Category: Daniel Dennett
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A Biophilosophical Dialogue: Conversations at the Evolutionary Edge of the Life Sciences
The conversation above occurred earlier today at the end of a two-day conference I cohosted with Spyridon Koutroufinis focused on the revitalization of biophilosophy. You can learn more about it at the Center for Process Studieswebsite. You can find a YouTube playlist of all the talks at this link. Two days of phenomenal presentations of ideas that push at…
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Alchemy, Technology, and Individuation in Novalis, Simondon, and Jung (dialogue with Tim Jackson)
Timothy Jackson: I really do think Simondon is becoming a very timely figure, and I think it’s probably underappreciated that his stated goal is to refound—have a novel axiomatic for the humanities, basically, or the human sciences. Like, to really break—I mean, like Whitehead, obviously—but to really break down that boundary between the two cultures. Matt…
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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 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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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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Minds All Around Us: Dialoguing with Michael Levin
You can read my reflections on this dialogue here.
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Ingressing Minds: Causal Patterns Beyond Genetics and Environment – Reflections on Michael Levin’s Platonic Research Program for Biology
Reflections on Michael Levin’s Platonic Research Program for Biology (a dialogue with Timothy Jackson) Timothy Jackson and I discuss Michael Levin‘s new pre-print “Ingressing Minds: Causal Patterns Beyond Genetics and Environment in Natural, Synthetic, and Hybrid Embodiments” (which will eventually end up in the anthology collecting papers from the “Metaphysics and the Matter With Things: Thinking With Iain McGilchrist”…
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Evolution by Natural Induction (Dialogue with Timothy Jackson)
A near verbatim transcript: Matt Segall: Hey, Tim. Timothy Jackson: Hey, Matt. How are you? Matt Segall: Hanging in there, doing all right. Yeah. Matt Segall: Nice shirt. Timothy Jackson: Oh, this? Yeah, it’s a tiger snake. They’re very common around here. The design was drawn by a friend of ours who does really cool reptile art. Matt Segall: Local in…
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Discussing “The Blind Spot” (2024) with Timothy Jackson
Tim joined me to discuss Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson’s new book. Below are some timestamps of what we covered in this long conversation: 0:10 The contemporary urban life-world 10:36 In defense of “direct experience” 19:26 Life is a surprise to physics? 35:45 Real time vs. Clock time 42:13 Organization precedes Evolution? 1:04:27 Organicism includes mechanism;…
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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…
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Polycomputing and Process Philosophy
Tim and I were at it again this afternoon. I begin by introducing some ideas from this preprint by Joshua Bongard and Michael Levin: “There’s Plenty of Room Right Here: Biological Systems as Evolved, Overloaded, Multi-scale Machines.” Here are some of the ideas we discussed in this video:
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Generalizing the Function: Process Ontology and Free Energy
Summary by ChatGPT4 based on the YouTube transcript: This conversation between Tim and Matt revolves around their philosophical exploration of process philosophy, the Free Energy Principle, and Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, with a particular focus on how these philosophical frameworks intersect with personal health experiences and broader biological and environmental contexts. The discussion starts with…
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Whitehead’s Panprehensionism: A Feeling For Reality (Dialogue with Tim Jackson)
Video timestamps are available on YouTube. Below is Claude 3 Opus’ summary of the transcript (with a few edits by me): In this detailed conversation, Matt, a philosopher, and Tim, a biologist, delve into various philosophical topics related to perception, consciousness, and the nature of reality, with a particular focus on the ideas of Alfred…
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Descendental Philosophy and the Confrontation with Nihilism (dialogue with Roman Campolo)
Roman has been reading my book Crossing the Threshold. In this dialogue, we explore Whitehead’s mathematical imagination, theory of perception, and attempt to overcome the nihilism that Nietzsche marked out as a pathological transition stage. Watch on YouTube for timestamps. ChatGPT summary: 📘 Perception and Reality: Perception is not merely passive reception through the senses but…
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Fantasy, Science, and Beauty in an Evolving Universe (dialogue with Tim Jackson)
Tim and I continued our dialogue about the Free Energy Principle and Whitehead’s cosmology. I began by recounting a short video of Karl Friston saying all human perception is fantasy. From there we discussed FEP’s instrumentalism, the Peirce-James pragmatist difference, and explored the implications of evolution as a general principle extending beyond just biology. We also…
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Whitehead and the Free Energy Principle: The Physics and Metaphysics of Information (dialogue with Tim Jackson)
Tim Jackson and I met for another thought jam to explore the interplay between contemporary physics, information theory, biology, and Whitehead’s process philosophy. We got into the ontology of abstraction and in the end found ourselves ruminating on the nature of reality in an increasingly technologically mediated world. Our conversation unveiled a shared concern: as…
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Intuiting Life Seminar Series
Above is a playlist including four sessions from the “Intuiting Life” seminar series hosted by the Cobb Institute Science Advisory Committee. Click on the hamburger menu icon in the top right corner of the video to see the playlist. The series featured the authors of a new book, Process-Philosophical Perspectives on Biology: Intuiting Life (2023),…
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Intuiting Life Seminar Series, a preview with Spyridon Koutroufinis
If you’d like to join us for the Saturday morning seminar series beginning this weekend, you can RSVP HERE.
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Seminar Series next month on Process Approaches to the Philosophy of Biology
The Cobb Institute Science Advisory Committee, which I chair, will be hosting a series of seminars next month featuring the contributors to a new book, Process-Philosophcal Perspectives on Biology: Intuiting Life (Cambridge, 2023). The book challenges the reductionist, materialistic metaphysics often adopted by biologists, arguing that this approach overlooks the intricate complexities and essential characteristics…
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