Category: Alfred North Whitehead
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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…
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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.…
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Imago Machinae: Made in the Image of Our Machines, Rethinking God, Technology, and Consciousness at Edge Esmeralda
Introduction by Janine: All right, we’ve got two more talks this evening for the next hour. I’m really excited to welcome Matt Segall. He is a transdisciplinary philosopher, associate professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness department at the California Institute of Integral Studies. And I first came across some of Matt’s work both online,…
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Human Consciousness and Machine Intelligence
I sat down with my friend Kent Bye earlier today to discuss the intensifying entanglement of human consciousness with machine intelligences. He read my recent chapter on the philosophical implications of AI and asked some great questions that elicited fresh thoughts. The podcast should be posted soon, but for now below is a preview of some of what we…
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The Invariance of Variation: Or Why Metaphysics Must Become Ungrounded (Dialogue with Tim Jackson)
Above, Tim Jackson and I dialogue about a number of conversations we watched, including: Matt Segall: So this is going to be laid back. We didn’t read anything, but we did listen to a whole bunch of conversations. I guess three. Okay, I threw another one in there. So, there’s the Levin and Deacon dialogue…
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Goals Go All the Way Down: Responding to the Deacon-Levin Dialogue
I’m grateful to Tevin Naidu for getting Deacon and Levin together. They only had 90 minutes but still managed to cover a lot of territory, including where they overlap and where some tensions may exist. I first met Deacon back in 2011 during a lecture he gave on his then new book Incomplete Nature. Regular readers may not…
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The Essence of Evolution: Reflections on my dialogues with evolutionary biologist Tim Jackson about God and Eternal Objects
My friend Timothy Jackson and I have been engaged in a rich interdisciplinary dialogue for nearly four years now. Where does the time go? After a bit of an email correspondence in the summer of 2021, our first podcast conversation occurred back in March 2022. We discussed the importance of generalizing evolution beyond biology so that the whole universe can be…
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Reality is a Process: Dialogue with Maitreyabandhu at the London Buddhist Centre
Slightly abridged transcript: Maitreyabandhu: So what we’re going to do this evening is have a conversation—obviously between Matt and me—about process philosophy and Buddhism. Really simply, that’s what we’re doing. To put it very simply, the central act of Buddhism—what Buddhism is really about, whether it’s here in Bethnal Green, Tibet, Burma, or wherever—is that a…
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Prehensions, Propositions, and the Cosmological Commons (dialogue with Tevin Naidu)
Tevin Naidu recently hosted me on his Mind-Body Solutions podcast. Above is the video and below is an edited and somewhat condensed transcript. Tevin: I have shaped today’s episode around your paper, “Physics Within the Bounds of Feeling Alone.” It is a wonderful piece—a beautiful read. One thing I often ask my guests to do is give a…
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An Anthropocosmic Approach to the Nature of Consciousness (My Talk at the UTOK Conference on Consciousness)
“What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his ‘soul.’ Man wants his physical fulfillment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for…
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“Psychedelic Realism”: My presentation at Breaking Convention
Below is an audio version and edited transcript of my talk at Breaking Convention last week, hosted by the University of Exeter. Video should be available in the coming weeks. Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes (Introduction) It is my pleasure to introduce our next speaker, all the way from California: Dr. Matthew David Segall. Matt is an Associate…
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Boundless Body Podcast with Brian Tierney
My conversation with Dr. Brian Tierney traces a winding path through the imaginal dimensions of philosophy, beginning with the etheric imagination as the subtle medium through which connection between self and world is actualized. Imagination emerges not as fantasy or escape, but as an onto-epistemic link between our inner life and cosmogenesis. Our discussion touches on the…
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“The Phenomenon of Life” By Hans Jonas: A dialogue with Timothy Jackson about Jonas’ treatment of Darwinism
In this session, Tim Jackson and I discuss Hans Jonas’ book The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. We focus in particular on two chapters, “Philosophical Aspects of Darwinism” and “Is God a Mathematician?” Our aim was to explore how Jonas, emerging from an existential–phenomenological and religious–philosophical context, offered both criticisms and appreciations of Darwin’s…
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Realizing the Noosphere
Below are some reflections following my dialogue with Layman Pascal and Brendan Graham Dempsey as part of Limicon 2025. The video of our dialogue should be online soon, and I’ll be sure to share it here. It seems to me that this conversation (see prior episodes) is necessarily transdisciplinary, drawing on natural sciences, aesthetics and art, myth and religion,…
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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…
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Processing Plotinus: A Bergsonian Reading
I was joined again by Pedro Brea (we discussed Bergson and Whitehead a few weeks ago) and now also by Jack Bagby(a colleague of mine at CIIS). We discussed Jack’s translation of Bergson’s lectures on Plotinus (1898-99). We also discussed an essay by Wayne J. Hankey on Bergson and Plotinus. Although I had previously known Plotinus influenced Bergson, our discussion highlighted…
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Culture as The Lifeblood of The Machine Economy (dialogue with Michael Garfield)
This was a really rich conversation. Michael just recently launched his new podcast Humans on the Loop. You can find more episodes and the show notes for this episode on his Substack: https://michaelgarfield.substack.com/p/h-12. Some brief reflections on the themes we explored: We began with the premise that money is a form of communication, a means…
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