Birthing a New Cosmology (reflections on my dialogue with Alexander Beiner)

I enjoyed dialoguing with my friend Alexander Beiner this morning. The recording will be published on Kainos soon. He asked whether I had a sense for whether the atheistic, secular orientation in academia is thawing, opening room for alternatives to physicalism. I do sense that! Panpsychism and idealism are the two broad categories that capture much of the new direction. Physicalism is waning, but there isn’t yet a crystallized consensus on the alternative. It feels exploratory, like when we discovered the earth isn’t flat and needed to redraw the map. I imagine a transformation in cosmology no less dramatic than the Copernican revolution, both scientifically and culturally. Right now we’re in the chaotic, frothy middle of that shift.

The danger in the interim, though, is defaulting to the “cosmology of the market,” where the only universal value is money. Money isn’t intrinsically evil, but in the absence of higher-order values it reduces human beings to selfish, competing animals in a fixed environment of scarce resources. That’s Spencer’s social Darwinism, not Darwin’s complexity. What I long for is a cosmology of surplus—surplus meaning, surplus value—where the real challenge is coordinating shared value so that our virtues, not just our vices, are mirrored back to us (I discuss this in my article on Rudolf Steiner’s social threefolding proposal). Such a view would foreground symbiogenesis and cooperation as much as competition. Our institutions are still running on the fumes of a mechanistic worldview that science itself has moved beyond. In the vacuum, consumer capitalism fills our tummies with surrogate meaning™️. But while it’s urgent to concretize an alternative, I resist rushing into a new ideological enclosure. My own preference is an organic, processual metaphysic, but the conversation needs to remain open.

This is what drew me to Whitehead. Few actually read him, though many cite the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” Whitehead began as a mathematician and physicist and had enough scientific background to make metaphysical sense of relativity and quantum theory. He wanted to replace the mechanistic metaphysics of Descartes, Galileo, and Newton (ie, God as engineer imposing laws on dead matter) with an organic metaphysics able to encompass evolution and cosmogenesis. Nature, for him, is not a box of simply located particles but a nexus of events or “occasions.” His metaphysics was experimental: categories distilled from experience, revised when they fail. In Process and Reality he even abolishes one of his categories mid-book to exemplify that openness.

The fallacy of misplaced concreteness comes from mistaking abstraction for reality. Galileo and Descartes methodologically bracketed qualities of experience to focus on measurable extension and quantity. That move worked fabulously well in an instrumental sense, giving us tremendous powers of prediction and control; but its success fooled us into thinking it was the whole picture. Science later tried to derive consciousness from the very abstractions that had excluded it. That amnesia left us with the impossible task of extracting mind from a model that bracketed mind out. Whitehead wants to restore both primary and secondary qualities to the same footing, rooting them in embodied experience. Mass and force are intelligible only because we feel weight, pressure, resistance, etc. Feynman, who didn’t have Whitehead’s new metaphysical imaginative background, famously said “nature is absurd,” with the implication that physicists should just shut up and calculate. Whitehead refused that: he sought intelligibility, not absurdity.

For me, the deeper point is that science has conditions of possibility: meaningful language, conscious agents, purposive experimentation and so forth. As Whitehead quipped, “scientists animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless are an interesting subject for study.” If consciousness and agency are ultimately epiphenomenal illusions, then science undermines itself. Materialism can’t ground the possibility of science itself.

We also discussed the influence of psychedelics on this shift. I think altered states have always shaped philosophy and science. Descartes’ philosophy was seeded by visionary dreams (and he may have smoked hashish as a young soldier). William James huffed nitrous and realized that modes of consciousness are world-disclosing. Psychedelics and visionary practices fueled Dr. Bruce Damer’s work on the origin of life, to give one striking recent example. The recovery of psychedelics may itself be helping to thaw mechanistic physicalism.

Ale asked what’s been keeping me up at night philosophically. I’ve been wrestling with evolutionary biologist Timothy Jackson over what principles are needed to get an evolutionary cosmos going. Tim wants order to emerge from pure variation—from a metastable field of vague potentials with no pre-defined blueprint. I don’t want a deist plan either, but I think variation requires polarity with something invariant. In Whitehead’s terms, there’s a realm of eternal objects—pure potentials—and a divine valuation that orients without determining, offering a lure of better/worse, ideal beauty, infusing empty possibility with appetition. That valuation gives Creativity a vector. Tim is uncomfortable with anything “eternal,” but I find Plato’s Timaeusinstructive: nous (the allure of form) in relation with chōra (active receptivity). Abstraction must be wed to becoming. Platonism isn’t antiquarian: Plato’s various schemas (he considers and rejects many alternatives) remain as relevant as ever. I’m excited by recovering neglected wisdom and integrating it with contemporary science and culture. Modernity pretended to start fresh, to be a revolutionary break with everything to come before, as if we could rebuild on a blank slate. But it always borrowed from older traditions. Maybe what’s needed is not a brand-new paradigm ex nihilo, but a recovery of the Neoplatonic cultural grammar that still inevitably underlies the deep structure of our thought.

That’s why I also find the Gnostic myth so provocative. It corrects the deistic picture, where creation starts with Logos as a pre-written plan. In the Gnostic story of Sophia, creation begins with yearning for intimate relationship—no plan, just yearning. That yearning fractures undifferentiated oneness into pieces so that relationship becomes possible. Logos is then not the blueprint in advance but the rescue mission: an ordering principle working incarnationally to remind the shards that they share an origin. This gives Logos a more dynamic role than the “big man in the sky” who already knows the end. It’s a more balanced picture of the masculine–feminine dynamic, one that gives the feminine pride of place cosmologically, in line with biology. The myth is profoundly embryological. I’m not reducing myth to biology, but in some sense it recapitulates the creation story of each human being at a cosmic scale. The development of the universe parallels fertilization and embryogenesis. Scientifically, I don’t see how these processes could be disconnected. We need a more integrated, relational imagination to see what the Gnostics were onto.