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: science

  • Human Consciousness in a Cybernetic Age: Or Why Logos is not a Loom

    The following is a transcript of my talk last week at our Mind-at-Large Project’s inaugural conference, “A New Dawn.” Video of all the talks, including this one, will be available in a few weeks on the Mind-at-Large website. Buenos días, everyone. I’m here at the Casa Oasis Guest House in Mérida, on the ancestral lands of the…

  • My Responses at Mind-at-Large Project’s “A New Dawn” Panel: Personhood, Participation, Imagination, and Mystical Theism

    A recap of my remarks on Day 2’s Mind-at-Large Conference Plenary Panel (also featuring Ed Kelly and Iain McGilchrist, moderated by Curt Jaimungal). I repeat the questions when relevant so you will know what Curt asked.  1. Well, I am tempted to take this in a direction that might sound a little idealistic, but when you ask…

  • Peeling Back the Veils

    LLM transcript of my chat with Seekers Mindtalks. Chapter 1: Exploring Reality and Consciousness [00:00] Raj: What if the way you experience reality isn’t reality itself? What if this constant feeling of disconnect, the low-level anxiety, the sense that something’s missing isn’t modern life, but just a misunderstanding of who you are? In this episode of…

  • Transcending the Culture War by Recovering Participatory Theism (Dialogue with Nathan Hawkins)

    Nathan Hawkins and I just finished a podcast recording (above) that I hope will contribute to amplifying the deeper notes that are still just barely audible beneath the surface noise of the culture war. We both agree that dialogue must replace partisan shouting, and that philosophy has an important public role to play in helping to…

  • The Logical Animal – Earth to Humanity: Put Down Your Maps

    The frogs are croaking on my left down in the Eel River, and on my right is the low roar of semis on the 101. This is nearly my last night in Humboldt County. I came out to the hot tub one last time to take in the night sky. It happened to be clear…

  • Truth in the Making: On the Possibility of Metaphysics in a World-in-Process

    “…‘becoming’ is the transformation of incoherence into coherence.”  -Whitehead (PR 25) “There is not one completed set of things which are actual occasions. For the fundamental inescapable fact is the creativity in virtue of which there can be no ‘many things’ which are not sub­ordinated in a concrete unity. Thus a set of all actual occasions…

  • Thinking With David Krakauer

    Listening to David Krakauer on Jim Rutt’s “Worldview” podcast while making dinner made a few things snap into place for me. You can listen to it here: https://www.jimruttshow.com/david-krakauer-3/ I appreciate how rigorously he avoids collapsing the epistemic into the ontological. Krakauer is very lucid about wanting to prevent effective theories from hardening into a metaphysics. His…

  • Philosophies of Ontogenesis: Evolution by Artistic Selection

    First, have a listen to Timothy Jackson’s recent Lepht Hand podcast about the ontogenetic stance: Then have a read of his essay on Darwin, Simondon, and Battaile and the importance of a “variation first” approach that replaces classical effective theory ontology with an account of ontogenesis. One consequence of such an approach is that we can only…

  • There’s no scientific evidence that consciousness exists.

    Evidence, in a scientific age, is usually thought of in a very specific way. We tend to assume evidence means empirical measurement: can I record this on a camera, or on some kind of detector? Can I transform what I observe—signals, data—from something tangible in the world into a mathematical model? Can I make predictions,…

  • Contemporary Natural Philosophy Needs a New Theory of Forms

    In this disputation with Jacob Given and Adam Robert, I was defending the thesis that contemporary natural philosophy needs a new process-relational theory of forms, and that Whitehead’s notion of eternal objects can play that role. Adam and Jacob structured the session as a kind of updated medieval disputatio: I offered a thesis and initial…

  • Patterns Are Not Puppeteers: The Return and Reformation of Platonic Form in Biology

    I’ve discussed the return of Platonism in biology before. The following recounts some of what I discussed with Bonnitta Roy as a visitor at The Pop-Up School earlier today. The main driver of the Platonic turn in the life sciences is Michael Levin’s remarkable lab research on bioelectric patterning in morphogenesis. He is now framing this as…

  • From Substance to Creativity, Or on the Modernity That Could Have Been

    Yesterday in my history of Western philosophy course, where my students are reading Richard Tarnas’ Passion of the Western Mind (1991), I lectured on a couple of seventeenth century philosophers in an attempt to catch the nature of the shift that historians call “the Enlightenment.” I then connect their innovations to a couple of nineteenth and twentieth…

  • Between the Speculative and the Prosaic: Life, Imagination, and Individuation

    Timothy Jackson and I went deep into descendental philosophy and aesthetic ontology, core concepts developed in my last book Crossing the Threshold (2023). I try to argue against both scientistic neutrality and dogmatic theology. I believe that any attempt at thinking the most general conditions of reality inevitably touches the spiritual. If it did not then natural science…

  • The Return of Form in Biology: Thinking Through Platonic Morphospace

    The mystery of biological form has led some biologists, most prominently Michael Levin, back to Plato’s theory of Ideas. Levin is driven primarily by the surprising empirical findings of his lab. He argues that his results are best explained by reference to modes of causality not traceable to genetic histories or molecular components. While he has…

  • Matter, Life, and Mind: Love as a Cosmological Power

    This was recorded on Saturday, September 13, 2025 as part of the Frontiers of Knowledge event at Wheeler Opera House in Aspen, CO. Below is the recording and a lightly edited transcript.  Good morning, everyone. I want to begin by thanking you all for allowing your curiosity to draw you here. We are engaged in a…

  • Birthing a New Cosmology (reflections on my dialogue with Alexander Beiner)

    I enjoyed dialoguing with my friend Alexander Beiner this morning. The recording will be published on Kainos soon. He asked whether I had a sense for whether the atheistic, secular orientation in academia is thawing, opening room for alternatives to physicalism. I do sense that! Panpsychism and idealism are the two broad categories that capture much of…

  • Notes from the Edge of the Ordinary

    Recapping my time in the twilight zone between physics and psi in Charlottesville, Virginia two weeks ago. I left the DOPS Psi Theory Meeting feeling like I’d been sitting around a camp fire telling ghost stories at the edge of a new continent. In fact, we spent the week together in the Marriott Hotel’s appropriately named Louis…

  • Ever-Living Fire: Process Philosophy and Plasma Cosmology

    Below is a transcript of my talk at the Process Philosophy, Plasma Cosmology, and Transpersonal Psychology meeting in Exeter, UK, which took place July 24-27, 2025. Other attendees include Robert Temple, Timothy E. Eastman, Barnard Carr, Steve Odin, Andrew M. Davis, Nick Cook, Ashton Arnoldy, John Priestland, Massimo Teodorani (virtual), Jeffery Kripal (virtual), Kelly Chase,…

  • My Biophilosophy Conference Talk: Romanticizing Evolution with Schelling, Peirce, and Whitehead

    Below is my talk at the “Revitalizing Biophilosophy” conference I co-hosted earlier this week. It is based on a long paper I am working on both for this conference and for “Cognizing Life,” another conference that I’ll present at next week in Tübingen, Germany (there is a free livestream option if you’d like to tune…

  • 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…

  • 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…