Category: Albert Einstein
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Debating the Place of the Human in Cosmology with Brendan Graham Dempsey
After some back and forth in his Facebook group, Brendan was gracious enough to invite me on his Metamodernism podcast to discuss several core ideas, including the nature of scientific inquiry, the role of human experience in understanding the cosmos, and the limitations of mechanistic models in science. We discussed the intersection of philosophy, science,…
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In Dialogue with Gary Herstein on War Machine Podcast
Matt Baker invited me back on the War Machine podcast to chat with Gary Herstein, coauthor with Randall Auxier of The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead’s Radical Empiricism (Routledge, 2017). We discussed Gary’s recent blog post about the uses and abuses of Whitehead’s God concept: “Happy-Touchy-Feely-God talk”. I tried to push back a bit as I…
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Navigating Kantian Thought with John Vervaeke
This dialogue with John Vervaeke about my new book Crossing the Threshold was recorded earlier this year. Claude’s summary: The book discusses overcoming Kant’s epistemological barrier between the world and human reason. Kant erected this barrier to preserve human freedom and agency against the mechanistic worldview of science. Matt aims to develop an “etheric imagination”…
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Energy is Information, Information is Communication: Thinking with Vervaeke and Henriques
Have a listen to Greg Henriques and John Vervaeke exploring the limits of reductive naturalism and the dangerous of decadent romanticism: John and Greg got some thoughts stirring, which I shared in the video below: For more on the communicative ontology I am proposing here, see this article of mine in Process Studies on Whitehead…
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![Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism: Turning Idealism Inside Out [draft article]](https://footnotes2plato.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/dallc2b7e-2023-10-31-10.29.56-photo-of-an-old-world-war-one-battlefield-overlaid-with-intricate-mathematical-patterns-and-equations.-the-sky-above-is-painted-with-swirling-galaxies.png?w=1024)
Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism: Turning Idealism Inside Out [draft article]
Below is a draft of a chapter I was asked to write for a book on Cambridge Idealism. It is still a bit rough in places and I’ll be continuing to update it in the coming weeks and months. I’ll be presenting some of the ideas explored in it at the International Whitehead Conference in…
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Mind and Life in the Cosmos
I’m sharing a version of a lecture I delivered for the Pari Center earlier this morning.
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The Integral Stage Authors Series (interview by Layman Pascal about “Crossing the Threshold”)
I’ve pasted the transcript below with timestamps (this is autogenerated from YouTube and so has some errors, but it is readable!). 0:34 welcome back to the author series on guess what The Integral Stage. I’m Layman Pascal on behalf of myself, Bruce 0:41 Alderman, and the Unspeakable future of life on Earth. And today we’re…
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Pre-order my new book ‘Crossing the Threshold’
My new book Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead is now available for pre-order (thanks to Revelore Press/Integral Imprint). Orders ship on Earth Day (April 22). “Segall’s new book is a sustained blissful effort to re-infuse 21st century thought with the courage, generosity, and imagination that he himself…
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“Modes of Thought” (1938) by Alfred North Whitehead
I was re-reading Whitehead’s final book, Modes of Thought (1938), and decided I may as well record an audiobook version. Below is the YouTube playlist with all 9 lectures/chapters (click the menu button in the upper right corner to expand the playlist).
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Are there alternatives to the Big Bang?
In November, Tim Eastman and I were invited by the Cobb Institute to reflect on the status of the cosmological theory popularly known as the “Big Bang,” a.k.a. the ΛCDM (Lambda cold dark matter) or Lambda-CDM model. Earlier this year, NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope came on line. Its huge mirrors allow for a six fold…
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Tim Eastman Unties the Gordian Knot: Complete Seminar (Sessions 1-9)
Above is an embedded playlist featuring all 9 of the Eastman Seminars that I facilitated for the Science Advisory Committee of the Cobb Institute from June 2021 through February 2022. Tim Eastman, a plasma physicist and philosopher, is the author of Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context (2020). These seminars invited other scholars…
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Dialogue with Bernardo Kastrup: Translating between Analytic Idealism and Process-Relationalism
My long-overdue conversation with Bernardo Kastrup is above. I am pleased with how this turned out. We mostly attempted to translate between our respective orientations, finding many overlaps despite differences of emphasis. I think important differences remain, though we’ll have to iron those out together in the future. A few thoughts about what we discussed:…
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Tim Eastman Wrap-Up Session: Quantum Physics, Process Philosophy, and the Simulation Hypothesis
We wrapped up our 9-part seminar series on plasma physicist and philosopher Timothy E. Eastman’s book over the weekend. Above is the recording of the final session, which included responses by Michael Epperson and me, followed by a really great dialogue among the other participants. The simulation hypothesis came up and was challenged in light…
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HomeBrewed Christianity podcast with Tripp Fuller
Had a great time discussing Whitehead’s cosmology with Tripp. Check it out here: https://trippfuller.com/2021/09/13/matthew-segall-cosmology-consciousness-and-whiteheads-god/ We discussed topics including: the allure of Whitehead’s vision of mind in nature (knowledge as ‘an adjunct within things known’) the potential of a process engagement with different natural scientific problems, including the origins of life the problems with reductionism what…
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Dialoging with John Torday about Cellular Evolution
Dr. Torday is Professor of Evolutionary Medicine at UCLA: https://www.evmed.ucla.edu/torday/ For more on the cellular theory of evolution: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4447538/ More about the Cobb Institute Science Advisory Committee: https://cobb.institute/science-advisory-committee/
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Tim Eastman Unties the Gordian Knot (session 1)
Last Saturday, the Science Advisory Committee for the Cobb Institute hosted plasma physicist and philosopher Timothy Eastman for the first of 8 dialogue sessions focused on his new book, Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context (2020). The book sketches a new approach to a theory of everything that builds on philosophers like Peirce…
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The Side View: Whitehead and the Physics of the World-Soul
I joined Adam Robbert on The Side View to talk about my new book on Whiteheadian cosmology.
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Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology (2021)
A new revised and expanded edition of my book Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology is now available in paperback and electronic versions.
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