LLM transcript of my chat with Seekers Mindtalks.
Chapter 1: Exploring Reality and Consciousness
[00:00] Raj: What if the way you experience reality isn’t reality itself? What if this constant feeling of disconnect, the low-level anxiety, the sense that something’s missing isn’t modern life, but just a misunderstanding of who you are? In this episode of Seekers Mind Talks, I sit down with Matt Segall, a visionary philosopher known for his work on consciousness and process philosophy, to explore why, despite more knowledge than ever, we feel more disconnected than ever. We dive into consciousness, AI, and the deeper questions most people avoid. Are we actually evolving or quietly losing touch with what it means to be human? If something about your experience of life feels off, this conversation might show you why. As usual, I’m your host Raj, and you’re watching Seekers Minds.
So, what do you think this moment actually is? If you compare it with all the civilizations that existed, or the last 200, 300 odd years where this scientific age has come into existence and the rationality way of looking at the world is prominent, and we sort of see the world as plain reduction. Sometimes I think of myself as I have a name, but that’s only a label. And then if you go and try it again, am I a human? That’s another label. And then you go, you kind of dissect it, that’s another label inside. Whether you want to call it organs or organ systems or atoms or whatever, it’s labels after labels after labels. Yet things from a basic reductionistic perspective, from atoms to two people having a conversation right now, is absurd in some sense and makes it real. Have you thought deeply about that?
[02:22] Matt Segall: Yeah. I mean, I hear you describing what for me is a sense that reality is experienced as a series of veils. And you know, we have names for those levels, those layers that you were peeling back, and that you can engage in a kind of skeptical maneuver where you start identifying these different aspects of your experience and realize that, okay, well that’s not the whole of me, there’s also this. And both of those together, that’s not the whole of me, there’s also this and this and this. And all of those things you might identify with as you ripple out from your own ego structure to your family, to your country, your species, etc., out to like, “Oh, we’re made of stardust.” And that’s still not all of what this experience is because, like you were also saying, it’s new every moment. There’s always… it’s not just that there’s another layer that we could add to our analysis of experience and sort of saying, “Well, that’s not the whole of me. That’s not the whole of me.” It’s not just an abstract process of removing the veils. It’s also an unfolding, a creative unfolding, such that what I’ve come to realize in this process of pulling the veils back is that there can never be a final veil to pull back, and a point where there isn’t another label you could put on a layer of your experience, because all we have is now. And you said maybe the past and the future are just delusions, we don’t know. We’re always now. We only ever think or feel or will or do anything in the present. And so past and future, maybe they’re just constructs. But I think there is a kind of idea of the past and an idea of the future that are constructs. But I also think the now is tensed. It has a direction. It’s asymmetric and irreversible. I mean, these are different ways of getting at it. Now, in relativity physics, you know, you were talking about simultaneity and that there really is no way within relativity to even conceive of what global simultaneity might be. There is no universal now in the sense of an instant that we could measure with a clock. Like, we can coordinate nows, but there is no global now. That’s mindbending when you inhabit the frame of relativity theory. But I don’t think that’s the only frame we can inhabit. Even just in physics, it’s not the only frame. Relativity theory seems limited in terms of what it can tell us because we also have quantum theory. But even in quantum theory, I think to really understand what collapse means, you’re going to have to bring in irreversibility, directionality, flow, right? That’s what process is. That’s why it’s so important to me to engage with reality in a process-oriented way, because it seems a flow. Even the now is a flow. It’s not an instant. And to say that it’s a flow is to bring time, some sense of time, not necessarily clock time, but duration or a creative flow back into our experience. And so I think it’s that creative flow that’s always eternally underway. It’s that that isn’t just another label or another layer we could peel back. That flow is the peeling back. And that’s what reality is. Reality is this process of revelation. And we can approach it skeptically and analytically and scientifically figure out, what is it really? And we can get very accurate with our ability to predict what veil will follow the last veil. But I think where science comes up short, at least if we expect too much of science, it can feel like it’s coming up short. But we don’t need to overextend science. Modern science is such a powerful means of accurately, honestly describing the patterns that hold in this flux, this flow that we experience, and we should take science very seriously. But it can’t tell us who we are, and it can’t tell us what we’re doing here or what we’re supposed to do next with all of this knowledge. It can’t even tell us why there should be knowers in this universe. Science presupposes that we experience this flow consciously and that we can be knowers, right? Science can’t explain consciousness. In my view, shouldn’t try to, doesn’t need to try to. But we get confused and think that science should be able to explain consciousness, but I don’t think that’s a scientific question. It’s a spiritual question.
Chapter 2: The Limits of Science and Qualia
[07:51] Raj: Right, you know, that’s something I wanted to connect with you about, is about this subjective experience of qualia. So I also wanted to talk a bit about the Mary’s room experiment. It’s a thought experiment. For the audience, I’ll just explain it to the audience. So Mary is a scientist who’s blind from birth—correct me if I’m wrong here—who’s blind from birth, and she’s been studying about the color red in all ways possible: dissecting it, intellectualizing it, thinking about it philosophically. But then one day, all of a sudden, she gets sight and she’s able to see the world, and for the first time she’s able to see the color red. And the question becomes like, did she learn something new? And this kind of touches about what something science can’t touch, I believe at least, because this experience we are having cannot be reduced. And in that sense, are there limits to science there, or is it blocking us from seeing reality?
[09:20] Matt Segall: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s Frank Jackson’s thought experiment, right? And it’s a very important flag planted in philosophy of mind and cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience because it really does lay out the stakes. As presented, I think it’s true to say that Mary learned something new. You knowing everything about wavelengths of light doesn’t tell you anything about the experience of redness or any other color. Because color perception, we know quite well experimentally, bears very little relationship—like our actual color perception, our experience of color bears very, very little relationship to wavelengths of light. So yes, we can produce certain subjective experiences with wavelengths that correspond to red, green, blue, whatever, but in everyday life, all these other contextual factors are determining how we see color. And so what I usually experience as red in my perceptual field is not going to have anything to do with a red wavelength. It’s going to have to do with shadows and optical effects and the visual apparatus of my brain. You know, it’s a much more complicated relational story. That said, this whole construct of qualia—as though experience is best understood or phenomenal consciousness is best understood in terms of these sort of raw sensory qualities or sensory universals, you could say, that are just abstract… right, they’re just a sensory atom in this kind of Humean conception. David Hume, his conception of what our experience is like is that the world comes to us in its most raw form as just patches of color arrayed on geometric surfaces. And I think that that’s an inaccurate account of our experience. And this is why I think Whitehead’s philosophy is so important in allowing us to conceptualize experience differently than classical scientific empiricism has. Because we don’t experience the world just through the five senses, like there’s some kind of holes poked in a screen where light’s shining through and otherwise we’re isolated from the world. Whitehead says our primary mode of experience is not these bare patches of color or sensa, like tones of sound or whatever, but our most primordial form of experience is actually emotional and purposive. We feel—he calls it perception in the mode of causal efficacy—that we feel and inherit these energetic currents from the world around us and from the past, and they push us, but we also feel where they’re going. And so we feel a sense of temporality, and not just temporality, but emotionally toned temporality. And the concept of qualia, it gets subjectivity as just a bare awareness or sensitivity, but it doesn’t give you the other side of experience, which is, say, excitability or being motivated to do something about it. I think that’s missed in this concept of qualia that’s popular in analytic philosophy of mind. And I actually—Daniel Dennett isn’t someone I often disagree with, but he has a whole criticism of qualia and I tend to agree with his criticism of it. And I tend to agree with what, you know, so-called illusionists—and I’m just throwing out some academic jargon now, apologies—but people like Keith Frankish, who I’ve spoken with, he’s an illusionist about consciousness. He thinks it’s just a confused way of speaking. There is no qualia in addition to just the usual physiological, functional story of what’s going on when a human being sees something or feels pain or whatever. So I agree with the illusionist critique of qualia, but I think there’s a whole other way of understanding what experience is that makes it irreducible, that makes it untouchable by any sort of materialistic explanation, that I think the illusionists miss. Does that make sense?
Chapter 3: Process Philosophy and Its Impact
[14:21] Raj: Yes. So when you adopt this philosophy of seeing the world as a continuous awakening or flow or process rather than things. So in terms of process philosophy, how do you think that will change the world from where it is right now to if supposedly a large population adopts it?
[14:52] Matt Segall: Yeah, it’s a really good question, really big question, really difficult question. Because on the one hand, obviously if that’s the nature of reality, there’s nothing to be changed about it. And on the other hand, it does seem that whatever the human being is, we seem to be uniquely capable of feeling out of place within this process. We experience this emotion called anxiety. We feel alienation. And this is, I think, maybe it’s not entirely new in the modern period, but you know you were talking about the last few hundred years and the rise of this form of objective scientific rationality and so on, and I think that’s related existentially and psychologically to the rise of anxiety and depression and meaninglessness and just this feeling of alienation from the world, from each other, from ourselves even. Modernity has both of these aspects to it: like we have more and more knowledge and power over nature, but also we feel more and more alienated from life. And that knowledge and that alienation, they seem to go hand in hand. And so, how would a process orientation to experience change our modern world concept? I mean, I think if it were true, I think it would relieve some anxiety. I think it would allow us to feel less alienated and to make better use of all of our knowledge and our power. Because one of the issues, I think, is that we have all this knowledge and power, but we don’t know what we want because we’re so out of touch with our own emotional life, our heart, our sense of what is good. And a successful person in our modern civilization, under the circumstances I was describing, is going to be wealthy but probably exhausted and overworked and sick and unhappy. So that’s a misalignment. And I think we have a lot of practical problems, some technical problems that we need to face as a civilization, some policy problems, political… but at the root of it, I think, is a need for a shift in consciousness. And I think we do have the power to shift our attention away from ideas that are killing us and the earth, towards ideas that might be more conducive to flourishing.
[17:53] Raj: Yeah, you know, I’ve read somewhere that in this information age, it’s also the age of spontaneous enlightenment, whatever enlightenment means. It’s a deep shift in awareness, that’s what I think. And this awareness… materialistic success is one side of the issue, and also sometimes a deep awareness shift in yourself can also leave you astray, or can lead to a feeling, “Okay, I am this awareness and then there is all this world that’s happening in front of me,” sort of reaching into a position of nihilism in some sense. And I feel like that is a result of all our current culture, where the current culture has taken our group awareness into a sort of feeling dread or lostness, or however you want to explain that, whatever people feel are missing in the current society. And I feel like that will take consciousness to a different place. What do you think?
Chapter 4: The Age of Spontaneous Enlightenment
[19:20] Matt Segall: Yeah, I think that as you say, in this information age, there’s the potential for these spontaneous enlightenment experiences. We have—all of us anywhere on the planet, even people living in relative poverty, they have smartphones usually, and they can connect to the internet and access scientific knowledge but also spiritual teachings from the whole history of humanity. And that’s a very new situation. I mean, there have been cross-cultural exchanges happening to some degree for thousands of years, you know, East met West on the Silk Road thousands of years ago, but not to this extent and at the speed that you can access anything. And so that’s created an opportunity, like for me as a teenager, to really explore Buddhism and the Vedic philosophies and Daoism. And to try to meditate and to experience, you know, shunyata, emptiness, or moksha. To have that sense of experientially contacting the ground of reality and seeing through the illusion of ego, seeing through the illusion of material possession and everything that’s impermanent. To touch truth, not just as a belief, but to really touch it. And I felt, you know, like as a 19-year-old, I was doing a lot of meditating and I was very depressed, and I was struggling socially, not finding frat parties meaningful, and feeling disconnected from my friends who wanted to go to those parties. And both feeling like, “Oh gosh, I’m not made to… I’m just not cool, you know? I don’t fit in. Like I’m not going to be able to do this and advance in this world where you’re required to behave in certain ways that to me felt totally spiritually vapid and intellectually vapid.” And so I was having this holier-than-thou experience meditating, trying to dissolve my ego, and I was depressed. I was feeling—I started to feel a kind of derealization, that like, “Well, this is all maya. This is all illusion. None of this stuff that I feel like I’m supposed to care about really matters. All that matters is just this pure being, the consciousness of emptiness.” And I would just seek out that experience. And I got pretty good, especially if I smoked a little weed, at being in that state of emptiness. And I eventually, through some traumatic sort of mystical experiences and other things, I shifted because I realized my culture as a modern American teenager—I was living in Florida at the time—it was making me incapable of really understanding what Buddha meant by nirvana or what was meant by shunyata. I was conflating it with, or interpreting it in terms of, nihilism. I was mistaking the no-thingness of emptiness in the context of Buddhist spiritual teaching for… I was conflating it with meaninglessness, with nihilism. And you know, lots of people have written about this, but it seems to me that what I eventually came to realize—and I think Carl Jung was helpful here—is that I was looking to a culture that was foreign to my own to save me. And that I, having been raised by, you know, my dad’s Jewish, my mom’s Protestant, and I had run away from that, the biblical tradition, because it seemed uniquely stupid to me and dogmatic. And I went to really the most mystical and esoteric deep forms of Asian spirituality and religion and philosophy, and it formed me. And I’m still a student of that massive, thousand-year-old, very diverse set of traditions in the East. But I also came to realize that I needed to work with what I grew up with, because whether I like it or not, it has shaped me and I can’t escape it. And so instead of seeking enlightenment—what I have now, it’s not that I’ve dismissed that, but I’m seeking in my spiritual life now what I would call incarnation, which is different from blissing out when I meditate, but feels more like deepening into relationship with others and with this world, right? So I think you can have both, but it’s just a shift in emphasis from when I was 19 to, you know, 20 years later now.
Chapter 5: Navigating Relationships and Integrity
[25:28] Raj: It makes you wonder about the power of the collective. Sometimes you’d have to give up, because I remember I had a similar sort of conversation with a meditation teacher I had on my show, and I sort of came into the same question. We’re all hypnotizing each other every moment. We are all being conditioned every moment by wherever our awareness gets exposed to. And you sort of—this sort of goes back to the saying of “you’re the average of five people around you” in some sense. You can only hold on to so much. How do you think integrity matters at that point, then, of being true to yourself and your findings?
[26:18] Matt Segall: Yeah. I mean, that’s part of the challenge of incarnation, is being in relationship and recognizing how, yeah, we are hypnotizing each other. We don’t exist in isolation from one another. So whatever it is to be an individual, I don’t think it’s simply an illusion to feel like each of us has some sort of a soul, a spiritual nature that affords us freedom and responsibility for how we show up in the world and what we attend to. But at the same time, we are so beholden to one another. We are, especially to those closest to us, incomplete without them. We don’t… no human being closes in upon themselves and is self-contained. Like, we struggle in all of our relationships against codependence, and we want to enter a relationship maturely, not out of neediness, but out of mutual respect and love. You don’t love someone if you’re just an emotional vampire in relationship to them. That’s not love. At least it’s not adult love. It’s maybe an infantile form of love that’s appropriate when they’re that age, but not when you’re an adult. And so yeah, how we navigate being responsible individuals in relationship to those who are composing us, and who we compose in turn, is a very difficult maneuver. Difficult in the sense that it’s painful, and that because we’re each fallible and can’t really take full responsibility for the things that we do—which is to say, I mean, we need to be holding ourselves as responsible for our actions as we can, but we also… I mean, I’m willing to forgive other people when they make mistakes or hurt me. I mean, if there was mal intent, I might want to reconsider how I relate to them in the future. But I try to forgive people even if I decide I don’t want to be in close proximity to you anymore. Because I know I make mistakes. Because I can’t be fully attentive. I can’t be as aware as I want to be. I know there’s more that I could be aware of than I am. I know my fallibility. And so I grant that same leniency to others, to the extent that I can. But yeah, that’s it’s hard. We are relational beings, right?
[29:36] Raj: So, okay. Are you always this calm? I feel like a sort of calm energy as I’m talking to you. Do you get angry?
[29:52] Matt Segall: I was angrier earlier today, actually, with one of those people who’s very close! But I have a pretty calm demeanor, and I think when I’m engaging in a conversation that has the intent of exploring what we’re exploring, it has a calming effect on me.
[30:15] Raj: No, I feel whenever we need to explore, the art of thinking slowly really helps. When you’re calm, or as you just explained, when you talk slower, calmer, there’s a possibility of new things erupting out, rather than just being in your default mode network or just being in your regular everyday habitual self. If we allow these spaces to just be in silence and not be awkward about the silences in between, that’s where new ideas and philosophies and everything else gets created.
Chapter 6: The Evolution of Consciousness
[30:59] Raj: Yeah. Shifting gears a little bit. I’ve heard you mention philosophy is the evolution of consciousness, and I also heard you say “the most my most experiences are feeling and responding to what is, but consciousness is feeling and responding to what is not.” What did you mean by that?
[31:26] Matt Segall: Well, you know, first of all, the history of philosophy as the evolution of consciousness, I think, is an attempt to redirect us from the usual way that the history of philosophy is understood as a history of ideas, as if the same sort of mentality existed across thousands of years and was just exchanging concepts. And it’s not that I would want to say that like 5,000 years ago people were less rational than we are today or something. I think in terms of cognitive capacity, human beings have had just as much potential intellectually as we do today for hundreds of thousands of years. But I think evolution of consciousness signals that what’s changing is not just the concepts that we’re thinking about. Our very perceptual experience of what we take the universe to be is shifting, such that what we now experience today in the modern Western world as a sense of “like I am inside my body probably somewhere between my eyes and there’s this world out there that exists apart from me, and most of nature is inert and dead, and then a little bit of it seems to be alive or it moves and animals seem to have agency, but all of that exists apart from me”—like this dualistic sense, common sense that we have today, and that ideas and purpose and meaning and stuff, well that’s inside the human skull or just inside of our human social networks, and everything beyond that is just a bunch of mechanistic stuff happening. That common sense view of the mind-world relationship is very new. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor would call that the buffered self, and he has a whole genealogy that over hundreds and thousands of years, how we got to that sort of a mentality. We have not always been that way, and so, you know, to understand the Vedas for example, you can’t bring your rational modern dualistic mindset. And I don’t just mean dualistic mindset in the sense that this is explicitly worked out philosophically by most people. Most people who are trained in philosophy would say “I’m not a Cartesian dualist,” but they live as if they were tacitly, and experience themselves as if Descartes was right about mind-matter relationship. Or lack thereof. So when we try to understand our own history as a human species, we have to keep this evolution of consciousness in mind, that the very relationship we assume today between mind and matter was not experienced in anything like we experience it. I think primal human beings experienced the world in a much more porous way. Whereas I think about ideas and it feels like I’m the one generating those ideas, those meanings, I think primal peoples the world over, indigenous modes of being, are much more porous, and that thinking and that relationship to what we today call ideas was experienced as a relationship to the gods, and that we were thought in by this larger cosmic intelligence. And that wasn’t an idea that they had; that’s what they experienced, right? And now we, in our modern sophisticated dualistic mode of consciousness, have this whole anthropological idea, “Well, that’s animism. And it was a projection.” But I think actually we’re—the modern mindset is doing way more projection and is way more anthropomorphic than the so-called animist cultures.
[35:42] Raj: What do you mean by projection?
[35:42] Matt Segall: Projection like, you know, 19th-century Western anthropologists would say that primitive people are entering into social relationships with one another as human beings, and they have kings or chiefs, and they have these different social structures that are meaningful to them because they have symbolic consciousness, and they project that capacity for symbolic consciousness onto nature and say, “Oh, our experience of heroism in our social and cultural context, the sun is the true hero that’s rising every day.” And that’s the projection from the modern anthropologist’s point of view, that this idea in culture of a hero gets projected onto the sun. Instead of what I think is really happening is that we learned as human beings what heroism is because a sunrise is harrowing, right? It’s… and so the vector of where meaning comes from, if we have this evolution of consciousness view, is no, primordially human beings received a sense of meaning and value and wisdom and intelligence from the cosmos and directly experienced that transmission. Now, in the modern period, we feel cut off and alienated from that and think that all the ideas are ours. All the meaning is made up in our heads and the cosmos is meaningless. Now rather than the primordial way, this participatory mode of consciousness being the projection, I think it’s the modern alienated way of being that is projecting meaninglessness and mechanizing the cosmos. It’s a mechanomorphism, if you want. Only human beings make machines. Nature is not a machine. To treat nature like a machine is anthropomorphic in that sense.
[37:35] Raj: Well, I’ve always thought of—yeah, this leads me to two questions. It’s like, I’ve always thought about where do we draw the line between what’s natural and what’s unnatural? And going back a little bit also, I also had this question of like, did you ever reach a point where you found out where you draw the line between what’s living and what’s non-living? Are you able to do that?
[38:07] Matt Segall: It’s both—both are fascinating questions. Yeah. I think cellular life is definitely something new in the universe. It’s a creatively emergent mode of existence that needs to be acknowledged in a scientific account of the evolution of the universe. But I also think that what came before cellular biological life as we know it on planet Earth—and I suspect the cellular mode of organization is probably true of life on other planets, but who knows, maybe not—but whatever life is at that biological level, I think it was already… well, obviously it had to be possible. And I think if we have a mechanistic conception of matter as just dead, meaningless, aimless stuff, there is no rational way I don’t think to explain how it could have become living, much less conscious. Now, I agree with philosophers like another Canadian philosopher, Evan Thompson, who argues for a mind-life continuity thesis, and so the first living cell is already conscious or has something like what we mean by mind in minimal form. But I would go even further. I think that the whole universe is a living organism. That at least would be a more adequate metaphor than to say that the universe is some kind of collection of machine parts. I think it’s more scientific, I would say, in the sense that it’s more adequate to the data we have, to say that the universe is organic rather than mechanistic.
[40:09] Raj: So this mouse can be organic?
Chapter 7: Life as a Creator of Machines
[40:18] Matt Segall: No, it’s a machine created by a human. It’s an artifact. That mouse, like any other machine, is a product of life. It’s an excretion of a very intelligent form of organism, the human. Other organisms, other animals have tools. Other, I mean really not just animals. My friend, the evolutionary biologist Timothy Jackson, who I’ve had a lot of dialogues with on my YouTube, he’s a chemical ecologist and he studies toxins and the ways that different organisms use toxins to defend themselves, to incapacitate prey. And that toxins are tools, and very simple organisms use toxins. And so this way that life creates machines is pervasive in the biological world. And it’s the exact opposite story, though, of life being a machine. No, no, life is not a machine. Organisms are not machines. Organisms make machines. There were no machines before organisms. And so it inverts the order of priority in terms of explaining, right? So yeah, I’m not saying that your mouse is alive. Your mouse is like a fingernail. It’s akin to a fingernail clipping, like it’s an excretion of life in some sense.
[41:38] Raj: But again, like, but that’s okay, then how about a mountain?
[41:45] Matt Segall: Well, here it’s subtle, right? I mean, it’s very hard to know where the boundaries of one mountain end and the next begins. In the case of cellular life, the membrane is a very clear boundary. Even though life is intimately relational, symbiosis is the rule, not the exception in the living world. But when it comes to a mountain, I think it really depends. Maybe some mountains are alive and others aren’t. And part of that depends on the quality of attention that the local community brings to it. So it’s an interesting question. I think that the whole earth is alive, and so you could think of a mountain as a particular part of the skin of the earth. But whether a particular mountain has sentience or animacy or a life of its own, I think might depend on the mode of attention of those who live around it. And how they relate to it and what they evoke from it.
Chapter 8 & 9: Umwelt and the Limits of Perception
[43:08] Raj: Just two days before I was listening to how eyesight evolved in organisms and apparently one theory is in some cyanobacteria, there was this more protein of cytosense or something that could detect light, and that enabled more foraging or some aspects of it, and that was later bifurcated into eyesight. And it kind of made me wonder into how our minds process the world. I’m also always fascinated by the idea of umwelt, which is the limits of our sensory perception. I can see violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red. And I’ve read somewhere that owls can see colors that we cannot even imagine. And same goes for hearing, same goes for other modes of senses that we experience. And your brain is actively constructing this reality. And this is also talked a lot these days by Donald Hoffman and other scientists. Then if you strip that lens, which is actually the way we see the world as through a living organism in it, which cannot be the full story because it’s only an adapted story, would that boundary still exist for a mountain or earth or this mouse or Matt or me or this computer or anything for that matter?
Chapter 10: Boundaries and Relationships in Experience
[45:01] Matt Segall: Yeah, that’s the thing about experience is that it can only articulate itself into something definite by creating these boundaries, these veils. And I think the temptation is, when you experientially through meditation or through a mystical experience or what have you, when you experience this revelatory quality of the moment and the way that you can just peel back the layers of the onion seemingly infinitely, there’s the temptation to say, “Oh, all of this is an illusion. This is all a construct. It’s all appearance.” But then you’re implying when you do that that there’s some bedrock reality you could get to. You’re opposing reality to the appearances of, you know, these endless veils, these endless separations that aren’t really separations. And that’s the thing about a boundary: a boundary is just as much a connection between the things as it is a separation between them. A boundary is another way of being in a relationship. And so the shift I think for me at least was from getting stuck in the “Oh this is all illusion, veil after veil after veil, it’s all maya,” which implies that there’s some bedrock I might get to or might be or might have, to instead focusing on the relation, attending to the relationship instead of seeing the veils as boundaries that cut me off. Veils, borders, membranes. These are modes of relationship. And recognizing that, oh, the bedrock I thought I might reach, the reality behind appearance that I was trying to get to, isn’t anywhere else than in the relationship, than being in between. Period.
[47:01] Raj: It’s diving into what’s given rather than diving into the unknown. You could put it that way.
[47:07] Matt Segall: What’s given I like because it implies gift, and unknown… there is something we can know about all of this. I mean, I’ve been maybe speaking from some type of experiential knowing that I think you’re resonating with and share. What’s unknown of course is that none of us knows what’s going to happen next because it’s a creative process. There’s novelty constantly ingressing, to use Whitehead’s term. But we do have some sense of how this process works, even if we don’t know specifically where it’s going deeper.
[47:56] Raj: Yeah, can you go deeper?
[47:56] Matt Segall: I mean, I’m surprised by experience all the time. And so I’ve grown to expect it. And that means I’ve become prone to take a kind of playful attitude towards life. And that playfulness is an intentional way of meeting experience because I have some expectation that it’s going to play back. And so it leaves room for spontaneity by expecting there to be something unexpected. And I don’t know, I found that actually there’s a tension to hold there between knowing and not knowing, accepting experience as the given, as you put it, or as a gift, which is to say saying yes to it, which is the first thing that any improv artist will say: you have to say yes to whatever happens or you’re done.
Chapter 11: The Seesaw of Life: From Self to Service
[48:55] Raj: Yeah. Is that how you see, after your understanding in this realm all these years, is that how you see this experience now? How do you see life after all these years?
[49:06] Matt Segall: I’m glad that… well I guess I don’t know if we reincarnate, but I feel it’s likely, and I’m glad that we do because life is hard and fleeting, short, and there’s so much… in the, Whitehead calls it the dream of youth. Like we have this vision of the possible, and then there’s what Whitehead calls the harvest of tragedy. There’s the inevitable failure of the execution of life to live up to the vision, to the dream of youth. I mean even I feel very lucky and tremendous gratitude for my life and for the experiences I’ve had, the people I’ve been and am connected to, and the work I get to do is meaningful and I’m grateful for it. But there’s also always this gap between the ideal and the real. And I don’t resent that gap. I think actually, you know, the harvest of tragedy, I think there’s something so beautiful in tragedy, and there’s plenty of comedy too. And so I, yeah, I’m turning 40 in a couple of weeks and it feels like I’m right at the middle of the seesaw of life. So where, you know, I think we, the analogy I was thinking of is like we begin life, and our parents or whoever our caretakers are, are sitting on the other side of the seesaw, and they’re the ones lifting us. And then gradually, with the support that hopefully we receive, we’re able to step forward. And you know, now I feel like I can support myself emotionally and to some degree well enough to feel like I can meet the world and contribute in what ways I can. But I also am feeling the seesaw tilt now to where I want to turn back and be of service. I don’t have kids, but it’s becoming easier for me not to be selfish, I guess, because you know, the first half of life is like “I want to succeed, like I want to, I need to make a name for myself,” you know? And now I’m just feeling the shift of, how can I be of service, and feeling the desire to do that.
Chapter 12: Aurobindo’s Influence and Evolutionary Spirituality
[52:06] Raj: Yeah, I remember reading somewhere you only start to live after 40, and up until that point you were just experimenting. I think, yeah, I thought it was Jung, but then I was doubtful. But yeah, I think it was him who said that until 40 you were just experimenting, which is interesting. Right, it’s like half of this given experience, and then for half of that experience you’re just to be a researcher. You’ve read a lot of philosophy of Aurobindo. How has that related to you?
[52:44] Matt Segall: To be honest, it’s been a while since I’ve read Aurobindo, but I did study his work as an undergraduate. I found The Life Divine in my university library at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. And yeah, it really captured my imagination and my… it just felt… just the very structure of his sentences are like fractals, in the sense that the whole vision is nested in each clause, you know? And so reading it, I would read it out loud and just felt like I was drinking divine nectar. And then I later ended up going to graduate school at this university in San Francisco, the California Institute of Integral Studies. And the “integral” there is taken directly from Aurobindo, whose… one of his students, Haridas Chaudhuri, was handpicked by Aurobindo to come to California to start this school. And so it was a kind of synchronicity, as it were, that you know, I had this chance encounter with Aurobindo’s work and then ended up applying to and getting into CIIS. I had discovered the school only after discovering Aurobindo. And so I studied there. You know, Haridas died in 1972 I think. But the school is still there, and the founding mission is rooted in integral yoga. I studied there with Robert McDermott, who’s a scholar of Aurobindo’s work, and took some courses with him studying Aurobindo. I think that vision of an evolutionary spirituality and an integration of the most profound aspects of Advaita with the most profound aspects of… you know, he… Aurobindo studied German idealism. And so I think he really understood the important civilizational… the important need for a planetary civilization to integrate the East and with the West. And just his whole story of being a revolutionary and then having the experience in prison of everybody becoming Krishna and becoming a yogi. I mean it’s… it’s powerful, and I think he’s a very… in the 20th century, you know, one of the most important voices that I hope continues to be heard in this century.
Chapter 13 & 14: Psychedelics, Auroville, and Cultural Transformation
[55:47] Raj: Isn’t he the one who made Auroville in India?
[55:55] Matt Segall: Yeah. Auroville. Yeah. Mother.
[55:57] Raj: I’ve been to that place. It’s a really fascinating place. I wanted to see an experimental society without money and how our psychology would change if we were not running after that one fictional god.
[56:14] Matt Segall: Yeah. Right. I haven’t visited. I’d like to visit India and Auroville at some point, but I haven’t had the opportunity yet.
[56:22] Raj: It was an amazing place, and me and my friend we had a weird encounter on the first day we went there. Both of us had these weird mystical dreams. It was super weird. Yeah. Sort of like a semi-psychedelic experience. We both experienced it and we were like laughing about it. Why did we have this weird dream here now? And I don’t know, it’s a lot of unanswered questions.
[56:44] Matt Segall: Yeah, for sure.
[56:52] Raj: If you have some more time, maybe we can talk about how psychedelics are changing society now, and what is that in relation to, you know, Aurobindo was saying the need for a planetary civilization to come out and where we forget our differences and move forward as a species together. How do you think psychedelics may play a role in that, or even meditation for that fact, because I feel both are the same?
[57:27] Matt Segall: You know, I remember when I first started reading about psychedelics as a 17 or 18-year-old, and it was in the context of studying the 1960s and the counterculture, and becoming more politically aware, and looking back to that time and the role that psychedelics played in transforming music and art and transforming culture and the whole hippie movement. It really captured my sense of what was still needed, and that it was like I needed to understand why did that fail? Why did the first psychedelic revolution fail? And to see how it was co-opted, to where like you have the Beatles dropping acid and transforming music, and then you know decades later in my own lifetime, Apple Computers uses the most psychedelic visuals and Beatles songs to sell their products. And it’s just like, okay, this message that was like “break out of the corporate, break out of the worship of the state into this new mode of consciousness” just got totally subsumed and co-opted. And so that was an important lesson to me. And then so more recently we’ve had this psychedelic renaissance, which, you know, psychedelic culture went underground since the 60s. And I think to call what began because of some academic research in what was it, like 2009, that the Johns Hopkins paper came out about psilocybin and mystical experience, to call that a renaissance I think is an example of academic elitism. Yes, I’m not saying there hasn’t been much more well-funded, well-designed research on psychedelics since then within academia and medicine. But there was also research going on and exploration going on non-stop, widespread, throughout culture underground. But I was initially, you know, when that work started to explode in the 2010s, I was a bit shocked. I couldn’t believe that all of a sudden psychedelics were getting a fair hearing, because you know, as an undergraduate I just was interested in them and had some experiences myself and saw their value for consciousness studies but also for consciousness transformation and cultural change potentially. But you know, I think now that it’s 15 years or so into this psychedelic renaissance, I think it’s mostly bad news, which is to say it’s being co-opted by the pharmaceutical industry. It’s being co-opted again by the self-help industry. People are more interested in microdosing for efficiency in the office than they are in transforming themselves. And so I used to think, like they did in the 60s, “Oh, if we could only dose the water in Washington, we could instantly change American politics.” And now I feel like no, that ignores the shadow side of this, which is psychedelics, especially the way they get used in the modern Western world. I think there’s a shamanic indigenous context where there’s more of a cultural container and a cosmology to integrate the experiences. But in most of the modern West, psychedelics function as what Stan Grof called non-specific amplifiers, meaning that they’re catalysts for the manifestation of mind and ideas and new sensations and new experiences, new ideas, but the moral vector comes from elsewhere. And we don’t have the cosmology, we don’t have the cultural context to integrate a lot of these experiences. And so a lot of inflation happens. I live in Northern California, I’m around a lot of psychonauts, and I say with as much compassion in my heart as I can hold, that there’s a lot of psychedelic narcissism. Which is to say, people who have become very inflated with a vision that’s detached from reality and just an inflated sense of self-importance. And rather than dissolving the ego, I think psychedelics can also dramatically inflate egoism. And so I am not convinced anymore that they’re a silver bullet or that they automatically bring about any kind of positive change. And we’re moving into a situation where the Pentagon seems to be the biggest funder of MDMA research because they want to get soldiers healed from their PTSD so they can get back on the battlefields. You know, it’s like that’s how far this psychedelic counterculture revolution has come.
[1:03:01] Raj: Do you think the Western culture has a sort of mind virus that is really strong then?
[1:03:11] Matt Segall: Well, yeah. And I… but so all that said, I have and continue to find in some ways altered states of consciousness and conscious relationship and forming allyships with plants and fungi of value. I think there’s a place for that in human life, but it needs to come along with the cosmology, with the spiritual forms and ritual practices and community containers that would help that. The catalyzation that these things can generate, the acceleration of consciousness evolution that they can definitely bring about, is channeled in positive ways, because it can easily be channeled in negative ways, in Charlie Manson ways or in “let’s get these soldiers back on the battlefield” ways. So I’m just more cautious, I think. And I see them as… I think psychedelics are important, but the fact that now they’ve gone mainstream, meaning corporate America and the government have accepted or are beginning to accept them more, is not necessarily a good sign. So careful what you wish for, I guess.
[1:04:42] Raj: Wow. Well, let’s see how that evolves.
Chapter 15: AI and the Question of Sentience
[1:04:53] Raj: I know your view on AI is that it can never have this qualitative experience that we are having of sorts, or that it can never… can AI become ever, do you think AI can become sentient?
[1:05:12] Matt Segall: Well, I you know, I am a panpsychist, right? To drop another term of art. That I think that there’s experience, some degree of experience in everything. I don’t think rocks are conscious. I wouldn’t ever put it that way. But I think that the atomic components which make up rocks and have some degree of self-organizing integrity… you know, every atomic element is individuated to some degree. And I think to the extent that the energetic organizations that compose this physical world individuate in some sense, to that extent they have an internal horizon of experience, right? So can AI be sentient? Can it be conscious? Can it realize experience or have this qualitative sense of living through what might otherwise just be a computational algorithmic playing out of code is an open question for me. I’ll say I think it depends on how individuated the machines become. Now when you start talking about cybernetic hybrids where there’s some organic material, when you’re actually talking about neurons interfacing with circuit boards, which exists now, well those neurons are experiencing something. Is there a coherent sense of global selfhood that’s emerging from that nervous tissue that’s in a very unique situation that’s never been in the history of biological evolution? I don’t know. Can I foresee forms of cybernetic engineered systems that are sentient? Yeah, of course. I think that’s fully within the domain of possibility. I don’t think like any of these large language models are conscious. I don’t think that’s the right… I think it’s a profound category error to imagine that what we find meaningful in terms of the outputs of language that we can speak is in any sense meaningful to the server farm that’s crunching those ones and zeros in transistors. Ones and zeros and information and data is a way of measuring the flow of energy. Information isn’t something substantial. It’s a way of measuring flows of electrons that have meaning for us within our symbol systems. And so can large language models be conscious? No.
[1:08:13] Raj: What if when it becomes multimodal and, you know, attach it to a camera, attach it to a microphone, give it 24/7 feed input and then possibly give it 24/7 memory access as well?
[1:08:30] Matt Segall: I would say it could produce a very generative AI. Using these machine learning technologies could produce a very sophisticated, convincing simulation of sentience. Would the system itself be sentient? I don’t think it makes sense to say that. And I think that there might be larger fields of sentience that could emerge, but that would require putting the human back in the loop. Which is to say, what sorts of sentience are we going to participate in as we engage with these new, very sophisticated machine learning systems that are multimodal and these robotic systems? I mean, to watch one of these robots walk around with such fluidity and to see how quickly they’ve advanced, it blows my mind. I mean, wow, that’s impressive. But we have to keep in mind, again, once you start bringing in organics and interfacing, you know, living cells with transistors, that’s a different story. But I think we have to keep in mind, if we’re just talking about computers as we’ve known them, that there’s a difference between simulation and realization. I am very impressed by the degree to which the simulation of human behavior has advanced, but I don’t think that’s the same thing or could ever even approach the realization. It’s a just a different ontological question, like the realization of consciousness or sentience or an experiential point of view.
[1:10:30] Raj: So it’s the process of creation, isn’t it? You’d have to wait and see. As your philosophy says, it’s like every moment is an event and we’d have to wait and see what happens, what comes out of it.
[1:10:46] Matt Segall: Yeah. Absolutely.
[1:10:46] Raj: Wonderful. Yeah.
Chapter 16: The Meaning of Life and Death
[1:10:51] Raj: Okay. I ask this question to all of my guests as the last question, and I know this is a sin to ask a philosopher this question, but I would still go on to ask. What is your meaning of life?
[1:11:07] Matt Segall: Well, I think it’s not separate from death. Yeah. And which is to say, the meaning of life for me is also the same question: What is the meaning of death? And so I make meaning of my life in light of the fact that I will die. And that helps me expand beyond just “I want to be happy” or “I want this or that” or “I want to be in love.” Or those are all important parts of life and I hope everyone gets to experience them. But I also think it’s an important part of my own spiritual practice to orient always to the fact of my own mortality. And so for me, I hear your question and I also hear “what is the meaning of death,” and that allows me to move into a deeper sense of who I am responsible to in terms of future beings, and orients me also to all the beings that have already died, and how what I experience as given, right, the gift of each moment that I inherit, is how do I inherit their meaning and make good on the promise of this process, right? Because it’s like I only get to be here so long in this form. And whatever meaning I might experience, whatever meaning I might make, I hope is relevant beyond just this form.
[1:12:55] Raj: Will death be the same as before birth? You think? Because that’s my current place where I have landed. Death will be like before birth, or it’s like the back of my head.
[1:13:10] Matt Segall: Death will be like before birth. But I think when you die, who you were in this life becomes part of sort of the divine whole. So what it will be like when you die, it will be like before you were born, except you will have existed and are now part of the divine wholeness. And so I don’t think it’s just back to the beginning as if you never existed. It’s not… remember I think of this as a directional process. It’s not going to end at some point. It’s not a finite teleology where there’s a goal we’re going to reach it. No, it’s infinite. But it’s cumulative. And so your life matters. And the wisdom that you’re able to acquire through what you experience and the ways in which you’re able to grow will be… sort of that in its turn becomes a gift that the next generation of beings receives. It’s adding to the container of the divine.
Footnotes2Plato 
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