Footnotes2Plato

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead

Category: David Chalmers

Infinite Intimate: Dialoguing with Marc Gafni and Zak Stein

Matt Segall: Hi Marc, pleasure to meet you. Marc Gafni: Good to meet you, Matt. Matt Segall: Really, as I said in my email, it’s an honor and it’s humbling to get to talk to you and Zak. I’ve had a chance to spend a little time with Zak. But yeah, great to connect with you. Where are…

June 18, 2025
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.…

May 30, 2025
The Mind is Not the Brain, and the Brain is Not a Computer (Dialogue with Victoria Trumbull)

Matt: Hi, Victoria! How are you doing this morning? Victoria: Good. Well, it’s evening for me here in England. Matt: Right. Well, really lovely to connect with you. Victoria: Yes! Matt: I wish I had had more time before our chat to finish reading your entire dissertation, but the chapter I did read is the favorite thing I’ve read in…

May 20, 2025
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…

May 16, 2025
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…

April 26, 2025
Renewing Religion: Dialogue with Philip Goff and Brendan Graham Dempsey

Brendan Graham Dempsey and I sat down with Philip Goff to discuss all things “pan”: panmatheism, panentheism, pangentheism, panpsychism… oh, and Christianity! Philip describes how he arrived at panpsychism: after initially embracing physicalism and even flirting with illusionism, he came to feel that reducing the mind to physical processes was incoherent. Turning to thinkers like Thomas Nagel, David Chalmers,…

March 29, 2025
Whitehead’s Revolutionary Concept of Prehension (Thinking with Tim Jackson and Charles Hartshorne)

Tim Jackson and I discussed Hartshorne’s article, “Whitehead’s Revolutionary Concept of Prehension.” Charles Hartshorne offers a detailed and insightful examination of Alfred North Whitehead’s process-relational philosophy. Hartshorne, who served as Whitehead’s assistant at Harvard University during the 1920s, was also profoundly influenced by Charles Sanders Peirce, whose papers he edited during that same period. This background…

February 21, 2025
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…

February 14, 2025
The Nature of Consciousness and What To Do About It (Dialogue with Jack Bagby)

In this dialogue, Jack and I explore the nature of consciousness. I suggested at the get go that conscious thought is a process of “becoming other,” an ongoing participatory transformation with reality rather than a separate substance or quality somehow realized inside the head. I opened with a couple of lighthearted but probing questions to…

October 30, 2024
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…

June 21, 2024
Jim Rutt Show on the Metaphysics of the Origin of Life

Here’s a link to Episode 232 of the Jim Rutt Show, wherein I join Jim to discuss the metaphysical presuppositions and cosmological implications of the Hot Spring Hypothesis of the origin of life. You can find a PDF of the chapter that Jim and I are discussing here: “The Cosmological Context of the Origin of Life: Process…

April 3, 2024
Panpsychist Pluralism

The following is based on a revised transcript of a recent lecture. Anyone paying attention to academic philosophy over the last decade or so will have noticed the new philosophical kid on the block. I’m talking about panpsychism. While a couple of decades ago the position would have been laughed out of court or met…

October 18, 2023
Revolutionary Left podcast introducing German Idealism

I was invited back on the Rev Left podcast to lay out the dialectical twists and turns of the German Idealist movement. Link here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/german-idealism

July 31, 2022
Evolutionary Thinking with Timothy Jackson

Below are parts 1 and 2 of my dialogue with toxinologist and evolutionary philosopher Timothy Jackson. We discuss everything from the philosophy of science and evolutionary epistemology, to the social and cultural impact of evolution, to the full-blown evolutionary cosmologies of thinkers like Whitehead and Peirce.

July 6, 2022
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:…

March 7, 2022
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…

February 14, 2022
Zombie Evolution (reply to Sean Carroll)

The physicist Sean Carroll was recently on the Mind Chat podcast hosted by the philosophers Keith Frankish and Philip Goff. Watch it here. I uploaded a brief interpolation of my own on YouTube, which among other things calls out the model-centrism at play in Carroll’s “Core Theory.” Earlier today, Carroll uploaded a blog post to…

November 18, 2021
Thinking with Carlo Rovelli: The Physics of Consciousness

Last summer, I traveled to the Gran Sasso Institute in L’Aquila, Italy to participate in a conference bringing physicists and philosophers together to rehash the famous debate in 1922 between Einstein and Bergson. My paper (which should be published soon) brought quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli and Whitehead into the mix. Yesterday I came across this…

December 3, 2020
Dialoguing with Philip Goff about Consciousness, Panpsychism, and Process Philosophy

November 18, 2020
Alchemical Consciousness After Descartes: Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism as Psychedelic Realism

The following is an essay originally submitted for publication in a book on philosophy and psychedelics. After some feedback from the editors, I realized it is too long and includes too many (I hope interesting!) digressions. I’ll be thoroughly revising my submission for the book, so I figured I’d share this earlier version here. Feedback…

October 15, 2020
Parsimonious Panpsychism? (response to Julian Walker)

This following is copied from a Facebook post Julian Walker made in response to Bruce Alderman’s defense of panpsychism (in the “Integral 2.0” group). I wanted to weigh in (my comments are below): “PANPSYCHISM is not more PARSIMONIOUS than EMERGENTISM (Reply to Bruce on his thoughts about the David/Matthew debate) In a way I hear…

August 25, 2020