Category: Albert Einstein
-
In Defense of Participatory Platonism: Dialoging with Tim Jackson about Dan McQuillan’s Critique of Data Science as Machinic Neoplatonism
Tim and I read McQuillan, Dan. Data Science as Machinic Neoplatonism. Philos. Technol. 31, 253–272 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-017-0273-3 Key themes discussed: Transcript: Matt Segall: Hey Tim. Timothy Jackson: Hey, man, how you doing. Matt Segall: Cool sweater—are those sea slugs? Timothy Jackson: Yeah. Nudibranchs. Matt Segall: Nice. Timothy Jackson: Naked gills. Matt Segall: So you are underslept and overread? Timothy Jackson: Oh, yeah, big time. I…
-
It from Bit from Chit: Philosophizing at the Threshold of Artificial Intelligence (dialogue with Robert Prentner)
Summary of my dialogue with Robert Prentner: I apologize for the sound quality, but there is a full transcript below! Robert began by explaining his shift from skepticism to engagement with AI. Early versions of ChatGPT struck him as underwhelming, but newer models like GPT-4 and Claude impressed him with their linguistic and problem-solving fluency.…
-
Science and Religion in a Participatory Cosmos
Last night I was invited by the Center for Christogenesis at Villanova University to share some thoughts on how the science/religion dialogue may be transformed by a participatory approach to cosmology. The video will be made available in a few weeks to those who register with the Center. I began by playfully suggesting I’d be proceeding as…
-
Process Metaphysics Meets Possibilist Physics (Dialoguing with Ruth Kastner)
Ruth Kastner and I first met several years ago in the context of a seminar series focused on plasma physicist and philosopher Timothy Eastman’s work. Ruth also participated in the “Metaphysics and the Matter With Things: Thinking With Iain McGilchrist” conference I co-hosted at CIIS last March. We’ve been meaning to sit down to see what bridges might…
-
Process, Reality, and Context: Timothy E. Eastman Unties the Gordian Knot – Summaries of the Seminar Series
Below is a detailed summary of each of the nine seminar sessions that ran monthly from June 2021 through February 2022 focused on Dr. Timothy Eastman’s book, Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context (2020). This event was sponsored by the Cobb Institute’s Science Advisory Committee, which I chair. You can read my review of…
-
Theories of Everything Podcast: Process Philosophy from Plato to Whitehead and Beyond (Dialogue with Curt Jaimungal)
Below I am sharing a couple of outputs from ChatGPT4o1 as a hopefully interesting way of summarizing my 3 hour conversation with Curt. In my prompt I asked it to create a very detailed narrative summary of the transcript written from the perspective of a 23rd century natural philosopher who had lived through the paradigm…
-
Why the World is Unfinished: Whitehead in 20 Minutes
The following reflections are based on transcribed excerpts from a recent podcast that should appear at the end of the year and that I will be sure to share. Do I consider myself a Whiteheadian? On the one hand, obviously yes—he is certainly the most influential philosopher for me. But at the same time, I…
-
Dialogue with Evan Thompson about “The Blind Spot”
The Theōros Project hosted philosopher Evan Thompson at CIIS for a dialogue with me about his new book (with Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser) The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (2024). We covered a lot of territory:
-
Whitehead’s Philosophy of Science
According to Susanne Langer, who was one of Whitehead’s students at Radcliff in the 1920s, every great philosophical scheme “must, in its original form, be regarded as a myth[1], which sets forth freshly and naively some new point of view [and] reveals new opportunities for rational construction” (The Practice of Philosophy, p. 178). Whitehead understood…
-
‘No Thinker Thinks Twice’: On the Attempt to Catch Whitehead in the Act of Philosophizing
What follows are some preliminary reflections on my panel presentation for the “Whitehead at Harvard” centennial conference this Friday, September 27. This Friday, I’ll be traveling to Harvard University for “A Century of Process Thought: Commemorating Whitehead’s Legacy at Harvard and Beyond.” The event is free to attend in-person or online (follow the link to register). The…
-
Quantum Physics and Process Metaphysics (dialogue with Flavio Lanfanconi)
A transcript of our conversation: Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Good to see you. Great. I was just trying to keep up with everything you’ve posted recently. It’s difficult, but… Matt Segall: Sorry about that. Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Never mind, it’s great. I was just finishing your last conversation with… Matt Segall: Roman. Dr. Flavio Lanfranconi: Roman. Yep, exactly. I’m bad with…
-
Etheric Imagination as Participatory Knowing: A Process-Relational Reading of Rudolf Steiner’s “Light Course”
Transcript: It’s really lovely to be here this morning, though it’s quite early for me. I’ve been enjoying the last three days of the Mysteries of Technology conference very much, and I’m very grateful to have been invited. I think what MysTech is doing is important, not only for the wider world to see the ways in…
-
The Physics and Metaphysics of Evolutionary Learning
Below is the video and a transcript of a conversation with Brendan Graham Dempsey following my review of his essay “A Universal Learning Process.” You can listen to the audio on my Substack. BRENDAN Hey, everyone. Today, I’m joined again by Matt Segall. Matt’s an associate professor at California Institute of Integral Studies in the…
-
Becoming the World-Body
You are not your brain, and you’re not just your body either, at least not if you think of your body as just what’s encased within the skin. To really understand what’s going on inside your body, you would need to understand its history, which is as old as the universe. Understanding the body means…
-
Discussing “The Blind Spot” with Gregg Henriques
Here is a rough transcript of some of my comments to Gregg: I think this book speaks to both of us for obvious reasons. The work you’ve been engaged in with your UTOK system to bring together the humanities and the natural sciences in a more comprehensive, systematic perspective, and any of the dialogues you’ve…
-
Toward a Goethean Physics: Reading Steiner’s “Light Course” (GA 320) through Whitehead’s Organic Realism
Below are some excerpts and more or less stream of consciousness reflections upon reading the student notes from Rudolf Steiner’s so-called “Light Course” (GA 320; Dec 1919-Jan 1920). The number headings correspond to each of his lectures. These notes are helping me prepare for a presentation next month at MysTech’s “Mysteries of Light” conference. 1. Rudolf Steiner spent…
-
Review of “The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience”
Review of The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (MIT Press, 2024) by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson By Matthew David Segall In The Blind Spot, Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson offer an urgent philosophical intervention into humanity’s all but doomed technoscientific civilizational project. The authors argue cogently that our contemporary scientific culture has steered…
-
Agency and Perception in Whitehead and the Free Energy Principle (dialogue with Tim Jackson)
Tim and I continue to explore how Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism might intersect with contemporary scientific theories, especially the Free Energy Principle (FEP). The FEP suggests that organisms strive to minimize the surprise of sensory inputs by adjusting their internal models of the world, which resonates in some ways with Whitehead’s account of perception as…
-
Space, Time, and Religion in the Making (dialogue with Roman Campolo)
Roman and I had another dialogue session to discuss Alfred North Whitehead’s book Religion in the Making (1926). This book lays out Whitehead’s understanding of the evolution of religious consciousness through the phases of emotion, ritual, belief, and rationalization. We touched on the significance of play behavior in animals and human beings, the transition from…
-
Prehension: Is Experience Fundamental?
Brendan Graham Dempsey and I connected again to continue our discussion, this time focusing on Whitehead’s concept of “prehension.” I explained that, contrary to Ken Wilber’s placement of the concept in the upper left (individual-interior) quadrant of his AQAL map, prehension does not entail just an internal or subjective experience. It’s a transformative process where…
Footnotes2Plato 