Footnotes2Plato

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

Tag: Panpsychism

  • The Side View podcast

    The Side View podcast

    Adam Robbert interviewed me over on The Side View Podcast. Check it out HERE. We discussed speculative philosophy, panpsychism, politics, and more.

  • “Electrons Don’t Think” by Sabine Hossenfelder

    “Electrons Don’t Think” by Sabine Hossenfelder

    The following is a comment I posted on the physicist and blogger Sabine Hossenfelder’s blog Backreaction to a post titled “Electrons Don’t Think.” https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/01/electrons-dont-think.html Hi Sabine. I discovered your blog last night after Googling “Carlo Rovelli and Alfred North Whitehead.” It brought me to Tam Hunt’s interview with Rovelli. I have been studying Rovelli’s popular…

  • Integrating Space-Time: Non-Dual Idealism, or Physics of the World-Soul?

    Integrating Space-Time: Non-Dual Idealism, or Physics of the World-Soul?

    Metaphysics is serious play. Serious because (if done well) it demands a reckoning with death, with limit as such, with finitude and necessity. Play because (if done well) it frees us from our perceived finitude to partake in the process of realization itself. Materialism and idealism, though mutuality exclusive as metaphysical positions, are nonetheless symbiotically…

  • Whitehead’s Way Beyond Postmodernism

    Based on this paper delivered at the 2015 International Whitehead Conference. 

  • Panpsychist Physicalism (continued)

    Panpsychist Physicalism (continued)

    Continuing the discussion about “panpsychist physicalism,” I’m sharing another one of my replies over at The Skeptical Zone (click here to read what I am responding to).  Thanks for the reply, keiths. Of course, everything depends on what we mean by physicalism. “Scientific materialism” is a phrase I borrow from Whitehead to refer to an outdated…

  • Panpsychist Physicalism

    Panpsychist Physicalism

    [Written partially as a response to some discussion over in The Skeptical Zone]: Physicalism is the idea that the universe is fundamentally composed of entirely blind, deaf, dumb–DEAD–particles in purposeless motion through empty space. For some reason, these dumb particles follow the orders of a system of eternal mathematical laws that, for some reason, the…

  • What is Life? (Part 2)

    What is Life? (Part 2)

    Continuing a dialogue in the comments of my last post, particularly the question of whether rocks have agency… An organic realism would suggest that some processes within rocks do have varying degrees of agency. Crystallization is telic. Atoms are self-organizing ecopoietic agents. The periodic table of elements is a taxonomic hierarchy that sorts different species…

  • Waking Cosmos Podcast Interview

    Waking Cosmos Podcast Interview

    Thanks to Adrian Nelson for hosting this conversation on his YouTube channel Waking Cosmos.

  • Archetypal Panpsychism: Whitehead, Jung, & Hillman

    Archetypal Panpsychism: Whitehead, Jung, & Hillman

    If you happen to live near Boise, Becca and I will travel there in January to give a weekend workshop for the Idaho Friends of Jung. January 20-21, 2017 Archetypal Panpsychism:  Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman A presentation by Matthew D. Segall, PhD, & Becca Tarnas, ABD Friday Lecture, 7:00 – 9:00 PM; Saturday Workshop, 10:00 AM –…

  • Panpsychism and Emergentism: a discussion with ProfessorAnton

    I posted Neil Theise’s video “Complexity Theory & Panpsychism” on FaceBook last week, and Corey Anton posted a response criticizing panpsychism and defending his own emergentist perspective. Their videos are below. Corey and I have gone back and forth on this issue a number of times over the years. I posted a set of responses to…

  • John Horgan’s article in “Scientific American” on Panpsychism

    John Horgan published an essay in Scientific American a few days ago criticizing Tononi’s integrated information theory of consciousness. I don’t understand Integrated Information Theory well enough to defend it, but I applaud the effort to make progress toward a scientifically operationalizable definition of consciousness. But it seems to me that part of the problem…

  • Pluralistic Panpsychism v. Monistic Idealism: another response to Kastrup (part 1 of 2)

    Kastrup has responded to my post a few days ago. The topic? Panpsychism. In any back and forth discussion like this, it is important to acknowledge that each of us has evidently written a great deal articulating our perspectives. Other than his brief essay on the threat of panpsychism, I have not read any of Kastrup’s…

  • Whitehead’s Non-Modern Philosophy: Cosmos and Polis in the Pluriverse (draft)

    The following was an early draft of a talk I gave in my own track at the Whitehead/Ecological Civilization conference in Claremont, CA. For video of the actual talk, click HERE.  This track has been given the task of re-imagining late modernity, and in particular, of re-imagining what John Cobb has called late modernity’s reductive monism. In my…

  • The Threat of Panpsychism?: A response to Bernardo Kastrup

    Bernardo Kastrup, a computer engineer turned metaphysician, recently posted a short essay called “The Threat of Panpsychism: A Warning.” I found the essay somewhat encouraging if only because it is another signal that contemporary philosophy (both within and outside academia) is moving beyond the tired “materialism v. anything else” debate and toward more interesting and relevant debates, like that…

  • An interview with Jesse Turri at Home Brewed Christianity on Science, Religion, Imagination, and more…

    HERE is the interview. I haven’t listened to it yet, but I remember a wide-ranging conversation on everything from my own intellectual and spiritual development, to the relationship between science and religion, to the role of imagination and psychedelics in the philosophy of nature. HERE is Jesse Turri’s personal website.

  • David Chalmers, Andy Clark, and Paul Churchland on Neuroscience, Consciousness, Physicalism, and Panpsychism

  • Evolutionary Panpsychism v. Eliminative Materialism: Towards an Anthrodecentric Philosophy of Nature

    A talk I gave at my graduate program’s retreat at Esalen a few weeks ago. Part 1: Part 2: A comment by media theorist and professor of communication Corey Anton about what I say around the 3 minute mark of part 2 about the death/rebirth mystery of cosmogenesis: Corey Anton: Hi Matt, Thanks again. A…

  • Panpsychism and Speculative Realism: Reviewing Shaviro’s “The Universe of Things”

    “The progress of philosophy does not primarily involve reactions of agreement or dissent. It essentially consists in the enlargement of thought, whereby contradictions and agreements are transformed into partial aspects of wider points of view.” -Alfred North Whitehead, September 10, 1941 It is in this spirit that I believe Shaviro wrote The Universe of Things.…

  • Ontologies of Work (capitalism) and Play (panpsychism)

    Now that the Pluralism Wars have died down, each camp having dug itself in for the winter, maybe its time to change the subject. Let’s talk about David Graeber’s recent article in The Baffler “What’s the Point if We Can’t Have Fun?” He makes the radical (or not so radical?) move of taking play seriously, not only…

  • Panpsychism in Contemporary Philosophy

    Last week, I shared a few of Galen Strawson‘s ideas about panpsychism (as quoted from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) on FaceBook. A very long thread began. The conversation continues at Dream the World Anew. I suggest you start there before reading further. In this post, I want to begin situating my own particular breed…

  • Panpsychism and Its Emergent Discontents

    Several of us got into a discussion on my FaceBook page regarding panpsychism and emergentism. On some accounts, if a philosopher rejects dualism and so desires to ontologically integrate what common folks normally call mental with what natural scientists understand to be material, her only option is to develop either a panpsychist or an emergentist…