Footnotes2Plato

One of the important ideas that Tim and I discussed last night was his threefold differentiation of the inquired (natural science), the speculative (metaphysics), and the prosaic (everyday experience).

I agree with him that God should be excluded from the inquired, lest we end up with some kind of unhelpful intelligent design hypothesis. But I do not agree that God can or should be excluded from the speculative, and certainly not from the prosaic. I think Tim agrees “God” (its affirmation or denial) may be relevant to the prosaic. But he disagrees it has any value in the speculative. But I see some conception of the divine as a key condition not only for motivating (in a psychological sense) speculation as well as inquiry, but also for making both speculation and inquiry themselves possible (in a transcendental, or better, descendental sense) in the first place. “God” is encountered prosaically in mystical experiences as well as in our love of intimates; and God naturally develops into a speculative posit as we begin reflecting upon the nature of the world’s intelligibility, which is an obvious prerequisite for any kind of scientific inquiry.

So while I am happy to ban God from the inquired (ie, God is emphatically not a scientific hypothesis one might devise some experiment to test!), I still think that to do inquiry, there are certain speculative posits and prosaic affirmations that must be presupposed. I’m not saying there is one right way of speculating about or prosaically opening to or denying God. But that we do so in one way or another in order to frame our motivations and methods of inquiry seems undeniable.

Tim argued in our dialogue last night that speculation helps make inquiry possible but doesn’t need to give the prosaic anything.

But I would say the prosaic instinctually speculates. Speculative images continually grow right out of our everyday doings and relatings.

So the question for us to explore is how these three domains remain distinct without being dissociable. I’d say inquiry presupposes speculative commitments and prosaic affirmations, while speculation itself grows out of everyday experience and valuation, with inquiry often correcting and pruning overgrown speculations. Their methodological distinction therefore need not amount to a clean separation in lived experience.

Transcript:

Matt Segall: We live in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures.

Well, I have about an hour and fifteen minutes before dinner’s going to be ready. Do you want to talk a little bit about Platonic spaces and the future of biology?

Tim Jackson: Yeah, for sure. Let’s do it.

Matt Segall: I think this multispecies communicative event that you witnessed is a pretty interesting place to start, because it shows how all intelligence in the living world is communicative. It’s collaborative. It exists in these ecological exchanges between beings, rather than inside a being. It’s transductive in the Simondonian sense. Intelligence is always relational.

Tim Jackson: Yeah, it’s informative in a similar sense. Let me quickly tell it again. You can cut out the way I said it previously.

I was just talking about being in Pennsylvania recently, being in the forest, and stopping and listening to these chirping calls. I realized they were chipmunk alarm calls: the chipmunks were reacting to my presence. Sitting and listening, I realized I was surrounded by a bunch of chipmunks, and then I could see them. It was evening, so the light was getting low, but they were about twenty meters away from me, all around me. I have a recording of this as well.

There were chipmunk sentries chirping away, and then I heard very similar response calls from birds up in the trees—a kind of acoustic mimicry. Then a squirrel came down and gave its own alarm call, looking at me. So we’re talking about this multispecies assemblage.

Just by stopping and paying attention, instead of blustering through the forest, I suddenly became aware of this. I often listen to bird calls here in Australia, and I recognize the alarm calls of different species. I often find snakes and other cryptic predatory organisms because birds tell me where they are. So that’s the context for what you were saying.

Matt Segall: In terms of the leading edges of biology and biological research right now, there are a whole bunch of ideas that both of us find really exciting, and Michael Levin’s work is there. What really got me into his work initially was this idea of cells as a collective intelligence.

What you’re describing happening between species happens bioelectrically between cells sharing gap junctions. It’s an even more intimate form of collective, communicative intelligence.

Because of his research into these cellular collectives, and the way he’s been able to give them new bioelectric form—to get them to create eyes where they’re not supposed to be on a frog’s body, or to get a flatworm to grow two heads—Mike has been led to suggest that the forms are not themselves a product of the history of natural selection that generated those cells. Instead, they’re somehow being drawn in from another domain. He describes a “positive pressure” that’s pushing these forms into history and the material bodies of organisms.

I think there’s something really interesting about not just Mike’s work on bioelectricity, but developmental biology more broadly, that is much more suggestive of formal and final causality than what one might see in the world of speciation. There doesn’t seem to be a clear teleology in any one direction there. It’s more of a proliferation, a diversification.

Embryologically, though, there’s a goal playing itself out. These cells are seeking an end: to grow into an adult form. There are all sorts of weird contingencies that don’t fit into a simple design paradigm, so I’m not trying to make it sound as though biological development—embryogenesis, ontogeny—implies intelligent design, or that Mike’s hypothesis is actually true: that agency is pressing into the physical from a nonphysical domain of pure patterns.

But embryology is more suggestive of that than Darwinian accounts of natural selection in the history of life on Earth, in terms of speciation and phylogeny. That seems much less suggestive of the Platonic hypothesis. And so the question is—

Tim Jackson: There are a lot of questions. Go ahead.

Matt Segall: That’s just my way of trying to characterize what Mike is up to as an interpretation and an explanation for what he’s discovered about these cellular intelligences and how they can be bioelectrically repatterned.

Tim Jackson: Yeah, that’s great. There are a lot of things to say.

One thing to point out is that the so-called Darwinian mode of reasoning is a response to the Platonic mode of reasoning. They’re responding to the same appearances, the same problematics. Of course, we could put Aristotle in there. Darwin’s innovation is to try to give an account of the immanent genesis of forms within biology.

One could see some of what Mike is discussing—and what many people have been discussing for a long time; D’Arcy Thompson is someone Mike often references—as distinct from what Darwin is trying to respond to, in the sense that not all of the genesis of forms is immanent to biology per se. There are forms that are, quote-unquote, “ingressing” from at least outside the biological domain. Depending on the tradition, people might say they ingress from the physical. There are physical constraints that all biological organisms must be responsive to.

Yes, in embryology there is more of an obvious overarching goal than there is in evolution sensu lato. But embryology is also a microcosm of that. It’s a single telos within a pluralistic myriad of teloi. And the question is: where does that embryological goal come from?

The evolutionary biological explanation—and I’m not talking specifically about neo-Darwinism, genetic determinism, or whatever—the Darwinian account, the naturalization of those goals that is Darwin’s own goal—not “own goal” in the soccer sense, but the goal that motivated him—would be to say that the goals of embryology, the so-called set points or target states, themselves have a historical genesis within biology.

That doesn’t preclude their making use of physical constants, physical patterns, and other aspects of form that are reliable aspects of their environment. So we’re going to need to get into a discussion of things like externalization and niche construction.

An organism never needs to build something, or expend energy attempting to recapitulate something, that it can take as given or take for granted. If something is an extraordinarily stable aspect of its environment, it can make use of that. We can talk about parasites here—and “free lunch” could become a very evocative term when we’re talking about parasites, as we should.

Externalization, and even the reduction of biological developmental competencies because of a very stable environmental condition, is really generic and ubiquitous in biology. We can talk about the way organisms make use of the physical constraints of their environments. They obviously don’t have any choice but to do that. But we can talk about it in a way that is operatively analogous to niche construction and the externalization of essential functional capacities that the organism, in some cases, no longer needs to invest in recapitulating.

As for cells as collective intelligence, to me that’s chemical ecology. That’s 101 for me, and I love Mike’s work in that regard.

I would point out, because it’s not said often enough, that bioelectric form is chemically mediated. We’re talking about two levels of description, or even two different operative levels, but they’re not mutually exclusive. When we move to the bioelectric, we’re not ceasing to talk about the molecular; we’re talking about another aspect of the molecular. I’m not saying this reductively. I’m not saying you could reduce the bioelectric to the molecular, but they are correlates of one another.

Of course, Mike and his team intervene and reorganize a bioelectric pattern using molecular means—drugs. That’s really important to point out.

Positive pressure is really interesting for Simondon. I won’t go on about that right now, but it’s something we can return to. Then there’s history versus natural selection, because that’s a formulation you brought up. We can define natural selection as a fairly narrow thing if we want, and there are several different descriptions or definitions we might use. We can also talk about the Darwinian triad—or what I call the Darwin–Peirce–Lewontin triad [wording to confirm]—as a schema, and it will then achieve such generality as to be applicable to history in general.

So one important question is what the distinction is between history and natural selection. Another is whether there is a justification for positing the existence of the nonhistorical, the atemporal: forms that do not have their genesis in any kind of historical process, which is something Mike often talks about.

These are all different questions. There are a huge number of questions brought up here, which is where you finished.

Matt Segall: Right at the origin of life, I think of perhaps the most important free lunch: the way lipids will form spheres just to minimize free energy. Without that physical constraint as an enablement, life doesn’t emerge.

Tim Jackson: Without chemical gradients in the environment, life doesn’t emerge. That’s a free lunch in a way, right?

Matt Segall: Yeah. It’s clear that Darwin provided a principle—especially when you include Lewontin’s dialectical reading of it and Peirce’s semiotic reading of it. Darwin shows how form can be immanently generated.

But I wonder about a distinction that, of course, a metaphysician is going to want to make between form as such and specialized formations of it. Maybe some things Mike Levin thinks are eternal, which biology just gets for free, are actually generated in the history of the physical universe—in atoms and molecules—through a process of evolution, or variation, selection, and habituation. Even the physical world is generated in that sense. It’s historical.

But we can push the buck back and ask: what about the forms that any physics presupposes? Maybe something like what Russell and Whitehead thought they were looking for when they started Principia: the logical basis of mathematics, arithmetic, and geometry. Where do these sciences come from? What are the conditions of their possibility? Is there something underlying the truths of mathematics that can’t be accounted for through some historical process of genesis?

There are so many interesting answers one could give to that question that are not necessarily Platonic. But the question for me is always: what do you think Plato’s theory is?

There are many readings of the Timaeus. Or, I should say, the astronomer Timaeus offers many different readings and stories about how the universe originated. He hedges: “Okay, obviously that doesn’t work, so let’s try this as a patch. We’ll clean that mess up later; let’s just move forward.” That construction project is messy. It’s full of improvisation.

It’s describing a process of development, or embryogenesis, that is full of a kind of communicative event, where the nous is communicating with, encountering, something other than itself, and then having to scrap the original plan and start over with what it actually discovers it’s in relationship to: the chōra, the receptacle.

When we talk about a Platonic space or Platonic form, I think that’s really important. Mike likes to use Plato as a placeholder for a philosophy of mathematics, but why not just refer to a particular philosophy of mathematics? If you’re going to invoke a man’s name, you should be willing to talk to him and understand what he was trying to say.

That isn’t a knock on Mike. It’s just as much a knock on anyone who thinks there’s only one interpretation of great thinkers—whether it’s Platonism, Jungianism, Whiteheadianism, or whatever.

Tim Jackson: Yeah, that’s really important. I’ll quote from Mike. I don’t know if this made it into the published version of Ingressing Minds [title to confirm], because I haven’t looked at that yet, but it’s in the submitted version.

Full disclosure: I was invited to review it, and I agreed. But I told the publishers it was going to take me a very long time. I was just about to go to China, and there’s a lot of technical detail in there that I wanted to do justice to. Ultimately, they decided to go ahead without me, which is what you expect from a publisher. Fine.

Quoting from the submitted version, on page eight, Mike says: “I make no claims here about what Plato, Whitehead”—from whom, of course, the term “ingressing” comes—“or others actually thought.” And that the “use of Platonic space, ingressions, and similar terms is simply to avoid proliferation of vocabulary and anchor these unconventional ideas in terms that are somewhat familiar to mathematicians.”

I understand Mike’s motivation, but my comment was that the unconventional use of familiar terms is at least as confusing as the coinage of novel terms. In either case, the confusion has to be mitigated through rigorous definition of the terms chosen. Whatever terms you choose, you’ve got to define them rigorously.

If you’re going to borrow those terms from the history of philosophy, they have to be integrated with that history; otherwise they’re free-floating. Those terms are already so polysemous that using them in another way can create more confusion of the kind you’re gesturing toward.

That is a concern, though it’s somewhat separate from some of the other things we’ve been talking about. But yes: what is Plato’s account? Does Plato have any one account? That’s obviously a good question.

Matt Segall: One of the concerns is that, within the network of people Mike invited to the Platonic Space Symposium late last year, I believe—and earlier this year we had some sessions talking with everyone—there seems to be this sense that what Mike is proposing is a Platonic space hypothesis he wants to test. It’s an experimental Platonism.

He’s saying, hypothetically, let’s treat the patterns and competencies we can manipulate bioelectrically, and that we see in the development of novel forms of life like anthrobots and xenobots, as ingressing patterns with their own agency. Let’s see if we can develop some statistical measure of what can’t be accounted for through historical natural selection, and what is more likely to be the ingression of some novel pattern.

I can’t vouch for the mathematics he’s trying to use to derive that statistical measure, but he’s proposing it as a research program that can be tested. I think that’s fine. But I also don’t think what Plato meant by form is something you experimentally test for. It’s a metaphysical presupposition. It’s more like the condition for the possibility of being able to ask certain questions about nature than something you’re going to discover acting in nature as a measurable property.

There’s another concern about the proliferation of neologisms and vocabulary. Metaphysics gets so abstract, and you end up inventing all these new words. But I think we need more than just “ingression.” We need to borrow a lot of other terms from Whitehead to clarify what’s at stake here.

Tim Jackson: You would say that, Matt.

Matt Segall: Of course. Someone has to say it!

When we say “a form” or “a pattern,” are we talking about what Whitehead meant by an eternal object? Sometimes Mike seems to mean something like that. But other times he attributes agency to a pattern, and that’s more like what Whitehead would call an actual occasion or an actual entity. That’s what has agency. Eternal objects don’t have agency.

Or is he talking about a society, in Whitehead’s terms—an enduring route of definite characteristics, of a definable form that persists through time? Is that what he means by “pattern”? It shifts. These various uses can be distinguished in Whitehead’s language, and I don’t think it’s just a matter of Whitehead’s language. We can make these distinctions.

It’s better than the form–matter distinction, the hylomorphic polarity. There’s a risk of collapsing it into a hylomorphic thing, where eternal objects are form and actual occasions are matter. But that doesn’t work if you understand what Whitehead means by those terms. The question isn’t, “How do you get a substance?” It’s, “How does an occasion concresce?”

Tim Jackson: Exactly. With the categoreal scheme, he’s explicitly trying to think outside a substantializing conception. Form and matter, or virtual and actual, would have to be operational or operative distinctions, not substantial distinctions. Simondon, of course, pushes very hard in that direction.

You’re right that form for Plato and many others in that tradition—and you also referenced what Whitehead and Russell were trying to do—involves metaphysical presuppositions. They can be presuppositions within inquiry as well. In fact, they generally are. That’s how mathematical formalisms tend to be used in inquiry, and we can unpack that in some detail.

From my perspective, with a metaphysics of underdetermination and an attempt to proceed with what I think of as minimal posits, the question is: can we ask of any given determination—and that includes definiteness—whence it came? Does it admit of a possible constructive account?

Just because we could give a constructive account wouldn’t itself answer the metaphysical question, but it would isolate a different question. If we can give a constructive account of this determination—and we can get into mathematics in a second, perhaps, and Peirce, who is really useful here—that can be both an actual historical account and a formal account. Historically, how and why did mathematicians reach this? Formally, what was it derived from? What preexisting mathematical formalisms were involved in constructing this novel determination?

If we can give those sorts of accounts, what do we get by positing an additional metaphysical source of that determination? That’s a live question. It’s the question of underdetermination in general: if I can give a constructive account, why would I need to make an additional claim?

Of course, there will be minimal conditions of determinacy that end up being posits. You do need posits. Philosophy always needs posits to move from experience to giving an account of experience—even to giving a description of experience, because you need terminology. The question is: what are the minimal posits? Again, I think this is Whitehead and Russell’s question.

We have Whitehead, Russell, Peirce, Simondon, and the whole history of constructivist and intuitionist philosophy of mathematics—not to mention Platonist philosophy. There are so many options, so many ways of thinking through these things. I’m trying to say: we can slow down. There’s a lot of work to do here.

That isn’t to put a brake on Mike’s empirical program. The experimental Platonism is awesome. Mike has amazing empirical work. Everybody knows this; everybody agrees on this. It’s extraordinarily evocative in illustrating the limitations of a neo-Darwinian or so-called mechanistic account of the apparent genesis of form.

Of course, those limitations have been exposed for a very long time. Darwin is already giving a different account, which is then appropriated into a more mechanical framing in neo-Darwinism, but that isn’t really Darwin’s conception. There have been lots of proponents of a new biology and alternative sources of form: Waddington, Goldschmidt, D’Arcy Thompson, Stuart Kauffman. That neo-Darwinian and so-called mechanistic paradigms are deficient, and that biology isn’t reducible to physicalist effective theorization, is a known thing. Mike’s empirical work is extraordinarily evocative in illustrating that and showing additional dimensions.

Bioelectricity research is eighty, ninety, a hundred years old—whatever—but Mike is doing it and communicating it in such a brilliant way that he’s opened up something that very much needed to be opened, even though a lot of it was already there. That’s always how these things go. We’re now in a situation where more and more people realize we have to respond to these things, and it turns out there’s a deep history of philosophical thought responding to exactly these kinds of questions.

So: empirical program, amazing. Experimental Platonist hypotheses? Absolutely. The attempt to construct a latent space of determinacy that could offer predictions, guide practical interventions, and so on is an absolutely legitimate and worthwhile experimental agenda.

The metaphysics is different. It’s so metaphysically underdetermined that there are many different accounts we could give. That’s where we can slow down. It’s not urgent to do that, but it needs to be done. Actually, maybe it is urgent: people are leaping to a position, and I’m saying, “Hang on, there’s a lot of work to do here.”

There are at least two different major responses required, in my opinion, which you and I have been talking about working on. One is biological: what’s going on in biology? What are the different theoretical options? What do the empirical examples actually show us, and what are the options for interpreting them? How does that fit with the history of metaphysics and process-relational thought?

Then there’s the mathematical question. How can we think about the four-color theorem, Feigenbaum’s constants, the natural logarithm, “Halley plot fractals” [term unclear], and all of that? Mike is presenting a way of thinking about those, but perhaps those aren’t the only ways. There’s space for other ways of thinking about them, and those need to be explored if we’re going to ask these fundamental questions.

The experimental program, including the use of latent-space-type models, doesn’t really hinge on answers to those questions. Maybe those questions aren’t answerable in any final sense. It would fit the way you and I think about these things to say we can keep going.

What’s opened up here is a pressure—a positive pressure, which I do want to get to, because there’s a preindividuality thesis about positive pressure—for those lines of inquiry. Both are extraordinarily rich, time-consuming, and technical avenues to pursue.

Matt Segall: Lots of good stuff there. I agree that the experimental Platonism is wonderful: searching for these latent spaces of determinability. There may be a lot of them that would allow us to predict and control these cellular collectives in far more interesting and regenerative ways, with medical applications and all sorts of beautiful and terrible things we could do with that power.

But instrumental Platonism—in one sense, finding those latent spaces of determinability is exactly what machine-learning algorithms running statistics are really good at doing. This will advance our ability to predict and control how organisms operate. But what is an organism?

One thing that concerns me more and more, because of the role of language models in particular, and the increasingly anthropomorphized forms of AI being released, is the temptation to conflate computation with cognition, consciousness, and personhood.

I think Mike is really encouraging that. I think he’s driven by an ethical sense that there are these other kinds of minds, if he follows through his understanding of how form ingresses and how, for him, form is actually mind. He means agency is ingressing from this Platonic space—minds with plans, right?

If he sees the physical world operating that way, then there’s this continuum from thermostat to Triceratops: one continuum of cybernetic complexification. I think we can still make meaningful distinctions.

This is why I like Raymond Ruyer: his principled distinctions between machine and organism, and the way he thinks of cybernetic machines as being able to transfer information but not create information. I think that’s really interesting.

It’s not that the actual physical makeup of these machines isn’t communicative and creating information, in the sense that there’s transduction happening in atoms and molecules and all of that.

Tim Jackson: And between us and models of all kinds, right?

Matt Segall: But as a designed machine that an engineer had in mind and instantiated, it can transfer information but can’t create information. The basic notion of a Kantian whole that Stuart Kauffman is always talking about marks a principled distinction between an organism and a machine.

But that doesn’t mean “organism” means constraint closure in some fixed way that isn’t open to exchanges with its environment.

Tim Jackson: That’s where Simondon is going to score even beyond Ruyer, in my opinion. I love Ruyer, but—

Matt Segall: Sure, yeah.

Tim Jackson: The oxymoronic nature of informational closure for Simondon. Simondon is also proceeding from a critique of cybernetics. Ashby’s definition of a cybernetic system is something that’s energetically open and informationally closed. I know I’ve said this a million times, but to Simondon, that’s an oxymoron.

The postulates of closure in general in these models are a major theoretical target of mine. But continue, sorry.

Matt Segall: We have to be careful not to reduce organism to operational closure. I love the autopoietic theorists and enactivist approaches, and I think there’s a lot there to be salvaged, but I also agree with Donna Haraway that nothing makes itself. Life is sympoietic.

This notion of closure makes ecology and ecological relations secondary, when they have to be primary. My first attempt to say what an evolutionary cosmology would require was in Physics of the World-Soul. Ecology needs to replace physics as the most general science we have. Not biological ecology, but ecology as the study of relationships among organisms—and by “organism,” I mean Whitehead’s generalization of that.

Because you want to avoid this definition of life in terms of organizational closure, I wonder if you have as much of a stake in the machine–organism distinction. We’ve talked about the machinic proposal of Guattari and Deleuze, which isn’t mechanistic in the sense I’m opposing organism to.

Tim Jackson: I have a stake in it, and it needs to be thought through in considerable detail, without recourse to too many preconceived notions. That’s on both so-called sides of the discussion.

Ruyer is a great interlocutor. Obviously, Canguilhem is saying a machine is a relay, a mechanism is a relay. Canguilhem is a vitalist, as are all of these guys, in fact. We have a problem in contemporary Anglosphere science and science-adjacent discussions because of a historical vilification of vitalism. We actually find it very difficult now to ask, “What is life?”

If you do ask that question, people say, “Go and read Schrödinger.” And it’s like, “No, hang on. I don’t want a pithily named essay with some good stuff in it and some not-so-good stuff in it to overdetermine that discussion.”

Matt Segall: Biophysicist.

Tim Jackson: Exactly.

Matt Segall: Maybe ask a biologist what life is.

Tim Jackson: Exactly. There are so many things to say in response to what you were saying, as always. But I have to single out David Chalmers here. In his formulation of the hard problem of consciousness—which I think is extraordinarily poorly formulated, sorry—he also says we used to have this hard problem of life. We used to have the option of vitalism, but now we realize that, at least in principle, life is fully describable in chemical and physical terms. Yet we still have this hard problem of consciousness. Is there a similar reduction that can be made?

But that problem of life never went away, except in rhetoric. Life is not reducible to physical terms, and that’s precisely what’s going on in this discussion of Mike’s work. A tag phrase Mike uses is “Physicalism is not enough.” Well, obviously! Vitalists have always been saying that.

Vitalism doesn’t mean some woo-woo additional spiritual force. It means something characteristic of life that is in excess of any well-defined basis of reduction. A physical theory works through an initial postulate of a well-defined basis of reduction.

The postulate of operational closure is derived from that cybernetic way of thinking, which is itself derived from this physical way of thinking. It’s super useful, it’s great, it’s really important, but it’s not empirical per se. It is a model-theoretic postulate.

Ecology in general—and I like chemical ecology, obviously; that’s my bias, it’s the work I do—to make it evocative and actually materialize it, involves organisms receiving operators from other organisms. They may be taking them intentionally or having them inserted against their will. These other organisms may be members of the same lineage or different lineages. Operational closure will not stand up to serious empirical investigation. There’s too much to say about that, and I’m not going to say it here, because I’m currently writing about it as well.

Here’s Canguilhem on Darwin. Sometimes people say there’s neo-Darwinism and then there’s ecology. But Darwin is a thoroughly ecological thinker, even though he wouldn’t use that term. That would be anachronistic, because Ernst Haeckel invented the term when he was thinking about Darwin, among other things. Canguilhem says:

“The fundamental biological relation in Darwin’s eyes is the relation of one living being to others. It prevails over the relation between the living and the milieu, conceived as an ensemble of physical forces. The first milieu an organism lives in is an entourage of living beings, which are for it enemies or allies, preys or predators, etc.”

Selection can be the second aspect of the Darwinian triad, sure. But selection per se—that’s ecology. That’s what it means. Again, that needs to be thought through a little more than it often is.

I would also say to everybody in this discussion: do not neglect materialism. With the “-ism” on the end, it ends up being a substantialism, and all of those should be thrown out, including vitalism, if you want. I’ve said enough about “-isms” in the past. But do not neglect materiality.

The materiality of organisms is extraordinarily important to be in very close, ooey-gooey, wet, warm—or cold, or whatever—contact with if you want to understand what organisms are.

You should think about cybernetic schemas. I love models and operative analogies. Simondonian allagmatics, which he derives from cybernetics, is a key thing we need to discuss, along with Peirce’s contribution, as well as Whitehead’s and others’.

Matt Segall: When saying “materiality,” I would always want “material-semiotic,” with that hyphen in there, so we recognize that matter doesn’t mean we’re not interpreting it, or that it’s not in relation to life. It’s always already in relation to life.

Tim Jackson: Exactly.

Matt Segall: I totally agree with what you’re saying, though.

Tim Jackson: From the perspective of chemical ecology, materiality is indexed by the fact that a molecule—any given molecule with a certain structure—has different signification, so it’s semiotic. It has different activities, properties, and functions. In fact, it will change its structure, but let’s not get too complicated. All of this depends on its material context.

That’s everything from pH, temperature, and basic physical stuff to the interaction partners available: what other molecule is it interacting with?

Materiality precisely concerns this underdetermination. This is what machinism actually concerns for the Deleuzo-Guattarians. This is what materiality is for someone like Bataille. Modern, twentieth-century French materiality is particularly concerned with this underdetermination and with contextually informed—but not determined—significance, relevance, and so on.

Matt Segall: I hear you saying that sodium and potassium ions and their history of interaction are perhaps more important than forms ingressing into cellular collectives, given the role those ions play in bioelectricity. There’s more material potency in the history of the relations of sodium, potassium, and all the other molecules involved in cellular bioelectric patterning. There’s more potency hidden there than is accounted for in Mike’s model.

He’s reaching for a free lunch from heaven, from a Platonic, nonphysical space that isn’t in that history of relationships, of the material conditions of life. Is that your basic sense of what’s gone wrong here?

Tim Jackson: Well, that is perhaps to leap to an interpretive limit. Let’s say that the describable, schematizable, modelable form of sodium and potassium ions is radically underdetermined in terms of the possible insertions or ingressions of those actual materialized structures into different assemblages or agencyings. Those will collaboratively—“determine” is the word one reaches for, though in a metaphysical context it can have infelicitous implications—inform what their activities are.

There’s the influx and efflux of sodium and potassium, and the way completely different molecules—drugs, toxins, or whatever—bind channels and receptors and influence the influx and efflux of these ions. There’s a rich material reality there, and of course Mike knows all of this extraordinarily well.

But the actual structure itself doesn’t mean anything; it has no significance on its own. It only signifies, only has an activity, in what ends up being an extraordinarily, explosively complex and really messy material reality.

With sodium and potassium in particular, you’re talking about concentrations involving billions and billions of molecules and their relative concentrations. These molecules are all moving. It’s crazy—crazy noisy in materiality.

Matt Segall: So your account of materiality—to avoid the “-ism”—is excessive. It’s excessive materiality, or materialism, if you want. But it’s not reductive materiality.

Tim Jackson: That’s the opposite, right? You said it perfectly, but I want to intervene: it’s excessive over the formal, in terms of the theoretically formal. It’s excessive over the basis of reduction, because a theory and a structure defined in formal terms are reductive. They’re a form of coarse-graining. Materiality is explosively more than that all the time.

Matt Segall: Which is why, in science and cosmology, we should only pretend to likely stories.

Tim Jackson: Boom.

Matt Segall: We shouldn’t pretend to theorize the whole, because whenever we try, we’re imposing totality on something excessive. Either we end up trying to discipline what we can’t control through the application of that theory, or we fail and try to control it a different way, instead of realizing that materiality is excessive.

I think I’m fully a materialist in that sense. I’m with you on that. We shouldn’t assume there is some form that exists in advance of the world and determines how the world will become. The world’s becoming is unlimited, creative, excessive.

I’m not a Platonist in the preformationist sense you’re critical of. Nothing Mike is saying, I think, should give any peace of mind to intelligent design theorists. But there’s a reason Stephen Meyer and William Dembski like Mike’s work as a way of nailing the physicalist coffin, the neo-Darwinist coffin, shut. And yet they draw on a lot of neo-Darwinian genetics to make their cases about design, specified information, and all of that.

But if we look instead to a theory of form, I think—as we’ve both discovered—I would go a little further with the metaphysics of form than you would be willing to. I think there’s a way we can meaningfully speak of form that isn’t the product of historical genesis, but rather part of what makes that genesis possible.

For me, this distinction between actual and possible, between the already actualized and the possible, suggests that form is real, but it’s not predetermining. It’s coeternal with materiality.

That might not be a way of putting it you’d like, because materiality and eternality shouldn’t really—well, is it all matter, all the time?

Tim Jackson: No, it’s not all matter, all the time, because matter is then just going to be an operative designation. What is most basic or most general in a metaphysical sense has to be prior to these sorts of distinctions: prior to a distinction between matter and mind, obviously, but also prior to a distinction between actual and possible, or actual and virtual. That’s a whole big question that you and I have nutted over heaps.

Matt Segall: I think it’s an interesting place in the Venn diagram of our views in relation to Mike’s work. Whatever the Platonic theory of forms is, it’s just as true in my experience as Democritus’s atomism, where I also think, “Wow, there’s a deep truth in that.”

Tim Jackson: Yeah.

Matt Segall: That’s that likely story. For me, it’s about how I wrestle with these ideas. Not how I reject whatever I think Plato meant, but how I understand what he thought he meant and see how it’s still very relevant to these questions.

I think I’m more with Mike that form is irreducible to history or to a process of contingent genesis. But that doesn’t lead me to attribute agency to forms. I still think agency is immanent, always cooperative, ecological, and distributed in a very material-semiotic way. Agency doesn’t get ported into the world from beyond. Nor does form.

This is where, even though I do so with some degree of embarrassment, I think talking about God—in a metaphysical sense, not necessarily a religious sense—becomes relevant. When you get to a limit of interpretation, as you put it, regarding agency and aim, I would definitely want to distinguish between conscious agency, some kind of deliberation we associate with rationality and human beings, and just bare aim: desire, or an allure toward something better in a normative sense.

When I reflect on the origin of aim in the biological world, or the origin of directionality in the physical world, my imagination is led toward something like Whitehead’s God, or Peirce’s God—though there are tensions there—or Teilhard’s God. In that direction.

I don’t think any of them figured it out. I don’t even think of theology as something you could figure out. It’s always theopoetic for me. But I do think some kind of theopoetry, some kind of likely story at the cosmogonic level, is going to make reference to nous, or God, or some kind of origin of aim, or cosmic Eros. Otherwise, I don’t see how you get this sort of evolutionary process going. Evolution at the cosmological scale almost implies that aim is at the root of things.

Tim Jackson: We do hit limits. Maybe one thing we can do is take a breath and come back from a limit. Or we could name the limit and start to figure it. The question is to what degree that’s warranted.

The God question is a big question, and we’ve planned future dialogues to go deeper into that. We’re coming for you—

Matt Segall: David Bentley Hart. We’re coming for you!

Tim Jackson: As you know, I want to speak to some of the other things you said before we go on to that. I strictly ban God from—this sounds ironic—

Matt Segall: For you, not in the inquired, right? [Wording to confirm.]

Tim Jackson: Well, or in the speculative. It has to be scrupulously banned.

Matt Segall: I will ban it from the inquired, but I still think that to do inquiry, there are certain speculative posits and some prosaic affirmations that are presupposed.

Tim Jackson: That’s true. This is complicated. That’s one hundred percent true, and I love theopoetics. There are speculative mediations with prosaic experience and all of these things.

But there is a kind of minimal limit case of the speculative, which, for me, is about what speculation gives to inquiry to make inquiry possible. Speculation doesn’t need to give the prosaic anything.

Matt Segall: But the prosaic naturally speculates. I think there’s something about speculative imagination that grows right out of our everyday values.

Tim Jackson: Absolutely. But that’s why these are methodological limits. What you’re saying is absolutely true. There’s too much to say there; I’m going to get a bit tangled up. There are several things you said that I want to respond to directly. Maybe we’ll come back and finish on God—who knows?

Matt Segall: We don’t need to talk about God. I just thought that, in terms of where agency comes from in a Platonic space, to avoid giving abstract patterns agency, it points toward God. That’s how I’m responding to it.

Tim Jackson: Unless positive pressure—

Matt Segall: Or gods. It doesn’t need to be monotheistic.

Tim Jackson: Unless positive pressure simply is the excess of materiality.

Matt Segall: I know. That’s your hypothesis. That’s what I was trying to describe with sodium and potassium: your sense that historical genesis is pregnant with all these patterns, these possibilities, these unactualized—

Tim Jackson: Not in a determinate or definite sense, right?

Matt Segall: Right, in an excessive sense.

Tim Jackson: Determination and definiteness—we can distinguish between those, and Whitehead does, but I’m collapsing them here for the sake of being brief—occur in contexts. They are relational. I think Whitehead would agree with that, though he’s attempting to solve the problem of how it gets started.

Matt Segall: That’s the ontological principle: the relational essences of eternal objects. Eternal objects, when you refer to them as pure possibilities, don’t have definite relations—or certainly determinate relations—to any particular actuality. But they do have to relate to actuality generally. They’re never found without a relationship to actuality generally.

Tim Jackson: Certainly not when humans are talking about them, humans notably being embodied and present in actuality.

Matt Segall: Yeah.

Tim Jackson: Just quickly, on Democritus versus Plato: I’m not even going to accept them being on different poles. A big part of what Democritus is talking about is the distinction between appearance and reality, which is what Plato is talking about.

Democritus is saying, “In appearance, color”—whatever he’s saying—“but in reality, only atoms and the void.” It’s a skeptical thesis about not taking appearances as fundamental. That’s also Plato’s problematic in a very big way. These guys are much closer to each other than one might think. That’s important.

I think we can all agree, with Peirce, Whitehead, Jung, and others, that appearances have a kind of ineliminable firstness of reality, an ineliminable reality to them, but they’re not all of reality. There’s stuff going on that isn’t necessarily present in that way. That’s why we have inquiry and speculation, and why we don’t just sit with prosaic experience and say, “This is all there is to know.”

Matt Segall: It’s also why we have art.

Tim Jackson: Yes.

Matt Segall: To go beneath surface appearances and enrich our experience, so it isn’t just what first met the eye. In a sense, we appreciate beautiful art because it’s penetrating into the depths and revealing what’s actually real to us, rather than the noise at the surface.

Tim Jackson: It’s not “what’s actually real.” That’s a—

Matt Segall: It feels that way, though, doesn’t it?

Tim Jackson: It’s another aspect of reality that we can attune ourselves to.

Matt Segall: I’m just saying art gets us deep—

Tim Jackson: I want to problematize that. This is another conversation. The whole reason the prosaic is called the prosaic for me is that those appearances that art can attune us to are often simply present for us, but we’re ignoring them. It’s a kind of seeing the sacred in samsara.

We don’t pay attention. We don’t necessarily realize the chipmunks are talking to each other, to the squirrels, and to the birds, because we aren’t actually listening. But when we attune ourselves to some other aspect of reality—which is always vastly excessive in relation to whatever we’re attuned to in the moment—we realize there’s depth.

But depth isn’t the right metaphor. Much as I love Jung, and depth metaphors are great, I don’t want to settle with that metaphor. It can be orthogonal. We can just turn over here and say, “Whoa, this thing is purple in a peculiarly beautiful way.”

Matt Segall: So you don’t think you’re more in touch with the place when you experience what we started this conversation with, that interspecies communicative event? You don’t feel more attuned to the reality of that place in those moments than when you’re on your phone or something?

Tim Jackson: I might have been more attuned to the reality of whatever was going on introspectively for me when I was thinking through some complex problem and making notes about it. Maybe, because I’m on the internet, I’m pulling in references from different scientific studies and saying, “Oh, yeah.”

Indeed, when I had the primary prosaic experience of this multispecies assemblage communicating—which I’m very primed to have, because it’s a key interest of mine and something I’ve studied in other environments—I then asked, “Is this a well-characterized phenomenon?” I shifted my focus to a brief literature search, and yes, it is.

Matt Segall: I don’t think we could disagree about this. I’m just saying perception is axiologically valenced. Phenomenologically, we feel a sense of some experiences being more valuable than others.

Tim Jackson: Yeah, sure.

Matt Segall: Maybe there’s a better metaphor than depth. But whether it’s art or science, or some blend of the two—which is what you’re doing when you’re tracking or looking for snakes—

Tim Jackson: We’re not really disagreeing, Matt. I was just talking about the terminology. This goes back to the initial point about Mike saying it’s not about what Plato means or what Whitehead means. For us, as the philosophically inclined—and I know you agree; I’m not teaching you to suck eggs—the terminology really matters.

We go for the readily available terminology a lot of the time, which is totally justifiable in communication. I could have just accepted your use of “depth,” because I know exactly what you mean. But there’s also an occasion to problematize it, because it might itself be bound up with certain speculative, metaphysical implications that we’re currently in the process of at least problematizing. That’s all I’m saying.

Matt Segall: We need to wrap up in a couple of minutes. I know there’s always more to talk about, but I can smell dinner, and it’s going to be ready in a few minutes. We’ve got to write about this stuff, Tim.

Tim Jackson: We do. We do.

Matt Segall: And we’ll get to that soon. Any last things you want to say?

Tim Jackson: There are a bunch of things. I’ll seed some ideas by saying them pithily without unpacking them.

One of the major movements we’re talking about is from retrospection to projection. Often we’re dealing with an achieved determinacy. It has been constructed, and then we retrospectively rationalize its construction in a way that posits it as having always already been in existence, concealing its actual genesis.

For what I call ontogenetic thought, which is a methodological program more than anything, the initial question isn’t whether we can definitively resolve that metaphysical question of preexistence. It’s whether we can open up to the question of genesis and try to give an account of genesis. Once we’ve given a certain account, we can ask what more the metaphysical presupposition of preexistence adds.

That’s the kind of thing you can’t actually refute. No matter what you say, it’s always possible to respond, “Now you’ve given a constructive account of our discovery of that preexistent form.” The question will always be: what does it additionally get us to say it is eternally existing? And what does it cost us? There might be ethical and all kinds of other implications of that preformationist approach.

As I said, Platonism and Democritus aren’t necessarily as far apart as we might think. Again, I want to emphasize the problem of confusing the derived model with the reality it’s derived from. That is precisely Canguilhem’s critique of the mechanical philosophical paradigm: mechanisms are derived from a consideration of organisms, of life, and in many cases from an attempt to recapitulate something organisms were doing. But then that derived model is projected back onto the organisms. Again, it conceals the genesis of those structures, those functional relays that characterize what a machine is.

Mike’s imaginary—and I think it’s fair to say this, though I’m happy for him to disagree—is the imaginary of an engineer and a computer scientist, and of course a developmental biologist. It’s already Platonic in the sense that those fields always make use of preexisting determinacy. They should make use of it, but they’re predicated on doing so.

All physics is that—no, not all physics; that’s far too sweeping. But standard physical theorization presupposes a space of determinate or definite possibilities that will then become determinate in the course of history. That’s already how you think in physicalism.

So the alternative, “Let’s go Platonic because physicalism isn’t enough”—well, hang on. Those things, especially the kind of Platonism we’re talking about, might already be much closer to each other than you imagine.

Two last things, really quickly. “Irreducible to history” is a phrase you used. History or historicization, to me—the constructive account of concrete realities or concrete conditions of realization—is the opposite of reduction. It always signals the indivisible remainder, the contingencies of history, and all of that. The formal account is the reductive account. To me, it’s the other way around.

Matt Segall: Let’s say “the past.” History could imply something more like successiveness. Let’s say irreducible to the past, to already determined forms, which are in the past.

Tim Jackson: Like I was saying in our little offline discussion—and maybe I wasn’t very clear—that’s operatively the same as an eternalist account in which the forms already exist. Maybe you say there was a historical genesis of form up to a certain point, but now it’s all determined. That’s the same as an eternalist account.

The very last thing I’ll say, and then I really will shut up: I would love to have got into something we touched on with Le Guin and Tolkien last time we talked. I think a lot about the similarities between mathematics and fiction, or world-building. They’re very similar. Setting up the rules of a game is similar in another way.

Once you’ve constructed a world with a minimum degree of constraint, many consequences become discoverable within that world. That applies particularly strongly to formal worlds, which have absolute rules of consistency.

We should do a talk on Peirce and diagramming in the context of our work on Levin’s Platonic space. This is very much Peirce’s thesis: we make a diagram to study the consequences of that construction that weren’t explicitly manifest in our construction of the diagram. As soon as we put together a minimal schema of operational relations—which is a diagram—it has consequences that always exceed what we put into it.

That’s also what Mike is talking about in an important way. It’s like Tolkien or Le Guin saying, “My character told me they wouldn’t do that.” You developed a character to a certain point, and then there were certain possibilities and impossibilities associated with that character or that world.

Matt Segall: “Evitabilities,” maybe, in Dennett’s sense, if not inevitabilities. [Wording to confirm.]

Tim Jackson: But we ought not then to confuse those consequences of construction with timeless preconditions of that construction. Those are two different things.

Matt Segall: Yeah. I think that’s related to the projection, the “retroproduction” [word unclear] thing you were saying earlier.

Those are helpful clarifications and seeds to plant for future discussions. Hopefully this is interesting to folks. It’s good to get back into the swing of things with you in these conversations. I think we need to get some of this written out and articulated in, dare I say, more detail. You thought I was going to say “depth,” but I said “detail.”

Tim Jackson: Detail is right. A lot of these questions require an extraordinary amount of detail. There’s the biological stuff and the mathematical stuff, and they do come together, but to some degree they need to be treated separately, because there’s so much detail in each of those forks.

We need to make a plan of attack. How are we going to work on this? That might involve a summary of what we intend to achieve through the work, and blah, blah, blah.

Matt Segall: We need a plan.

Tim Jackson: Yes.

Matt Segall: But not a deterministic one.

Tim Jackson: Indeed.

Matt Segall: All right, Tim.

Tim Jackson: Cool, man.

Matt Segall: Enjoy the rest of your day. I’m going to go eat some dinner.

Tim Jackson: Enjoy.

Matt Segall: We’ll chat soon.

Tim Jackson: Sounds good, man. Take care.