unconscious because there’s nothing there to reflect it to itself. It meets no resistance. He says the primordial nature of God is unconscious and only becomes conscious in the consequent pole after coming into relationship with all the finite actual occasions.
I’m going to go a layer deeper into Whitehead’s categorical scheme here for a second. You mentioned hybrid prehensions earlier. Whitehead says that this primordial evaluation or ordering of possibility by God is felt in the physical pole of every finite occasion, but we have a hybrid prehension through the physical pole of God’s mind because hybrid prehension is mind to mind. God is this mind that underlies the whole history of the physical world that provided it with the order that it exemplifies, that we can study scientifically. In feeling the whole past, we also feel God’s way of envisaging the possibilities latent in that physical past. Then God’s consequent physical pole is God’s response to how we feel that conceptual pole. Consciousness arises out of that.
I think what Whitehead is actually suggesting is that our human consciousness of this process is the consequent nature of God. We realize that in our coming to awareness of this process.
Sam: That was beautiful. I’m on the verge of tears a little bit because of how beautiful this ties into everything, to religion, to… you mentioned Islamic philosophy. It does mention this in a very parallel way. I’m actually going to have a guest on later this summer who’s going to tell me about Ibn Arabi, a very famous Islamic scholar and philosopher who talks about cosmology in this manner where the very purpose of the universe is creativity and God is like this grand soul and we are waves within that grand soul. It sounds so parallel to everything you’re saying. I’m excited to make links between those two.
Matt: What’s great about Western philosophy and Islamic philosophy is that we share this common source in Plato. We’re all riffing on the same basic melodies here.
Sam: In the process of the many becoming one, the many become one and are increased by one: doesn’t that defy the laws of conservation of matter and energy and all known mathematics?
Matt: It doesn’t defy all known mathematics, it has its own mathematics behind it, but it does defy the laws of thermodynamics or at least challenges how generally we can affirm them because, after all, these laws only apply to closed systems. Who says the universe is a closed system? Even a steam engine isn’t a closed system, but we devise idealized models to explore new designs. I don’t think this means all of a sudden that process metaphysics is unscientific. I think it means that we have to understand what the laws of thermodynamics are. It’s an abstract model. It provides us with approximations useful in many circumstances. But in reality, we can’t actually measure with enough precision to be certain that energy is conserved, for example, in living bodies. Actually, even in our large scale picture of the universe, in the inflationary model, what is this dark energy stuff? Where’s all that extra energy coming from to accelerate galaxies away? There are all sorts of ways in which these laws are not respected even within physics. I think we have to loosen up around that.
Sam: I’m an engineer. I graduated with a degree in engineering. I’m thinking of what are some of the practical effects that can be created? This could be like a self-generating form of energy. If we can understand it and tap into it, it could be like this infinite resource of sorts maybe. I’m really thinking outside the box here.
Matt: It’s important to distinguish between physical power, which is rooted in these very ancient habits, and our mental and conceptual power, which can really partake in a great deal of novelty. We can, using that conceptual novelty, invent new sorts of machines and technologies that utilize that physical energy and power. It remains to be seen how habit-bound it is and how much energy we can free. The fact that we can create nuclear reactions and harness energy from that is quite a stunning example of the application of intelligence to the manipulation of matter so as to release a tremendous amount of energy. Who the hell could have imagined that there would have been that much energy in these atoms? If mind does that, I’m open to the possibility of something like zero-point energy or something else that makes even fusion look like child’s play.
Sam: Tell me a little bit, this was something that kind of blew my mind when I read it. Tell me a little bit about Whitehead’s iterative process of concrescence, how it might be seen in real time within wet-dry cycling of geyser-fed thermal ponds.
Matt: There’s this theory or hypothesis of the origin of life that’s gaining some notoriety because it seems, for various reasons, to be at least as plausible, if not more so, than the reigning theory, the deep-sea hydrothermal vent theory of the origin of life. This so-called “hot spring hypothesis” is suggesting that life originated in freshwater on volcanic islands four and a half billion years ago, roughly. There would be geysers going off regularly, refilling these ponds, which would then evaporate. They get refilled and then evaporate. It turns out that organic chemistry, amino acids and nucleotides, are just raining down from space at this point in the Earth’s history. All the ingredients you need are there. They collect in these ponds. The problem for origin-of-life researchers is how do you get polymers to form longer chains? You need a catalyst of some kind. Dehydration can actually provide that catalyst and allows longer polymer chains to form out of these organic chemicals. There are also lipids readily available in this early earth environment. You get the spontaneous formation of these lipid protocells in these shallow ponds. Each one contains its little packet of chemistry, a little chemical experiment that’s being tested for stability every time a pool fills up. The film of lipids and organic chemistry buds off, forms all these little protocells. They’re each tested for stability. Basically, long story short, you get a process of chemical selection here. David Deamer and Bruce Damer are the main researchers here. I’ve become friends with Bruce Damer and written some papers together. Basically, Whitehead’s process of concrescence is a general account of the production of novelty in the universe. Whitehead intended it to apply at all scales, from our own first-person experience of a conscious stream of thought down to the quantum scale and the meso-scale of the study of life. Whether we’re studying cells or we’re studying this transition between chemistry and biological cells, this cycle of dehydration and rehydration where you get these protocells budding off, they form a film as the pool would dehydrate along the edges of the pond, and then the budding off into these protocells is very much akin to the process of concrescence, where you get a cumulative process that’s producing and selecting for more and more stability of these protocells. There’s admittedly still a little bit of hand-waving because we don’t know exactly how these stable protocells became capable of reproduction (aside, say, from just spontaneously cleaving in two). There are other things to explain there. But I think it’s a good example of how this process Whitehead is describing at a very general metaphysical level is applicable to this special example in origin-of-life science and can help us better understand the principles that are at play.
Sam: Why were only artists, in Whitehead’s view, the only people that could achieve the level of genius?
Matt: I think Whitehead wouldn’t say that actually. That was Kant’s view, really, that only artists could attain genius. I can unpack that a little bit. Kant, in his third critique in 1790, called the Critique of Judgment, describes the way in which biological organisms are different from the physical world, the non-living world, for many of the reasons I described earlier. He points out that we can’t really have a scientific explanation or a mechanistic explanation because he thought science and mechanistic explanation were the same thing. That’s what science does for Kant, is seek a mechanistic explanation. Life couldn’t be explained that way. He said, “well, then we can’t have a science of biology.” What he pointed out, though, is that artists, when they produce a beautiful work of art, what they’re actually doing is tapping into that same sort of organic living power in nature and giving expression to it, but they don’t know how they do it. They can’t explain the steps involved. They couldn’t teach somebody else. I mean, you can teach artistic technique, but you can’t teach genius. For a science, you would need to be able to teach someone else how to reproduce this exactly or it doesn’t count as knowledge. So Kant denied scientific genius. I think there’s a real issue here that needs to be worked out. Ultimately, for someone like Whitehead, what it would mean to be a scientific genius, it would mean to be able to, ourselves as living organisms, to intuitively participate in that living power active in the rest of a living world and to know it from the inside out. To recognize that if we were going to explain life, it would need to take the form of that kind of intuitive resonance. We give up the need to explain it mechanistically. We accept that we can have an organic science instead of a mechanistic science and that scientists can do what artists do and tap into that deeper creative dimension of nature.
Sam: I’ll throw you one last question now. Psychedelics, you also do a little bit of study on psychedelics in your practice, right? Does the experience of psychedelics that people describe point to ideas of process philosophy? I’ll just give you a personal example. Many people speak about, while under the influence of psychedelics, looking at the sun and saying “it’s greeting me, it’s looking at me,” or looking at plants and other beings, feeling the life, and perhaps it’s magnifying hybrid prehension. The real thing that I noticed that’s critical about the psychedelic experience is looking at inanimate objects, what’s commonly referred to as inanimate, unconscious objects, and seeing them as alive and almost having this degree of presence or feeling. Can we, is that accurate in your experience?
Matt: It’s accurate in my experience. There’s actually a fair amount of empirical research on this question. There is survey research on people who have had psychedelic experiences and how their beliefs about the animacy of the non-human world has changed before and after. Pretty much across the board, people who started as materialists tended to be more either idealist or panpsychist after psychedelic experiences. People who didn’t believe in some sort of a higher power or spiritual being beforehand tended to be more likely to believe in that afterwards. These sorts of chemicals and the experiences they elicit do have effects in terms of belief change and a sense of well-being because people feel more connected. That’s not always because they have a beautiful, love-filled experience. Sometimes very difficult sort of ego-death experiences can lead to, on the other side of that, a sense of profound gratitude and a renewed sense of the preciousness of life. That’s important to remember that these can be difficult experiences too and still have psychological benefits on the other side of it. Removing the filters that are normally in place, the perceptual habits that we usually have between us and direct contact with reality, psychedelics seem to dissolve boundaries and we come more directly face-to-face with both deeper parts of ourselves and deeper dimensions of this animate community of beings that we share this universe with. These psychedelic substances and experiences have really important philosophical significance and obviously religious significance as well.
Sam: Amazing. That’s essentially where this shamanic animism, these ancient so-called primitive cultures, have come up with this idea independently. Maybe they did influence each other, but it seems like these cultures came up with these ideas independently. It’s somehow natural or pointing towards a common pervading truth, right?
Matt: Yeah. The rational waking ego is the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface of the water, there is this psychospiritual domain, this transpersonal domain, and human cultures across the planet have had various shamanic means of navigating the interface between what’s above the water and what’s below the water. In the modern Western world, we’ve been pretending that there’s nothing to see down there.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?