The Invariance of Variation: Or Why Metaphysics Must Become Ungrounded (Dialogue with Tim Jackson)

Above, Tim Jackson and I dialogue about a number of conversations we watched, including:

Matt Segall:

So this is going to be laid back. We didn’t read anything, but we did listen to a whole bunch of conversations. I guess three. Okay, I threw another one in there. So, there’s the Levin and Deacon dialogue about evolutionary biology, and there’s the Bernardo Kastrup and Jay Garfield dialogue—about Madhyamaka Buddhism and analytic idealism, and some very ancient debates about metaphysics, and this tendency to substantialize ideas, or what Whitehead would call “misplaced concreteness.”

And we listened to my colleague Sean Kelly speak with—do you remember the guy’s name he was speaking with?

Tim Jackson:

I wanted to say Jason Hoskins or something, but that might be someone completely different. That might be someone on Twitter.

Matt Segall:

Yeah, I think that’s someone else. And then what was the fourth one?

Tim Jackson:

You sent me that Rupert Sheldrake—

Matt Segall:

Oh, Rupert and Mark Vernon, of course.

Tim Jackson:

I think because Rupert had been not entirely complimentarily referenced by Deacon. Right? Deacon saying to Levin, “Oh, your old work reminded me more of Rupert Sheldrake—and that was a bad thing. But thankfully, you’ve grown out of that.”

Matt Segall:

Right. Yeah, yeah. So I definitely want to talk about that. And then—so it was Luke Johnson who was in dialogue with Kelly about Hegel—

Tim Jackson:

And Jung. Jayton Hoskins, who is someone that I think we—I think we both occasionally—

Matt Segall:

That’s right. So, I think in addition to triangulating—or whatever the four-version of triangulate would be, quadrangulate—all of those videos, you and I have been talking about what the metaphysical anti-ground or ground might be. “Variation” in your terms, I think, would be your preference for how to do that.

Whitehead has “Creativity,” but then there’s also this co-eternal thing—a God in its primordial and consequent poles, phases. And I think that that’s very much at the core of a lot of the ideas thrown around in these discussions. So, I don’t know where we want to start—I mean, actually, I do know where we want to start. I’ll get to that in a second. But I just wanted to make sure you knew that I came fully armed [holds up Process and Reality].

Tim Jackson:

I always assume, Matt, that you have all the quotes memorized. What do you even need for at this point?

Matt Segall:

I just like to rehearse some of these pages.

Tim Jackson:

I’ve come armed with some stuff. We can battle.

Matt Segall:

But I think, you know, one thing I’ll throw into the mix—which I know you already have a response to—is: when it comes to variation, I have trouble knowing what it means without its polar complement—something invariant.

And so I feel like to reference variation is already to implicitly, in a sense, depend on something invariant by which you would even know that there was variation occurring. Which I kind of think is what’s going on with the primordial nature of God and Creativity in Whitehead—that sort of conceptual oscillation at the groundless ground of everything.

Where there are problems if you only have the primordial nature as the base concept, and you might want to get along with just Creativity—but can you even reference Creativity without implicitly having some invariance in the background?

So, let’s return to that. But the first thing I want to say is more coming out of the Jay Garfield-Kastrup conversation—just about the purpose of metaphysics, or what I think the aim of philosophizing, let’s just say, should be. And I feel like Buddhism allows us to avoid spiraling off the proper aim of philosophizing into—I don’t know—the abstraction Olympics or something, and instead just keep the eye on the prize, which is attending to human existence, and to the suffering that comes from being embodied and coexisting with other bodies.

“Dukkha” literally means “crowded space,” you know? And so, I think making sure our metaphysics is soteriological—that it’s actually going to help us suffer less—I think is really important. And I was glad to see at various points Jay Garfield—who, you know, we’ve hung out with in the past—I was glad to see him direct the conversation in that way and remind everyone of that.

But I also felt like, in the exchange with Bernardo Kastrup—who also has a way of… a form of fixity in an alignment with a perceived truth that prevents meeting difference in a productive way—dialoguing versus debating… I think they both kind of fell into a debate mode, even though I think Jay—and Bernardo too—would probably both say they prefer not to debate, because it does take you off this proper aim of metaphysics, which is to alleviate suffering.

And so, in any exchange of ideas with somebody, I feel like if you end with a very sharp disagreement, it’s like a missed opportunity to alleviate suffering. Yeah.

Tim Jackson:

I suppose that just really depends on one’s definition of debate as well, and where we draw the line between debate and dialogue. Debate, perhaps, can be—I mean, there’s an ideal of debate, which I think is both instantiated in probably scientific contexts—I mean, the ideal is present in those contexts. Is it actually manifested and instantiated in those contexts? Well, often not. Yeah.

And I’ve been part of big public debates in the scientific context which really did not, you know, instantiate the sort of ideal of a kind of constructive debate where we’re all learning from each other and we’re not, you know, confusing our positive theses with our own egos and all of that sort of stuff. But there is that ideal there.

And then I think there’s also that ideal in this Indian context, which Jay was talking about—this sort of classical Indian context where people are, you know, vociferously debating, but with a view to soteriology. That, you know, getting our ideas right—and the only way to do that is in a kind of, you know, more or less debate-like exchange.

Getting our ideas right does have this potentially transformative and soteriological—salvific, ataraxia, maybe, we’re trying to achieve in the Greek sense—effect. And they did say in another dialogue on that same channel—which I just listened to about the first fifteen minutes or so of this morning, likewise—okay, well, so then I think the first question perhaps even that the host asked him was: What is the purpose of philosophy?

And Jay did touch on that a couple of times in the discussion with Bernardo, and probably most clearly in response to an audience question at the end of that dialogue. But this was the first question he was asked in this other video—which is like the title, the slightly clickbaity title, but is very much a Jay thing to say—it’s like “The idea of reduction is absolutely crazy,” or something like that.

But absolutely—well, I don’t know if it said “absolutely,” actually. But yeah, the host—I think his name is Amir—asked Jay: What is the purpose of philosophy for you? And Jay explicitly said it’s—you know—transformation. So, exactly to your point, there is this sort of soteriological aim there. But I think that Jay’s very committed to the idea that debate can take us there.

And, you know, I think he also—because he has this, he’s very… he has a certain way of what I call a kind of performative dogmatism in debate. And he’s very, very sharp and tries to be very precise and kind of refuses to—we were talking about this on WhatsApp—but he refuses to engage in that kind of, you know, mutual, reciprocal, translational—

Where you say something that I don’t really agree with in the way you phrased it, but I translate it into my own terms. And I say, “So what you’re saying is kind of actually this.” And then you say, “Well, not exactly,” and then we somehow sort of meet in the middle by merging our frameworks.

And Jay is very—he’s anti that move, I would say. And I’ve often heard him say things like, “Well, I don’t want to make the mistake of thinking everybody’s saying the same thing.” So I think he’s very committed to maintaining a very—you know—kind of hardline position in order to differentiate it from other views. And then in a sense, that like—

Matt Segall:

Analytic mode of thinking is necessarily oppositional.

Tim Jackson:

Yeah, yeah.

Matt Segall:

You know, in this translational mode—I love that way of thinking, of that mode of thinking—translational thinking—that’s not prone to debate. It’s more synthetic. You know, it’s seeking integration rather than engaging in thought as an exercise in analysis to separate the wheat from the chaff and say: “This is the right view, and that’s the wrong view.”

Tim Jackson:

And I think that there’s a place for both of these things. And I do find it challenging—I did find it challenging in the past with Jay Garfield—that I do think he’s one of the most lucid exponents I’ve ever come across of a conventionalist philosophy, which is not grounded on some absolute foundation. Kind of—it’s conventions all the way down. And you know very well that I’m very much in that sort of camp, in the way that I think.

Matt Segall:

I also consider myself an anti-foundationalist, yeah.

Tim Jackson:

Yeah. And to be clear, obviously, this is not relativism. And there’s a lot of beautiful writing—again, from Jay and people in that milieu—about why Madhyamaka skepticism, for example, is not relativism, et cetera, et cetera. But given that he’s such a lucid exponent of conventionalism, I sometimes find that again, in this sort of performative dogmatism, it reminds me a little bit of ways people talk about Karl Popper.

Although I do think, you know, Jay is a genuinely lovely human—and I’m not sure the same could have been said about Karl Popper. But then again, I mean, I don’t know him, you know. I didn’t know him.

Matt Segall:

I’ve heard he suffered some trauma, I think, in his life.

Tim Jackson:

Yeah. Jay does sometimes act in those debates as though he is in possession of the perfect dictionary, right? As though: “This is the way of saying things.” And so I think he strays into this territory which I call “refutation by reification,” you know. And the self is a really obvious example in the kind of hardline Buddhist context.

Where it’s like: “The self is X. So, I will define the self as something. You know, nothing that is X could possibly exist, according to, say, the Buddhist marks of existence. Thus, there is no self.” And it’s not open to the argument of: “Well, you know, actually I use the word ‘self’ a little bit differently from that, and maybe…” you know.

So it’s a kind of: “This is what the thing is, because it can’t be that, or something like that can’t exist—so it’s refuted.” And then there’s a refusal to budge on that definitional move, which is the whole argument, in a sense.

Matt Segall:

Yeah.

Matt Segall:
Yeah. I mean, I know Jay Garfield draws on Wittgenstein, and his conventionalism is grounded not only in this Buddhist resistance to reification and the idea of dependent origination, but he also applies it in his understanding of language. That conventionalism, at the level of language, though, seems to—I mean, you’d think he’d be more flexible about how words are used.

Why does language need to be wielded as a weapon? That’s what happens in debate—where you get attached to certain words and ways of phrasing things and become unwilling to go a layer deeper. I agree with Wittgenstein that there’s no private language, but I also don’t think concepts and words are simply the same thing. There is a conceptual process that precedes linguistic articulation.

I’m not saying all Wittgensteinians deny that, or that that’s just what the idea of a private language would mean—but I think sometimes it gets lost in a purely conventionalist understanding of language, which then becomes this idea that there is no pre-linguistic conceptual process going on—no pre-English, or whatever the vernacular is, layer of thought.

But yeah, language as a weapon leads you into debate. And I think the alternative way of engaging in rhetorical exchange—or transaction—with someone would be to consider language more like an intrinsically artistic medium, and a commons. The best we can hope to do is come up with metaphors that are appealing. And even in logic, we’re ultimately using—maybe very well-formalized—metaphors, but still, they are metaphors.

Tim Jackson:
Yeah. I think perhaps there’s a tendency—again, I don’t want to speak for Jay—but in that mode of using language as a weapon, while still being in service of a contemplative, soteriological perspective, there’s a tendency to bracket those two things in a very strong way. And I do think there are good reasons to do that, as you know.

But language then becomes—well, its actual function in the moment is the analytic one. It’s a tool to cut. And of course, because the ultimate nature of things is empty, and we can think about parallels with ineffability and—

Matt Segall:
Which, of course, is just a metaphor. “Emptiness” itself is a metaphor, right?

Tim Jackson:
Sure, sure, sure. But it’s referring to something that’s beyond articulation, beyond thought—all of that. So we’re not really even talking about it; we’re just saying that we can’t talk about it.

And then, when we are engaged in debate, we’re using language as a weapon. One of the things that gets talked about very briefly in that discussion is the difference between the two Madhyamaka schools: Prāsaṅgika and Svātantrika.

My understanding of that—though it’s been some years since I was really closely following all this, but I was quite into it for a while—is that the Prāsaṅgika school, as Jay says, wields the reductio argument as a weapon. Their entire debate strategy is to deconstruct the opponent’s position without offering a positive alternative of their own.

The Svātantrikas, on the other hand, do present positive positions. As Jay discussed, there are debates about whether there’s a real difference between the two schools. People are identifying as Prāsaṅgikas but being called Svātantrikas by others—whatever. It’s all a bit tangled.

But in Svātantrika, you can offer a positive view. So in some sense, it’s more like a kind of Popperian fallibilism, where on the one hand you’re still a hardcore skeptic—so when you offer a thesis, you’re still committed to the four—not just three—but the four marks of existence: impermanence, suffering, not-self, and emptiness. Emptiness being the big one for the Madhyamikas.

So your own thesis is empty too—but you can still put it forward as a provisional tool in debate. Whereas Prāsaṅgikas, supposedly, limit themselves to the use of reductio. So…

Matt Segall:
I think what’s… You know, I feel like maybe we’ve both mostly been critical of Garfield here, but probably both of us agree far more with him than with Bernardo on most questions.

Tim Jackson:
Yeah. I do think it was a real demonstration of the virtue of that Prāsaṅgika reductio approach, actually—despite where we might differ from Jay, and despite the mode of delivery and how vociferous the debate became.

I think it was a great example of how something that you might otherwise be tempted to accept through one of these translational moves—you might be like, “Oh well, Bernardo’s an analytic idealist, but he’s kind of saying something similar to Whitehead, or what a process-relational thinker might say, so we’re fine, we agree.”

And because of Jay’s refusal to agree, you actually get to see—I mean, this is sort of how I already felt about Bernardo—not that I have deep familiarity with his position—but you get to see how foundationalist, essentialist, and reductionist his view actually is.

Matt Segall:
Proudly. That’s what it means to be “analytical” and “scientific” for him.

Tim Jackson:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it revealed him as very—regardless of the merits of the content—very dogmatic, really. Very rigidly adhering to his particular view. And after Jay left, he even basically said, you know, if people don’t agree with him about several things—

Matt Segall:
The principle of non-contradiction, for example.

Tim Jackson:
Exactly. He said something like, “If they don’t endorse the principle of non-contradiction,” and he still insists that from that, everything follows. Even though Jay spoke about that specifically, Bernardo kind of insisted, “Well, if you allow contradiction, then anything goes.”

And Jay was like, “No, no, no. That’s not the case in paraconsistent logics. That’s not the case in a kind of conventionalist view in general.” And then Bernardo said, “If someone doesn’t agree that all infinite regress is vicious,”—so Jay was saying, “You’ve got to demonstrate that an infinite regress is vicious. There’s no reason to assume regress is inherently vicious.” But Bernardo insists that it is.

So then he goes on to say that if you agree that infinite regress is vicious, then you agree there must be a ground. You agree the buck must stop somewhere. There must be something absolute. That’s a quote, I think: “There must be something absolute.” And that the one pre-theoretical given in nature is subjectivity. I.e., that the absolute is, in fact, subjectivity.

Then he basically says he can’t have a debate with you if you don’t accept those positions. Which, if you take all of that together, amounts to saying: “If you’re not an analytic idealist—if you don’t agree that you’re a foundationalist, and if you don’t agree that subjectivity is the absolute—then I can’t debate with you.”

Matt Segall:
Yeah, well, then you can’t debate at all. Because you don’t brook any disagreement. I won’t take the time to find the exact quote, but in the beginning of Process and Reality, Whitehead talks about how trivial it is for two different metaphysical schemes to produce descriptions of the facts that contradict one another. That’s very uninteresting.

It’s inevitable in metaphysics that you’re going to construct schemes that you hope are internally consistent. But when you’re engaging deliberately to meet a different scheme—to try to triangulate your approach to the truth—if you’re not going to work on translation between the two, then you’re not even communicating with each other.

So what’s the point? I mean, I guess the point of a debate like what Bernardo and Jay did was for the audience’s sake. And I think I certainly felt like issues were clarified in my mind—even if Bernardo and Jay didn’t come to any agreement. I mean, they didn’t agree about anything. But I think I felt… more—well, it was frustrating to watch at some points—but I left with more coherence than I started with, in terms of how I understand Bernardo’s position and what the stakes are here.

And you know, I think one of the things I really appreciated about what Jay did was putting ideas in historical context. Ideas have histories. And I think that’s his conventionalism, you know. Whereas Bernardo, referring to his idealism as analytic—I think, like analytic philosophy generally, though Jay is an exception—doesn’t really like to think about the history of ideas.

It’s just: “What’s the argument?” And the argument could have been made by Plato 2,500 years ago or today, and the logical content of that argument is the same. Whereas I think if you put ideas in historical context, again, you’re less likely to miss—first of all—the soteriological function of philosophy. Because that’s… it’s not just Buddhism.

It’s the whole Socratic lineage, I think, and the Neoplatonic lineage, which emphasize that philosophy is preparation for dying. You know? We’re building the death ship. This is a spiritual exercise—not just arguments for the sake of abstract truth.

But I think that grounding of ideas—maybe “grounding” isn’t the right word—but that locating of ideas in history is really important. And it’s one of the things I’ve always felt uncomfortable with in Bernardo’s thought. Because there’s such a rich history of idealisms one could draw on.

And I know he taps into Schopenhauer, and he taps into Jung—not that Jung is just an idealist—but other than that, I feel like there are forms of idealism that come out of Schelling’s and Hegel’s thought, and even Fichte’s thought, or the British Idealists later like F.H. Bradley, that are so much more…

I mean, I just—I don’t find anything—sorry, Bernardo—there’s just not much original that’s not already in these other thinkers. And all of those arguments have been responded to. And so, you know, Jay was a little impatient at certain points, because he’s an academic philosopher.

And I know Bernardo has a Ph.D., but you specialize when you get a Ph.D.—you’re not necessarily involved in the wider conversation. There’s always so much more history to know, but I feel like trying to establish one’s ideas outside of and independent from that conversation that’s been going on for a long time… is a little bit irresponsible, maybe.

It doesn’t mean you can’t come up with good ideas that are popular or that help people massage out some metaphysical knots—but I feel like it also might risk leaving you blind to the already extant knockdown arguments against what you think is indubitable.

Tim Jackson:
Yeah, it’s such a difficult balance to strike—the balance between a kind of deference to history and the desire—and really the need, because it’s a motivating impulse, it’s a drive—to do something original, to feel like you own your ideas in some sense. And of course, if you spend—I don’t know if “too much” is the right word—but if you spend a lot of time studying the history of philosophy, you’re going to come away with the impression that your ideas are not very original. It’s painful.

Matt Segall:
It is painful.

Tim Jackson:
And I think it’s also healthy to keep confronting that. But at the same time, it can be a way that you lose motivation. So I don’t know. The balance to strike there is—well, I think in the kind of YouTube era, there are obviously a lot of people who have developed quite an audience by articulating something that is original—or seems original or iconoclastic or whatever—in a particular context.

But then if you were to put that into the rich history of thought—and obviously not just Western thought, as this debate particularly demonstrates, in terms of the similarity of things going on in Indian thought for at least a couple millennia—then, you know, there’s something else of great interest there. There’s something of very historical interest there.

But it does—and we’ve talked about this with other things—you know, it’s like: “How original is assembly theory?” Or is it really just another way of talking about a kind of generic constructivist evolutionary thought?

And you know, one can do this a lot. One can undermine the originality of a given thought by historically contextualizing it. But then at the same time, you might be missing something that is kind of original. And the way that even—you know, as I think we would also agree, because the role of context is so pervasive—it’s like the only context-free truth is that context is inescapable.

We’re relational thinkers, right? So by inserting an old idea or by making the past present again, we do renew it in a certain way. There is a kind of originality to that. And maybe, you know, for something like assembly theory—borrowing from, or kind of mashing up, formalisms that might be used in one context and bringing them into another—there’s a kind of inter- or trans-disciplinarity to the approach which is original, even if ultimately, the thought form that seems to undergird the whole thing…

Matt Segall:
…is not that original. Isn’t it odd that the word “invention” literally means “to find,” and the word “fact” literally means “to make”? It’s like these words get reversed.

Tim Jackson:
At some point, yeah. It’s very peculiar. I think that just speaks to the…

Matt Segall:
…paradox of creation and discovery being so entangled.

Tim Jackson:
Yeah. And I think that this is—I mean, to your point, and we’ve talked about this previously—that that duality or binary between invention and discovery is a false binary anyway. Especially when we talk about mathematics in this way. Is mathematics invented or discovered? It’s a false dichotomy, really.

In my case, for evolutionary, kind of constructivist, constructive realist views—just one thing that you said a couple of comments ago, just to bring back the context thing—I do think there’s something about the… you were talking about the artistic deployment of language.

There is a kind of intrinsic polysemy to words. They mean different things. And it’s funny to say “intrinsic polysemy,” because this is again an example of just the transcendent role of context. So inserting a word into a particular context is what gives it its meaning.

I think this will be a good way for us to segue probably into some of the Deacon-Levin stuff as well, because of Terence’s discussion of what information is, for example, in that conversation, which opens onto some very rich areas of thought, I think.

But yeah, I mean, I think there’s a role for analytic precision, and then there’s a role for the kind of virtuous vagueness of language. And we never quite get it right in any given context, because there’s no precision—or there’s no absolute precision. There’s no perfect criterion that can tell you: “Right now is the time to be hyper-analytic, and now is the time to go into poetic mode and allow that vagueness to flourish.” But both things have their virtues.

Matt Segall:
Yeah, exactly. Upaya. Or skillful means, right? And a lot of debates that we have—especially in the contemporary context, or in the modern context, like science-versus-religion kinds of debates, or reductionist debates—this is more true because it’s more exact.

For example, Deleuze talks a lot about this: the conflation of the true and the exact. And that’s a big issue. It leads to people talking past each other a lot. So I have a principle of bi-directional coarse graining, which I sometimes talk about.

Which is, when you make something incredibly precise—like in a limiting sense, with a deterministic model, like a mathematical model or perhaps a computational model—you are, in fact, screening out or filtering out a lot of very real details about other aspects of reality which cannot be figured in such a precise way, and which are, again, intrinsically vague. And that vagueness is itself a virtue. Holding this balance between these two different approaches…

Tim Jackson:
Yeah.

Matt Segall:
It reminds me of—you know, we’ve talked about scale a lot, and continuity and discontinuity, or discreteness—and this metaphor that comes up several times in the debate between Bernardo and Jay. And then Jay talked about it again in his follow-up video: the metaphor of the ocean and the waves.

You know, Bernardo loves to talk about this “Mind-at-Large,” or this universal subjectivity, as equivalent to the water. And our embodied sense of having a particular perspective on the world—as separate subjects—is, he calls it, a dissociative alter. But those are the waves, the surface of the water.

And, you know, Jay pointed out that we don’t want to substantialize the water, obviously. But I was thinking about how, when we think of water in this metaphor—as Bernardo wants us to think of it—it’s like a phenomenological relationship to water. It seems, when it’s calm, to be this crystal-clear, placid, neutral sort of substance.

But we know that when we look closer, it’s actually a violent agitation of molecules. Those molecules are themselves made of atomic elements that are themselves composed of violently agitated subatomic events of various kinds. And so, there’s not actually a point where the variation—the waving—stops.

And yet, there do seem to be these discrete levels of a kind of resolution where…

Tim Jackson:
…the individual appears. Yeah. And so, “concrete abstraction”—maybe we’ll get to that as we get into Levin and Deacon. But a concrete abstraction that’s not just a—

Matt Segall:
—projection of our human way of categorizing things. Concrete—it’s concrete.

Tim Jackson:
That’s what I mean by that. It’s a real abstraction.

Matt Segall:
“Abstraction is nature’s mode of realization,” right? And not just—

Tim Jackson:
—that’s how construction works. That’s how emergence works, right?

Matt Segall:
Yeah. And so I think there’s something about Bernardo’s perspective that I do want to salvage here, which is not the idea that there’s a fundamental reduction layer that everything else is an instance or a property of, but rather—there is sense to be made of invariance.

It’s not simply some kind of dogmatic imposition of a sky-daddy. I think there’s reason to think that invariance is just as real as variation. And that invariance is not simply an emergent habit or enduring convention that comes from variation and the evolutionary process of selection and inheritance.

I think invariance can have—does have—a role, even when we’re thinking about firstness, in Peirce’s sense of firstness. There’s something eternal in the firstness, in the way that Peirce understands it. Yes, it’s like chance—it has this immediate sort of unpredictability about it—but there’s something invariant there too.

Tim Jackson:
Well, its very unpredictability—its variation—is invariant.

Matt Segall:
Yeah. “The only constant is change,” we like to say—which you can’t even say what you mean without implying the opposite.

Tim Jackson:
And this is where contradiction is important. To affirm that contradiction can exist. Where we can say that it’s always going to be a kind of—I don’t know if “category error” is the right term, but in the loose sense—a category error to say that what is ultimate is A or B: consciousness or matter, change or stability, the many or the one.

You know, we look for some of the—when we’re being vague, and felicitously vague, necessarily vague—in speaking about origin concepts, then we can say, like you and I have talked about, “the many-one.”

And it really depends, in so many ways, on what you’re trying to do with the thought. Like Peirce will say, “If we are to explain the universe…” Right? So, if you’re trying to erect an explanatory hypothesis, you better not start with preconceived or prestructured, pre-formed elements that have determinate form, because you just took them off the table.

You basically erected an unexplained explainer. And you’re going to explain things in terms of something that you can’t explain. So that’s why Peirce is clear that when you’re thinking about firstness in a cosmogenic sense, you’re thinking about this kind of germinal nothing, in which the only constant is change.

But it’s not determinately nothing. It’s pure indeterminacy. Right? It can’t have any determinate content. And this is just a principle of impoverishment as well, because determinate content is explanatory baggage.

If you’re using that to explain things and saying it itself is not amenable to explanation, well, you just put a block in the path of inquiry—Peirce would say. So when you’re trying to do explanatory reasoning, you want to minimize the preformed content.

But again, depending on your role—on the desideratum—if you’re trying to explain some very local, concrete system that is obviously in medias res, like is itself formed from a deep history of inherited…

Matt Segall:
Right, it’s informed by a deep history of inherited form and all of that.

Tim Jackson:
…then, of course, you’re going to take variation in an evolutionary context to speak about some clade and its traits and try to understand them. There is a way that, methodologically, you take variation first.

You don’t posit that a trait came into the world for a particular purpose, right? Because again, that’s just non-explanatory. That’s special creation. You’re saying, “Okay, I can’t explain this, so it’s just here—look, the thing needs to see, that’s why it has an eye.” You can’t do that. That’s not explanatory.

But of course, when you take variation as a substrate for these things, you are also taking the invariant context in which it comes to be. So you can say that there is an organismal phenotype, and it kind of is doing things and needs to do things, and then there’s this layer of variation—whether it’s genetic mutations, stochastic gene expression, spontaneous brain activity—all of these different things, which are concrete “substrates” for undirected variation.

But they are, of course, always in relation to an invariant. They are variations of—

Matt Segall:
—variations of, right. So the nature of light, for organisms that have evolved the capacity for sight—the nature of light is an invariant. And I wouldn’t want to say that eyes—that there was some premonition of eyesight that generated an eyeball in the course of evolutionary history.

And yet, there’s something about light that does imply sight. And there’s something in light for organisms to become and enter into a tropic relationship with.

Tim Jackson:
And that’s the principle of selection in many ways. I mean, really, when you’re talking about it in that way—and to be Peircean about it—you’re talking about the interplay of firstness, secondness, and thirdness, always already. Because, you know, firstness is that undirected variation, and you affirm the existence of that. Something had to be built from that. So that you don’t just affirm the premonition, like, “I need an eye, so here’s an eye,” which would be magic.

But you’re saying that there is a pre-existent phenomenon—which is almost the wrong word to use—but there’s a pre-existent property, which is light. And also that when you are constructing this evolutionary lineage, when you talk about purpose—you know, you’re evolving light-sensitive cells and ultimately eyes and things so that you can make use of that relation, that available relation between light and a light-sensitive cell in order to orient yourself in the world.

Well, in order to—for the purpose of—so as to—all of those are claims about thirdness, right? So you’re—

Matt Segall:
—saying that, yeah, but already in the light itself—and in radiation—I think what I would want to say is, there’s not the specific purpose of creating an eyeball, or a water-based eye, or an insect eye, or any kind of specific physiology. But there’s… there’s a—I don’t know—I would want to artistically suggest that there’s something in light that is seeking sight.

There’s something about light that leads it to sight. And that it’s not a specific idea, or kind of—you know—teleology in the way that we would think of how an architect designs a building. But it is a—you know, light already has a directionality to it. And it has a kind of aim, and a kind of…

You know, these least-action principles, I think, are suggestive of an intuition of—the presence of the future. Yeah. That allows there to be a minimal form of action—a quantum of action, if you will—that introduces a sense of the possible already at the level of light. And a sense of the possible is minimal mind, you know?

And so that’s like a—this is… again, I’m speaking metaphorically about a physical process, right? The radiation of electromagnetic energy. But also trying to connect—in a scientific way—physics and biology, in a way that doesn’t make biology seem fundamentally different from what was going on in the physical world. And that also doesn’t make biology—or psychology, and the intensification of this capacity for purpose and aim—seem totally accidental.

But that it was somehow already implicit in the photon.

Tim Jackson:
Yeah. I mean, I think principles of least action and biology do obviously connect, in the sense that the relational principle—you know, the principle of least action—is a relational principle. It’s a kind of negotiation, if you want, between a system and its environment. So the path of least action is always contextually defined—locally contextually defined.

So, that systems of various kinds follow paths of least action—or more formally speaking, and instrumentally speaking, their behavior can be understood using variational principles—is a function of, obviously, a distinction between system and environment. And an assertion—or an empirically valid assertion—that a system will take a path through its environment that is, in some sense, dictated by its environment.

But it’s the path of least action given the material—or whatever other—constraints that are relevant here. So yeah, I mean, I think that it’s an ecological principle. Essentially, it’s a relational principle. So it’s another principle about the kind of transcendent role of context.

I don’t know, you know, whether it’s… I think that the future—I mean—

Matt Segall:
I’m not saying that eyes were inevitable just because there was—

Tim Jackson:
No, no.

Matt Segall:
Yeah. But I think—I’m trying to avoid having to make life and mind into something that doesn’t fit. I mean, you know, we’re here, so it clearly fits in this physical universe. But it doesn’t fit in a conceptual sense, such that we need a whole different set of categories to understand what the living world is, and what mind is.

And I think it matters, again, soteriologically, how we understand our own consciousness and our capacity to suffer—as a component in the cosmos, as some aspect of the whole universe—whether we think of it as, like, this accident that’s not somehow implied by just the very existence of a physical universe, versus imagining life and mind—and our own consciousness—as like the flower of that cosmic process.

I think that does shift how we relate to our own suffering, our own death, and what the larger project is that we’re involved in. Because if life is something highly… I mean, it is precarious—a human life, any lifeform is precious—and we don’t want to just… This is Hans Jonas’s worry with Whitehead, right? That he’s eliminating the existential severity of death.

Death is real. But I feel like if we can put death in the context of… this—for me, this is animism, in my point of view. To think of light as wanting to—light as having this aim at what becomes sight. It’s not that it knows in advance that it was going to create eyes. But light already implies sight, as I’m trying to render it.

Tim Jackson:
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s animism because—for me—animism is precisely this relational principle. That, you know, these things—things that encounter one another—are reciprocally informed. So it’s the basic fact of, again, an ecological mode, in which a thing is the kind of thing that it is—and this is a behavioral principle as well.

So a photon is taking the path that it’s taking because of its encounter with a particular medium that it’s moving through, or something like that—at that level. But an organism has the form that it has, has the capacities that it has, because of not just the synchronic context of its ecology, but those synchronic contexts and the way they’ve been inherited diachronically, through evolutionary history.

Matt Segall:
But what if a photon—I mean, you talk—what if—I mean, this is Whitehead’s wager, right? Metaphysically, to think in terms of the whole universe as an ecology of organisms. And so, any persisting entity—whether it’s a photon, or a planet, or a cell, or an animal—is an organism.

Tim Jackson:
Yeah. And of course, I am a thoroughly relational thinker in the sense that, for me, there is no determinacy—there’s no definite… This is actually a beef I have with Whitehead. There is no definiteness outside of an actual situation. And even the definiteness—or the quasi-definiteness—of possibilities are themselves… they receive that definiteness because of their adjacency with an actual situation.

Matt Segall:
Which could be his position. I’m not convinced that when he talks about general possibility or potentiality versus real potentiality—because real potentiality is what you’re talking about—but when he talks about general potentiality, I think he would agree or admit that we can’t actually say anything about that.

Tim Jackson:
Well, it’s in the Peircean sense too. “Real” or “pure”—because he likes his purity, right? Pure potential is absolutely indeterminate. So it’s a limit concept. Right? It’s the pure indeterminacy that is disconnected from any actual situation. So, obviously, we can’t say anything about it because we’re in an actual situation, and it has no relation to us.

Matt Segall:
So it’s a regulative ideal, in the Kantian sense.

Tim Jackson:
Yeah, exactly. And that regulative ideal is pure indeterminacy. Like, pure potential is pure indeterminacy.

But—so, I mean, there are too many things going through—

Matt Segall:
No, no, no. I went on my Goethean tangent about light, so I don’t know where that comes from.

Tim Jackson:
No, it’s very generative. And it’s good to put me in a position where I don’t necessarily have pre-formed responses myself. Except to say that, of course, I’m on board with everything being relational.

And this is, indeed, again, how I understand animism—that it’s, if we were going back to the Buddhist context, the principle of dependent co-arising or interdependence, right? There is no arising—there is no actualization—without a kind of reciprocal informing that goes on between, you know, stipulated systems, stipulated environment.

You know, when we make that distinction, we see that in fact, even when we’ve made the distinction, the two things are completely interpenetrating one another. And that’s what a principle of least action also indicates to us.

I mean, does it indicate anticipation? Well, I don’t think it necessarily does for, like, a photon. Because a photon will just change its behavior when it encounters a different medium. And it’s obviously moving as fast as anything can move. So, is it anticipating? Does it need to anticipate that?

It just—it just has an instantaneous change in its behavior, basically. Or as instantaneous as it can be from our reference frame. You know, what’s instantaneous to us.

One of the things I wanted to come back to, though—if I can, if I have the working memory to do it—is, I guess, the…

Matt Segall:
Just to say, though—light seems to me to be a limit percept, in the way that Whitehead’s, you know, “general” or “pure” potentiality is a limit concept. Just to say that, yeah.

Tim Jackson:
That’s a nice way of putting it.

So I wanted to just go back to history for a second—and the history of ideas. One of the reasons—I hope I didn’t come across as a pedantic ass earlier when I was critiquing Bernardo, but anyways—I felt bad about that, dropping names and talking about the history of philosophy.

Matt Segall:
No, no, no.

Tim Jackson:
If anyone came across as pedantic, it was very much Jay. And I think that where he was not at his best—for me—in that debate was when he was being a bit condescending. Like, “This is elementary,” sort of thing. I mean, even though I can appreciate his frustration.

Matt Segall:
Yeah, I know where that comes from.

Tim Jackson:
But at the same time, I don’t think it’s helpful.

But one of the reasons to be studying history—and I know you would agree with this—the history of ideas, and the history of the ideas that exercise us in the present, is also to identify a history of false problems, right?

Some of the problems that are bequeathed to us by the history of philosophy—or by cultural evolution or whatever—it’s not that we shouldn’t feel we ought to refute them, because they are still present in some current of contemporary thought. You know, reductionism is alive and well. The mechanical philosophy is alive and well. All of that.

So we do need to critique them. But I think, you know, part of our critique is just demonstrating that these are, in fact, false problems.

So, I always say the mechanical philosophy has a hard problem of consciousness—I don’t. And I, of course, fully agree that life is not alien, mind is not alien. But there are different approaches we can take to that, nonetheless. Because it’d be quite different…

I think the panpsychist approach here, of saying that mind has to be fundamental in some sense and pervades—like, ubiquitous, “pan”—otherwise we could never explain its emergence from matter—that already accepts the Cartesian framework. Because you’ve accepted the duality. And you’ve accepted that there is some schism between them. And that one thing could never emerge from the other.

Whereas if you’ve got a different ontology, you don’t have to accept that there is that kind of schism. Mind doesn’t look miraculous from a process-relational point of view. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s “pan”—that it’s pervasive, either.

It just is an intensification. And Whitehead says this about consciousness specifically, right? That it’s an intensification. So there’s no problem of more generic patterns, or more generic process. There’s no real problem with emergence of that kind. It’s kind of an illusion, in a sense.

You know, we have this perspectival difficulty with the fact that I seem to have subjectivity and my books don’t—or whatever.

Matt Segall:
I mean, I accept the hard problem of consciousness really just as a framing—only as a bridge. Because I think when Chalmers sets that up, he’s trying to speak to the common sense among scientists, at the very least. Because the mechanistic materialist point of view—which is a specific form of materialism (animism is also another form of materialism, right?)—

Tim Jackson:
And hylozoism.

Matt Segall:
Yeah. But I think Chalmers is setting up that framework because it still is—thirty years later—less so now, but still for many, especially in the mid-90s and most of the 20th century, it was common to assume that consciousness was a rude intrusion into an otherwise well-behaved universe. A universe we could understand in a functionalist way, if we’re talking about biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science.

And Chalmers’ point, with that framing of the hard problem, is just to say: we could have a complete functional explanation of the brain and its environment and have nothing whatsoever to say about consciousness. And I think that makes sense from within the materialist common sense.

But if we’re not going to accept that, then of course we don’t have the hard problem. I don’t personally have the hard problem. But I think pedagogically, I often begin with that just to make the bridge—to help people who might have assumed that science and materialism (in the mechanistic sense) are the same thing, to help them bridge to a more animist point of view.

Tim Jackson:
Yeah. No—and it’s useful for that. I think from the animist point of view, it’s just mistaken to say that you could have a complete functional explanation of the human organism and consciousness would play no role in that. I think that’s a false claim.

And also, of course—I’ve said this so many times—but the way Chalmers formulates the hard problem initially, that it can’t be a mechanistic or functional explanation, but nonetheless it’s a problem for science, is also the wrong way of formulating it.

Matt Segall:
I agree. I don’t think it’s a scientific problem.

Tim Jackson:
Science deals in functional and mechanistic explanations. And I think, you know, in animism, you get a much broader sense of function or capacity—like powers and all of that sort of thing—which changes the scope of the question there.

But I think even within a kind of standard scientific paradigm, the way Chalmers formulates it—it’s not designed to, but it immediately gets scientists offside. Because they’re like, “Well, there are no other meaningful questions.” You know, if you’re a positivist, there are no other meaningful questions. So you just told us it’s not a meaningful question—or at least not a scientific question—so then don’t tell me it’s my problem.

Matt Segall:
I think—we’re, you know—Whitehead, just a few years before Wittgenstein says “Of what we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent,” wrote The Concept of Nature in 1920—so almost… when was the Tractatus, the late ’20s? I can’t remember right now.

But Whitehead says something in Concept of Nature that you could easily mistake for a kind of positivism. He says, look, science studies nature, and nature is what we are aware of in perception. We shouldn’t be introducing mechanisms into science that are not just hidden from us for now, but are in principle hidden from our perceptual capacity—including the extensions of perception through instrumentation.

Nature is what we are aware of in perception. And with that definition, science—it’s not that it can’t explain mind, it’s that it presupposes mind. It presupposes the perceiver. It presupposes knowledge, that knowledge is possible. And the problem of how mind, in that sense—the knower, the perceiver—relates to what we are aware of in perception, is a philosophical one.

And so there’s all— the difference with Whitehead, from the logical positivists, is that he still leaves a lot of work for philosophers to do about how mind and nature relate. But he says, look, science is most productive when it’s focused on what we are aware of in perception, and finding systematic relationships among percepts.

Tim Jackson:
Yeah.

Matt Segall:
And come up with the best models to predict the percepts in their unfolding—in their systematic unfolding—and don’t get mired in these false problems of trying to explain consciousness in terms of the relationship among percepts.

It’s like, you’re not going to be able to do that. And don’t invent matter as something behind percepts that is the cause of percepts. So, that’s Whitehead’s position. I’ve seen it mistaken for positivism, actually—but I think it’s different, in an important sense.

Tim Jackson:
Yeah. And so again—just to return—and then we should jump into the Deacon and Levin thing, because there are a bunch of things I want to say about silly things—no offense, Bernardo—that Bernardo said in that discussion. Like, “Ninety-nine percent of scientists would say that economics is reducible to physics.” And I’m just like, what are you talking about, man? That’s crazy.

You’re basically denying existence to economics. Anyway, we don’t need to get into that right now.

TIM JACKSON
There are a couple of things I still want to say about that. I mean, just going back to the mechanical philosophy—it’s always… even though, you know, we talk about onto-epistemologies, and there are very important and principled relationships between ontology and epistemology—we can’t let the two drift apart.

But we also don’t want to conflate them or reify them as a logical given or a fact or something like that. I think we should all just read Rosenbluth and Wiener. And we’re going to talk about Wiener, I hope, in the discussion of Levin and Deacon when we talk about information. In fact, Wiener’s critiques of Shannon information are very pertinent to what Terence Deacon was saying.

Obviously, Arturo Rosenbluth and Norbert Wiener—this is kind of pre-cybernetic but foundational stuff for the cybernetic movement. The role of models in science—that’s the name of their little paper. It’s very short and everybody ought to read it because it begins with this line—I’ll just quote it briefly:

“The intention and result of a scientific inquiry is to obtain an understanding and control of some part of the universe. This statement implies a dualistic attitude on the part of scientists. Indeed, science does and should proceed from this dualistic basis. But even though the scientist behaves dualistically, his dualism is operational and does not necessarily imply strict dualistic metaphysics.”

And basically, you know, they talk quite nicely about simplification, abstraction, and the role of models, right? So the whole mechanical philosophy, in some sense, stems from the division into res cogitans and res extensa, which really is a methodological division.

MATT SEGALL
It wasn’t Galileo, but it became metaphysical with Descartes.

TIM JACKSON
Yeah, yeah. Even though it’s got that methodological side—I mean, Descartes has a methodological aspect and an ontological aspect, right? I suppose he does. And then it gets even worse with people like Julien Offray de La Mettrie, who really go hard on the mechanistic view. Although, most of them are more nuanced—and I know you’d always say this about Descartes—they’re more nuanced than we give them credit for, if you actually go and read what they have to say.

MATT SEGALL
Right. I love Descartes’ phenomenology. But his ontology is terrible.

TIM JACKSON
Yeah, fair point. So I think really, if we just take that opening paragraph from The Role of Models in Science by Rosenbluth and Wiener seriously, we just note that—yeah—it may well be necessary to exclude an explanation of all the transcendental preconditions for the possibility of doing science and doing modeling in order to actually explain this little part of the world, to some degree. And to develop—and obviously cybernetics is a strongly instrumentalist movement—a kind of instrumentalist handle, a kind of control.

Of course, control theory develops out of cybernetics. But to gain that kind of control over this little part of the world, we’re going to have to bracket a lot of things—including the investigator themselves. But, you know, famously, cybernetics has that second-order movement: the inclusion of the cybernetic system, the treatment of the observer themselves as also a cybernetic system in relation to the cybernetic system they’re studying.

And indeed, as Margaret Mead discusses, the whole cybernetic movement—the societies, their conferences, all of that—as itself cybernetic. So there’s this kind of nested recursivity. But Rosenbluth and Wiener are already pointing to that. This is kind of pre-Wiener’s adoption of the term “cybernetics.” But yeah—we know observers are, of course, part of and implicated in the observations they’re making. But we intentionally bracket them in order to create tractability.

The problem only emerges when we then read an ontology directly off the model. That’s one of the things I’m always harping on about. With these variational principles—so precisely the kind of models that Wiener really pushes hard in cybernetics, but that also have this legacy from the development of probability theory and everything—there’s always this, you know, positing of a fixed state space over which you can calculate probabilities, over which there are distributions or paths, and those sorts of things.

And that’s just how probabilistic methods—variational methods—go in their development. For the developers of probability theory, that fixed state space kind of corresponds with the mind of God, you know? Because they were determinists. Laplace, Bernoulli, blah blah blah—I’ve said this many times.

But it’s still a very present problem.

TIM JACKSON
We could talk about the free energy principle—we’re not going to—but when you take those models, which are coming out of that legacy and which need, in order to develop tractable equations and useful models, to embed a bunch of assumptions… Read the footnotes in free energy principle papers. They mention all of these things: Laplace, normality, the mean field theorem, etc.

Those are things you don’t want to read off the model. Those assumptions are there to make the model tractable. The ergodicity assumption, for example—you don’t want to elevate that into an ontological principle. And that’s why there is always work for philosophy. There’s always work on the interpretive side of things.

And it might also be why some of these modeling programs sound amazing and have the ring of truth to them—but they don’t actually create really, really useful models. Models that could, say, predict the evolutionary trajectory of an organismal lineage, or indeed predict an organism’s behavior.

They could give you a kind of vague set of principles about what an organism does in general—and of course, that’s important. I’m a big advocate of vagueness in fundamental principles. You know—one, two, three: variation, selection, inheritance. But don’t confuse that with a complete description or a complete explanation of the target system.

So that’s just… you know, I guess I got here on the history of false problems and stuff. Studying the history of the development of formalisms is also important to me.

And then, really, last point on this: because you were talking about “aim” and trying to get away from the hylomorphic principle, where an aim is—well, you were talking about an architect basically designing a house and building a house. And we shouldn’t use that model for understanding why there are eyes, basically.

I think one of the reasons we have to… you know, we don’t want to slingshot all the way to the other side of things where we imagine that Darwin wasn’t naturalizing purpose, but eliminating purpose—which is complete nonsense, because he’s naturalizing purpose. The whole “purpose” and “mattering” is just an intrinsic part of the evolutionary logic. Adaptation. Darwin is not an adaptationist, but adaptation is, of course, an intrinsic part of the mode of reasoning there.

So don’t slingshot all the way over. But also, we need to notice that, to get out of that incredibly canalizing ancient lineage of hylomorphic thought—based on a designer who imbues a material with form—we do need to go pretty hard on some of these things. Because our thought is…

MATT SEGALL
Language is not that different from DNA that we inherit—and it shapes the phenotypic expression of our discourse. And it’s a—

TIM JACKSON
—an enabling constraint, right? It’s not a bad thing, intrinsically. And we need it. But at the same time, we’ve got to keep trying to discover novel lines of flight, degrees of freedom. And going back and studying the history is an important way of doing that.

It’s like—why was that technical schema of, like, brick molding or whatever, why was that the fundamental example that was used in the development of the hylomorphic theory? And blah blah blah blah blah. By understanding why it was used—and in fact, how it fails to even capture…

Simondon is just so good on this—how it fails to even capture the realities of brick molding itself. How it’s a very abstract version of what’s going on there. And there are reasons for that abstraction. Because there’s a sociocultural context in which, again, it’s taken for granted that there is a divine imbuer of forms. Eternal forms and blah blah blah.

Studying all of that helps us to discover degrees of freedom to kind of move beyond it. Yeah. Yeah.

TIM JACKSON
…why was that technical schema of brick molding, or whatever it was, the fundamental example used in the development of the hylomorphic theory? And, you know, blah blah blah. By understanding why it was used—and in fact, how it fails to even capture…

Simondon is just so good on this—how it fails to even capture the realities of brick molding itself. It’s a very abstract version of what’s going on there. And there are reasons for that abstraction, because there’s a sociocultural context in which, again, it’s taken for granted that there is a divine, you know, imbuer of forms and eternal forms and blah blah blah.

Studying all of that helps us to discover degrees of freedom to move beyond it. Yeah.

MATT SEGALL
Well, first of all, I think, as a philosopher, I know that I’m not at all equipped to actually construct useful models in physics. I’m not a mathematician. Biology—I can start to get more of a grip on the technical details of the models. Psychology and cog-sci—I feel more equipped. But really, as a philosopher, I feel like my main concern is—as Whitehead would say—I feel like a critic of abstractions.

And I feel like I’m on the lookout for misplaced concreteness in the way that models subtly shift from just being instrumentally useful to being existentially explanatory—where the model becomes, or the hypothesis becomes hypothesized. It becomes equated with what’s real. Because then all of a sudden, you know, there are consequences.

The consequences of model reification are: you could end up providing cover for certain political and economic and social ideologies. And while science does provide us—I do believe I’m a scientific realist to some degree—I think science provides us with access to a natural world independent of our social and political and economic ideologies. But I also think those ideologies shape science and scientific research—obviously, scientific funding—deeply.

And philosophy…

TIM JACKSON
Yeah, you’re right.

MATT SEGALL
But we don’t… There’s less… I feel like philosophy is a little bit more outside the economy. We’re not particularly valued or getting paid very much.

TIM JACKSON
A very Bergsonian position for you to take, you know—that philosophy is valuable precisely because of its uselessness.

MATT SEGALL
Yeah. No, I do tend to take that position when I don’t even need to be backed into a corner. But when philosophy is forced to justify itself as being a legitimate university department because it’s producing… it’s training people for jobs that allow them to make a living, I’m like—

I mean, I think it’s good for democracy, maybe. If we still care about that.

TIM JACKSON
What living are you talking about? Which philosophers are these, making a living?

MATT SEGALL
Yeah. But my point is, I’m not equipped to actually do the experimental work and construct the models that are properly speaking scientific. I’m not capable of that. But I think the role of the philosopher in a scientific age is to be the critic of abstraction, and to be the sort of…

…the guardian of not just common sense but also of imagination. From the temptation of scientific reduction—because obviously science, technoscience, is extremely powerful. And it’s powerful because there’s a lot of truth in it. It’s gotten a grip on real features of the universe. And we need to reckon with that as human beings, and not remain attached to pre-scientific abstractions.

But science has its own abstractions—and its own idols. And I think this is the enduring relevance, maybe, of negative theology. Right? Which was, I think, even before the risk of the reification of scientific models, negative theologians had come up with a way of inoculating the religious mindset against mythic misplaced concreteness.

TIM JACKSON
The prasangika—you know, as the reductio wielders—is kind of the apotheosis of that trajectory. You wouldn’t call it negative theology as such, but it is.

MATT SEGALL
Yeah. I mean, that was something else I had made a note about—to talk about Buddhism, and the atheism or at least agnosticism. If you’re a strict Madhyamaka skeptic, you wouldn’t be an atheist necessarily—you’d be agnostic, I guess. But there was a point where Bernardo said, very early on in the debate, that “we’re never going to get around the West.” He says, “we’ll always try to find ultimate reality.”

I don’t know that that’s right. There are plenty of Asian traditions that want ultimate reality too. So I wasn’t quite sure. But this idea that there is this obsession—probably already there in theism to some degree, in medieval theism—but I think it also manifests in modern science. This need for the theory of everything. Basically, the monotheistic One God to rule them all is, structurally and logically, not all that different from the theory of everything.

And I think Bernardo’s capturing something there—though I still think there are schools of thought in Asia that would similarly want the final answer.

TIM JACKSON
There’s negative theology, as you were saying, which guards against that tendency in the West. And of course, it’s not at all coincidental that the theory of everything and the monotheistic, omnipotent, omniscient, blah blah blah God have such a strange resemblance. Isn’t it weird how determinism is really similar to omnipotence?

It’s like—these are theological ideas which continue to canalize the history of scientific thought. I agree with everything you’re saying. And I think that, you know, when I’m critiquing abstraction in science, I’m just being more philosophical at that time. Whether I’m a philosopher—I mean, you know, whatever—I’m just what I am. That wasn’t meant to be a God reference.

MATT SEGALL
But I think, yeah, you are a philosopher, Tim—and a scientist. I’m just a philosopher.

TIM JACKSON
And I know it goes without saying—but I’m also the kind of person who compulsively needs to say the things that go without saying: all of what you were saying about science—which is very true about science—is also, of course, equally true about philosophy. In the sense that, you know, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is a pretty big deal in the history of philosophy.

And even people who propose such fallacies and coin them in such pithy ways might not entirely be… you know, free.

MATT SEGALL
Oh, make me read three pages of Process and Reality to you right now.

TIM JACKSON
I mean, it’d be from the first, like, 25 or 30 pages. That’s my favorite section, just because it’s all the fallibilistic philosophy of science stuff, which I think is great.

I mean, I think that Whitehead—to me, he’s very much on the Svatantrika side. In the sense that he affirms a fallibilistic principle of the non-completability of metaphysical systems and philosophical systems in general. He says things like: every proposition must be up for debate, or whatever. So I think he’s a good fallibilist in that sense. That’s kind of like—all right-thinking people are. He’s not a dogmatist.

But then he goes as hard as he possibly can on completing his system, right? And I think it’s a kind of instrument. It’s very Popperian—not that he’s taking anything from Popper, obviously, because he’s working before him. But in a sense, making the system as precise and complete as possible should make it more vulnerable to refutation.

But I think Whitehead does try really, really hard to complete his system, despite his building in of certain kinds of incompleteness. So he’s not a determinist. But I think, in the Platonic sense—and Plato is not a determinist either—but in the Platonic sense, like Plato in the Timaeus is trying to provide a complete cosmological scheme.

And I think that Whitehead is very much working in that tradition. And I think that’s why he makes use of the primordial nature, and the eternal objects, etc., in the ways that he does—because he’s trying to get this completely coherent—

MATT SEGALL
—and I would say he is definitely in the Platonic lineage. But because he’s only—

TIM JACKSON
—offering a likely story. Yeah. No, but that’s it—that’s perfect. I’m not disagreeing with that. That’s the fallibilistic aspect. You know, Plato is self-undermining, and therefore kind of evolutionary in this sense. He’s allowing the thought to evolve, but he’s still trying to complete the system.

And even after that—well, if it’s after—whatever. But in the Parmenides, when Socrates basically takes the Timaeansystem to Parmenides and is like, “Hey, this is the theory of forms, what do you reckon?” And Parmenides is like, “Well, you have a big problem here about the nature of participation, because how do these disparate principles interact with each other?” And then Socrates is like, “Oh, you’re right. I do need to complete my system.”

Hence, the One. So there is a continual move to try and complete things. I’m not against that. I’m not saying that I’m against that. But I am saying that those are the things that I criticize Whitehead for—and I think that’s what they’re there for.

MATT SEGALL
Yeah. So I think, going back to the soteriology idea that I started us with, Socrates and the Buddha are not all that different—if you think about Socrates’ relationship to the physiologoi.

TIM JACKSON
I agree.

MATT SEGALL
All of a sudden, ethics is first philosophy for Socrates. It’s not that ethics was ignored by Heraclitus, or Thales, and the other guys. It’s just that they were more concerned to know the truth about nature—about the cosmos. They didn’t yet, I don’t think, have a differentiation between truth and beauty.

Like, the cosmos, the truth about the cosmos, and the beauty of the adornment of the visible world were compact for them. And Socrates comes along and says, “But what about you? And your knowledge? And what you are to do in this polis?” It starts to be more focused on individual souls all of a sudden, and your ethical responsibility, rather than your knowledge of the truth and feeling of the beauty of the cosmos.

Not that that gets eliminated—I mean, Plato has a lot to say about that. I think the Socratic tradition still has a lot to say about nature, but always, I think, framed as secondary to the ethical question—which is: what is the good life?

TIM JACKSON
Is there not a real historical distinction here between Socrates as we know him through Plato and Xenophon, and Plato himself?

The Socrates I’m referring to in the Parmenides dialogue is not Socrates. That’s Plato. That’s Plato’s mouthpiece. And so I think, from what I understand—or the image I get of Socrates, the historical person who never wrote anything—is very much what you’re saying. Very similar to the Buddha in that sense, and is a kind of critical, negative thinker.

The truly Socratic dialogues end in aporia, you know—reflection on the positive philosophy of the physiologoi. So it’s almost a completely critical philosophy. It’s a reductio philosophy. It’s like: you don’t even know what you’re talking about, because you don’t even know what these words mean.

And I very much appreciate that. I think what’s kind of weird for me—and we should get on to Levin and Deacon, and probably not get mired in this too much—but I think what’s interesting is that, because Socrates centers things back on the individual person again, when Plato then tries to do the complete synthesis, and he wants to do the metaphysics as well as the personological side of things, it actually ends up being even more projective.

This is almost like what Schelling is saying in that fragment on the Timaeus—you know, that thing we read.

MATT SEGALL
He was like 14 when he wrote that. I mean, he’s a prodigy—but let’s not go too far.

TIM JACKSON
Right. But he’s sort of saying that Plato is a kind of Kantian—a transcendental philosopher. He’s making the point that you shouldn’t reify Plato’s categories as metaphysics, because they are psychological categories.

And so it’s just wrong to read him as though he is proposing a positive metaphysical scheme. But if he is—if and when he is—it’s a very kind of projectionist scheme. Because he’s basing his understanding of the cosmos on his understanding of the psyche.

MATT SEGALL
It’s projective in the Jungian sense. Of an anamnetic method, you know?

TIM JACKSON
Yeah. Yeah.

MATT SEGALL
And I don’t think that’s intrinsically—

TIM JACKSON
—bad? Well no, it’s… it’s bad. It’s—right, this is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness again.

So if you were to reify the method, or the projective content—in this case—to me, that’s the problem. Doing that isn’t the problem. So what I like about Jung, and why I always think people should read Jung through the method—don’t ignore the places where, throughout his career…

Sorry Bernardo Kastrup—the only book of his that I own is Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics. And I take exception even to the title—and I haven’t read the book. But…

Don’t ignore the parts throughout Jung’s career where he says, “I’m not a metaphysician. I’m an empiricist.”

MATT SEGALL
“I’m a physician.”

TIM JACKSON
“I’m a physician,” exactly. And I do all my work through this, you know, physician’s stance, essentially. And so I have this principle of psychic reality that must not be confused with metaphysics.

Right? And of course, if you read—or if you ignore—that kind of bracketing move that Jung does—or worse, if you say, “Oh well, that’s just him backsliding,” and blah blah blah… I mean, people say that a lot. If you ignore that, you’re obviously ignoring Jung’s own injunction to pay attention to it.

But of course, if you read Jung, you’re going to be able to say, “Oh, this is all metaphysics. Look, he’s a metaphysician,” blah blah blah, if you choose to ignore his own methodological stricture.

And you can, of course, read an implicit or tacit metaphysics in what Jung is saying—obviously. But you just need to recognize that that’s not Jung’s metaphysics, per se. Because, as he says, “I’m not a metaphysician. But I do have this principle of psychic reality.” So I treat all of these contents of the psyche as real—in a psychic sense.

TIM JACKSON
But I do have this principle of psychic reality. So I treat all of these contents of the psyche as real in a psychic sense. And I’m very on board with that, actually, personally. It’s just—I have an issue with that little move where we go, “Oh well, in fact, because this is psychologically real, it’s ontologically real.”

And to me, that’s not dissimilar to reifying the content of an effective theory. Because I do think psyches—like organisms as a whole—are, and this would be a Free Energy Principle kind of point (but again, without reifying the Free Energy Principle itself), are effective theories of their environments. And this would also be the Peircean sense, in which they are arguments.

Organisms are constructed through this process of concrete abstraction, which is very much related to the way we build an effective theory. But if you then simply read the ontology off the effective theory—from within the effective theorization, which is your psyche—that’s that projective fallacy. And that’s actually the fallacy of misplaced concreteness again, just in a different way.

And that’s why I like prasangika as well. And, you know, why Jay Garfield’s perspective—he wrote this beautiful essay on Vasubandhu, the Yogācāra philosopher—on Buddhism and illusionism, in the special issue of, I think, the Journal of Consciousness Studies, edited by Keith Frankish, called Illusionism. And the best essay in there—for me anyway, not that I actually read them all…

MATT SEGALL
Name-drop warning.

TIM JACKSON
…but he wrote this beautiful essay on Vasubandhu in there and kind of Vasubandhu’s illusionism. I mean, it’s almost enough to make you an illusionist.

Now, I know you’ve said many times that you think there’s a lot in common between process-relational philosophy and illusionism, but that there are certain key points of difference. And I would completely agree with that. Like—I don’t like the…

MATT SEGALL
Yeah, Frankish and I did a lot of translation when we had a chat, and it was a—

TIM JACKSON
—a beautiful conversation. And Keith actually seems like a really wonderful guy. So anyway, I guess that’s all a digression.

But I think that the fallacy of misplaced concreteness—like any kind of foundationalism—is going to be committing that kind of fallacy. And so if you’re reifying the content of your psyche, or the content of a mathematical model, or whatever it is—or just whatever you’ve received from some sociocultural context…

And let’s not forget about Reinhold Schürmann and his notion of the philosopher as civil servant. So that in some sense, philosophers have often had the role of shoring up the status quo—like giving it… what Hegel does with his Philosophy of Right, yeah?

So yeah, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is all over.

MATT SEGALL
Okay, yeah. What about Deacon and Levin? Let’s just do a hard pivot.

I mean, it’s related—because I think, okay, maybe this is a segue—emptiness in the Buddhist sense, and what Deacon means by absence. He even makes the reference to Taoism, I think, in Incomplete Nature. And I guess it’s a Taoist metaphor—of all the work that’s done by the space in the middle of a wheel. That it plays a very important role in allowing a wheel to be a wheel, and yet there’s actually nothing there.

TIM JACKSON
That’s also… that’s dukkha, though. Dukkha—you know, you mentioned it being associated with being in a crowded space. Another thing that it’s always associated with is the wheel—the axle-wheel relationship that is imperfect.

So there’s a certain… a wobble. And it’s constitutive. You can’t make it perfect. It’s always going to be there, and you kind of just have to learn to live with it, in some sense.

MATT SEGALL
So yeah, there’s always this disequilibrium. And yet, there’s also this role that absence plays—to grease the wheel, you know, to fall…

TIM JACKSON
To really jump.

MATT SEGALL
I thought that was a good segue. But okay, go ahead.

TIM JACKSON:
That’s also—well, that’s dukkha, though. Dukkha, you know, you mentioned it being associated with being in a crowded space. Another thing it’s always associated with is the wheel—the axle-wheel relationship that is imperfect. So there’s a certain… a wobble. And it’s like—it’s constitutive. You know, you can’t make it perfect. It’s always going to be there, and you kind of just have to learn to live with it, in some sense.

MATT SEGALL:
So yeah, there’s always this disequilibrium, and yet there’s also this role that absence plays—to grease the wheel, you know? To fall.

TIM JACKSON:
To really jump.

MATT SEGALL:
I thought that was a good segue, but okay—go ahead.

TIM JACKSON:
I’m going to let you get right back to it. But disequilibrium, far-from-equilibrium, you know—this is just a drive theory. And the notion of suffering—there is a soteriological aspect, almost, to this kind of thermodynamic view of life. We’re always grasping. We’re always stuck in that position, which might be described as primal confusion to some extent—of thinking we need something. But we do. You know, we are completely dependent on environmental sources of energy, and blah blah blah. Anyway, that was a—

MATT SEGALL:
—a weak jump, but you continue. No, I mean, I think the way that Terence Deacon tries to describe a process by which thermodynamics and entropic gradients can become about themselves, as he puts it—and he’s, you know, he read Peirce very early on, I know he read Whitehead too—but he has his criticisms of Whitehead that are not dissimilar from your own. That I have tried to… I’m not going to say that sentence—that’s too arrogant. We’ve had a conversation about Whitehead where I think he’s misunderstanding Whitehead—but in a way that is easy to misunderstand him. It’s the same issue you have—that, like, as if there were a finite number of eternal objects, and that you might run out, and that Whitehead’s somehow limiting creativity by saying that there’s, you know, a realm of eternal objects envisaged by the divine, which is—

TIM JACKSON:
Let me respond to that. That’s not exactly my critique. I’m saying that there is a formal relationship between the move—what he makes between the, you know, the relationship between the primordial nature and its envisagement of the—

MATT SEGALL:
and Laplace.

TIM JACKSON:
Right. But I don’t think Whitehead is describing the same kind of finite state space. But there are also lots of ways that infinities are built into those state spaces, right? There’s this… you know, interesting form of relationship between infinite and finitude—an infinity that actually guarantees the finitude of the calculation. And ergodicity would be a classic example of that. These kinds of reliance on laws-of-large-numbers–type arguments—where I call them tacit infinities. But, I mean, we don’t necessarily need to go into that. I don’t think Whitehead is Laplacian. I think that there’s too much in common, in a certain sense. And I think he also has to erect his principle of the infinity of eternal objects in order to avoid this concern. And I’m like, you don’t actually need that—because eternal objects are just continuously generated, essentially, right? Like, they’re generated by this process of actualization anyway. That’s—we don’t need—

MATT SEGALL:
—to get into that right now. It certainly is, I think, a legitimate description of what it looks like from our perspective, as actual beings, that—

TIM JACKSON:
So you’re saying I’m the one indulging in the projective fantasy?

MATT SEGALL:
If you really—we have to get—we have to reach out to the psychoid and recognize that.

TIM JACKSON:
But what is the psychoid? You know, the psychoid is… that’s a vitalist principle.

MATT SEGALL:
I’m happy with vitalism. If you want to—if the evolutionary biologist wants to defend vitalism, I’m on board. I’ve avoided it because I’m worried that the biologist would peg me as anti-scientific.

TIM JACKSON:
What do they know? Well, you know I’m going to have to—because you asked me to defend vitalism at this biophilosophy conference in July. I’m going to defend a particular reading of vitalism, animism, and materialism, which just shows that these things can all get along, essentially—that these are complementary principles. But yeah, the psychoid—the Drieschian psychoid—

MATT SEGALL:
Hans Driesch, the embryologist.

TIM JACKSON:
Yes. Jung gets the idea from him. It’s just that principle of generative change, in some sense. It’s like, what it is to be living—or psyche-like, in this case—is to be continually changing in some kind of… you know, not necessarily intrinsically creative manner. Well, I guess it’s creative because it’s creating new states.

MATT SEGALL

Self-moving. I mean, that’s what Plato meant. Yeah. And Aristotle meant by the psyche, self-moving.

Exactly. Yeah.

MATT SEGALL

So, I mean, just to go back to Deacon, this, this accounting tries to offer thermodynamics and then morphodynamics and then intentionality. Yeah. He tries to describe a process whereby without any kind of skyhook in Dennett’s sense, you could start to get these loopy thermodynamic far from equilibrium processes whereby… energy begins to fall up,

I think is how he puts it in Incomplete Nature, where because of the accumulation of adaptive constraints, you start to get processes which are self-perpetuating, self-moving, if you will. And Deacon’s critical and incomplete nature of Whitehead, he calls it a uh a homuncular explanation because he thinks whitehead’s just presupposing at the

beginning and in matter what needs to be explained which is this self-propagating capacity and i think um i i i think that you we can’t there’s no scientific way to decide this question of whether self-propagation self-movement begins with biology or whether it was always already there in in the physical world because from my point of view

as and i’ll use your term an animist as a vitalist there is no materiality and there is no material process which isn’t already uh in some sense um self-organizing or organized yeah yeah and so and also just to say in the

TIM JACKSON

colloquial most trivial sense animate animate yeah

MATT SEGALL

um like i was saying before even even light even even photons are already directive like they there’s a vector quality to even the simplest forms of of energy and that’s all you need and that vector quality you could say is just um a entropic um you know, spreading out, cooling down, but it’s still exceptional.

TIM JACKSON

Yeah. Well, and also just nothing is moving them.

MATT SEGALL

Right.

TIM JACKSON

Self-moving, right? You know, it is their nature to move. Like, how would you even define light without the notion of, you know, its speed of travel, et cetera? And you actually said this really beautifully in your discussion of the waves and the water, and that really there would be no point, no matter how much we zoom in,

uh at which there would be no motion there would be no activity if we want you know animacy in some in some very trivial sense we’re trying to to obviously play with it rhetorically because there’s this you know classical or traditional division between the inanimate and the animate, but also in the very colloquial,

even more outside of that context, sense of something being animated. There are no things that aren’t moving on some scale. Things that appear still to us appear that way because of a phenomenon of scale, because of a reference frame. Either we’re moving with them, In an exact one-to-one, you know, we’re on the planet.

It feels like it’s not moving to us because we’re on it. We’re moving in sympathy with it. Or things of just moving at scales that we can’t perceive, which could be either too fast or too slow.

MATT SEGALL

So I think we’re… And I know you have a lot more to say about Levin and Deacon. We can transition there. But I think where Whitehead is very much unlike Laplace and Newton is that for Whitehead, the source of invariance is not some law. nor is it uh some corpuscle some material atom that endures through time as

unchanged as a kind of mini substance for whitehead what’s invariant is um these definite potentials not something actual not an actual law not an actual particle uh or a body of some kind but uh but the invariant elements are these eternal objects which are pure possibilities and i i think that might seem logically

equivalent or structurally isomorphic to what laplace is doing i think it makes a huge difference because there is no room left over in the laplacian or the newtonian universe for anything like potentiality or possibility And we can quibble about the definiteness or vagueness of possibility, which is an important point.

But I really don’t think what Whitehead is saying about eternal objects and the primordial nature of God is different. really isomorphic to laplace it’s not even an inversion of laplace it seems to me quite different because of the emphasis on the polarity between the potential and

the actual everything’s actual in laplace and newton the laws the particles it’s all actualized space time you know there’s no potentiality right but so there’s an

TIM JACKSON

abstract isomorphy um and isomorphies are always abstract um Well, that’s a big claim, but you know, come at me. This is a kind of identity of Indiscernible’s claim as well. And I totally grant that, of course, Whitehead is not Laplacian in the sense that the Laplacian determinism is the kind of classic modern form of determinism, which is,

of course, a version of the problem of theodicy. which is that give me the initial conditions or the boundary conditions, position and velocity of all the particles, you know, all the assumptions that are built in here at any in any given time slice and the entailing laws, which are formal causes.

Sorry, you know, Hans Jonas, you don’t understand. Those are formal causes, laws are formal causes. Actually, Sheldrake and Vernon got onto this, you know, and they were they were referencing what’s his face? What is his name? You know, all things are full of gods.

MATT SEGALL

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. David Bentley Hart.

TIM JACKSON

And they were saying that he was noting how laws in the kind of modern sense are formal causes, which is absolutely right, which I think that Hans Jonas absolutely misses if people want to watch that conversation that we have. um so yeah okay laplace is completely deterministic because the formal cause is

fixed for all time and it’s you know and it’s it’s absolutely canalizing there’s only one possibility for every for every um you know uh for the pathway you know the the pathway of the entire universe is completely canalized and that’s not whitehead at all you know that’s

MATT SEGALL

Lacoste says there are no gaps anywhere for freedom or spontaneity to sneak in. And Whitehead says all there are are gaps. I mean, that’s what an actual entity…

TIM JACKSON

I totally get why you… But I’m speaking in a very abstract and formal sense about the relationship between the… what whitehead achieves in the act of earth framing so the way whitehead solves the frame problem cosmically um with his primordial nature and you know looking through

these definite eternal objects and giving this you know initial relevance of them organizing you know that he’s the possibility the possibility as you like to say you know he organizes He’s the relator God. You know, he puts them in relation in a certain way. And without that, everything would fly off in all different directions chaotically.

And I’m just like, no, I don’t think we need those assumptions. And I do think Whitehead, you know, great mathematician that he is, is taking thought forms which have owe something to Laplace because everybody’s mathematical thought forms owe something to Laplace in the history of, you know, post Laplacian theory.

including the use of probability theory, which he is a primary architect. And I think Whitehead is thinking with those thought forms, even though he’s perturbing the Laplacian ontology in all sorts of ways. So it’s a kind of a, I don’t know, I need to substantiate this claim more, but I’m saying that there’s a real…

resemblance here between the thought forms not with really what’s done with them um but yes we can quibble about the definiteness and vagueness that’s not a quibble

MATT SEGALL

you know that no no that’s yeah that’s the key point three hours just on that at

TIM JACKSON

some point yeah yeah yeah Yeah. So, I mean, pure possibilities, that’s to me, again, I’m not claiming to be in possession of the perfect dictionary, but the way I define possibility is that it has a certain degree of definiteness to it. Yeah. Is that it has a certain degree of definiteness to it, as opposed to potential,

which could be completely indeterminate. And so, you know, I prefer to speak in terms of virtual and actual. I prefer to avoid substantializing these terms. I prefer to say that they’re just operators, right? Because I think we get into a lot of problems when we substantialize them,

even though that’s a separate issue from the one that we’re talking about right now. So I think that the term pure possibility is kind of a contradiction in terms, because I think that things only get that definiteness, which is characteristic of a possibility or indeed an object. Okay, in a relational manner,

you’ll say that they do that because that’s the relationship with the primordial nature of God, right? And so, yes, in a relation to a specific actual situation, the primordial nature of God in this case, you have a relative definiteness of possibilities, adjacent possibilities that, again, yeah leave their their definiteness relative definiteness and thus their status as

possibilities as opposed to just pure indeterminacy um because of their adjacency with a particular um you know actual situation and i don’t think the problem with the with the with the primordial nature of god then because it kind of conforms with all of this because that is the point it’s an actual entity or that you know

is correlated with all these is that there are just far too there’s an infinite range of of Of, you know, possibilities correlated with that, which means that that primordial nature itself has to be infinitely complex because the definiteness has to be derived from the definiteness possibility has to be derived from definiteness determinacy in actuality.

And so I’m like, this is really, really front loading the possibility landscape here. And I just don’t think you need to do that because I think that the primordial actuality, if we’re going to think cosmogenesis and we should only think that as a limit concept and kind of apophatically, ultimately,

the whole point of erecting a positive thesis in cosmogenesis is essentially to show how none of them work. You know, like you can’t think absolute origins because you’re now at the limit of thought and you’re discovering that limit and then being thrown back onto conventionalism and all of that. And again,

I will agree that Whitehead is kind of doing that, like this is a svatantrika or a fallibilist erection of a positive thesis. But I think what it shows to me is that if you’re gonna think this arrangement of a primordial actuality and its association with thus a possibility landscape, which has some degree of definiteness in it,

it has to be maximally simple um and and so it cannot so that so then you don’t have an infinite array of of of

MATT SEGALL

you know um the primordial envisagement i think is actually as simple it’s the consequent nature that becomes complex um

TIM JACKSON

That’s fine. But then, again, it’s the way that eternal objects have their predefiniteness in correlation with that absolutely simple primordial nature. It just doesn’t work like that for me.

MATT SEGALL

They only have a predefiniteness relative from one actual occasion, finite actual occasion, to another finite actual occasion. which is just to say, like, the past is given would be another way to say that. And so I don’t actually think Whitehead’s in disagreement with you or that I’m in disagreement with you.

What he means by general potentiality or pure potentiality is creativity.

Yeah.

MATT SEGALL

And God is the first simple, maximally simple ordering of that potentiality. So it becomes a given primordial fact that all subsequent actual occasions inherit.

TIM JACKSON

Yeah, and I’m actually fine with it when it’s put that way. I just think that, again, we probably shouldn’t keep getting into the minutiae here. I think that there are lots of attendant things that Whitehead says, and that you often say, which don’t follow from that statement. That there must be some primordial actuality, again,

if you’re thinking cosmogenesis, that it must be maximally simple. therefore you know it’s haloed like every actuality by possibilities like you can go here this way or that way from any given situation from any concrete situation so to speak right there are degrees of freedom associated with it because we’re not actualists because we’re not determinists

um and all of that is fine and i agree with that and here we you know we converge on something which we’ve which we’ve talked about many times which would be the primordial god the function or the operation is as an operator is an attractor

selector or an er canalizer and of course to have the kind of process relational view that we both have and to think cosmogenesis in that context that is the thought form that you’re going to be thinking i think it’s just that Whitehead really seems to front load it when he needs to posit this primordially

infinite landscape of eternal objects, you know. And then all these issues about the immortality, like the past is given, the past cannot be changed, but there are all these issues about the immortality of the past, which for me are also big sticking points. There’s also the Leibnizian principle that every actual object ingresses the whole

array of like everything.

MATT SEGALL

Internal objects, yeah.

TIM JACKSON

Yeah, but with, you know, ordered degrees of relevance. And I’m like, you don’t need that either, in my opinion. That’s very abstract. And I think, you know, not everything is related to everything else. And of course, again, the limit concept of that is what I call Bohmian lockstep, which again becomes another kind of actualist determinism.

And I grant that Whitehead has his various… elements of his scheme to prevent some of the infelicitous consequences of the thought forms that he is taking from um you know the history of like either philosophy or you know mathematics and and logic that he borrows from and he he

very eloquently you know creates this thing and then he sees the the negative consequences and he tinkers here and he puts in another principle to ensure that you know we’re not going to collapse into some kind of actualism or determinism or whatever but

some of those things are problems that he just created for himself in my opinion um by taking too much from that that history in some sense like that he yeah well he’s

MATT SEGALL

he’s a brooksonian philosopher uh in the sense that he thinks that the real um the highest achievement a philosopher can hope for is to create their own problems right and we talked a lot about do you want to think in originally in original ways you have to create your own problems

TIM JACKSON

And I think all of the philosophers that you and I talk about frequently and that we love are in exactly that, either in that lineage directly, so like Simmenden and Berkson, who take their, Simmenden and Deleuze, who develop this concept of the problematic. And, you know,

Simmenden does a lot with that and I think creates very new concepts on the basis of it. And Deleuze, when he writes about Simmenden, recognises that Simmenden has done new things with that in this pre-individual field as a problematic field and all of that. But yeah, the works themselves are that, and they would all agree with that.

I mean, like, Deleuze would say that, you know, what is it, like a corpus, the work of a philosopher is nothing other than the, you know, identification of some problems and the systematic, you know, if he said that very early on in like 53 in the Hume book, But also,

we said this about Plato when we were talking about the Timaeus, that Plato generates a problematic, which is clearly incredibly fecund, right? And this is also fallibilism. Every solution creates a new problem. That’s Simenden’s transductive series of individuations, because every individuation retains its charge, especially in the living world.

world retains its charge of the pre-individual problematic so it has a new set of problems that are associated with it to the degree that it is a novel that it is an individuation it’s it’s a novel solution um and so you know it becomes this transductive series and i just call that constructive evolution um

So, you know, I agree with all of that. None of that requires the immortality of the past, which is not what you said anyway. But I mean, when we’re talking about Bergson in this context. But let’s get back to Levin and Deakin. So just to segue again there, although I just interrupted you, I’m very rude. But…

You know, I don’t know Deakin well, is the truth. You know, like I’ve had Incomplete Nature on my shelf for I don’t know how long, and I’ve dipped into it a few times, but I’ve never really read it. I mean, I’ve gleaned a bunch about his basic principles from, you know, dipping into it,

from talking to various people. I have read a couple of papers over the years. You know, I was quite interested in biosemiotics for a while, so I read a few papers, including a few Deakin papers. Obviously, I’m interested in Peirce a lot. I find biosemiotics often quite disappointing. I think he and I would probably have,

and he obviously has it much more developed than I do, a kind of similar story about what I would call constructive coarse graining and the role of non-equilibrium thermodynamics in trying to understand that bridge from the development of systems from a thermodynamic context perspective that about for which things can matter,

like their preservation can start to matter in a sense. You know, that could be thrown back on the Persean tautology, you know, things which are good at persisting tend to persist, which is natural selection, the tautology of natural selection. What I thought was what I’d really like to get to as well, and just to introduce this,

was the discussion of information in the Levin-Deakin dialogue, because there are really fascinating resonances, I think, there with Simenden, but also it’s more coming out of Wiener and Wiener’s critique of Shannon. And Wiener didn’t get mentioned by Deacon. But yeah, maybe that’s somewhere we can go just to presage a few topic areas.

MATT SEGALL

Yeah. Well, I’d be curious to hear what you thought about Deacon’s, as I understood him, his attempt to distinguish between information and interpretation or evaluation. Which is, I mean, it’s kind of already implicit in Shannon with the difference just between meaningful information, the content of a message and the energetic medium through which it’s transmitted, the channel.

And so I think maybe that’s already implicit in Shannon, but he’s not really themed. He’s not focused on the message. He’s more interested in the medium.

TIM JACKSON

Well, he’s explicitly excluding it. And I think that there are probably different ways of thinking about channel and message entropy. But I mean, in the engineering sense, in the kind of fundamental framework that Shannon and Weaver develop, at least as I understand it, meaning is explicitly excluded. And this is Weiner’s critique, actually, even though Weiner is,

of course, deeply, intimately familiar with the kind of formalisms they’re developing and does see it as a real achievement. He has the immediate critique that, well, information is about something. And in your engineering scheme, you haven’t included that kind of in your… emergent definition of information. I mean,

channel entropy is like the amount of entropy that a channel can transmit while still retaining the capacity to transmit a signal. message entropy is the entropy associated with the actual signal right so it might not be the message entropy in this case because this is an engineering question

might not actually be making use of the bandwidth of the channel right um so it could be very a very inefficient use of a of a channel to transmit far less information than you can but information is kind of here indexed to entropy

So the amount of entropy is the amount of information in a kind of isomorphic sense here for the Shannon Weaver thing. And Wiener, who is like literally the guy who develops the mathematics for the Brownian term, the Wienerian term in a lot of these, in like variational methods, he’s still saying that…

yeah obviously i you know i get the methods it’s clearly very useful for solving these engineering problems but um entropy is not information entropy is potential um so it’s the potential for organization and that is what and that organization of those degrees of freedom which are there

in the entropy so in like the bandwidth of the channel that will be in fact the information so information is about a structure which conveys a meaning so it’s about a structuring of of entropy the entropy itself that could just be disorder you know like a channel has the amount can transmit this quantity of

you know we don’t want to say information but this this quantity of of information in the Shannonian sense but he’s like that won’t all be information right um information will be the constraint of that um entropy um yeah which I take it

actually to be this was not a very lucid way of articulating it that I just did but I take it to be what um what deacon is saying uh and so i want to get to the way simondon would say it um

but i’ll let you respond first but i take it to be what um deacon is saying when he says that information itself it has to be meaningful right like it’s um it’s not just i don’t think this is exactly what he said but it can’t be just that um entropy

MATT SEGALL

yeah i mean deacon and levin got into this dispute about um how far down goals or teleology goes and you know deacon said at one point um that normativity or the the idea of meaningful information only matters to the extent that there is a um

somebody to whom it matters a a what was the exact word that he used a yeah I forget right now but he you know that their beneficiary was the word I think who’s the beneficiary of you know the distinction between meanings. Uh, and so, you know,

I think of Bateson’s account of information is a difference that makes a difference there. It implies this three-way relationship and persistence, you know, that, that there’s an interpretant interpreting a sign in relationship to, to an object. that that type of information can’t be easily quantified i think because um it’s

too perspectival it’s too subjective um but it’s essential to what we mean by by life and by the um the maintenance of the, the metabolic cycles that allow for a horizon of concern to, to emerge. And so this gap between information defined, uh, syntactically and information and semantic information, I think is a really it’s a gap.

And it’s a gap that I think some theorists have tried to leap. But for me, it’s another example of where we have to tread lightly and be very careful not to verify another kind of dualism between matter and life, between physics and biology. Because there’s clearly a difference between

um information that matters to a to a being that’s trying to continue to self-perpetuate its own existence and entropy yeah and i think weiner would say

TIM JACKSON

that that’s constitutive of the definition of information that it matters you know because it has it has a meaning you know and it’s it’s functional um so there’s

MATT SEGALL

just to say these attempts at an information ontology that would try to use information to describe what physical reality is i i am very ambivalent about that because on the one hand it seems to me to apply experientialism but only if you extend what what we are

saying here um you know that it needs to be meaningful information yeah not just syntactic

TIM JACKSON

yeah yeah not just entropy quantity of states basically you know and that would be um there’s this much of information it’s more like there’s this much potential information um but you know this many states that could be meaningful to somebody but they’re not information intrinsically just because there’s state a or state b

is not intrinsically meaningful so i think the way that i would think about this and kind of what Terence was saying was triggering in me was, I guess, the way that Simenden takes off from Wiener’s critique of Shannon and the way that information and I’m going to use my own terminology, but, you know,

both to safeguard my originality, but also not to say that Simenden is I’ll try and say where Simenden is actually saying this and where I’m saying what I’m saying. But I’m saying information David Sloan- has this important relationship to notions like, and I think this is very consistent with what deacon is saying constraint. David Sloan- form.

So inform, informants, this is Simondon’s point in a very big way, and actually with selection. So information is a principle of selection, because what you’ve got in a kind of broadly Simondonian picture, let’s take an organism. So we just make it uncontroversial in terms of there’s a meaning here or a mattering here,

an aboutness to the signal or to the sign. So initially you might think that the organism is the interpretant and it is in a certain sense. But in fact, what the organism has within it for Simondon is this problematic field, right? This pre-individual problematic field of basically undirected variations.

It’s pre-individual in the sense that it is not catalyzed by the individual itself, right? So there’s all this spontaneous activity in organisms, whether that’s, you know, it’s the stochasticity that I’m always talking about at all sorts of different levels. And really, we are talking about all sorts of different levels.

You know, people always want to reach for the random genetic mutation here, but it’s stochastic.

MATT SEGALL

you know gene expression the intracellular matrix just yeah things are banging

TIM JACKSON

around they’re banging around think molecules are moving in brownian motion um there’s all this uh stochastic spontaneous activity in like nervous systems in in in brains and behavior itself like i’m waving my hands like an idiot you know this is basically stochastic behavior you know like a lot of our behavior is stochastic

and there’s a there’s a kind of a principle um And again, these things are stochastic or undirected at their various levels. You can always go back to the laws of physics or something to make it silly and say, look, it is constrained. It is. It’s not random. That’s to be missing the point completely.

It’s at a particular level of description where differences make a difference. it is a kind of pure difference, right? And so part of the Simondonian thing here, which Deleuze takes a lot of, will be that, you know, you have to have difference in order for the difference to make a difference, right?

So you’ve got all of this spontaneous activity going on and a signal, or something happens, and that constrains all of that spontaneous activity, it selects a particular subset of it, and it’s like, this is what you need to be right now, or this is the way you should go right now. So there’s like a principle,

ants are such a good example of like, you know, when they set out foraging before they are canalized by something in the environment or by pheromonal trails from other ants or whatever, they’re doing a random walk you know they’re just like going they don’t know where

they’re going but there’s a principle in behavior which is kind of like you know when you when you got to go and you don’t know where to go you just go you know so it’s like when you don’t know what you’re doing you spitball you throw something at

the wall and see what sticks you know this is actually very related to persian abduction as well obviously which we’ve discussed in the past but you put something out there you’re always palpating the environment you’re always probing it in some sense at all these different levels that we’re talking about and

then you see what responds um but shifting the perspective to the perspective of the of the signal that’s coming coming at you that is not a response to you necessarily um you catch a scent you know on the wind you know you catch a scent trail on the ground whatever you see something coming at you um

something in the environment becomes a signal because of the way that it constrains all that spontaneous activity that’s going on in you and is like this is the bit you need to deploy right now so you know i i say it’s like an elicitation from the

environment it’s not a solicitation and this is why it’s not deterministic and why it’s kind of meaningful in information because meaningful and informational or informative because it’s not forcing you to be a certain kind of thing it’s kind of like you have this capacity to be lots of

different things you have degrees of freedom and the environment is is eliciting from you a particular thing that would be the the thing to be right now if you want to avoid that predator or find that sugar residue or whatever it might be. Listen to someone speaking and have your brain, spontaneous brain activity canalized by their words,

which is constitutive of learning in this medium or whatever. So it becomes a signal because of the way it selects, because constraint is selection, right? You’ve got a field of variation And the signal is like this bit, right? This subset of that field of variation is now selected and then that’s amplified.

And this is individuation for Simmenden, right? The individual who’s already like an individual, right? But he’s still, again, we’re speaking about living systems. is charged by has you know retains inside of this charge of the pre-individual this problematic field and that’s what enables it to become another individual like a

transductive series of individuations and this happens under the influence of the environment but it’s he calls it an internal resonance right and this is why it’s meaningful right The fact of that elicitation is contingent on the organism having the kind of variation in it that can be elicited in this manner. Right.

So that there is a kind of thing to be right now or a direction to go right now is constitutive on the constitution of the organism, which is a kind of, you know, he would talk about this a little bit in terms of the imprinting of the signal form. But.

basically I guess in the Persean sense then it gets a bit funny because the pre-individual field of the organism is actually in a sense the object the sign is obviously the thing happening in the world which refers to that subset of the pre-individual field that is i guess now the

object right and the interpretant is actually a transformative event where the internal resonance between the the you know structure or whatever the the form of that information and the thing that’s going on the object that subset of variation inside the organism, the internal resonance between those things elicits the next individuation.

And that individuation is the process of interpretation. Right. So the interpretant is not as such the static individual who receives a signal is like, oh, yeah, I know what that means. It’s that process of becoming a novel thing, which is how the Persean triads iterate. Right. The interpretant becomes the object for the next round of individuations or

signaling or whatever.

MATT SEGALL

I wouldn’t want to say the organism is the interpretant. I think the organism is the whole triad. the organism environment field is always the triad, you know, and Whitehead has his version of that with, of the triad with, you know, objective data, subjective form and super objective, uh, expression.

Um, and, and, and that’s, um, I think a way of, of getting at, um, This relationship between phylogeny and ontogeny, I think.

Yeah.

MATT SEGALL

Where there was this moment when Deacon made this quite, it was very, I would call it participatory insight that he articulates where he says, every thought, I don’t know if this is an exact quote, but he basically says every thought is a micro… Embryogenesis. Yeah. The process of ontogenesis is ongoing.

And then our own our own experience of. Interpreting the meaningful information in our environment. is is on is on onto genesis that’s what that’s what we’re involved in doing here and you know he makes this great uh statement about speaking and language and how a

sentence he says a sentence before i speak it is undifferentiated you know i don’t know what i’m going to say until i say it and as whitehead puts it you know i uh i the end of a sentence i i you know i complete a sentence um

always in process or i you know i i end a sentence because i have begun it in a certain way but i don’t know exactly where the sentence is going when i begin it it

TIM JACKSON

just unfolds it’s not determined by the initial conditions but it’s just like just

MATT SEGALL

like ontogenesis is not determined by a genome yeah we should definitely get into

TIM JACKSON

compression and decompression before we finish by the way but yeah continue yeah

MATT SEGALL

Yeah. And so it just has me thinking about the relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny in terms of what is actually more concrete and what is more abstract. And in terms of thinking about history, obviously we’re always inheriting that history, but I’ve been thinking so much about your you’re harping on this point that like we never have,

there’s no whole past that we get to just inherit moment by moment. And so this evolutionary history is there, it constrains us, but it’s always broken and partial and,

TIM JACKSON

Yes, exactly. Because decompression is not one-to-one, right? I mean, that’s jumping because if anyone’s actually listening at this point, they don’t know about the compression decompression thing, which we’ll get to.

MATT SEGALL

Well, presumably they would have listened to all four of these podcasts that we were

TIM JACKSON

talking about. I mean, we haven’t even mentioned the Jung one and I think we won’t, but do that another time. I’ll watch part two of that. And we’ve neglected the Vernon Sheldrake thing, which I thought was also a good chance.

Yeah.

TIM JACKSON

But do you want to keep going or can I quickly rejoin?

MATT SEGALL

No, I mean, just I would love to hear your thoughts on ontogeny and phylogeny. And when we think about evolutionary creativity, I mean, the ego-devil theorists are on about this all the time, that a lot of evolutionary novelty actually comes through and shifts in development rather than mutations in the genes or something.

TIM JACKSON

Yeah, well, I mean, and I’m always harping on, thank you, about that, because when I talk about how you know, people talk about quote-unquote random genetic mutation as like the source of novelty. I’m like, yeah, stochastic gene mutation, which is part of, you know, ontogenesis. I’m talking about actual Brownian motion of molecules, non-steriospecificity of molecules,

the fact that any given molecule can stick to a whole bunch of different molecules and might indeed modulate them in some way, right? It’s not that there’s a one-to-one relationship between receptors and ligands. There’s a shit… A whole lot of stochasticity at that level, at the level of behavior, stochastic.

I mean, this is all behavior in some sense, by the way. Like some behavior is molecular and goes on inside you and some behavior is the whole organism. But it’s like stochastic, stochastic, stochastic in some sense, like it’s a generative, in fact, right? Not fully constrained degrees of freedom at all these levels.

And a lot of what goes on in evolution is, I mean, where does selection actually operate on the organism, right? And of course, there are differing, there’s a bunch of stuff that I want to get to in this response, which I’ll try and keep short.

There are different ways of compressing information, and we’re going to get to that later. And the genetic compression of things that have worked in the history of, you know, of a developmental history of the lifetime of a single organism, which is where selection is acting. That’s one mode of compression and one mode of inheritance.

And it can do some things and it can’t do other things. Right. And that’s one of the reasons why there’s a proliferation of modes of inheritance or compression, like culture, for example. Right. A lot of things.

MATT SEGALL

Selection is not just acting. you know, on the genome, it’s acting also semiotically at the level of decisions that the organism’s making.

TIM JACKSON

Well, if my account of the nature of information was at all lucid, what I was saying is that information is intrinsically selection and constraint is selection. So those principles, I’m being abstract in a sense, but they can be mapped onto each other very, very closely. And that individuation, that transductive series of individuations,

which I consider a constructive evolution, is going on moment to moment. So I love what… deacon was saying about you know every thought being an ontogenetic event that is just simenden not just i’m not saying that he’s taking it from him or in it that’s simenden’s view of individuation that’s even a jungian view of individuation but of

course simenden is deeply developing this with the thermodynamic schemas with the information theory with the cybernetics so it’s like um even though simenden bizarrely and maybe he never read him never mentions purse the resonances here are very very very strong It’s also very, of course, because for, you know, everything is embryo genetic in a sense. Right.

But this is this. OK, so the what were a couple of things I was going to say? Well, one thing to say in passing is because we talk about abstraction is that these are all also processes of abstraction because selection is a process of abstraction, right? Because abstraction is a drawing away from.

So if you have a field of variation and you have the selection of some subset of that, It’s a kind of coarse graining, in some sense, or a synecdoche, where that subset is now standing in for that field of variation, for that range of potential. It’s the subset that’s going to be actualized,

which is not to say that the variational field was not itself in some sense actual, but this is why virtual and actual are operational, not substantial terms for people following along with the metaphysics. But it’s abstraction because it’s drawing away that subset from its broader field and it is concretizing it.

It’s like this is now the subset that you are in fact going to be manifesting in some sense. But that’s what we do in abstraction with a model, right? You know, we say, okay, these are the variables that are most important for whatever study I’m doing. I’m going to abstract away from all the other variables.

Here’s my model. It captures certain variables with very high fidelity and just ignores other ones. that’s a selective move right it’s also why we can talk about things like selection bias in in in model both model development model selection etc etc right like selection again i’m not really i’m not trying to water down these concepts to the

point of absolute triviality but i am as this kind of you know uh fundamentalist evolutionary thinker say also talking about how ubiquitous they are so this kind of selection the thing that information does um as as a constraint function is also a kind of concrete abstraction um so so that is one

thing that i wanted to say and also just to say that we talked about it with an organismal example because it’s very vivid to think about organisms individuating in this way and we can point to you know stochastic gene expression blah blah blah blah but this is also just what simonton says is how information works in general

right there is a necessity for this problematic field which you can think of kind of analogous to um shannon’s uh channel entropy and i think it’s really the way you were talking about the difference between channel entropy and message entropy um and even maybe the way deacon was implying that they’re different but i don’t think

that is exactly the shannonian sense i think it’s the the way weiner would talk about those two things being different right That the channel entropy is this potential, it’s a set of states or degrees of freedom that can be constrained by the message. And that constraint function, which selects some subset of that channel entropy,

that is the informational content, which is non-contractable. quantitative in that sense, like the information. It is quantitative in the sense that, you know, you have this big field of variation and now you have some set of it and you can quantify that, which is what message entropy is. But that’s not the informational content.

The information is in that resonance that we talked about. which is the way that the interpretant is this transformational thing. Now you know to go left instead of right or whatever. Ontogeny and phylogeny. Oh, well, ontogenesis, just to say that just like Whitehead’s whole philosophy is the philosophy of organism,

Simenden describes his philosophy repeatedly as a philosophy of ontogenesis, right? So, I mean, it’s a philosophy of individuation, but it’s ontogenesis as metaphysics. Yeah. and ethics and everything it’s like a complete philosophy or like where onto genesis is the kind of fundamental or individuation but these are basically the

same thing um but he will use the term onto genesis all the time in in in this regard so just to point that out um yeah so what’s more abstract though you asked

MATT SEGALL

um yeah i mean and if we we clearly all or each inherit a lineage but we there’s a irreducible stochasticity or variability in the present that I think is manifest in ontogeny, but it’s not simply a, it’s not random. It’s informed by the history and it’s creative, there’s a capacity for improvisation that I think is suggestive of,

yeah, aim and a capacity to interpret and to semiotically imagine and abductively generalize or reason that, you know, to me is suggestive of something more than just the motion of molecules, you know?

TIM JACKSON

Yeah, because the motion of molecules in this set of analogies that we’re making is the channel entropy, right? So it is undirected, and it’s necessarily undirected, otherwise it wouldn’t have the capacity to be canalized in a novel manner, if it were already completely canalized in a kind of Laplacian sense.

MATT SEGALL

But this is also why… And there’s not a master molecule who’s driving… No, no, no. …steering the boat. No.

TIM JACKSON

Richard Johnston, PhD.: : reciprocity between you know agent and arena organism and environment. Richard Johnston, PhD.: : which is completely constitutive of this of this whole process and indeed why for persons it’s it’s it’s triadic and that improvisation though. Richard Johnston, PhD.: :

is only possible because the whole of the past is not inherited at the molecular at the kind of molecular being just the generically lower or reductive level. whatever is your basement level.

MATT SEGALL

So this is important. The Laplacian idea of determinism is based on the whole of the past without any gaps, just pushing the present forward. No room for alternatives. Whereas I think the idea from Bergson or Whitehead of the past being indestructible is the past as not just this

already actualized plenum but the past has real potentiality that’s recreated anew in each present

TIM JACKSON

Yeah, no, and I actually think it’s a beautiful idea. I love the idea of Dure, but I think that Bergson exploits a felicitous vagueness in his formulation of that concept, which when made maximally precise is kind of Laplacian, but it’s not in the way that he talks about it. Maybe we get to that,

because I think that’s very relevant to the compression, decompression thing. I think I just want to respond really quickly to your ontogeny and phylogeny, what’s more abstract thing. So what I was trying to get at there is that, in a sense, the process of selection is a process of abstraction. So they’re both abstract.

uh they both are always a kind of you know choosing of a particular subset of potentia which is a kind of abstracting um and then phylogeny like phylogeny when we say that we are and when we separate the two as opposed to just saying like onto phylogenesis or someone like jean-jacques coupier could say like he’s that’s a

french um biologist and philosopher of biology who would just say that, you know, and you can see this in some works from Mike Levin. You can obviously see this in the variational synthesis of the free energy principle. And I’ve been saying this for a very long time myself as well.

Like, you know, development is the evolution of the individual, I would say, right? You know, like there’s no real principle difference. There’s a difference in scale here, but there’s also a difference in mechanisms of inheritance. And when we separate ontogeny from phylogeny in the way that the kind of neo-darwinian synthesis has us do that,

we are taking a particular mode of inheritance and saying, like, this is the defining, you know, separating. But not all organisms really do that as much as as as we do, like a lot of organisms. develop more and evolve more through somatic mutations and then like reproduce

through fission and whatever that’s just one mode of inheritance it’s very important and it’s really I think very and obviously a lot of my work has been on genetic inheritance but you know, it’s very important and it’s fascinating and important to understand, you know, what it can and can’t do, but it’s just a mode of inheritance.

And one of the really powerful things, as I often say about Darwin and his virtuous vagueness, his felicitous vagueness, is that he’s not a mechanistic thinker in the sense that he doesn’t have a mechanism for inheritance, right? So he’s got this triadic set of principles, essentially, you know, selection, variation selection and inheritance, but because he doesn’t

know exactly how inheritance works in some mechanistic way. He’s not tempted to abstract one form of inheritance and be like, this is the fundamental form, which is what the neo-Darwinian, which is really neo-Mendelian and Weismanian or whatever, and actually hylomorphic. You know, so where Darwin is kind of anti-hylomorphic in an important sense, at least the principles are,

because the form emerges from the variation, not the other way around, the neo-Darwinian synthesis is a massive resurgence of hylomorphism because it’s saying, like, no, the genes imbue the matter. This information in the genes imbues the matter with form. Right.

MATT SEGALL

Right. Um, do you want to, before we wrap up, talk about Deacon’s criticism of Levin as, um, pre-formationist, uh, because of the way he imagines these bioelectric fields, 11 responds. And I think, um, points out that these are just set points that can be changed and they’re historically emergent and not necessarily fixed in some maternal sense.

So he does have his own conception of the morpho space as a trauma, but.

TIM JACKSON

Yeah, I think, well, I want to talk about compression and decompression if we can really quickly, but I think that Yeah, I think Mike is a bit of a preformationist, but I think Mike responded extremely well to what Terence said there and demonstrated how, yes, it’s the middle, because it’s related to the decompression discussion, you know,

it’s the middle of the bow tie, like it is a state that is achieved, that’s kind of reconstructed. Yeah. and then it canalizes the things that are downstream of it. But it is itself the product of both an evolutionary history and a decompression process in the ontogenesis itself. So it’s not eternal and sitting there the whole time.

I think we see, to me at least, and far be it for me to say that I know the way the world works, but that Mike still has preformationist tendencies in the more recent discussion around, as you mentioned, you know platonic morphospace and and when he’s talking about things like order for

free you know referencing stewart kauffman or or you know deacon brought up the lazy gene hypothesis and there was a whole rich discussion about about you know exploitation of kind of mathematical patterns In the physics, obviously, that’s a real thing. Like, obviously, that’s a thing that goes on.

But I mean, that’s because, you know, physical constraints are extremely stable and enduring. You know, they’ve been around for a very, very long time. And so they’ve been there to work with and organisms have both made use of them and also to some degree just not had any choice. Like, not because we’re hard determinists,

but if there’s even a skerrick of truth in the fact that these physical laws are very, you know, inflexible constraints, you have to be in conformity with them.

MATT SEGALL

But that’s… Your point is those are still historically emergent, even those physical laws.

TIM JACKSON

Yeah. Exactly. My point is those are still historically emergent, which is a nice point that Sheldrake made. I mean, so the irony being that, you know, Deakin was saying, oh, you know, you used to be really preformationist like Rupert Sheldrake, but now you’ve grown out of that.

And it’s like the discussion that Sheldrake and Vernon were having about laws. Sheldrake is going the full purse, you know, the cosmological purse now. Laws are habits. Laws are conventions. Laws are themselves evolved and potentially evolving, but are not eternal, you know, and therefore not unexplained explainers, right? There is a process which led to them.

And in principle, there might be a way of explaining that. So that was ironic. Where was I going to go? the physical constraints are those kinds of things they are habits conventions as well but in a different you know substrate or whatever or layer of reality if you

want to think that way um but mike kept saying you know it’s just there in the mathematics it’s just there in the mathematics um and it’s like again i don’t want to mike is an incredibly subtle and brilliant guy and i have a huge amount of respect for him but it’s like where is the mathematics Well,

when you run an algorithm on a computer, this is instantiated in a concrete system that is itself making use of all the physical constraints. Are mathematics and physics the same thing? I don’t think that they are. There are obviously an unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics and physics and all that, but they’re not the same thing.

where and and to the point from right at the beginning about not having access to kind of pure potential because we are ourselves actual um so anything we have access to is adjacent to us in some sense like how would we have access to any

mathematics that was pure in the sense that it had no relationship with our nervous systems or no relationship with any physical subject what’s substrate whatsoever um so i don’t think it’s it’s it’s not enough to say it’s just there in the you know a system or a pattern of relations that is describable using this

mathematics um you know has these properties which are indeed surprising incredible work that you know mike and josh bongard and and others have been doing on like minimal um cognitive systems and stuff amazing work but i don’t you know we don’t need a

prep we don’t need i think to go straight to a kind of preformationist you know platonist um like mathematical platonism to try and account for that kind of thing i do want to talk about compression and decompression but um yeah well i i think um

MATT SEGALL

when when don’t remember i guess it was mike who said that something like there are causes that are beyond physics and history that are mathematical mathematical causes and that runs afoul of whitehead’s ontological principle which is you know that all causes are actual entities and not his eternal objects are not um the reasons that

anything exists they’re drawn upon by what exists to characterize themselves but that’s all the agency is with the actualities And, you know, Mike and I have been trying to hash that out. And I continue to be surprised that an evolutionary developmental biologist is more platonist than me on this question. But it’s an interesting position to be in.

But there is a way in which Whitehead, you know, wants to… say that there is something invariant presupposed even in this evolutionary ontology where we want to emphasize variation as the first um and but for white it’s not anything geometrical it’s not anything um it’s not a law of physics right that’s um

eternal but he when he talks about the extensive continuum which for him is sort of uh one way of talking about the primordial nature of god is this extensive continuum um which he describes as one relational complex in which all potential objectifications find their niche. And he says the extensive continuum expresses the solidarity of all possible

standpoints throughout the whole process of the world, but it is not a fact prior to the world. It is the first determination of order that is of real potentiality arising out of the general character of the world. um and so this is how you know his primordial nature of god is a is a fact not an

idea or a positive or an abstraction which is i think what purse is also arguing for um he’s you know um depending on which purse but yeah or which whitehead um but you know i think this and he says that um In terms of what characterizes the nature of this extensive continuum,

I want to just share a little bit more of what he says there. Yeah, it does not involve shapes, dimensions, measurability. These are all additional determinations of real potentiality that arise within our cosmic epoch, within the historical process. But nonetheless, he wants to refer to the extensive continuum as a real potentiality.

And he thinks we can actually, we can know it in principle. He thinks that it has something to do with adjacency, which I know is a very important, idea for you. Whitehead thinks that that is not something we derive from historical process, but something that allows us to understand historical process.

It’s a it’s a principle that allows us to understand variation and invariant principle that allows us to understand variation.

TIM JACKSON

Yeah, and I think that’s a point that’s very well taken in the sense that in order for selection to occur, there needs to be a kind of, I mean, in order for relations to exist, there needs to be some kind of principle of adjacency. And so, yeah,

you’re going to converge on a point where there is this minimal set of relation, of principles, and you know you do you do perceive that i think um i mean this is the sense in which i think it’s a kind of you know inverted transcendentalism or descendentalism if you want um but um you know we read off

the horizon in some sense, but what is the most generic set of principles that seem to apply to everything, basically? And they’re, of course, maximally abstract. And of course, they necessarily imply other things, you know, like they couldn’t really be absolutely deconstructable because then you wouldn’t be able to generate anything from them.

So they have to be in, you know, and so you’re picking your most impoverished scheme, if that’s indeed the way you pursue speculative ontology. um in a in a in a kind of very careful way hopefully but also in a way you know it’s going to devolve on some aesthetic principle that that you have where you’re

like well i prefer to derive you know adjacency from selection or to say that those are also actually isomorphic in some sense you know like adjacency and selection so i speak of um you know mostly in my private notes but adjacency selectionism you know But like there’s some like, you know,

selectionism implies a certain kind of adjacency and adjacency in a relational philosophy implies selection because it’s a formational influence. Like by being in contact in some way with this other thing, I am, you know, reciprocally shaped by it.

MATT SEGALL

Yeah. And this is, this bottoms out into the aporia of like why it’s co-ultimates, you know, creativity and the primordial nature. It’s like, is is adjacency historically emergent or necessary to understand the idea of historical emergence or the reality of it i mean you kind of need both already yeah

TIM JACKSON

well i mean yeah if you i guess if you if you materialize in some sense the the metaphor and so you’ve got like this a simendonian conception of a pre-individual field um you know there are there are it’s it’s it’s one important point. And I just think that people are just using the words differently. Like,

I think if I were going to respond to just that quote you read, there’s a lot of things that I’m going to nitpick there because I don’t use those words in that way. Like, you know, all potential objectifications find their niche. I’m like, you know, not in something that’s permanent, man. No, you know.

or eternal, because there’s too much pre-definiteness in that. Whereas if we went in the Simondonian direction, and he has beautiful quotes, which I don’t have all. I mean, I may have them accessible, but… about the the the free individual like if it’s kind of the if reluctantly we were

going to think um a cosmogen he doesn’t say it in this way but you know he basically says you might accuse me if i extend this kind of argument into a into a cosmic register he doesn’t say cosmic um of of a kind of creationist principle um but Okay, here’s a quote then.

The prime mover would not be simple and singular, but the being insofar as it is anterior to any appearance of phases, harboring them energetically, yet not as forms or structures that can come forth. In the same way as the position of the problem in a certain sense bears the

possible solution as a tension toward a signification that incorporates the data of the problem, albeit without the prior formation of the effective lines of the solution, which would only appear through the real becoming of the resolutive invention and which are this becoming. Thus the capacity of resolutive becoming is contained in the being before any

becoming through the incompatibility that it will be able to make compatible, but not the line of this becoming’s existence, which is not already given and cannot be preformed since the problematic is without phases. That will probably be even harder for most people to pass than the Whitehead quote, probably considered it’s less poetic for sure. But, you know,

all of these things like without phases, the line of this becoming’s existence is not already given without the prior formation of the effective lines of the solution, not as forms or structures that can come forth. You know, he is obviously speaking at the limit of thought. So you’d be able to nitpick.

We would all be able to nitpick. This is a verbal expression of that, which cannot be spoken in some sense, right? You know,

MATT SEGALL

you’re talking about- The only obvious thing you could say about that statement is he’s speaking at the limits of thought.

Exactly.

TIM JACKSON

Exactly. But those little provisos that he constantly has, and he is trying to figure this from, you know, a schema that he has derived from an exhaustive study of the science of his time. Like the detail, I mean, it’s like mind numbing at points. the detail that Simmenden goes into in his investigation of different scientific paradigms.

But the little qualifications that he has, even though the Whitehead sounds more beautiful, I would agree, even though I do think Simmenden can sometimes write some really beautiful passages too. um but these things not as forms or structures that can come forth without problem

you know all of that stuff to me is hedging a little bit more safely in a way than some of the things that whitehead uh some of the language that that whitehead wants to use um so so i guess that’s all you know perhaps all there is to say there but

some of this relates to this compression decompression thing i don’t we’ve been going for ages but i don’t know if we want to quickly talk about that um and um So the basic idea here, and maybe you can, because you made better notes on the discussion than I did, but I didn’t make any.

But the basic idea here would be that, let’s say genetics is a form of compression. It’s compressing that set of traits, strategies, whatever, that worked during the life of an organism. It is a compression of them. So that was selected for basically.

It is a compression of them into a heritable form that is then passed to the next generation. And then the ontogenesis of the next individual um is a decompression of that compressed information um and it you know it it works pretty well as a metaphor and actually mike’s done some really beautiful stuff that

i really like um on on bowtie nodes and and actually the improvisation is very briarian in this it’s the improvisation that um goes on during this decompression process And of course, there’s improvisation because the inheritance is lossy, right? You know, like there are degrees of freedom and that’s why there’s, you know, developmental plasticity, phenotypic plasticity,

experience dependent plasticity, why you have a one to many relationship here in the sense that one genome can make many different individuals. And in fact, according to a generic principle of individuation, we’ll be continuing to make, you know, a new individual every time something happens. So that’s nice.

I guess that some of the points that I would make is, to the extent that the genome contains compressed information and therefore is a constraint function, it’s actually itself a form of selection. It’s the product of selection, but it acts as a selector, which is its informative role.

In some sense, it’s got a very narrow role in that it is… um you know it does other things too but the main thing it’s constraining is like transcription before the you know the formation of mrna transcripts or basically you could say skipping over transcription translation and that is a two-part

process it’s constraining ribosomes uh it also encodes ribosomes but it constrains them and tells them what proteins to make um so a ribosome can make like you know an indefinite array of different protein um forms um but the genome is telling it which ones to make. So it’s, it’s,

it’s a selection function on the behavior of the ribosome, but there’s all kinds of stuff that therefore downstream or whatever of that production of proteins, it just can’t constrain doesn’t constrain.

MATT SEGALL

The amino acid sequence is not exhaustively constraining what the function of the protein is. I mean,

TIM JACKSON

Not at all. Yeah. And even way less than probably most people, probably even a lot of biologists imagine in the sense that I mentioned earlier that proteins are not really stereospecific in their interactions in the sense that they interact with a lot of different things. And they interact, you know,

and all and their structure is about biasing those kinds of interaction propensities and the effects of those interactions. So it’s a constraint on that. But it’s not a again, it’s not a one to one. kind of constraint things are accidentally doing you know stuff that they haven’t

been selected for all the time and that is actually the the grist for the mill of molecular acceptation it’s really important that they do other things that they’re not fully constrained but they even change shape you know when they bind one thing they change confirmation and that changes their their functional um their

propensity to bind other things you know like proteins are like you know very dynamic entities themselves right um So there’s all this, I guess, and we’ve already made this point, there are all of these other layers of kind of unconstrained degrees of freedom beyond the product, beyond the template for the production of a bunch of particular,

you know, protein forms. And that includes the degrees of freedom of the proteins themselves.

MATT SEGALL

Right. And I guess this is what Deakin means by the difference between information and interpretation. Like if we say that there’s some information in the, in the genome and the nucleic, in the nucleic acid sequence and in the, amino acid sequence that gets translated into.

That’s not the way necessarily that meaning gets produced by the ways that proteins end up I would say exerting agency in their intracellular environment.

TIM JACKSON

Yeah, I would speak in this case to differentiate from chemical ecology, although this term molecular ecology is already a kind of overdetermined term as well, but I would speak of an ecology of molecules, right? the meaning of a molecule or the like function or capacity that it has in fact not

only its function but also its properties and all properties are this way but like are radically context dependent so it’s like where where is this protein in the body of the organism and what is its ecosystem in terms of interaction partners and what are their relative abundances because a lot of

effects are like stoichiometric and things they rely on relative amounts of interactions it’s not like one protein and another you know one protein protein interaction has this big effect on the phenotype it’s population level you know hence it’s probabilistic it’s you know biased and canalized and things but it’s it’s not

MATT SEGALL

And proteins aren’t just interacting with environmental conditions and then other proteins, but they’re feeding back on the genome itself and activating other genomes that maybe had remained dormant until the environmental trigger cued it to start.

TIM JACKSON

So they’re regulating gene expression in this sense, and that’s a major source of plasticity, cell differentiation. It’s like a crazy amount of shit going on.

MATT SEGALL

But when I ask what’s more concrete, ontogeny or phylogeny, I think I’m trying to emphasize what Deacon was trying to say about how he thinks… biology has underemphasized the decompression process um and overemphasized the

TIM JACKSON

compression process genetics in other words neo-darwinian biology has gone in that direction um definitely uh i hate that term as you know neo-darwinian it’s just so stupid um because it’s like anti-darwinian but um i mean obviously it has darwinian aspects to it right And we can all quibble over what’s the like key aspects of Darwin’s thought.

But if you think if you take Darwin’s real intervention, real intervention, whatever, like particular intervention to be against the doctrine of special creationism, special creation. So it’s an anti… Of species. Yeah, exactly. Good rejoinder. But that’s what I mean by special creation as opposed to creationism, I suppose. Right.

Which is just the Aristotelian notion of there being a species essence. And then the fact that every individual is different is because of accidental variation or actually in platonic terms. It’s because of coric necessity, because matter cannot take the form perfectly because it’s too unwieldy. But that puts the form before the accident, so to speak, right,

and says all the variation is a deviation from the essential form. And Darwin just switches that. No, species, the patterns of variation, the clumping which enable us to speak about species and genera and be able to do… our classifications and all of that kind of stuff and these are again real concrete

abstractions they’re not fake it’s not that species are not a thing but they emerge from and also thus blur at their boundaries so they’re not natural kinds because natural kinds are the result of special creation events they emerge from this variational process so if you take that to be the Darwinian view which is the anti-hylomorphic view

then the neo-Darwinian view is anti-Darwinian in the sense that it goes back to this hyalomorphic view where, yes, they do have a notion of random, which is basically an accident, but it’s very much trapped in this germline, you know, in the germ… content in the compressed content and it is the it is the determining factor and

even though individuals might vary so even though there’s a kind of phenotypic plasticity that’s irrelevant to evolution which is again the opposite of the dominion logic because this variation of individuals you know that all characters can vary to some degree right and he says stuff like that

is in fact, that’s the variation that’s Christopher the mill of selection. Because he’s not wedded to a particular mechanism of inheritance, he can make general claims which turn out to actually be more true. So when they got like really jazzed on precision and reductionism and trying to be like physics, And that has led us astray.

That has led us to the overemphasis on compression in this terminology. So, yeah. And the other thing, I guess I already said it before about compression is that heaps of the variation, though, that an organism will accumulate cannot be compressed back into the genome. But that’s why there are all these other layers of compression, including epigenetic mechanisms,

but everything up to and including cultural norms and language and all these

MATT SEGALL

things. And everything down to these laws or emergent habits of physics that provide for the five spiral and geometric packing and all these other things.

TIM JACKSON

although that’s not why those exist those pre-exist that lossiness of compression but yeah for sure they are a form of compression absolutely and they can be exploited yeah yeah there’s a lot you don’t need to compress because it’s just it’s what you can take for granted about the environment in which

decompression is going to take place because it’s invariant at the time scale that is relative and again you can see that at different time scales that’s specialization so you can say like all organisms are specialized for these physical constraints whereas some organisms are specialized for very very specific niches

and so they put a lot of stock um their compression process or whatever puts a lot of stock in a certain stability of the environment, which is great for them as long as that stability exists. But when it goes away, you know, specialists can be very vulnerable to extinction because they’re not adaptable.

And so that’s why we have different, you know, generalist and specialist things. But so, yeah, I mean, culture, et cetera, Korzybski and time binding, those are also forms of compression that are relevant here. Oh, and just to go back to the genome as constraint or information, it’s important we must always remember that there’s also cellular inheritance.

So even at the level of this phylogenetic multiple generation conception of evolution, there are a certain set of constraints that can also be taken for granted, which are not encoded in the genome, which are like the constraints associated with the cellular cytoskeleton and things like that, or the pre-existence of a ribosome, things that are inherited directly somatically

from the prior generation, which are necessary to begin that decompression process and ensure that it is, you know, duly canalized from the very beginning. The genes themselves are canalizing constraint functions. That’s the sense in which they are information, but also that the cell structure and the cellular machinery, if we don’t mind that metaphor for a moment, that,

you know, can be taken for granted.

MATT SEGALL

is kind of always already going to be there too so two things and then i think we need to wrap up um so darwin does reject special creation of species but i think he’s still because he has a mechanistic physics in the background assuming special creation of life I mean,

he uses the rhetoric of the divine breathing life into the first or a few forms of life. Maybe that’s just poetic loss, but still there’s a kind of mystery there that he’s assuming. Yeah.

TIM JACKSON

Life is a given. Life is a given to him. He does, as we know, he has his warm, wet pool and blah, blah, blah. But that’s not really the level at which his explanatory intervention is made.

MATT SEGALL

And then the Goethean point, would be about the human, which doesn’t seem to be explainable in terms of specialization. The human seems to be profoundly unspecial, more general. And is this in the sense that we’ve, the the neoteny and the the way in which we’ve avoided becoming overly um fixed

into a niche and you know we don’t have we don’t have um um claws fangs and and you know we’re not especially um a powerful as a most predators are and yet because of our our capacity to survive in multiple environments and to be especially malleable um we’re dominant on the planet right now. And so there’s,

there seems to be something strange happening with the human being in terms of not fitting into a niche. I think that would be Goethe’s suggestion, but even I’m wondering, because it’s been a while since I’ve read Descent of Man, doesn’t Goethe make a similar point about humans being Darwin say something about

us being unspecialized in a weird way.

TIM JACKSON

Yeah. I also need to reread Descent of Man, but yes, he does. And, um, And I think it’s a generic point. Like, I think a lot of people make that point. But I think, you know, so I often say, and I will have said many times in our recorded conversations, you know,

humans are the species whose niche is niche construction.

MATT SEGALL

So one of the things we- We’re the most artificial species, in other words.

TIM JACKSON

Yeah, so it’s not in a sense that we’re not specialized, that we don’t have a relatively narrow set of parameters within which we do well. It’s that we’re very good at creating those or sheltering ourselves. So we’re good at self-selecting, self-canalizing, because this is what niche construction is. Niche construction is another form of compression.

So it’s another way of, so there’s inheritance, obviously, of, you know, along that line as well, but it’s a way of, of, of canalising ontogenesis or decompression in this sense, by putting a set of canalising operators into our environment. And one of the really nice things that Terence also said was that when he talked

about memory and he talked about synaptic weighting and various things as ways of biasing a kind of a metabolic flux that was going to pass through that neuronal network and What would be recovered, the decompression in this sense, would be the canalizing of that flux by what had been stabilized as relatively invariant on that time scale.

And again, that’s kind of, it’s just like, I don’t think I’ve said that very eloquently, but that’s very similar to niche construction. that you are creating something relatively invariant that is going to keep canalizing the more rapidly changing dynamics of the system. And so a lot of this is like that,

like a lot of this is about separating change, like rates of change over different time scales. And that implies to everything from the kind of physical constraints which an organism can take for granted through the genetic like through all these different modes of inheritance and even

this kind of moment to moment onto genesis thing um there’s a separation of time scales going on where the thing that’s moving really really fast through the system can be canalized by the thing that is changing less rapidly um and that’s like a launch equation or something so that sure but i think also um

MATT SEGALL

I don’t want to false binary because I agree, you know, we should be thinking in terms of ontophylogenesis, but phylogeny, the history of life generationally, is a series of individual organisms. and the the creativity the decision making the the learning all of the stuff that individual organisms do in their ontogenesis and their development might not be um

might not be compressed as information contained in the genome but it’s nonetheless inherited in the broader context of um memory

TIM JACKSON

Yeah, well, multimodal inheritance, as we’re talking about, yeah.

MATT SEGALL

And so what’s more concrete? Like, we’re always… Yeah. Individual, you know, the present moment where all the causal activity is happening is… individual organisms and so rather than thinking of the genome or phylogeny as being the causal the main causal factor i do i do really appreciate deacon’s point

that we need to pay more attention to the the decompression the development the individual organism and its process of ontogeny when we want to understand life you know

TIM JACKSON

Yes, I 100% agree. And I think that that is, you know, very much echoed in the so-called organismal term in biology, which I just think is also just to turn back to, you know, Darwin and common sense. But I just see phylogeny, if we’re restricting that term, I mean, the genesis of trees.

You know tree we can get all Deleuze-Guattari in here and you know contrast trees and rhizomes but like ecological or synchronic relationships are very rhizomatic because they’re horizontal and they are like very very complicated and always changing and blah blah blah and what we get over vast periods of evolutionary time

when we understand diachronic relations in this you know we can say relatively abstract way again there’s abstraction going on at all these levels is this tree form and part of part of what’s going on there is that compression process where not all of the details of

ecology of synchronic relations are compressed into genomes and indeed when we have the trees they look relatively tree-like even though trees are in fact wildly fractal um and an actual tree if you get really really close to it and look at all of its you know twigs and everything um it’s more rhizomatic than

is more isomatic at different levels, right? You just zoom in, zoom out. You know, if you abstract and look at a very long period of history, you also have the selection biases that result from the loss of records of many elements of the past. In fact, you know, many lineages

Not only actual synchronic relations that were going on at a very specific time, but lineages that existed, either a loss forever or we haven’t recovered them yet, or we just haven’t sequenced them yet. You know, like how minimal our like sequencing is still in some in some even in this incredible age of big data.

you know like when we’re doing reconstructing evolutionary histories of um hymenopteran bee ant and wasp um venom evolution um and we are um using a comparative genomic method now you know and it’s this incredible stuff and we’re working with so much data but we’re working with like 100 genomes out of like

I mean, minimally 100,000 species, maybe over a million. You know, it’s like the amount. So there are selection biases at all these levels. And then when we develop a visual representation of that very, you know, biased landscape, for all these reasons, again, it looks tree-like. If you zoomed in, it would look rhizomatic. So I don’t know,

like phylogeny, there’s an overemphasis on a particular mode of inheritance, I would say. And because that mode of inheritance has been, you know, dominant and we even get you know ridiculous things like genetic determinism and stuff there has been too much of a focus on compression and i would say and so i

completely agree if you’re framing it that way but i would even say there’s too much of a focus on one mode of compression rather than all these other forms of inheritance, which are equally can be described as forms of compression. So, yeah, I mean, I agree with what you’re saying. It becomes very abstract, the focus on phylogeny,

if we define phylogeny according to all of these abstractions. If we’re just thinking about lineages, um that could be cellular lineages that could be the individual as a lineage you know that so i think when you’re thinking in terms of the bare principles they are

just the same thing to me on different time scales and that’s partly because i don’t recognize the privilege again even though i work a lot in molecular biology of um of genetic inheritance over other forms of inheritance so know there are again there are organisms that don’t rely on that nearly as much

like mike’s planaria for example um but organisms that undergo all kinds of somatic changes and reproduce by fission more than than they do um and of course sexual

MATT SEGALL

reproduction is a very particular thing i think you know you and i both want to avoid determinism and the way that i would emphasize for doing so to avoid that is to say that the past is always present as a potential It’s never present as a, as a determination of what happens in the present.

It’s present as a potential that the, that what the organism, what the, what creativity is doing in the present is always going to involve some degree of inheritance, but always inheritance of of potentialities, inheritance of kind of food that needs to be digested and reproduced in the present, right?

So there’s never a way in which the past could force what’s occurring in the present.

TIM JACKSON

Yeah, yeah, no, for sure. I mean, the past is an enabling constraint. Obviously, for evolutionary thinkers, you know, we have this constructive, you know, way of thinking, right? You know, the universe doesn’t renew itself. It’s not a Boltzmann brain, right? It has a history, which is… not deterministic, but determining in some sense.

And the way that works for me is exactly in terms of this principle of the virtual or the potential is only structured by these principles of adjacency, which are the past. So like an actual situation comes along with this structuration of a virtuality because of what it is inheriting from its past,

like it’s inheriting that structured relationship to virtuality. from from the past. So all of this constructed complexity that we have that is associated with all of these degrees of freedom that we might have. That is, of course, the bequest of the lineage and not to be overly phylogenetic about it, but is the bequest of history.

I just think that’s really different from saying that the history is is like holy. I’ve said this to you in private, I just don’t see the need for the rushing to the limit. Like we don’t need to say whole, we don’t need to say entire. And Berg’s examples are very unconvincing. Like his actual examples,

like the way that a memory might suddenly jump out at us and be very high fidelity and kind of erupt from the unconscious. And this gives us an example, like a demonstration, a phenomenological experience of the yeah it shows that there are a lot of things that you’re not remembering

most of the time that haven’t in fact been lost it doesn’t show you that the whole of the past has been lost the past though does work and those eruptive memories do work exactly in the sense that we were talking about um information working they work as a fascinating constraint that elicits some novel arrangement from you they

MATT SEGALL

are individuating um or dormant genes that get have to be activated by environmental cues that

TIM JACKSON

Yeah, exactly, exactly. There’s tons that we don’t normally, that is not normally present for us that may yet be, that still has that potential. And this thing about the structuring of virtuality is exactly the discussion we’ve been having for the last hour and a half or whatever about compression.

um not we haven’t been talking about compression exactly but you know all of these different modes of inheritance memory are structurations of virtuality they are canalizations of again if we think about it in very concrete terms all that stochastic behavior that’s going on in an organism at all these different levels

spontaneous stochastic undirected intrinsically undirected behavior is canalized by all of these compressions whether that’s again you know the genes whether that’s something in niche construction whether that’s the language that a child is, you know, interpolated into or acquires, whether that’s like the way you set up your environment, and mine’s pretty chaotic,

so maybe some more canalization could be going on. But, you know, the things that you set up, the habits that you develop to keep yourself on the rails You know, that’s a way of structuring your potential because you could fly off in all sorts of different directions,

but you leave the Simenden book on top of your computer at night so that you remember that the plan tomorrow is not to look at the thousand other books in your room, but actually to read some more bloody Simenden, you know, like ways we seed a future, you know. panelization of our behavior.

Yeah, they’re all they’re all again, at some very abstract level, those things are all the same. There are very important differences, different modes and mechanisms of compression can do very different things and work on different timescales and all of that. But in some sense, in the speculative ontological impoverishment diagrammatic sense, there’s something very,

very much shared in common.

MATT SEGALL

Yeah. I’m running up against a couple of metabolic constraints, which is that I have to urinate. Philo is threatening to claw me in the back if I don’t feed him.

TIM JACKSON

Sorry, I always have to apologize.

MATT SEGALL

I should have fed him before we sat down. I forgot, and he’s patient right now because he realizes that his attempts to scratch me are not working yet.

TIM JACKSON

I’m the same. I need to pee. I need to eat. I’ve not really had breakfast. Um, and it’s like 1230 now. Um, I hope like one or two listeners make it this far because it’s two different conversations in some sense. And I think that the, the Dick 11 reflections were, were pretty rich.

Uh, I hope anyway, I think there was a lot of good stuff there. So, yeah.

MATT SEGALL

Yep. um always too much uh to untangle but uh enjoyed this one and um you know i mentioned the stuff about the human and and specialization versus being unspecialized because i think it’d be fun to talk about christophe uh huick’s book

and his engagement with darwin um so um i don’t know if that’s where we go next but i wanted to

TIM JACKSON

We definitely can. I mean, we also talked about the Simenden-Novalas paper.

MATT SEGALL

Oh, right. Yeah, yeah. Romantic Mechanism or whatever that paper is called.

TIM JACKSON

Definitely. Why don’t we do the Simenden-Novalas just because it’s short, but why don’t you also prepare for me like a list of excerpts from the HUIC that you think I should read so that we can angle towards that too.

MATT SEGALL

Perfect. That sounds fun. Cool. All right, Tim. Enjoy the rest of your day.

MATT SEGALL

See you, man. Until next time.