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 in Aspen, CO.

UPDATE: the full video including Bruce Damer’s talk is now available:

Below is a lightly edited transcript of my remarks.

Good morning, everyone. I want to begin by thanking you all for allowing your curiosity to draw you here. We are engaged in a project of mythic proportion, as Bruce was just alluding to. We are trying to usher in a new story of what it means to be human and to find our place in this universe. That is a collaborative effort. Dr. Bruce Damer and I began collaborating about six years ago, when we were invited by a benefactor of a group of artists to inspire them with some big-picture ideas about the origin of life and process philosophy.

This was back in what I call the BC era—Before COVID—in 2019. And I think the pandemic is a vivid illustration of the dangers of a certain kind of anthropocentrism. A microbe, a tiny little virus, shut down the entire machinery of our civilization for a time, and in the aftermath triggered immense social and political discord. So while it’s true that human beings—especially in our industrial form of presence on this Earth—have become a geological force, we are also quite fragile, as individuals and as a civilization. COVID made that fragility unmistakably clear.

What I want to share with you builds on many of the threads we’ve already heard this morning from Brian Swimme, Jude Currivan, and Mary Evelyn Tucker, concerning the role of the human being. The task is to avoid both extremes: on the one hand, crude anthropocentrism, and on the other, a crude anthropomorphism. One way beyond the anthropocentric view—which assumes that all meaning, value, and consciousness are locked up inside human skulls—is to reinhabit an animist universe. Every pre-scientific culture on every continent had an animistic understanding of nature: that consciousness is not confined to humans, but pervades the sun and stars, the plants, the rocks, the animals.

Modern science, in a rather conceited way, taught us to dismiss this view. We were told the sun is just a ball of gas, rocks are just crystals of atoms, and the world is, at bottom, dead. But instead of projecting this mechanistic image onto the cosmos, I think we can recover a kind of animism. The story of cosmogenesis that we heard this morning, and Bruce’s account of biogenesis, invite us to imagine matter not as dead stuff but as alive with potential. Of course, the risk of recovering animism is that we might veer into anthropomorphism. But the balance is worth seeking, and in fact our survival—and that of many other species—may depend on our capacity to hold that tension.

Bruce has been describing a paradigm shift within a special science, within biology, even within the subdiscipline of abiogenesis, the study of life’s origins. It has been momentous to watch this happen in real time. When Bruce and I first started talking six years ago, he was just beginning to publish disruptive papers, stirring controversy among scientists. Now, six years later, it seems clear the paradigm shift is well underway. As a scientist and a philosopher, we’ve reflected together on how paradigm shifts open space for deeper collaboration between the two disciplines. Read our co-authored chapter “The Cosmological Context of the Origin of Life” here.

I am especially drawn to metaphysics—not the Barnes & Noble kind of metaphysics about crystals, incense, or tarot cards, but metaphysics in its original sense: the inquiry into what conditions make science itself possible. What kind of universe must this be, such that conscious agents concerned with truth could emerge? That’s the metaphysical question.

This is why Bruce’s work caught my attention: it carries cosmological implications. Cosmology is not only the study of the large-scale structure and dynamics of the universe; it is also the study of how humans tell stories and make meaning to orient ourselves in that cosmic context. Modern science, for good reasons, once severed value, subjectivity, and mind from fact, matter, and measurement. That severance gave us brilliant discoveries. It also oversaw tremendous devastation. Now the task is to bring them back together. Science and myth, science and religion in the broad sense, are not opposites. Science emerges from myth, presupposes myth, and is sustained by cultural values like the love of truth. Where does that love come from? From a long cultural lineage that preceded science.

The invitation here, again, is to hold the tension between the fear of anthropomorphism and the risks of anthropocentrism, so that we can tell a story—rooted in scientific evidence—that replants civilization in the living Earth out of which we emerged. As a civilization, we’ve lost the plot. Our social, political, and cultural disputes are important, but they unfold within a larger cosmic context that we’ve largely forgotten. A renewed cosmological orientation could help us resolve those disputes more wisely.

The paradigm shift in biology and abiogenesis may be an indicator of something larger: a cosmological revolution akin to what Copernicus set in motion. By recovering ancient heliocentric ideas, Copernicus catalyzed a new worldview and a new kind of civilization. Before him, the Earth was imagined as the still center of a tiny universe, encased by crystalline spheres and surrounded by the divine. Copernicus’s heliocentrism—motivated partly by spiritual concerns—elevated the human intellect. To imagine the solar system from the sun’s point of view required imagination, mathematics, and a leap beyond immediate experience.

Today, as we live through a paradigm shift in the life sciences, we are also living through a cosmological revolution in how we understand our place in the universe. The cosmos has always been alive, but we forgot. We grew distracted, and now the challenge is to remember.

Before we can explain how life originated, we need to define what life is. That is no trivial matter. Philosophers of biology debate it endlessly. Is a virus alive? It requires a living cell to reproduce, but outside that context it just sits inert. Bruce’s work on wet-dry cycling and the formation of polymers suggests that the line between “nonliving” chemistry and living organisms is not a hard break but a gradient. Life is continuous with the chemical creativity of matter itself. There is no absolute gap.

This reframing implies that life did not emerge from dead matter banging around randomly. Rather, there is a spectrum of vitality reaching all the way back to the Big Bang. Perhaps “life” should be reserved for biology, but we can say the cosmos is pervaded by creativity. Alfred North Whitehead used that term to name the cosmic capacity for novelty. Creativity is not just a human trait—it is the fundamental character of the universe itself.

This means that when we ask about the origin of life, we are also asking about the origin of matter, and behind that, about the origin of mind. Charles Darwin himself half-joked that asking about life’s origin was as difficult as asking about the origin of matter. Yet as philosophers, we must push further: What is it in the nature of things that makes science itself possible? Why is there a universe that generates beings like us, who can reflect upon its origins and imagine its futures?

We find ourselves in a strange loop: the universe gives rise to minds, and those minds reflect back on the universe. Matter, life, and mind are not separate compartments bridged by miraculous leaps. They are stages of one creative process. Human beings are not anomalies in the cosmos; we are exemplifications of its creativity. The universe is trying to understand itself through us.

A concrete example of what it would mean to live in such a cosmos is love. Even in our secular civilization, love remains enchanting. We seek romantic love, love our families, our friends, our pets, and, for many of us here, the natural world. Yet over the past centuries, influenced by science, we have become embarrassed by love. We shrink it down into a mere private emotion. But if we step into this new worldview, we can recognize love as a cosmic principle, inherited from billions of years of evolution. Our capacity to love is not something we invent; it is something we inherit.

As heirs of this evolutionary achievement, we have a responsibility to carry it forward. Values like truth, beauty, and goodness are not projections of ours onto a meaningless universe. They are the fruit of cosmic creativity, billions of years in the making.

And so, as much as everything I’ve said is grounded in science, it is also a new way of relating to science. Stephen Weinberg once said, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.” Richard Feynman, another brilliant physicist, told us, “Nature is absurd. Don’t try to understand it. Just find something you love to do.” Their humility was real, but their imagination of science’s meaning was too small.

Why are we curious? Why do we hunger for truth? Because curiosity itself is cosmic. The quest for truth, for beauty, and for goodness springs from the creative core of the universe. Discoveries are not just facts; they are beautiful, enlivening, and transformative. They give purpose. We need a new adventure to replace the old myth of capitalist technological progress.

That new adventure is the collaborative work of re-storying our civilization. What you’ve heard this morning and what you’ll continue to hear today are invitations, lures, and sparks meant to inspire you to carry this story forward—into your families, your communities, your lives—so that we might live into a new worldview together.

Thank you.

Q&A

Q: How old were you when you knew you wanted to be a philosopher and to do that for a living?

A: I didn’t even know the word until high school, when I had an influential teacher who inspired me to become a teacher myself. But before I had the language for it, I had the experience. When I was seven, I suddenly realized one day that my perfectly healthy mother—she’s still alive and well—was going to die. That realization threw me into an existential turmoil that lasted for weeks. What got me through it was realizing that I myself would also die, and that my own consciousness had come into being and would eventually transform into something else. That awareness opened a window on my existence that I’ve never stopped looking through. At this point, I think I’ve climbed out the window.

Q: How do you account for the truth, beauty, and goodness that seem to be at the base of everything?

A: It isn’t something accountable in the ordinary sense. Each of us has feelings—many feelings—that shape our sense of purpose and meaning. You can explain some of these through anthropology or evolutionary biology. Certain attractions or aversions, feelings of disgust, emerged at certain stages in primate or animal evolution. But if you keep pushing the question further back, you reach a point where even the first cell had something like hunger. Where did that come from?

Brian described the formation of stars in organic terms: stars are hungry for energy, they have life cycles, they are born, they live, and they die. Values like truth, beauty, and goodness are admittedly human articulations, but I believe they describe a texture of value that goes all the way down. Traditionally, human beings have related to the source of these values—the cosmic attractors drawing us toward truth, beauty, and goodness—as spirit. In modernity, we’ve leaned into dualism, dividing nature from spirit. This fueled confusion: religion started treating scripture as science, while science imagined it could explain everything with facts alone. Both sides lost sight of the larger whole.

Just as many of us are embarrassed to think of love as anything more than a private emotion, we are also embarrassed to speak of spirit. For some today, “spirituality” has become a vague sense that “something is out there,” a mystery we can’t quite explain. Sociologists call this the “spiritual but not religious” crowd. It’s a positive sign of openness, but it can easily be co-opted by consumerism. Spirituality becomes a shopping mall: a little Buddhism here, a little Taoism there, maybe some cosmic Christ—eclectic but noncommittal. Traditionally, religion formed character, often through assent to dogmas—community-tested ideas with transformative power. I don’t think we can return to traditional religion as it was, but I do think we need to be less noncommittal about spirituality. We need to recover ideas like spirit and the divine without imagining they conflict with science.

So when asked where truth, beauty, and goodness come from, why the universe seems so finely tuned for life and consciousness, my best answer is that there is some spiritual ground to existence. That may be satisfying to some of you, and unsatisfying to others, but as a philosopher, I have to admit it’s the best I can do.

Q: I’m glad you spoke about spirit. How do you see its connection to the soul, which is both individual and universal, and to intuition?

A: Meister Eckhart, the German mystic, offers a profound insight here. He saw the soul as a womb. Through our devotion and love—not only for the divine but for one another and for all creation—we are giving birth to a new type of spirituality. He even said we are giving birth to God within our souls.

In our individualistic, psychological culture, much emphasis is on therapy and overcoming our complexes. That is important work. But if we reconnect to spirit, we see that this inner work is not just for ourselves or for our loved ones. The whole universe needs human beings to give birth to a new spirit. Spirit is not only the origin of our existence; it is also our destiny. It isn’t guaranteed we will realize it, but perhaps humanity is not yet fully human. Maybe what it truly means to be human involves wisdom and compassion, and we are still striving toward that. The soul is the womb where that new form of wise and compassionate consciousness can be born, and that is what spirit is.

Q: The universe seems very interested in complexity. Is there a moral element to that, or is the universe just trying out anything and everything, like a jazz improviser?

A: All traditional religions have wrestled with this in the form of theodicy: if God is all-good, why is there so much evil and suffering? Science has shown us that cataclysm, destruction, and death are not accidental but essential to evolution. Death is intrinsic to life.

So is the universe morally driven? I would say no, not in the sense of morality we usually project. Morality evolves across human societies. It would be anthropomorphic to project a particular moral code onto the cosmos. What we can say is that the universe appears to have an aesthetic aim: the pursuit of intensity of experience. Complexity heightens that intensity.

As matter and energy complexify—from atoms to stars, from single cells to fungi, plants, animals, and human beings—experience deepens. That means both greater capacity for suffering and greater capacity for beauty. If evolution were only about survival, we wouldn’t expect increasing complexity, since greater complexity often means greater fragility. Human beings, for example, are quite fragile. But our sensitivity to aesthetic intensity is unmatched.

So if the universe has an aim, I would say it is not moral or immoral but aesthetic. It seeks the deepening of beauty and intensity of experience.

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