Below is the video and a transcript of a conversation with Brendan Graham Dempsey following my review of his essay “A Universal Learning Process.”
You can listen to the audio on my Substack.
BRENDAN
Hey, everyone. Today, I’m joined again by Matt Segall. Matt’s an associate professor at California Institute of Integral Studies in the Department of Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness. Matt, of course, is a brilliant Whitehead scholar and just generally wonderful thinker, has a wonderful Substack and engaging in the the topics that are nearest and dearest to my heart, but comes at these topics from a different angle. And so I’ll say more about this in a second, but Matt is a wonderful interlocutor and a decent, wonderful human being as well. So I appreciate being able to dig more into these topics with Matt.
Matt just wrote a response piece for one thing about my recent book, this universal learning process book that’s coming out as part of the series on the evolution of meaning. And so we thought it’d be cool opportunity to talk more about that and to try to
unpack a bit more of the different ways that we are conceiving of some of these, um, big, big issues that we’re both passionate about. So, uh, thank you again, Matt, for coming on the podcast. And I look forward to digging into this again with you.
MATT
Yeah, Brendan, been looking forward to this and, uh, really enjoyed reading your book. Um, just, I learned so much, you know, and especially around thermodynamics, I went, I did a reasonably deep dive, you know, maybe like 10 years ago when I was in grad school.
And it’s amazing to see how much further the ball has moved forward just in that time. And so it was great for you. You kind of got, got me caught up to speed there. And So, yeah, let’s let’s dig into it. Cool.
BRENDAN
Yeah. And I mean, gosh, that topic alone, there’s so much there. And I appreciate that. But yeah, I mean, there’s there’s so much here in general. So one of the things well, before actually before I say anything else, I did want to double down on the mutual relationship and respect that I think we both have for each other. But just for my part, how much I really appreciate you as an interlocutor, as someone who, when I think about as recently, you came to mind as an example, as someone who, you know, we both care a lot about these issues.
We have rather different takes on some very fundamental aspects of it. But just the way that you show up to these conversations is always very charitable, respectful. There’s just a decency and a goodness. And, you know, I really appreciate that. And so, yeah, I love being able to have these deep conversations where there are maybe some
profound metaphysical, philosophical worldview, theological disagreements. But but it’s great when those are generative tensions and productive and fruitful and fun and good spirited. And so I I appreciate you very much for that. Um, so yeah, I just wanted to throw that out there. Uh, but, um, so yeah, the other thing I wanted to do, uh, briefly,
because it’s such a big topic, um, all this stuff that we’re trying to, to get at. And so, um, uh, the thought occurred to me that, you know, trying to find a way into some of this so that it’s not just this sprawling thing
and this hydra that one issue comes up and another thing is that we could try to offer some kind of summary maybe of where we think each other is coming from or of our own positions relative to what this thing is that we’re trying to talk about, what we’re trying to uncover. So that I thought could be
you know, one way into this and, uh, just, you know, to take a couple of minutes to try to do that and then maybe dive into some of the, the, the finer details. How does that sound to you?
MATT
Great idea.
BRENDAN
Cool. Um, and so I, let me, let me make an attempt at that then, uh, through this term that, uh, that you threw out in this piece, uh, of, uh, pan-Matthewism, which, uh, Is this a coinage? You said, let’s christen this topic this, but when I Googled it…
MATT
I’ve been throwing pan on so many different words with different interlocutors to try to arrive at some agreement. I haven’t heard it before. Maybe someone’s used it, but I just came up with it.
BRENDAN
Yeah, I loved it so much for many kind of reasons. So what that term means is pan, meaning all, and math comes from the Greek mathēn, meaning to learn. And so a notion of sort of reality as pan-matheistic means sort of like this all learning nature of reality.
But I also love the kind of connotative or associative aspect because it has that sound of theism in there as well, pan-matheism there. Uh, so to kind of, uh, kind of, uh, you know, take on panentheism or pantheism, panmatheism, uh, is a great term for this, you know,
worldview or frame of reality that I’m trying to present in this book, which is that the universe represents a universal learning process and that there’s this unfolding, uh, nature of reality that, uh, uh, occurs as a kind of learning process. And, um, And so that, I think, is something that we’re both speaking to.
I think in your response, you said at one point that there’s a lot of convergence on that and that, as you said, stand in complete alignment with this overall argument that learning is the archetypal act of transcendence. And so just as sort of a starting point, we’re interested in that topic.
And so that would be where I might begin with some of this. And I don’t know. How does that… How does that starting place work for you?
MATT
Well, learning is super important. And I think part of my attitude in entering into conversations like this is a kind of pedagogical attitude. I know I have something to learn. I love to learn. I know you love to learn. And so how better to actually get meta in the sense of
a kind of second-order cybernetics approach to be what we are trying to describe the universe as doing, to do what we’re trying to describe the universe as being. And so… that is a rather large place to converge, I think. And so pan-Matthewism could be a banner that unites many of us who disagree on the fundamentals,
because we’re trying to continue to broaden our own perspectives. And, and so yeah, I mean, should I should I share a bit of what I think where I think you’re coming from? And yeah, yeah, go for it.
BRENDAN
That’d be great.
MATT
So it seems to me that in framing your project as metamodern, that this sort of dating of a true historical break is quite important in the sense that there was a moment in recent human history when we began to see the world in a fundamentally new way.
and it led to a break from certain kinds of mythic and magical and religious modes of understanding and engagement with, with reality to a fundamentally scientific mode where we don’t pretend to have operatory access to a rational being who is in charge of the world, but rather recognize ourselves to be at least somewhat rational.
And we hope to become more rational and capable of studying a natural world that, um, may not have been created by a rational being but that nonetheless is intelligible to us and that this break is so important that you know we really need to distance
ourselves from uh what say uh and i’m speaking mostly in a sort of western european um context here but it might apply across culturally but the you know the bible was basically the document from which all truth and goodness and beauty was meant to come for people. And that there’s just a real important new methodology,
new way of understanding ourselves and understanding nature that requires… Yeah, rejecting these mythic and magic ways of knowing. However, you also acknowledge that this new modern scientific way of understanding the world was too reductionistic, and it doesn’t do justice to our own human conscious capacities.
It doesn’t seem to do justice to the forms of order and organization and complexity that nature is capable of as itself an evolutionary learning process. And so the meta move is going beyond just this initial modern break with tradition, let’s say. to try to acknowledge that which cannot be reduced to some kind of mechanistic process,
cannot be reduced to just rules governing the interaction of parts, but there is some kind of a holistic emergent intelligence and even that it could be that the universe, while it didn’t begin in an act of divine creation, may give rise to something like a god through our own collective agency,
the interaction between human beings as we learn together could give rise to something approaching a kind of divine intelligence. And so you’re trying to rediscover maybe what was lost by this sharp break that modernity represents with the traditional ideas of the past, but recover them in a way that would be compatible with everything we know scientifically.
So yeah, hopefully that’s at least the rough edges of where you come down on what we ought to be struggling with in our moment in time to become meta-modern and not succumb to any pre-modern temptations.
BRENDAN
Yeah, that’s interesting. I always forget how interesting an exercise this is in general, just to, you know, hear the reflections on, you know, what we are putting out, what we’re presenting and how that’s landing for people in the most salient points is kind of an interesting thing. As well.
So that also helped me helps me think about, you know, yeah, because I think the rough edges. Sure. And then it’s interesting to kind of maybe begin to finesse like those particular emphases in terms of like, oh, that’s interesting that that lands as a particular emphasis or something that could be. you know, worked out.
So that’s, that’s really helpful. And then I can try to, you know, reflect back to you what I’m interpreting, you know, where you’re coming at it, which again, I think there’s a lot of shared recognition, starting from the notion that there is dynamic creativity sort of at the heart of the universe.
Of course, being a, you know, sort of Whiteheadian acolyte or someone who finds a lot of insight in the kind of process relational framing and in Whitehead’s thought in particular, there is this notion that basically, one, and I think this is something that continues to be a source of
uh of of divergence between the particular ways then that we wind up fleshing out a kind of similar project is that there’s a pan psychic component as it might tend to be called or pan experientialist component that as you trace down and sort of into
the fabric of reality uh you don’t necessarily ever lose touch with what we would think of as the internal or the or the experiential or the feeling side of things, but that that goes all the way down, and that there’s therefore this lifelike aspect to all levels of the universe, and that any…
their dependence upon maybe strictly mechanistic or stochastic framings of reality are ultimately going to be falling short of something, which is to the degree that they miss that kind of inherently dynamic, creative, and to some extent, therefore, kind of like willful or intentional aspect to every moment in the kind of cosmic unfolding. Um, and so, you know,
that deepens across time, but I think one of the things you’re trying to emphasize in this piece is that metaphysically there’s no like rupture there, that if you go all the way down, there’s still this stuff of like what we can identify as down at the bottom in a sense.
And that, uh, therefore we’re justified in kind of, uh, a unique, uh, Application of our own epistemological and phenomenological lenses on reality, trying to make sense of the world through that, because it has deep continuity, fundamental continuity with the ontological nature of reality. And then finally. because of that,
a kind of critique that arises from that appreciation of certain forms of modern scientific abstraction, model creation, and what Whitehead calls this fallacy of misplaced concreteness of creating these models about reality that we then sort of mistake for reality. And so getting therefore kind of disconnected with the real nature of things,
because we’ve invented this sort of like mechanical sort of, you know, toy of how things work conceptually. But then we we kind of forget that that’s just a tool. So there’s a there’s a number of kind of epistemological and ontological metaphysical critiques in there.
as they are sort of themselves all situated as part of a similar project to try to move beyond sort of modern reductionism and the kind of nihilism and relativism into a kind of, you know, revitalized understanding of the grand reality, the kind of grand narrative of existence, which is ultimately something that we are very at home in.
How does that land for you?
MATT
Yeah, I think that’s about it. I think the only little tweak I would make is that one of the points I’m trying to get across is that with the pan-experientialism thing, yeah, it’s accurate to describe it, at least to begin with, as saying that some kind of mind or feeling goes all the way down.
But we have this way of thinking top-down, big, small. And I think that the process relational ontology is an invitation to shift out of that way of even mapping reality in terms of You go down and you get to the littler things and you go up and you get to the bigger things.
Instead of thinking of small and big, thinking more in terms of whole and part and that also all of the parts contain the whole in some sense already. And so pan-psychism, pan-experientialism is not just like, Oh, the all even the itty bitty, the itty little bittle, the itty, I can’t say this word,
itty bitty little things down at the bottom are experiential in some sense. But it’s also to say that the whole thing, the whole the world soul. is also an important level of not just analysis, I guess, but synthesis to consider. Where does wholeness come from in the first place?
If you get it at the level of a hydrogen atom, there’s a kind of wholeness that’s realized. You get it at the level of a cell. You get it at the level of an animal body. There’s some kind of wholeness that’s manifesting at the level of Gaia, like a living planet. Where does that come from?
I think there’s got to be some kind of archetype for that. And so pan-experientialism, I’m happy to say pan-psychism too, as long as we acknowledge there are different species of it. There’s a substance form of pan-psychism that’s popular among analytic philosophers that I think is not that helpful really. But the process form of panpsychism is saying, yeah,
there is a world soul, which is to say that there is a wholeness manifest at the level of the cosmos and that that wholeness is in some sense alive and living, not in the same way that a cell is alive, but in some sense, the cell is a recapitulation of that cosmic life.
MATT
Mm-hmm.
MATT
And so this kind of whole part way of thinking and never forgetting that the parts are holographically recapitulating the whole is also part of what a panpsychic metaphysics in the process relational sense would mean for me, right? So, yeah. Okay. Getting away from the small, big ways of thinking about the universe, which to me, I mean,
Plato was already hip to this. It’s kind of like, those are relative terms. Are we really getting to the metaphysical core of anything by thinking about the universe in terms of big and small? I’m not sure. Like metaphysics is a search for scale-free categories would be another way of putting it.
BRENDAN
Yeah. Well, that’s a good lead up into what one aspect of this conversation I thought we could get into because, and I also, I’ll say, you know, audience… you know, bear with us in the sense of being patient. Cause I feel like, um, one of the things that’s exciting about this conversation that we’re having and
that other folks are having too, um, is that there’s a lot going on here. And, and for like a conversation like this, um, I think it’s worth taking our time to sort of unpack things and kind of sift through them. Um, especially because one, these are systematic sort of framings. These are
are holistic kinds of framings of reality. So if you pull on one thread, it kind of moves this thing over here and, you know, there, there’s a kind of gestalt element to this. So, um, so that’s important, but also, uh, you know, where we are, I think in many ways aligned in many respects on the gestalt, it’s,
it’s the fine details, uh, of really digging into like, where, where is the divergence here and what are the repercussions of that? And that actually takes some detail work to get into. And that then takes some time to just unpack a lot in order to be able to get to
that level of granularity that we get some clarity about things. Um, so I, I, I conceive of our conversations as one being part of like a broader conversation, both in the sense that other people are having aspects of this conversation too, but also that we’re,
this is sort of an ongoing conversation that you and I are engaged in. And, uh, you know, whether that takes the explicit form of like an actual, um, you know, sort of like series of conversations, the way that some folks do like Greg and John or whoever, um, you know, it, it, it’s in that vein.
So there’s a kind of slow motion, um, element to this. Um, okay. So, but I did, let’s start there on this notion of, um, of metaphysics. Um, by the way, let me know, is my, uh, let me know if my internet is being weird.
MATT
Um, uh, I still have heard everything you shared a little fuzzy, but okay, cool.
BRENDAN
Yeah.
MATT
Um,
BRENDAN
So on this notion of metaphysical scale-free categories, I wanted to pose this to you. Because at one point you kind of raised this in the response piece that you wrote. So you say… quote, whatever the metaphysical categories we construct end up being, they should apply everywhere to every entity, regardless of scale and complexity.
And that sort of stood out to me as being like, oh, okay, this might be a point where we could kind of begin to illuminate some of the differences of how we’re coming at this issue. Because one of the thoughts I would propose to you that I think is a good way of
describing the way I look at this is that I actually would propose that metaphysical categories themselves emerge or evolve. And what I mean by that is. Uh, is I guess something like the way, you know, that, that, that Greg talks about it in a, you talk framing that you’re going to need a,
a different kind of metaphysical set of, of ways of thinking about, let’s say human culture, uh, than what you’re, what you would, uh, apply to say physical atoms. Um, and because these are genuinely emergent sort of ontic planes of existence that come into being, uh,
that you can’t just sort of take categories from other parts of complexity and apply them equally to others. Now, this might then lead us to the kind of ridiculous notion of meta metaphysical categories, right? Like what are the kind of laws or logic or reason or deep structures that would then sort of be able to
include and account for all of these different kinds of categories. But as a first pass, how does that idea land to you if you hear the notion that metaphysical categories emerge and are themselves part of the creative process? And two, just to help frame that as a meaningful way that maybe we’re differently approaching this big
topic and how we think about these things and therefore accounting for some of the different conclusions we draw.
MATT
Well, you’re absolutely right. I completely agree that we need to somehow account for the possibility of new categories arising. And Whitehead actually has these eight major categories in his metaphysical scheme. And It’s kind of absurd. He’s got like 28 categories of explanation,
and the first part of Processing Reality just scares a lot of people away for this reason. It’s like, whoa, this is baroque, where you’re coming up with all this stuff. But he fully intends it to be an open-ended scheme, and that we’re going to continue to need to add things as our experience deepens,
because he ultimately wants experience to be the criterion of our metaphysics. So you get the actual entities, the eternal objects. the prehensions, what he calls propositions. These are his categories, right? But he has an eighth category that he calls contrasts. which is the ways that prehensions come together to form patterns.
And he says that this eighth category actually includes in its nature a kind of indefinite progression of new categories because we can proceed from contrasts to contrasts of contrasts and so on to indefinitely higher grades of contrasts. And so, yeah, built into the scheme is this possibility of new categories. But a contrast is a less…
earth shattering category, then there’s novelty there. There’s genuine novelty there as new contrasts arise, but it’s not as fundamental as an actual entity or an eternal object. An actual entity, you could also call an occasional subject because then you get better at the contrast with eternal objects. You have occasional subjects and eternal objects.
Those are really the two categories that Whitehead is saying apply at all times. And so when you say that what reality is finally made of are these event-like entities, not like, they are events, for him, that means that, yeah, there’s a mental phase, a mental pull to that,
just as much as there is a physical phase or a physical pull, which for him, in other words, means that there’s a kind of repetition of the past. Every event includes a repetition of the past and some degree of anticipation of the future. For him,
you’re not going to be able to remain concrete in your descriptions of reality at whatever scale unless you’ve got all of this going on. If you think that nature is made of some instantaneously present bit of matter, That’s the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. There is no such thing in nature.
BRENDAN
That’s an idea, it turns out. As I hear that, it lands for me as just the opposite way. I want to say that metaphysical categories are abstractions that we generate from real actual entities and processes in reality to then try to account for how those occur. For example, if I were to be doing straight up metaphysics,
I guess I’d probably land somewhere myself in like a dialectics of like a metaphysical dialectics. I do think that when you look at there being, you know, I don’t know, there’s some sense of like plurality and then sort of a… the way that a plurality creates a kind of relationship.
And then that relationship exists ultimately then within a higher totality that’s able to take those plural entities in the relational aspect as subsystems within a higher system. That is a process that I see going on in all aspects of the universe. And you could even relate that very directly to the learning process.
You can relate that to evolution. You can do all these things.
MATT
Sounds like a great account of concrescence as well, just the plurality, relationality, totality. It’s another way of describing concrescence.
BRENDAN
But it’s interesting. It’s interesting though, because the way that I tend to associate that is like, okay, that’s a good model for trying to account for how things occur. But I wouldn’t say then like, let’s just stick with some very kind of Hegelian language, which actually isn’t even Hegel, but like a thesis into this synthesis,
which in the Hegelian tradition sometimes gets used. And I know that wasn’t Hegel. I don’t think that antithesis and synthesis and thesis are like real metaphysical entities. I feel like they are real ways. How would you say they are terms we might use to account for real processes that
have a pattern nature that we can see occurring in reality. But if you’re looking for what is the most real aspect of something going on there, I wouldn’t place that in the metaphysical or the metaphysical dialectics category. I would place that in what’s actually happening. Right. Is something learning like like when I learn, you know,
and I’m taking two mental constructs and I’m putting them together to create a higher totality and recursive complexification process. Right. Um, it’s the actual instantiated embodied fact of that occurring that is real. And then the dialectics is just this abstract model that I use to make sense of it. So I would say that trying to do metaphysics,
you know, properly requires that we own that we’re abstracting that these things, we don’t want to make this platonic move and say, oh, these are actually more real or most real. Do you know what I mean? Do you see what I’m saying? Like, or is that how you think of it? Is that how Whitehead thinks of it?
Or…
MATT
Yeah, well, I guess it’s paradoxical, right? Because obviously, his account of the concrescence of actual occasions is a kind of abstraction, of course. And he’s not trying to say reality is made of these abstractions. But he’s trying to account for the nature of concrete reality in such a way that we
see how abstraction is a real part of how it functions. And that this capacity to abstract isn’t introduced by language using human beings. It’s actually part of how physical process operates already, that there’s a coarse-graining activity, that there’s a process of filtering and prehensive unification in his terms that’s very dialectical as you’re describing. Actually,
Whitehead’s account of the learning process in the most general sense that he could manage to describe it That’s what concrescence is an attempt to do. And it is this movement from, as you described it, I think, plurality to relationality to totality. Concrescence begins with the…
physical prehension of objective data in the past, which is a plurality, a multiplicity, you could say. And that grows together into those, that objective data grows together into a new subject, experiencing itself from a novel perspective that’s never existed before, realizing some novel value. subjectively immediately experiencing that, but then perishing to become a superject,
which is then new objective data for the next round of concrescence. And each time there’s an iterative and cumulative learning process, which occurs. And that goes all the way down, right? And so that means that no two moments are ever the same. It might be that there’s nothing major learned when a burst of electromagnetic
radiation from some distant star travels through empty space. There’s very little in the way of novelty produced it pretty much continues to vibrate and reiterate itself indefinitely um but nonetheless over the the vast spans of cosmic uh space and time even simple vibration seems to have possessed enough mental originality to uh
to instigate these emergent mutations so that you’ve got from hydrogen clouds or clouds of hydrogen gas, you got stars, you got galaxies and on and on. And so, but I think, yeah, this is a fundamental issue around When we want to metaphysically describe the nature of reality, of course, we’re going to be using abstractions to do so.
But I think the risk is when we limit ourselves to just physical explanations, say explaining the whole universe and this learning process even in terms of the physics of heat dissipation or thermodynamics, What do we really mean by heat in that way? Because for a physicist,
it’s a kind of statistical measure and a calculation that is numerical ultimately. And so we’re not, heat’s not made of numbers. There’s real numbers. process going on. Energy is something tangible. It’s something that’s active. It’s actual. And so how do we describe that in a way that doesn’t actually leave us in an
attempt to be more physical in our explanations, that doesn’t end up leaving us with a pure mathematical abstraction at the end of the day?
BRENDAN
Well, and I want to get there with this, because I feel like all of this is bound up with this issue of, yeah, misplaced concreteness, the role of abstraction in learning and all this stuff. And ultimately to this metaphysical question, which we’re kind of probing at the moment. And so there is then this sense,
if we could try to… Well, let’s zoom back in on that particular issue of… when you’re talking about metaphysics, trying to basically being able to be, you know, apply everywhere to every entity, regardless of scale or complexity, it sounds like you’re, that’s, I mean, explicitly what you’ve stated,
but you’ve also now said that you’re open to the idea of these other categories emerging in time. So in terms of what the proper role of metaphysics is, like the level of analysis, you could say, Where do you come down on that? Do you think that if we’re trying to get to the bottom of this,
so to speak, that we need metaphysical categories that are going to be just as true of atoms as they are of people? Or can we use metaphysical categories that are going to say, oh, no, actually, people have emergent properties that aren’t witnessed here down at the atomic level,
and we want to be able to account for that with an evolving metaphysical register of categories? Yeah, so clarify that a bit.
MATT
So what undergoes emergent evolution in a kind of Whiteheadian cosmos would be societies. His term would be societies, which is his way of accounting for the enduring bodies in our everyday environments as animals. Our own bodies are societies. Rocks and tables and chairs are societies. Stars are societies. historical roots of actual occasions of experience,
streams of actual occasions that are repeating certain definite characteristics as a genetic lineage of sorts. And that maintains a form that persists over time. There’s no matter underlying the form that is mutely enduring. There’s a form that is being reiterated by these little experiencing activities. And much of the non-biological world that has enduring forms is very repetitive.
And we can use mathematical models to predict it with a very high degree of accuracy. Once you get biological societies, there’s more life, as we say, and it’s harder to mathematically model these things. We could produce more abstract models, like free energy principle type things.
They give us a general picture of how that might be possible for a cell or an animal to navigate its environment through kind of predictive processing or whatever. But we’re very far from being able to take even a single paramecium, mathematically model it so as to know what it’s going to do next in a particular environment.
You just have no idea. And so societies become more complex. There are emergent events which occur. chemistry and autocatalysis to autopoetic cells that reproduce one another, reproduce themselves to multicellular animals with nervous systems. And yeah, new capacities are coming online as this process of social evolution in Whitehead’s terms occurs.
But the fundamentals of what an actual occasion is and what it’s capable of and what allows for these societies to emerge, maintain themselves and be conscious and intelligent and agential, That’s that’s baked in. That’s what reality is.
BRENDAN
So I think I agree with that because I mean, I’m I’m a modest, you know, I think that this is all it’s all one, so to speak. And then from that one stuff, you get everything that we see. But we’re talking about. you know, different configurations of different complexity levels.
And then I do think that that creates different kinds of emergent sorts of behavior that then require new basically laws to be able to account for. But that doesn’t mean that, you know, there’s a dualistic or pluralistic nature to the ontological basis of reality. So in that sense, I think we agree on that.
And so I’m willing to say that, yes, okay, if we mean that, then I would say that these metaphysical categories should apply everywhere to every entity, regardless of scale and complexity. But now here’s the interesting thing. And I think there’s two… There’s so much, but there’s two aspects here, let’s just briefly say.
One of them is that those metaphysical categories, I think, are rather sparse. They’re interesting, but they’re, you know, because they’re so general, they’re not particularly, you know… uh compelling or you could say in that sense uh so we’ll just leave that aside for
a second um but it’s worth noting the other thing though which i think is much more important is that um is that given that and we see that complexification does while still coming out of this monistic Ontological substrate whatever we want to think of that as lead to new and new
kinds of phenomena That’s where I see the action and I guess that these are two kind of directly related ideas It’s like when we’re really interested in trying to chart then complexification It’s in seeing what dynamically and creatively emerges and evolves out of that process that I feel like is the real that’s where the
that’s that’s the story part and Um, so when I, and here’s the key point I want to make, um, for me, thermodynamics is, I guess, let’s say, uh, a way to be able to frame this as sort of like, yes, stuff does occur at this thermodynamic level all the way down.
But the whole point to me is that there are discontinuities that even though you can look at anything in thermodynamic terms at a certain point, that becomes it doesn’t give you a lot of information about what’s going on. Right. If you try to assess a paramecium in terms of just thermodynamics,
you’re going to not be able to account for much. Right. And the more complex you get, the less and less a purely kind of thermodynamic explanation is going to be able to do any work. And that’s directly proportional to the level of complexity as you were just saying, right?
Like the regularity of how like a crystal in space, how can we mathematically model that and how deterministic and how sort of like rudimentary and sort of easy is that to conceptually deal with? versus, you know, paramecium on up to a human being, you’re getting layers and layers and layers of informational richness stacking on informational richness that,
yeah, the whole point is that you can’t then reduce that down to some simple explanatory process. And so when I use thermodynamics, to be clear, I’m not trying to then say, look, it’s all just thermodynamics, right? But I do think that if you’re trying to account for the whole story, that then when you get the story started,
it’s going to be rather basic, boring kinds of more deterministic stuff or stochastic stuff that then blossoms eventually into more complex, interesting, sophisticated, and I think ultimately kind of more intentional and conscious phenomena. But so… I think in broad strokes, we agree with each other, but is the distinction there that I’m trying to draw clear?
Yeah, I think so.
MATT
You know, thermodynamics are so tricky and understanding entropy, especially when it gets borrowed. I mean, because you really do play on this translation that can be made and you’re careful between entropy and information, which Claude Shannon first does, but he’s kind of using it metaphorically. And a lot of people don’t. collapse the metaphorical use.
And entropy is a slippery concept because you mentioned crystals and I hope I can get this right, but crystals are actually an example of a very ordered state of matter that’s also very high entropy in the sense that there aren’t any other states that those
molecules could be in in that closed system that they’ve already fallen into the most probable state. And yet, is it still a very ordered state? And so we often equate entropy with disorder, but that’s not always true. And so these are such slippery concepts, which makes them generative. And I mentioned that in my post,
but I think it’s a very neat historical fact that Sir Arthur Eddington is giving the Gifford Lectures in 1927. And that’s where he famously says, Entropy is, in some sense, the supreme law of the physical world. And you can contradict Maxwell, you can contradict Newton even,
but God forbid you contradict entropy and your theory has got to be wrong. Whitehead comes along a year later, giving the Gifford Lectures at the University of says basically, yeah, there is obviously this tendency in the universe for things to waste away, but there’s a counteragency. There’s another tendency. It’s just as real.
But the thing is, we can’t account for it by something we could physically measure. And even entropy is already a statistical measure. We’re not actually tracking energy at that level of precision where you can’t track every molecule in a gas chamber. You’re giving a statistical measure that tells you not where any individual molecule will be,
but in total where the system will be after a certain amount of time, probabilistically speaking. But Whitehead’s saying there’s a mental pull to reality. you’re never going to be able to measure that with any instrument because it’s the mental pole always seems to be kind of behind the scenes.
It’s like on the one hand, it’s the one who designed that instrument in the first place. That’s where the mental pole comes into the picture and the theory of of thermodynamics, but Whitehead says that the mental pull is responsible for the diversion of energy. And so he didn’t have the word constraint yet,
but there’s some sense in which that’s what he’s talking about. And with the laws of thermodynamics, There are certain assumptions built in there that I think still need an explanation in order for thermodynamics to really count as an explanation. That’s the source of constraints. Where did those first come from? What allows energy,
even if it’s entropically governed and there’s a tendency to dissipate gradients, let’s say, where did the first gradient come from? Where did the first constraint come from that allowed work to be accomplished by the movement of heat? That’s not explained by entropy itself. Right.
BRENDAN
Well, that’s what makes it a first principles account too. I mean, and that’s ultimately I do think what we’re all aiming at. I mean, first principles and values is similarly what the cosmorotic humanism people are trying to do is trying to account for meaning and value from first principles. And again,
as I note in at least a footnote in the book, I don’t think that that’s quite the right approach either. But we are trying to get to that. the bottom of it, so to speak. Right. And so the reason why Eddington says that in that lecture and why physicists have largely followed suit, well, not just largely,
but I mean, I don’t know if a physicist who kind of would contest that is because it does seem to be the nature of, of, of reality that it follows that second law of thermodynamics. And if we could account for it in a more primitive way, then that would be the deeper law. Right.
But in the sense that that’s just that’s how it works. So there is an element to that. We do have to start from any account of anything from some place where it seems like, all right, now, whether or not the second law is itself emergent, you know, That is a different kind of conversation in some ways.
MATT
Well, it’s not that I’m saying it’s emergent. Let me put a fine point on this because I think it’s crucial that I’m saying entropy is not actually self-justifying in the sense that it’s presupposing an earlier first principle, which would be, where’s the source of constraint coming from? You know, another way of saying it is entropy,
a measure of entropy is always going to be perspectival or situated somewhere looking in a certain direction. And from that situation, it seems like this would be the more disordered state relative to that state. But in, you know, a Big Bang cosmology, in order for
dissipation to give rise to higher forms of organization that increase the global entropy. There must have been a very low entropy state at the beginning. And that requires an explanation that’s not already sort of coming along for free with just the declaration that heat dissipates. Dissipates from where? How did it get concentrated originally?
BRENDAN
Well, I mean, part of this becomes an infinite regression issue, right? Where it’s sort of like once you get to some seemingly, I mean, we have what are called anthropic constants or just constants in general, right? Like why is the speed of light the way it is, right? It just is.
I mean, like presumably there’s some root cause for that, maybe or maybe not. I mean, when you’re trying to do fundamental physics, it’s fundamental in some sense of like we’ve tracked it down as far as it can go. And and that’s what we’re working with.
And so I think if you’re going to try to regress that causal chain further back. I mean, in our current model, right, that does actually reach a point at the at the singularity where it’s like, no, no, no, it doesn’t make sense to ask the question what happened before the Big Bang or
where did the Big Bang come from, you know, to certain kind of scientific framing of that question, because it came out of this process. But you are asking something I think that is true, which is that there are constraints that create that are necessary for a physical universe to occur. But once we start asking those questions.
They do enter us into a realm of speculation that we’re not necessarily
MATT
naturalistically- I think it’s just the difference between physics and metaphysics. If we’re going to do metaphysics, these are the questions. We can’t just rest satisfied with a description of entropy. Obviously, yes, that’s happening. But metaphysics is then saying, okay, what must be the case if that’s possible?
BRENDAN
That’s just how I understand metaphysics. Maybe it’s important then to appreciate the kind of… Definitely speculative, yes. Right. Let’s say the kind of project that I’m engaged in is specifically trying to bracket, what do we seem to know with a good amount of certainty without having to lean too much into speculation, metaphysical speculation?
Uh, and, and can we account for meaning and value on those terms? That’s basically what I’m up to. If people want to then say, well, but where did the big bang come from? And, you know, what is the nature of, of reality and truth? And what, you know, what does it mean for, uh, you know,
logical consistency to be like, these are questions are good ones, but like, you know, those are in the realm of a kind of metaphysical thought that I’m trying to leave this important question of meaning and value out of because if we want to hang our hat on metaphysical speculation we’ve kind of seen what happens when we
try to do that too much right if it’s sort of like all right well we can all take this back to the bank of the first mover right in some kind of Aristotelian sense it’s like I don’t know about that or you know obviously you mentioned earlier the
the move away from scriptural and mythic accounts of reality into different accounts. If we’re trying to use speculation in a domain of just abstract thinking of what might or could be the case, I think then we’re going to be in danger of our sense of meaning and purpose becoming profoundly destabilized whenever that speculation winds up reaching,
I don’t know, either empirical evidence that invalidates a particular model or thought, or, you know, someone comes along who devises a particular theorem or idea that actually shows why that is internally inconsistent or whatever, right? So that’s why the naturalistic framing, I think, is so powerful is that it’s sort of bracketing that stuff off.
And it’s just working with what we seem to know from the world of physics and science. Can we account for these things? And I think powerfully we can. And I think that that’s crucial for people being able to then find a sense of meaning and purpose that they don’t have to then, you know,
feel like that’s all resting on potential quicksand. So maybe in that sense, we’re engaged in very different projects. And I don’t think that metaphysical speculation isn’t, you know, important. It’s just of a different kind of, it’s itself a different category from what I’m up to. I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that.
MATT
Oh, this is really good. I think it does clarify some things because it seems to me that to go back to this modern break with the traditional modes of understanding and relating to the universe, there was a certain myth that got covertly smuggled into modernity and modern science, which is the idea that metaphysics is optional.
The idea that we could just do empirical observation and test models and not have any kind of metaphysical speculative substratum. I don’t think that’s possible. I don’t think metaphysics is optional. And I think one of the reasons that modernity kind of continued to eat itself and
undermine the value claims it was trying to justify is because of this denial, because of this imagination that it might continue to exist without myth, because you just end up smuggling in covert myths and without metaphysics. We all have a metaphysics, whether we’ve explicitly articulated it or not, because again, metaphysics,
it doesn’t need to be conceived of as something extra in addition to physics. It’s a generalization from our physical knowledge, from our biological knowledge, from our psychological knowledge. We’re generalizing from the special sciences to understand how they are possible. What’s the deeper conceptual network that would allow us to understand to the extent that we can understand?
first of all, how physics, biology, psychology, et cetera, fit together. And also that would allow us to answer the question like, okay, well, what must reality, what must the universe be like such that it manifests in these special ways?
BRENDAN
Well, yeah, no, and I do agree with that. And I’m not saying that we can eschew metaphysical contextualization for understanding of reality. I don’t mean that, but I do mean there’s a lot that we can do For example, when we encounter, let’s say, a tree,
that there’s a lot of complexity about that tree that we don’t have to account for to be able to kind of meaningfully get by in the world and have things work and have it be more or less in… to be in comportment with reality relative to that tree. Okay.
Um, so I’m by the tree and other persons by the tree. Maybe I think, you know, uh, let’s say one person thinks that, you know, a God put this tree here. Um, and I think that it’s a product of, you know, evolution and another person thinks that, uh, you know, et cetera, right.
We could come up with different sort of speculations about what’s the context for this moment, but we can all also, uh, get by very well together, making a house out of that tree, you know what I mean? Or climbing the tree or admiring the beauty of the tree.
I don’t mean to put this purely in utilitarian terms, right? Like there are certain things that just present themselves to our experience that then in that sense, metaphysical speculation is a little bit of a surplus or an addendum too, because here is this reality that we’re engaging with, we’re engaging with effectively. And to that degree that
we’re doing that we’re learning accurately about that tree so that’s kind of the the way that i’m talking about things right like i think that we can say study chemistry and uh and chart biological evolution and so on and so forth uh in terms
of the kinds of work that gets done in the sciences without having to then account for where did the universe come from do you see what i mean like That’s the kind of speculation that I feel like we can bracket because it’s not
immediately bearing on all the things that can come out of what we can do in a meaningful way with the information that we have. What do you think of that?
MATT
I agree. I think… Just maybe, and I think this is true of you too, but you’re maybe being humbler or just not fully wanting to acknowledge your own curiosity about these big questions in this particular moment to defend a more moderate position in terms of what we can actually make sense of with the learning
from the latest special sciences. But look, Aristotle said we’re the thinking animal, we’re the… The sorts of beings that wonder and even Kant said, look. I didn’t think we could answer the questions, but he said, we’re going to keep asking them. It’s in our nature to ask them. And so this is what we’re here to do.
We’re here to understand the nature of the universe. Let’s do it, Brendan.
BRENDAN
I think that’s certainly true. And obviously, I’m curious about where the universe came from. But again, this project that I’m engaged in, I conceive of as trying to do a couple of things, one of which is that people in our society that you and I are a part of, and however we want to delimit that, We,
I think, both acknowledge that there is a deficit of and a kind of profound collective confusion around issues of meaning and value, which is having profound negative consequences on the ecosystems, the biosphere, and ultimately our own survivability, thrivability, and sustainability as a species and all the other species around us.
So like direct consequence of breakdowns in meaning, value nihilism, relativism, et cetera. And so I see that as a direct consequence of people drawing false conclusions. And I because I experienced this myself of working with certain premises about reality that lead to false conclusions about the nature of meaning and value.
I myself went through a period of like, oh, I guess we’re all just deterministic reductionistic particles moving through space and therefore meaning and value are just an invention for social control and all this stuff. Right. And it’s like, no, that’s actually not true.
And it’s not true, not because we have to speculate about where the universe came from. It’s not true just based on what we know about subsequent developments in the sciences and better understandings about complexification and information and so on and so forth. So what I see the goal is trying to maybe, yes, more humbly in some sense,
delimit the project towards, all right, given more or less consensus understanding from the natural sciences and natural philosophy, and let’s just say the sciences in general, though, of course, this also includes the humanities to some degree. Given that, can we have a more accurate accounting of meaning and value? Just using that framework,
can we understand what we mean by meaning and value in a way that actually has some real legs to it that we can be like, hey, actually, yeah, things aren’t all meaningless. It’s actually very clear that meaning and value are real in some profound sense, and then go from there.
And I think we can do that without having to postulate speculative metaphysical entities that your average scientist would have trouble assenting to. And so that’s why framings of meaning and value that want to, for example, posit it as being sourced beyond and above or beyond and beneath space and time are like, no, no, no,
I don’t think we have to do that. And it’s just sort of like a scope issue, right? It’s like, you know, Carl Sagan famously quipped, right, to, you know, to bake a loaf of bread first, you must invent the universe. But like, okay, yeah, but actually to bake a loaf of bread first,
You need the ingredients and you need to put it in an oven and all that stuff. And so rather than someone being like, hey, I can’t bake this loaf of bread until I know where the universe came from. It’s like, well, I don’t think we actually need to do that.
So, yes, I’ll totally admit my own fascination of curiosity around these metaphysical issues. But I also think that they’re going to remain speculative for a long time to come. And if we want to hang our hat on this sort of receding horizon of continual metaphysical questioning.
as being the base of our meaning and value, I think then we’re going to be waiting a long time. And I just think that that level of metaphysical establishment isn’t necessary to do the sorts of work that I think we can already do.
Last thing I’ll say about that is that I’m open to the idea of this framing that I’ve given in this book being given more fundamental accounts. Maybe in 20, 30, 100, 1,000 years, I don’t know how long, hopefully we’re still around,
People say, hey, that whole second law thing, it actually turns out that’s all dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. And whether that’s that’s emergent, it’s actually there’s a more primitive aspect of understanding here. Or now we know that the universe itself was the product of an infinite number of
universes in the past or whatever it is like we can get deeper into that. And I not am only open to that. I celebrate the fact that our knowledge is continuing to be. evolved and expanded and moved into in terms of our learning. Because it’s a learning process.
So, anyway, yeah, I’ll just that’s some more framing for this project.
MATT
I think of metaphysics as a kind of ontological diplomacy. So, we have this tree you’re talking about, and we have different interpretations of it. Maybe some of them are just flat out wrong. Maybe some of them are ethically questionable. And so the metaphysician is in a situation of having to adjudicate these claims on reality.
And sometimes I have even referred to my approach as a kind of ontological pluralism for this reason, which is more a gesture towards the diplomatic aspect of it. I’m also a monist in another sense. To say that everything is made of actual occasions is a kind of monistic suggestion,
even though each actual occasion is novel and in a sense, a new world arises with each one. That’s also kind of pluralistic. So there’s a paradox here. I mean, Deleuze and Guattari say something like that secret formula we’re all looking for is the way in which monism equals pluralism and that these don’t need to be opposed principles.
There’s a synthesis position here. Um, but you know, so metaphysics is, is, has got to be diplomatic. We want to be as inclusive as possible to see. And this is something, you know, Wilbur says in his different ways, like everybody’s right. And we just got to figure out how they’re right.
When we see what perspective their proposition is true from, um, metaphysics is to search for those propositions, which would be, uh, as aperspectival as we could get them, which is to say they’re true from any perspective. Which means that when you actually try to utter a metaphysical proposition, it can seem almost utterly meaningless because it’s so general,
it’s so vague, it’s meant to apply to everything. And so as you were saying earlier, it could be kind of boring to actually do metaphysics in this way. what’s unique about the approach i would want to take really rooting it in experience is that it’s you know in william james’s sense it’s radically empirical
it’s different from humian empiricism james thinks we we we also feel relations directly not just our experiences isn’t as hume thought just uh composed of these like raw sensory universals or quality or something that the mind then associates and builds up an inner model of the world radical empiricism says no we feel the world directly
And Whitehead’s elaborating on this Jamesian kind of phenomenology or radical empiricism so that his metaphysics, his account of concrescence, I hope can be understood not as a kind of series of posits that he’s just coming up with categories and that they’re internally consistent. And so what does this have to do with the actual world we inhabit together?
What he’s trying to do is look at our human experience. And he’s a deep student of James’s Principles of Psychology, this amazing text from 1890 that in many ways, even in neurology, is ahead of us 100 years plus, 130, 40 years plus later. We haven’t made much of an advance on James, I would say.
People should read Principles of Psychology and let me know if they think that’s true. But Whitehead wants an account of reality that does justice to our human experience of conscious agency, as well as to our understanding of quantum physics, as well as to understanding of physiology and how cells navigate their environments.
He wants one set of categories that applies across all of them and does justice to all of them without having to say that any of these levels is more real than any other level. And he’s very clear that none of the laws of physics and chemistry are broken in the way that the human body operates.
But that’s not the same thing as saying that there aren’t other principles at play. And I know you’re fully aware of this with the ideas of emergence. But rather than thinking of his radically empirical metaphysics as just positing metaphysical entities left and right, he’s really trying to look at what are the hardcore common sense presuppositions of
human existence that are required for science to be possible and all of our theorizing about nature to be possible, and also for our sense of ourselves as moral agents, for law to be possible, for politics. we need all those things to be real. And I know you think they’re real.
And even if they are in the intensity and complexity, which they realize, even if they might be emergent, there’s also something that Whitehead thinks must be true of reality as such, if conscious agents could have emerged at some point later on. And that looks something like saying that, yeah,
aim or value is now normally we would want to say intrinsic. And the thing is, we don’t want to say intrinsic if that means non-relational. Value is totally relational. Aim is totally relational. And so rather than say that value is intrinsic, we could say that, I mean, we may as well just say that relationality is intrinsic.
Relationality goes all the way down. And to be in relationship is an erotic activity. And that that Eros is, and here I’m shifting into some of that Zach Stein’s language and cosmocratic humanism because I like it. I’m not familiar with all the details and I don’t know exactly how it diverges, but this idea that space and time
ultimately our ways that we have of measuring the world and which geometry we use to try to measure space and time or space time. I think I’m with Pankare and Whitehead that that’s kind of, it’s, it’s a matter of convention. There’s no, I disagree. And Whitehead disagrees with Einstein.
I know that’s bold, but it’s to think that there’s only one space time metric that, for the way that the physical world is it i think that’s actually an instrumental choice it’s like it depends uh you know different geometries are useful for different purposes um and so Well, sorry.
BRENDAN
Yeah, finish your thought.
MATT
Just to finish that thought, it seems to me that when we generalize, when we seek to come up with metaphysical explanations, what we’re trying to do is arrive at a set of categories that would allow us to take our own conscious agency seriously, just as much as we take the findings of natural science seriously.
And at the end of the day, to make experience the arbiter, because if we end up wanting science to explain our conscious agency by reference to something that has fundamentally no experiential aspect, fundamentally no aim, we’re always, from a Whiteheadian point of view, going to be committing the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
We’re going to be putting the model before experience and attempting to somehow get experience out of the model.
BRENDAN
Yeah. And that whole cluster of ideas that you just mapped all, for me, get down to this issue. And I don’t know how to get to the bottom of it. But it does seem to turn on this problem of continuity and discontinuity. I mean, I think one of the biggest aspects where,
and I was trying to get this earlier but didn’t do a very good job framing it, is that I think where we diverge most is that, what language do I even use for this? Something like, you know, that experiential aspect that you want to find that continuity with going all the way down.
I am very comfortable as seeing as discontinuous, right. As being something that, that emerges yes, out of earlier real realities, but doesn’t necessarily need to go as far down as a panpsychic perspective. Once it, or is it, positing it goes. And for that, I have no issue seeing, for example,
will emerging out of what lower down the stack is more or less deterministic or chaotic. That to me is not a problem in the same way that when I look at certain phenomena around me that I recognize wouldn’t make sense to posit at a fundamental level, You know, like, I don’t know what the example would be color,
you know, like yeah color is real right it’s it’s there I see it and it’s all around me but at the same time, you know, once you then you appreciate that there’s this like photon relationship and the, you know, and how light gets diffracted and the angle and all this stuff you’re like oh okay
then yeah I guess at a certain point. Maybe there isn’t really color in how I think about it. And actually, maybe color is a more contextualized notion of some deeper reality. And those kinds of discontinuities are fine for me. And in fact, they enhance the whole story.
It’s like color emerges out of a colorlessness or wetness emerges out of, you know, things that aren’t wet. And, you know, emergent behavior of various kinds reflects certain kinds of degrees of pattern and and certain phenomena that just aren’t present in the in the earlier parts and it’s
like that to me is is fine so then i don’t need to have in my conception of things atoms having some willful nature to them um you know i like also myself language around love and eros but but really as a metaphor until you get to something that has a nervous system, right.
That, that can like feel that. And so again, I, I get the hang up, but I, I, I haven’t yet found a way of being able to cognize the you know, what the problem is as we move further into the, let’s say less complexity as these things shading further and further down until
you’re really just dealing with something that is, you know, probabilistic or chaotic or deterministic. And it’s like, that to me doesn’t diminish anything and it doesn’t provide, it doesn’t cause any, um, kind of philosophical confusion or you know sense of contradiction of like well how
did we then come to be from these things that weren’t that it’s like well that happens all the time everywhere you know all over the universe things are becoming things that they weren’t and yet they do follow a dependent relationship on what has been. So there’s continuity and discontinuity.
And all of these issues seem to get hung up on that point, which is why I’m kind of belaboring it because it’s, it’s, it’s related to the panpsychic bit. It’s related to the role of models and abstraction. And so for me, and I’m not sure if this is a temperament thing or if I’m missing something philosophical,
if there’s an argument that could be made that like would, you know, show why there’s some contradiction here. You know, I don’t know. Anyway, so that’s that’s where I’m coming at it of like as an issue around continuity, discontinuity. And I guess the last thing I’ll say is that for me,
then the whole story is itself one of beginning from simplicity and then getting love and feeling and emotion and wonder and awe and splendor and all these things. Right. And it’s precisely because it doesn’t begin there and becomes that that we get this really profound evolutionary narrative that is towards greater meaning and value and depth and consciousness.
Whereas if we tried to somehow put some minuscule version of that and stuff it in all the way down right at the beginning, sort of like. Anyway, do you see what I mean? So all these things are bound up with each other. And that’s why it becomes so difficult.
And it’s like we’re trying to unpack each other’s gestalts on this whole thing. And so it’s hard.
MATT
Yeah. I mean, are you comfortable with the category of kind of emergent physicalism as what a metamodern cosmology, your metamodern cosmology is proposing? It’s basically emergentist physicalism.
BRENDAN
I would need to know what you meant by physicalism, obviously, because I think that term easily gets alighted either with materialism and or naturalism, and I make a distinction between all these. I’m very happy with naturalism.
MATT
I just mean whatever the best science of your choice of the current day that’s not looking at anything that can’t be measured and modeled. And so in other words, energy, thermodynamics, information theories, that that’s what’s considered physicalism nowadays. And that you’re saying consciousness is emergent from…
BRENDAN
Yeah, I mean, there are many things… Like consciousness, we obviously don’t know how to measure and model. And so I think that… But it’s clearly real. And again, you talked about constraints earlier. There’s so many other forms of causation that aren’t just efficient causation. There was one point in your response which might have been construed as me
suggesting that I basically just think that there’s only efficient causation, which is not the case. I think that there are all these other forms that go into that.
MATT
What about when the universe was just clouds of hydrogen? Would you say that is just efficient causation?
BRENDAN
No, not really. There’s a great book, Context Changes Everything by Alicia Herrero. She talks a lot about these constraints that are themselves causative, that they have a causal force in reality. She uses so many examples of this too quickly. If you put a couple people over a bridge, the bridge is fine.
If you put a whole group of people going over a bridge, the bridge is fine. If you put a whole group of people going over a bridge who are all stepping in unison, you’re going to create certain frequency dynamics that actually could cause the whole bridge to collapse. That’s not an efficient causation thing, right?
It’s the same number of people. It’s the same number of particles. What’s different is that there’s a different constraint on how, like the differences,
MATT
the pattern,
BRENDAN
the differences are different. And you know, a, a, a rotary if you go around you know one of these um traffic circles right like it causes material to behave differently even though there’s not like something crashing into another thing so there’s all sorts of different ways and those are
all real right so i want to be very open to the causal forces but i do think this part is really important there are causal forces and and i i this is the biggest reason why i have my whole hang-up around this stuff is because
I see at least the project that I’m trying to articulate as being causally closed as best as we understand it. And you could disagree with that. And there are certainly areas of it that probably maybe aren’t, right? And when we’re talking about the first principles aspect, right?
Is it actually causally closed to talk about the second law of thermodynamics as being a first principle? It seems to be, but maybe that could be pushed back if we had different, you know, information and or theory, what have you. But my point is that Um, there is a general sense that things cause other things.
And my biggest concern around any alternative theory comes in when you want to kind of free lunch and you want to say, ah, but there’s this other thing that doesn’t have a causal, you know, explanation that we can account for. And then at that point, I’m like, I don’t know what that means.
Like, and I think a little bit of this mental pull of, of the Whiteheadian framing and, um, sourcing things beyond space and time is another version of this and similarly right it’s like i just that to me is a sign of like you know we’ve hung our hat on
metaphysical speculation rather than a pretty clear accounting of what occurs um and so i’m looking for a model that can be as best as we can, causally closed, because as soon as you introduce a lack of causal closure, it’s not scientific and it’s not really an account of- Let me ask you about that,
MATT
causal closure, because that would seem to me to be, if causal closure holds, How can that be squared with the possibility of a kind of emergent top-down agency from, say, a conscious human being? If causal closure holds, I’m pretty sure we have to go with Robert Sapolsky and say we’re completely deterministic.
BRENDAN
Yeah, and I think that this is where a lot of this boils down, because I don’t agree. I think that you can still have causal closure and emergence and unpredictability, and you All of that. I don’t think that this leads us to radical determinism.
And I think one of the whole insights of emergence is that these are causally closed phenomena that are still fundamentally unpredictable. So, for example, right, in certain emergent phenomena or modeling, right, the only way to know what happens is to run the simulation. There’s no way of predicting it. There’s no like theoretically, mathematically predicting. it’s unpredictable.
The only way to know what happens is, okay, let’s see. And so that is therefore, but it’s not magic. It is real and it’s mathematical and it can be accounted for, but you just, it’s, it’s, it’s fundamentally impossible to know in advance. That’s the kind of stuff that I feel like we need to be orienting to,
to get the kind of more mysterious phenomena that we experience. I mean, Stuart Kaufman’s notion of the adjacent possible and all this stuff Stuart Kaufman is a scientist. He wouldn’t say, well, yeah, there’s actually no causal, you know, there’s no, you know, he’s not going to be positing magic.
It’s just that when you look at how these things play out, they are open and that they’re fundamentally open. And so that gets us out of the straitjacket of reductionism. And that to me is so important.
MATT
I guess I don’t see causal closure. I don’t see these things being consistent. I don’t think we need to have causal closure in this. Because causal closure to me implies that all we would need to know is the position and the velocity of the particles or the way that the fields are behaving in any given moment.
And then there’s no… way for anything to intervene and how that’s going to play out and there are entailment laws that’ll tell you exactly what’s coming next maybe the modeling thing yeah that’s true but that’s is that in principle or is that in principle we couldn’t have perfect knowledge of everything, of the initial conditions.
BRENDAN
Well, this does get to some interesting questioning around issues of emergence. Is it epistemological or is it ontological? This sort of a thing. But I do think, I’m actually glad that we’re hitting on this because this to me is super important. And I think a lot of people…
will both misunderstand what I’m trying to do if this isn’t unpacked. And I think that will also continue to fall into pre-modern traps unless we can square this issue. Because I think that this is what leads people to want to abandon rational, causal explanations of things because they feel like if I go in that direction,
I’m going to get stuck in the straitjacket of reductionism. And it’s like, no, I don’t think that’s the case. So
MATT
Well, just to say rational causal explanation, I’m with Aristotle. We can have at least four different ways of understanding what a cause is. And so just because we’re saying causal closure to me is about efficient causes being sufficient. And I’m saying if we really wanted a rational causal explanation, we’re going to need to go beyond that,
even at the level of hydrogen atoms, a cloud of hydrogen atoms.
BRENDAN
I don’t think about it that way. And I’m happy to be corrected if I’m misusing that phrase. Maybe in the history of philosophy, causal closure only refers to efficient causation. But I mean all forms of causation. I mean final cause. I mean formal cause. I mean, you know… Well, then, okay. Yeah. Yeah. But… Okay.
Well, so this is good. Okay. So for me, what I want to avoid is this… This example of what you could call the one ended stick. Right. So I used to live with this aesthetic philosopher and he was just an ardent atheist and materialist, more or less. So I don’t agree with his whole metaphysical suppositions,
but he he kept harping on this thing that I do think is a good illustration of at least this one point, which is he would always say God is a one ended stick. And by which he meant we can imagine a one ended stick.
But if you actually were to think about like or try to make a one ended stick, let’s say like that doesn’t that’s not possible. Right. So so we have certain ideas in our heads that we think make sense, but then they don’t actually exist. And so this also has a profound connection to the whole learning process.
uh framework that we’re conceiving of because children might say that oh yeah when i roll out the ball of clay now there’s more ball of clay than there was before when it was a ball right because look it’s longer but actually it’s because there’s a deficiency in what they’re able to bring together simultaneously and integrate in
terms of the different causal aspects that are going on here also this is why the developmental tradition is so key and clutch for this whole line of argumentation because It’s the developmental approach that is what allows us to see more and more causal variables integrated into a relationship with one another.
And that leads us into complex thought from simplistic thought. So anyway, my whole point is that we want to avoid concepts that are one-ended sticks, where we actually need to be able to account for what’s going on here. And that doesn’t mean, oh, look, we have this velocity and position, and therefore we know everything.
Not that at all. but we need to account for all the different possible forms of causation. This is where you do get into all of the complex ways that things influence each other. This is why complexity thinking is so important because it’s still causal. When you look at a murmuration of birds,
behaving the way that they do it’s not like you know oh it’s magic now because isn’t that cool it’s like no there’s still a reason why this is occurring but we can begin to appreciate how this whole network of causes is having a kind of uh you
know summative cause so that to me is clutch i’ll pause there but like i i’m glad we’re hitting on this issue because this is um really important
MATT
Yeah. So it has been my working understanding that causal closure implies efficient causation is sufficient and that there’s an attempt to eliminate the need for any formal or final causes. Maybe there’s other understandings of what causal closure means.
BRENDAN
Well, I’ll defer to you. I mean, you’re much more in the realm of metaphysics and philosophy. So if that’s how you hear that.
MATT
But the way you’re defining it, okay. As long as we’re including formal and final causation as part of what a naturalistic explanation would require.
BRENDAN
Right.
MATT
And I would say at all scales, then I’m on board with that. But in terms of this one stick thing, if I could just respond to that, I like that. And I think… The idea of God as a creator, as the prime mover, that is an idea that is impossible to understand how it could be real because
everything has two sides. But Whitehead’s God is bipolar. And actually, I would think of physicalism as a one-sided stick in the sense that where it’s an accounting of reality and bringing in emergence, I think muddies the waters a bit and requires a lot more. I mean, it requires this whole conversation,
but to posit the general physicalist sort of position that reality is just this collection of physical causes, efficient causes, is to neglect the conditions of the possibility of your knowledge of that fact. In other words, this physical universe, so-called, gave rise to conscious agents doing science who then describe it as a physical, causally closed system of interactions,
you’re not accounting for your own existence. You’re trying to describe the universe as though it were one-ended stick and forgetting that you’re standing on the other side of that stick making this explanation. And so we always need to be dipolar. This is why dipolar metaphysics is so important. We want both ends of that stick.
And never to forget in our explanations that there’s an explainer and we need to account for the explainer just as much as the terms of the explanation.
BRENDAN
And I totally agree with that. But here’s the question for you is that would you be comfortable with a notion of consciousness being causally closed in the sense that I’m talking about? All formal, final, not just efficient cause, but at the end of the day, so to speak, consciousness
was it could be accounted for in the sense that, you know, real cause and effect mechanisms were, and I know the word mechanism might be problematic here, but I mean, relationships, let’s say cause and effect relationships are the means by which we experience our, our conscious realities. How does that idea land for you?
And I’ll just qualify that with one thought, which is that a lot of people are, want to make consciousness this sort of black box you know of sort of intentionally it it doesn’t relate to causal relationality and and that’s where i i find you know this is partly why the scientific enterprise to describe consciousness becomes so
uh kind of difficult from the beginning because some people just want to keep it inherently immune from any kind of causal um and i don’t want to say explanation because i think that that sounds reductive right but in the same way that like you know I’ll pause there.
Does that notion that consciousness is a product of a very complex set of causal relationships, how does that idea land for you?
MATT
That’s fine with me. Consciousness, Whitehead says, is derivative. It presupposes experience for him. And so experience is most experience is not conscious. And a lot of people have trouble with that whole concept of conscious experience. They’re just synonyms. But he actually wants to reserve what we think of as consciousness, whether animals or self-consciousness in human beings is,
yeah, an emergent consciousness. phenomenon that is the result of the filtering and the amplification that these social forms of enduring biological bodies afford us. And so he’ll say, there are certain streams of occasions of experience flitting around in the interstices of the brain, he says, that are peculiarly situated so as to inherit through transmission,
channels of transmissions of feelings through the body, a highly filtered, like organized flow of environmental, vectors right and and these occasions of experience that we associate with our conscious stream of thought our self-consciousness uh are you know summing up or a kind of accumulation of all this environmental and you know this is very similar to
you know contemporary accounts um uh in terms of um embodied and active accounts. I’ve been really trying to bring this into dialogue with free energy principle ideas. There’s a lot of, at least on the face of it, convergence in how Whitehead thinks of consciousness. Like Levin would say, it’s built atop of this agential material.
and is an achievement of a collective of cells, which each cell is the achievement of a collective of organelles and on and on. We’re talking about nested societies, right? And that there are basal forms of experience upon which our own conscious agency rests. And the fact that we can be conscious agents is a testament to the…
the cooperativity of this community of beings that is able to, in a way, sacrifice their own individual agency for the sake of something larger than themselves that they might not even be capable of knowing anything about. And just to dwell on this point, in the semantic informational terms in which you were
the research you’re drawing on to define living beings as being able to produce meaningful information where meaningful information is whatever they can garner from their environment that allows them to persist, that makes them more likely to persist in that environment. It starts to make me wonder if that might not
that idea might not have in some way contradict what Levin and others suggest about cellular collectives and the way that an individual cell can actually sacrifice its own need for independent subsistence for the sake of some greater whole, some greater collective that it belongs to.
And so that leveling switch is an interesting factor that I’m not sure how to account for in terms of this This sense of semantic information requiring or being identified with information that allows that individual being to persist. Where’s the possibility of sacrifice for the sake of the greater whole in that account? Yeah, definitely.
BRENDAN
I’m trying to think of which thing to tackle first, because… Yeah, sorry, I just threw that in there. No, no, no, it’s great. Let’s come back to that, because I have a very specific, easy answer to that one. But what you were saying a minute ago was interesting, because it made me think,
it brought a connection to what you were saying earlier about… Whitehead’s notion of this sort of the whole and and how there’s like the whole is in all the parts there was a kind of fractal nature you were describing earlier and
it was made me think how yes a body can be in service to the collectivity of a of an animal and not have any itself kind of knowledge of that entity but that is the whole context that is permitting that cell to exist and And it made me think for a second,
if you wanted to take that notion really seriously, that the whole of existence in some ways could be partly, you could say, dependent on our own experience, our own reality, our own existing. And we don’t conceive of that in the same way that the cell doesn’t conceive of the animal, but it is intrinsic.
It is necessary to the being of that animal in its totality. And that provides a really fascinating way of thinking about our relationship to, let’s say, God. I just wanted to see if you had any thoughts on that
MATT
I have imagined that the cells that compose the human body are engaged in some sort of ritual practice whereby they are worshiping. We are their version of a kind of monotheistic deity that they are worshiping. But it brings home the point that through this practice of ritual worship, that they’re actually also creating that deity.
They’re not just standing apart from it, looking up to it. They are making it as they worship it. I think that’s actually an appropriate analogy for human religiosity. I like that.
BRENDAN
I loved reading Durkheim through that lens too, because he took a very functionless kind of reductive stance of God is society. But there’s always been this notion, even going all the way back to ancient Greeks, talking about if you don’t feed the gods, they’ll die. And so it’s really important that humans do that.
And so even there’s this kind of nascent notion that human beings create the gods or that we we are necessary for the God survival, let’s say. And, and then Durkheim kind of comes along and it’s like, no, like yes and no. And it’s not because there’s a God, but it’s because we’re all doing this thing.
And so we’re creating this thing, but I think you can take it really further and much more the way you were just talking about that. We actually, it’s all of the, all of the above, so to speak. There’s a whole thought that I, you know, it would be interesting to unpack in other ways,
but it relates a lot to things that I’m very passionate about in terms of mythopoeia and all of that but I did want to say what you just responded to though as beautiful as that is I do also then again want to drive home at least for me that there also
needs to be a discontinuity in an account like that right like sales and like there’s a need to want to draw the metaphorical because there’s like, yes, it’s analogous to maybe how humans worship a deity is how cells relate ritualistically, as you say, to the body. Um, but I also want to then say,
but it’s not the same as, and I think that pushed, you’d probably agree, but I always want to make that explicit. You know what I mean? Or maybe you don’t, maybe you would say that it is the same.
MATT
No, I’m sure there are important differences. Um, But I think, you know, in some sense, again, doing metaphysics, we’re searching for analogies and no analogy is going to be perfect. But we do want to make these comparisons. And yeah, this point about continuity and discontinuity is super important. I mean, it’s deeply important.
sort of woven throughout Whitehead’s whole accounting of the universe, that he explained both those aspects which are continuous and those which are discontinuous. And there’s this kind of enigmatic statement he makes at one point in Processing Reality that there is no continuity of becoming. There is a becoming of continuity.
And what he means by that is that the actual occasions are what become. And they give rise to continuity. So continuity is at the level of, you would say, possibility is continuous. So the realm of eternal objects, there’s infinitely many eternal objects for precisely the reason that there are infinitely many shades of color between red and orange.
infinitely many numbers between one and two you know it’s and so um possibility is continuous but actuality he says is incurably atomic and by atomic he doesn’t mean a little particle atomos in greek means whole in a sense undivided quantized yeah and so you know Continuity becomes, which is to say,
this is one of the reasons he says that space-time, which again is a kind of abstract metric, and I kind of lost my train of thought earlier getting into that really interesting issue. Space-time for Whitehead is like a field of possibility that is emergent from the relationships among actual occasions. And so these little processes,
these little acts of experience are relating to one another and they’re all internally related through these networks of prehensions are giving rise to maintaining and always also subtly transforming what we call space-time. And because the space-time studied by physics has been laid down billions of years ago by what Whitehead would call the electromagnetic society,
and even more basic than that, what he would call the geometric society, which establishes the dimensionality of the universe as we measure it. These are the background forms of enduring order achieved by this network of occasions of experience. But that continuity of space-time can’t be absolute.
And this is a point that’s not just coming out of his speculative metaphysics, but out of attempts at quantum gravity. There seems to be a quantized nature to space-time.
BRENDAN
It also does seem, though, that you get a fine graining as you, you know, look at the statistical hole. And it’s like, yeah, maybe in a glass of water, you don’t know where any particular particle is. It’s kind of, in that sense, inherently unique. And, you know, to kind of make this comparison.
But you can get the temperature of the glass of water in its macro state. So you could say spacetime is inherently, you know, not… absolutizable because it’s got all these linked path-dependent sort of occasions that constitute it. But you could also say, looking out at sort of the swath of what we call space-time,
those differences even out and we can do the sorts of things that physicists do because… You know what I mean? I don’t know if one could make that… But they don’t even out.
MATT
There’s asymmetry at the… I mean, the cosmic microwave background radiation is strangely dipolar. It’s like, whoa, what’s going on?
BRENDAN
Yeah. Well, before… Before we close, which we probably should do soon, I did just want to address that issue around self-sacrifice and that sort of a thing, because I think it’s important. And one of the things in my framing of this book that I would be worried that people would take away,
and so I’ve made efforts to try to repeat over and over again, not to be confusing here, or not to… This is not to say that, and I try to do that multiple times… Uh, because I would be worried that people would take a reductive view of this, uh, right.
Anytime you try to do something by developing a kind of archeology that goes down to the archaic, uh, then people are going to be tempted to say, oh, that’s, it’s just that. And it’s like, no, that’s not what it is. It builds on top of itself. And that’s what complexification is and why it’s so important.
So even though I also am making a thermodynamic argument, I’m not just trying to say, look, and now we can use thermodynamics to explain human behavior or whatever. Yeah. Uh, that doesn’t mean that human behavior doesn’t have a thermodynamic component to it. So anyway, I just wanted to say that as framing to this specific particular issue,
because by thinking about meaning as pertaining to the information linking an entity within this environment that bears on its viability, um, it doesn’t just presume then that we’re talking about the atom, the atomistic individual there, right? In the same way, right, that we’re, and by, yeah,
and I mean atomistic in the way we were just talking about it. I don’t mean atoms, but like, so I am a human being because there are other human beings. Like I literally cannot be, and I hope this comes through when I talk to the level of symbolic learning in human culture,
because my whole sense of being a self is, is dependent upon there being this shared collective thing that we do called language. And then basically this dynamic feedback loop between my socialization into a collective is, you know, ultimately then what allows me to be an individual ego in a collective society. So the point is,
there is no atomistic individual, right? And then this does lead us to the notions of the individual and all of that, this transpersonal thing. But so there is no, just like, you know, neoliberal ideal notion of the individual who can be apart from things. It’s like, fundamentally, if you’re a person, you’re part of a collective. Now,
If that’s the case, then the viability of that individual unit of the collective, its viability is influenced by the collective. Right. Without the collective, then the individual couldn’t be. And I think the same is true with a cell. Right. That if you’re talking about a cell in a body that’s part of a multicellular organism, you know,
for example, right, like one cell. couldn’t continue to be if it weren’t for the operations of another cell in a totally different part of the body doing a different task. Let’s say they’re part of pumping the blood and the other parts of filtering the bile or something.
But if these cells stop doing what they’re supposed to do, the whole organism is going to die. The collective has direct bearing on the viability of the individual constitutive part. Issues of self-sacrifice seem to me to be directly accounted for in these things. And every form of altruism, self-giving, love, all these sorts of things is that, like,
I am because you are. I am because there are others. And who I am is directly related to you. And my values are directly related to your values. And so to some degree… we are not just individuals we are also operatives of the collective and so oftentimes the collective distinctly prizes those individuals who take up that role
to to support the collective um by sacrificing themselves so i mean you know evolutionary psychology and other forms of of thought have already i think done a decent job tackling this issue because it always gets raised in the context of evolution of like well then if we’re all just self-serving you know entities why
would we dot dot dot And it’s like, no, we can account for all of this very well when we situate ourselves as part of collectives and being dependent on them. So that would be my answer to that issue.
MATT
Yeah. I think as long as evolutionary psychologists accept multi-scale selection and group selection of these things, then I take that particular discipline seriously. There’s a lot of evolutionary psychology, though, that… still runs on that 1970s, 1960s version of Dawkinsian selfish gene biology, which ends up reading neoliberal economics into the biological world and justifying
current social conditions by naturalizing them, which I think is highly… That’s not a good science. I think there are other approaches to evolutionary psychology, which take this… the importance of collectivity. Every individual is made of individuals and part of bigger individuals. What gets selected is a matter of perspective.
All of these scales are operative in evolution in terms of units of selection. And that’s a whole other interesting… There’s so many little things we could have touched on that we didn’t get to today, but
BRENDAN
Well, we’ll have another chat because, you know, at least another, because we’ll need a couple of these. I mean, this has been a very wide ranging conversation, but again, it’s so, I don’t think there’s anything for that. Like we have to do that because all of these things interact. We’re talking, as I said, at the opening,
there’s so much stuff that you have to unpack to be able to get at the fine shades of difference. These shades of difference do ultimately scale up to have rather different important different implications for our kind of bigger ways of seeing all this stuff.
But you’ve really got to drill down to like find the little nub and then, you know, clarify that. So I’m very happy to do. Yeah. Another couple of conversations. And yeah.
MATT
Yeah. Well, I feel we made a lot of progress and that, you know, When Whitehead looks at the history of philosophy, he says, don’t pay attention to the superficial disagreements. Like look beneath the surface and you see the zeitgeist at work. And in some sense, metaphysics is really difficult because the real presuppositions,
the general presuppositions you’re making are always kind of just behind the edge of your thinking. conscious thinking ability. And so I feel like beneath the surface and to some extent on the surface of everything we’ve been talking about, there’s a lot of a shared sense of why this is important, first of all,
and an ethical imperative that’s baked into it and a real desire to learn from each other and to learn from all of the cutting edge science that’s available and to just try to make sense of our existence in an evolutionary way. So there’s a lot of convergence between us,
even if there are these really interesting points where we’re trying to figure out where we differ. Yeah.
BRENDAN
I totally agree. And it’s that being at the edge of your thought because you’re trying to give voice to something that is a presupposition to deeper held notions. Those are precisely the things that deserve to be interrogated. And so there aren’t a lot of folks for various reasons that I can have those kinds of conversations with.
But this one I felt I felt there, which is a both. It’s like a it’s a very productive and like exciting place to be. It’s also very uncomfortable because you’re like, oh, I’m usually much more articulate. And like I but this is, you know, but it’s good because it’s supposed to lay bare your suppositions.
And then, you know, are they actually justified and that sort of a thing? You know, so all that’s all of that’s really important. Plus, you know, when we lay them bare, we can be more clear about. you know, sort of like, well, yeah, he’s starting from this axiomatic position and I’m starting here.
And maybe they’re both equally justified or we have our different reasons for justifying either. But that’s why when you, you know, kind of zoom out, the things are different. But yeah, all that’s just to say that, yeah, I think it’s necessary work. And it might be a bit niche.
Maybe this podcast and the future ones that we do won’t be for everyone because they are trying to do that sort of a thing. But I do think, I don’t know, I gain from that. And I do, I think, yeah, I want to do that.
I want to dig into what I’m presuming here to consider how it could be otherwise. And if it were otherwise, what would that look like? And how does that change the whole gestalt?
MATT
It might be fun, actually. you know next time to on the surface totally change the subject and talk about like metamodern Christianity and myth and reason and science and how we sort out because we might discover connections to the sorts of details we’ve been exploring today but make it more in a more accessible context I don’t know
BRENDAN
I’d be up for that. I also, in our last minute or so here, I wanted to think about, yeah, what would be those next moves for the conversation? A couple of things came up for me out of this that I think are digging into.
And one of them is I would love some deeper clarity and maybe it’s really boring and technical, but there’s an issue here of like, on the one hand, there is this issue around misplaced concreteness and this abstraction problem that divorces us from experience.
On the other hand, it seems like metaphysics would be a perfect example of that, right? How do we resolve a seeming tension there, I think, where you might see me doing that in terms of relying too much on the sciences, but I would be concerned to do that by relying on metaphysics.
And so what’s sort of the proper role of abstraction? What is abstraction actually doing for us and how does it work? Those sorts of questions I think would be important to probe um maybe to some degree uh there are other things too but i’m
also very happy to yeah kind of switch gears and then come at it from a totally orthogonal angle and and drill back down into a this was there were there any particular things that came up for you that you’d want to dig further into
MATT
Well, we could talk a bit about some of the issues with a kind of emergentist account of consciousness. I do think there are certain questions that I would have around how a kind of epiphenomenal view of what consciousness is differs from the idea of a top-down causal role for consciousness to play and how that does square.
Now that I understand that for you, causal closure doesn’t mean just efficient causes. I can see how you can get around that issue. Where consciousness comes online in the history of evolution, is it nervous systems? Is it single cells? Is it networks of cells?
Because it seems to me that the neuron and the nervous system is a somewhat arbitrary boundary. I mean, a lot of different forms of let’s say, faster learning becomes possible with the nervous systems. But single cells, paramecium, learn, have memory. They’re cognitive agents already. And so is the nervous system really the line we want to draw there?
So yeah, questions like where exactly on that scale?
BRENDAN
I think that that would be a wonderful way to continue this. I do keep when we get into that issue, because you mentioned earlier, well, you know, not all experience is conscience. And I’m like, yes, totally. That’s sort of the whole point. But then it’s like, so what do we mean?
We obviously did a whole conversation on prehension, but it still left me like. So anyway, that would allow us to dig more into that, which I do think is really, in many ways, the crux of a lot of this of like, what do we mean by these notions of prehension?
mentality or intentionality or interiority rather and all this stuff. So yeah, I’d love to dig into that and kind of compare notes of where we… And maybe you can bring some important kind of alternative information to kind of more standard conceptions of what that looks like. I know you’d mentioned Levin’s work and that sort of a thing.
And I think he’s doing some of that in exciting ways. So cool. Well, Yeah, we’ll be in touch and we’ll set up another time to continue this. So I look forward to that. And I appreciate you, man. This is great stuff. I love having you, as I said, as an interlocutor on all this and really, really deep,
juicy, awesome stuff. So Matt Segal, thank you so much. Appreciate it.
MATT
Thanks, Brandon. Yeah, a lot of fun to be in dialogue with you.
BRENDAN
Till next time.
Footnotes2Plato 
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