Tag: evolution
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Thinking With Machines
A rough transcript of the video above of me cleaning dog poo out of my robot vacuum: My earlier conversation about machines and organisms with Levin:
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Taming the Technological Dragon, with Michael Levin
Selections from the transcript of this conversation (complied by AI): Matt Segall: I just finished your paper “Technological Approaches to Mind Everywhere” that came out last year and really enjoyed it. The more I read your stuff, the more I am shaken free of some philosophical commitments that I think I had arrived at because…
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Music, Memory, and the Song of Life (dialogue with Karen Wong)
Karen Wong invited me on The Meaning Code again to discuss ideas we both find enriching. Below I’ll share a near transcript of some interesting tidbits, including discussion of Michael Levin’s work. Mike Levin frequently quotes William James, who defines intelligence as the ability to accomplish the same goal by different means. This definition emphasizes…
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Rudolf Steiner and Racism
Update Jan 31, 2024: The conversation continues on our Urphänomen Substack page. As a teacher, I do my best to actively encourage deep and sustained dialogue about the racism, implicit or explicit, that shows up in the statements or actions of any figure studied with my students. Many modern European and American thinkers, including all…
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Platonizing Biology: a dialogue with Michael Levin
Thanks to Karen for hosting this conversation on The Meaning Code. We started with a high level issue: the relationship between metaphysics and/or (philosophical) cosmology and the special sciences. I wanted to be sure he understood that I as a philosopher am in no way trying to tell scientists how to define or understand their…
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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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Platonic Physics: In Dialogue with Wolfgang Smith
Here is my conversation, recorded yesterday, with Dr. Wolfgang Smith. His new book PHYSICS: A Science in Quest of an Ontology is available from many online bookstores. We discussed a range of topics, including wholeness in physics and mathematics, Whitehead and Russell’s different interpretations of the failure of the Principia Mathematica project, the fallacy of…
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Hunger for Wholeness podcast with Dr. Ilia Delio
I had a wonderful conversation with Ilia Delio and Gabbi Sloan a few weeks ago, Part 1 of which was just released here. We discuss a number of topics, including the problem of evil. Part 2 continues the conversation here. The podcast comes out of Dr. Delio’s work with the Center for Christogenesis. She has…
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In dialogue with Iain McGilchrist
See also my blog review of McGilchrist’s new book The Matter With Things.
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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
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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.
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Human Energy Project podcast interview by David Sloan Wilson
Bruce Damer and I joined David Sloan Wilson on the Human Energy Project podcast for a conversation about the Hot Spring Abiogenesis Hypothesis and its cosmological implications. This was recorded late last year. Transcript available.
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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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Process Philosophy and Metamodernism with Brendan Graham Dempsey
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Returning to Cassette Tapes to dialogue with Will July about abiogenesis, the afterlife, and everything in between
It was great to chat with Will again on his podcast Cassette Tapes. Check it out here: https://www.cassettespodcast.com/episodes/30-matt-segall
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The Cosmological Context of the Origin of Life: Process Philosophy and the Hot Spring Hypothesis
I just sent a draft of this coauthored essay off to the editors. Astrobiologist Bruce Damer and I have been building toward this for a few years. I’m thrilled to have gotten it to this point, and looking forward to peer review! The essay will be featured in a book coming out of this conference…
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Goethe and Whitehead: Steps to a Science of Organism
This essay was slated to be published in the Holistic Science Journal, but it looks like it will end up somewhere else later this year. I’ve been sitting on it for a while, though, and wanted to share it here. Feedback welcome. “Goethe and Whitehead: Steps to a Science of Organism” (2021):
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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…
