Category: Henri Bergson
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Jung, Simondon, and the Ontogenesis of Philosophy
We just wrapped the “Forever Jung” conference co-hosted by CIIS and the San Francisco Jung Institute. Tim couldn’t be with us in person, but I enjoyed his Zoom presentation on Jung and Simondon (video of his talk should be online soon; you can listen to mine here). Below are some LLM assisted notes on Tim’s exegesis of the…
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Creativity and the Cross: Martinus, Bergson, and Whitehead in Dialogue
A conversation with Pedro Brea and Karsten Jensen. LLM generated transcript below. Matt Segall: Hey, Karsten. Pedro Brea: Hey! Karsten Jensen: Hi, Matt! Hi, Pedro! I’m so happy you both agreed to have this conversation with me, and I really look forward to it. Matt Segall: Likewise. My exposure to Martinus was through you, Karsten, and I really appreciated…
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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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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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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…
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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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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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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…
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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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Machinic Heterogenesis and Ecosophic Futures: Thinking With Félix Guattari
The video above records my thoughts after reading a chapter from Felix Guattari’s book Chaosmosis (1995). Turning again to the work of Guattari and his frequent collaborator Gilles Deleuze felt important as the US enters a dangerous moment in its own history. Fascism is not just an external threat, not just about those bad people over there. As…
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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:
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Reading Whitehead on Evolutionary Theory (Dialogue with Tim Jackson)
Tim Jackson and I just read Whitehead’s 1929 book The Function of Reason together. Here is our discussion: I begin with historical context about two important biologists who influenced Whitehead at Harvard: Lawrence Henderson and William Wheeler. Henderson, in his 1913 book The Fitness of the Environment, argued for continuity between cosmic and biological evolution, suggesting…
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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…
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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…
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Discussing C. S. Peirce’s “A Guess at the Riddle” with Tim Jackson
A rough transcript: Matt Segall: Hey, Tim? One sec. Just getting my earmuffs on here. Timothy Jackson: Oh, good! Matt Segall: There we go! Hey! How’s it going? Timothy Jackson: Yeah, not too bad, man. How are you? Matt Segall: Doing well. Good morning. Timothy Jackson: Evening to you. Matt Segall: Yeah. Super excited to talk about Peirce. Haven’t read Peirce for…
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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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