Footnotes2Plato Podcast

Roman begins by inviting me to reflect on the developmental roots of human selfhood and how this might relate to machine consciousness. Infants deprived of loving contact often fail to develop a coherent sense of self. From there, we explore the role of mortality, vulnerability, and embodied participation in the formation of consciousness, drawing out the limits of computational models of mind. We then move into broader ethical and spiritual terrain: the crisis of meaning in a disenchanted, hyper-technologized world; the spiritual poverty at the root of our social and ecological breakdowns; the soul-making power of gossip; and the subtle ways we are lifted in life by humility and grace. We settle on the fact that selfhood is a gift received from love, shaped by shared attention and intention, and sustained only through the self-emptying of mutual becoming. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

Our conversation touches on themes including the relationship between individual and collective awakening, the nature of divine consciousness, religious diversity as a path to unity, and the transformation of suffering into spiritual growth. Our discussion integrates insights from various traditions—Sufism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Jungian psychology—while exploring how these perspectives illuminate our current moment of planetary crisis and potential transformation.Sami Chhapra is a therapist, inquire about his practice here. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

I apologize for the sound quality… The lapel mics I got for this interview clearly didn’t work very well (despite the AI noise canceling feature!). ChatGPT Summary of my dialogue with Robert Prentner:1. Setting & Opening Exchange* Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco. Matt welcomes Robert, who is in town for a small symposium hosted by Joscha Bach on consciousness and AI.2. Robert’s Turn Toward AI* Robert traces his intellectual path: for five-plus years he has pursued a mathematico-philosophical study of consciousness.* Initially skeptical of AI’s relevance, he changed his mind after hands-on experience with GPT-4 and Claude in 2023–24. Their coding competence and linguistic versatility convinced him they pose serious philosophical questions about cognition.* His current project: reframe “AI consciousness” so that it is not imagined as something magically generated inside computation but understood in relation to—and possibly as an access route to—an already-fundamental field of consciousness.3. Mapping Metaphysical OptionsMatt outlines four classic stances on mind–matter relations—physicalism, dualism, idealism, and panpsychism—and asks Robert to place himself.* Robert situates himself between idealism and panpsychism, sympathetic to Leibnizian and Whiteheadian currents, but wary of being boxed in by labels.* He rejects physicalism as both explanatorily barren (eliminative materialism) and existentially impoverished (no room for value, freedom, or meaning). Dualism fares no better: it leaves causal gaps.4. Process, Time, and the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness* They probe Whitehead’s critique of “misplaced concreteness,” contrasting undermining reduction (materialism) with overmining reduction (some forms of idealism).* Robert admires Whitehead’s ambition to keep philosophy a “critique of abstractions” that welds common sense to speculative imagination.* A thorny issue: how to think genuine process (and creativity) if spacetime is itself emergent or an “interface.” Matt invokes Bergson’s durée and the Einstein–Bergson dispute; Robert presses for an account of process “without time.”5. Large Language Models as Interfaces* Robert likens LLMs to early prototypes of perceptual “interfaces” (cf. Donald Hoffman): they compress vast corpora of human-generated meaning into usable symbol systems.* Both caution against literalizing metaphors (“the brain is a computer”) and against the cultic reification of “information” (Wheeler’s it-from-bit becomes, in Robert’s upgrade, it-from-bit-from-chit—consciousness).* They agree that information divorced from meaning and agency is just a new version of physicalism-plus, vulnerable to Whitehead’s same critique.6. Agency, Embodiment, and Machine Consciousness* Drawing on enactivism and autopoiesis, Matt raises the argument that metabolic precariousness may be a prerequisite for sentient agency.* Robert distinguishes consciousness-as-such from perspectival, embodied subjectivity. Embodiment might be indispensable for our mode of agency, yet other architectures could instantiate agency differently.* Both foresee political and ethical battles over robot rights once behaviorally humanlike machines emerge. Different cultures may diverge sharply on whether such entities merit moral status.7. Platonic Mediations and the Role of the Soul* Robert reaches for Platonic language: the soul mediates between ideals and empirical instantiation. LLMs might assist human beings in that mediating labor—if we approach them with explicitly metaphysical (rather than reductionist) sensibilities.* Matt notes a “tacit, unconscious Pythagoreanism” in much computational theory; better to be “a Platonist on purpose.”8. Whitehead’s Theological Dimension* Matt summarizes Whitehead’s panentheistic God with primordial (mental) and consequent (physical) poles, raising the tension between perspectival pluralism and an all-embracing consciousness.* Robert suggests some metaphysical distinctions may be pragmatic artifacts—useful interfaces rather than ontological ultimates—but cautions against premature answers.9. Ethics, Power, and Tech Capitalism* They converge on a warning: AI research is dominated by military–corporate interests whose incentives clash with philosophical and spiritual concerns.* The greater near-term peril may be not rogue superintelligence but widespread “moral atrophy” as humans outsource judgment, skill, and meaning-making to automated systems.10. Personal & Spiritual Reflections* Invited to share his spiritual orientation, Robert recounts a high-school “letter to my future self” that prodded him to foster humanity’s spiritual evolution—an aspiration he still feels.* He resonates with the Vedic triad sat-chit-ānanda (being-consciousness-bliss) and sees the AI era as demanding renewed attention to existential and ethical questions long neglected under market logics.* Both agree philosophers must join the technological conversation lest the future be shaped solely by profit and power.11. Closing* The talk ends on a sober yet hopeful note: “We’ve got our work cut out for us,” Matt says. Robert concurs, expressing gratitude for the dialogue and anticipation of further exchanges at the symposium. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

Explore the intersection of alchemy and technology as Simondon’s concepts of individuation are linked to Jung’s ideas. Discover how Novalis's ‘poet-engineer’ concept provides a framework for reinterpreting AI and modern tech. The discussion navigates the relational dynamics of creativity in machines and biology, emphasizing that evolution thrives on entropy. Delve into the philosophical contrasts between individualism and collective understanding within romanticism. Language's transformative role in shaping self-identity ties everything back to technological consciousness and our societal evolution.

Victoria Trumbull sent me her dissertation a few weeks ago: “On the Memory of the Soul: The Spiritualist Metaphysic of Saint Augustine and Henri Bergson” (Oriel College, Oxford). I’ve only had time to read the second chapter critiquing the brain-mind equation, but will certainly be devouring the rest as soon as possible. Victoria indicated it will be published as a book early next year, so stay tuned. We agreed the reigning “brain-as-hard-drive” picture is a metaphysical mirage: localization of memories in neural tissue (so-called “engrams”), predictive-processing hype, and Shannon-style “information” are smuggled in as if such models were the thing itself. I invited her to unpack why these paradigms, while perhaps useful for engineering purposes, miss the mark when it comes to explaining consciousness. She showed how Bergson (with Plotinus as an important influence) explodes the representational model of mind by emphasizing duration, qualitative change, and the organic continuum of perception. “The information in the sea of energy around each of us, luminous or mechanical or chemical energy, is not conveyed. It is simply there. The assumption that information can be transmitted, and the assumption that it can be stored are appropriate for the theory of communication, not for the theory of perception. … Shannon’s concept of information applies to telephone hooks and radio broadcasting in elegant ways but not, I think, to the firsthand perception of being-in-the-world, to what the baby gets when it first opens its eyes.” —J. J. GibsonOn the personal side, Victoria shared how a life-threatening illness cracked her open to a personal, loving Creator and convinced her that philosophy must safeguard the value of personhood against vague forms of spirituality. She senses—like I do—that younger generations are done with smug atheist materialism and hungry for a rigorous, spirit-affirming metaphysics.Timestamps: 00:01:51 – Why did memory become the focus of your dissertation?00:05:47 – What’s fundamentally wrong with the “memories-are-stored-in-the-brain” view?00:16:54 – Can you unpack the flaws in the information-processing metaphor of mind?00:23:38 – How does talk of “information” in neuroscience slip from metaphor to fact?00:31:18 – In what way does Bergson separate thinking-activity from language (and why does that matter for AI)?00:37:50 – How does Bergson rework Plotinus into an evolutionary, creative philosophy?00:45:36 – Why does Bergson’s notion of duration rule out brain-state accounts of perception and memory?01:04:31 – Where do you stand on embodiment: is matter privation or creative partner?01:18:25 – On a personal level, how do your own religious/spiritual convictions shape this work? Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

Our conversation felt like an improvised rhythm of tangents. But as I joked to Pedro, a perfect circle is made of infinitely many tangents. What might appear like digression is often an expression of the deeper topology of thought, where every seeming sidetrack curves back toward the center. Plotinus’ νοῦς (nous) floats above space and the bodily senses, while Bergson roots intellect in spatialization. His intellect isn’t a contemplative light but a tool for navigating matter. Jack noted the divergence: where Plotinus exalts vision, Bergson privileges rhythm and duration. Sound, not sight, becomes a truer guide to being.Pedro linked Bergson’s open morality (see Two Sources of Morality and Religion) to the evolution of consciousness: saints, sages, and mystics open humanity to wider and wider horizons. This resonated with my reading of Whitehead and Rudolf Steiner: that consciousness evolves through embodiment, not in spite of it. Plotinus sees the body as a fall, whereas process panentheists relate to incarnation as the necessary medium for moral and spiritual evolution.We explored matter as more than privation. For Bergson, it resists the élan vital, canalizing creativity. Matter is a mirror for spirit to reflect upon itself. From there we flowed into physics—light not just traveling through space, but generating it. I shared Ruth Kastner’s transactional interpretation of quantum events giving rise to spacetime. Pedro affirmed an ontological reading of probability, noting how his students, exposed to Bergson and Whitehead, also began to see time as creative advance.Jack shifted us to thought without image—chess masters feeling potential moves as virtual forces. Bergson insists on non-representational thinking. I connected this to Jung: archetypes exceed the images they inspire. Representation is a narrow band within a much broader spectrum of cognition.Pedro mentioned Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche as the one who collapses δύναμις (dýnamis) and ἐνέργεια (enérgeia). I resisted, since process-relational ontologies need a polarity between potential and actual to account for novelty. But of course Nietzsche doesn’t simply abandon aim, he just embeds it in the flux. Whitehead’s tragic divine poet reintroduces telos—not as triumph but as the lure of Beauty through suffering.We closed by invoking Plotinus’s final words, that he aimed to find the divine in oneself and unite it with the divine in the cosmos.Timestamps: 00:00 Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion reading idea00:01:15 Intelligence, instinct & free-will00:02:40 Plotinus vs Bergson on intellect & space00:03:53 Vision, rhythm & musical duration00:05:30 Closed vs open morality & evolution00:09:38 Embodiment, matter & spiritual growth00:13:52 Dionysian mysticism, Nietzsche & the body00:16:48 Matter, potentiality & Aristotle’s legacy00:23:28 Light, infinity & “image all the way down”00:27:28 Matter as non-being / Buddhist emptiness00:33:08 Virtuality, memory & pure duration00:38:53 Probability, quantum ontology & process thought00:44:18 Space-time as field of tendencies (relativity)00:49:38 Light, spatiation & quantum transactions00:57:28 Non-representational thinking & imageless cognition01:06:43 Will-to-power, teleology & eternal return01:11:53 “Finding the divine within” – Plotinus’ aim01:17:58 Chess masters, intuition & virtual perception01:24:48 Translation project – goals & workflow01:30:48 Closing remarks & next-meeting plans Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

Dialogues we are responding to include: * Michael Levin ⇄ Terrence Deacon on goal-directedness in biology:* Bernardo Kastrup ⇄ Jay Garfield on Madhyamaka Buddhism vs. analytic idealism:* Rupert Sheldrake ⇄ Mark Vernon on law-like habits and spiritual science:* Sean Kelly ⇄ Luke Johnson on Hegel, Jung and the psyche (which was mentioned early on but unfortunately we didn’t get to yet!):Some reflections amplifying key points in my dialogue with Tim: Philosophizing should keep its eye on the prize: attending to human existence and the suffering that comes from being embodied and crowded together in space (“crowded space” being the literal meaning of Duḥkha). Metaphysics must stay soteriological; it ought to help us suffer less rather than spiral into abstraction olympics. Whenever dialogue turns into an oppositional contest of right view versus wrong view, I worry we lose sight of this healing aim.The path away from weaponized debate is translational thinking. Instead of locking language in private dictionaries, I try to meet difference in a productive way, translating another’s phrasing into my own idiom and offering it back so our frameworks might mutually evolve. Language is an artistic medium and a commons; even the crispest logic still relies on metaphor. If we forget this, we slide into misplaced concreteness, mistaking abstractions for reality and reifying whatever vocabulary flatters our position.Variation already implies something invariant, a background that lets differences register as different. Whitehead speaks to that polarity when he pairs Creativity with the Primordial Nature of God, who envisages the order of what otherwise remains an infinite multiplicity of potentiality. Without something stable, the very idea of change becomes nonsensical; similarly, without the continual ingress of novelty this stability would be devoid of meaning. I see the same rhythm in biological life. Genes compress the hard-won lessons of past organisms, but development decompresses them in real time. Every thought becomes a microcosmic embryogenesis, to paraphrase Deacon, improvising from undifferentiated hunch toward determinate articulation. What we inherit is real potentiality, food that must be digested afresh in the present, not a deterministic script that seals our fate.Ideas may have eternal beginnings but they also become historical creatures. Study of their histories of ingression inoculates us against reification—against crystalizing concepts into dogmas or worshiping scientific models as idols. Philosophers serve as critics of abstractions, guarding both common sense and imagination from reductionist temptations. We remind science that its power lies in mapping experience, not replacing it, and we remind religion that ultimate reality cannot be captured in any book.The past is always present but as potential. The past is not, pace Laplace, an unbroken chain determining what is actualized in the present. There are gaps everywhere into which new possibilities can flow. I try to wield concepts lightly, translate generously, and judge metaphysics pragmatically by the creative release it affords and by the subtle easing of suffering it makes possible.Timestamps (links take you to the YouTube version):02:00 Today’s Agenda: Four Big Dialogues 04:15 Metaphysics & Alleviating Suffering 08:10 Debate vs Dialogue (Garfield · Kastrup) 12:45 Translational vs Oppositional Thinking 16:40 Variation, Invariance & Creativity22:30 Ocean–Wave Metaphor & Animism 28:20 Light, Vision & Least-Action Musings 35:40 Process Cosmology & Creativity 42:55 Consciousness & the “Hard Problem” 50:30 History of Ideas & False Problems 57:40 Mechanical Philosophy Critiqued 01:05:30 Language, Models & Misplaced Concreteness 01:13:25 Socrates, Buddhism & Soteriology 01:21:55 Whitehead vs Laplace Determinism 01:30:40 Information, Entropy & Meaning 01:39:45 Prelude to Deacon–Levin: Goals & Teleology 01:47:30 Deacon – Levin on Goal-Directedness 01:54:30 Information vs Entropy (Shannon · Wiener) 02:01:00 Simondon: Information as Constraint & Selection 02:09:00 Variation, Stochasticity & Abduction 02:17:00 Laplacian Determinism & Indeterminacy 02:25:30 Whitehead, Past Immortality & Evolution 02:34:00 Cosmogenesis: Simplicity vs Infinity 02:42:00 Constructive Course-Graining & Identity 02:51:00 Genes, Epigenetics & Developmental Constraint 03:00:00 Lineages, Individuals & Open-Ended Evolution 03:09:00 Closing Reflections Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

In this discussion, guest Ashton K. Arnoldy, an astrological consultant specializing in Hellenistic traditions, shares his journey into astrology sparked by 90s media. He and the host explore how astrology intertwines with healing in a materialistic world and its role in self-discovery. They delve into the evolution of astrology, tracing its roots from ancient practices to modern interpretations. The conversation also highlights the cosmic influences at play, encouraging a deeper, more personal engagement with astrological concepts.

Pedro Brea, Jack Bagby, and I decided to continue digging into Plotinus—specifically the Sixth Ennead—focusing on the relationship between the One and the Intellect, and between the World-Soul and individual souls. Why and how does the One overflow into the Many? We also read a helpful chapter by Gina Zavota titled “Plotinus’ ‘Reverse’ Platonism: A Deleuzian Response to the Problem of Emanation Imagery.” I began by posing a question to both Pedro and Jack: what is Plotinus’s relevance today? Are we drawn to him purely for historical reasons, like curators of ideas perfecting and preserving a museum exhibit, or is there something alive in his thought—something that can still catalyze our contemplative life, instigate self-transformation, and contribute to contemporary metaphysics? I suspect there is indeed plenty that still pulses in Plotinus’s vision. The challenge is to square his multi-layered depiction of reality with our contemporary knowledge—physics, cosmology, evolutionary theory, etc.After hearing Pedro and Jack’s initial impressions, I respond to Pedro’s point about how Plotinus integrates metaphysics and ethics. I love that he emphasized the idea that to know the truth, we must become like it. For Plotinus, knowledge entails self-transformation, aligning with the Good. It is a form of theosis or divination, much like the Eastern Orthodox understanding of the liturgy not as a representation of truth but as its enactment. This also relates to later Neoplatonists, like Iamblichus and Proclus, who emphasize the philosophical import of ritual. Turning to Jack’s comment that The Enneads sometimes feel like it was written in a “fever dream,” I agree that it can be disorienting. Plotinus writes in response to mystical experience, so he admits we can only grasp things fragmentarily with our finite minds. Yet he has an unshakable sense of everything overflowing from a single Source. And whether the Source is a cause, or a creator, or an overflow—we can talk about the metaphors Plotinus uses to describe how the still Source nonetheless becomes, how cause becomes effect. Or maybe even saying “cause” is already too much… We can have an intuitive, almost revelatory sense of oneness and the systematic nature of knowledge and ideas. But in practice, when we try to write about it, it’s inevitably fragmentary. I couldn’t help but feel that—even though Plotinus was writing in the third century—it resonates so deeply with the German Idealists and Romantics. Take Fichte, for example. The whole idea of the overflowing of intellect from the One, and intellect generating itself through its turning back to contemplate the One—it reminds me so much of Fichte’s dialectical account of the “I” and the “not-I.” That whole process of self-positing, where the self is generated through a kind of differentiation from itself. The fragmentary nature of Plotinus’s writing is also convergent with (and perhaps influential for) the style of the Romantic fragment, which the Schlegel brothers emphasized. Romantic philosophy is all about the fragment. That’s not to say there isn’t system—it’s just that fragments are the best we can do to capture a thought on the page, like a leaf exfoliating from a plant. Each fragment is an expression of the archetype of the plant, but also a unique facet of the oneness of that archetype.Pedro asked about the importance of participation, leading me to lay out how the concept of participation morphs historically from Plato through Aquinas to Schelling and the Romantics (Jacob Sherman has written a great genealogy of participation that tracks this development). Where Plato treats participation as a sort of “copying” of Forms, Aquinas reframes it more existentially, while the Romantics treat it as co-creation—where the boundaries between creature and creator soften and even dissolve. It is that more co-creative sense of participation that I favor, which somewhat meshes with Deleuze’s idea of the virtual and actual. I do, however, remain concerned that if we replace essence entirely with events, we end up with a nominalism that might undercut our sense of reality’s moral and metaphysical depth dimension. I want an account of real form and value that is robust enough to avoid mere relativism.I also suggest there may already be a “reversal of Platonism” in Plato’s own dialogues. This comes through especially in the role of the Receptacle in the Timaeus (Tim Jackson and I discuss this in our dialogue on Timaeus). Then, in Plotinus, I notice how contemplation is only possible because the One overflows; the One becomes “Good” in that act of self-outpouring. That suggests the One’s “superabundance” is enhanced by the many returning to it via their contemplation of it. The intellect, Soul, and all of Nature’s beings each, in some way, contemplate their return to the One, thereby enabling it to continually become richer. I label this a co-creative notion of participation—though I admit it is not always spelled out this way in Plotinus’s own texts. I bring in Whitehead as a way to reinterpret this idea: the contemplation of the One by the many can, paradoxically, enhance the value realized in the One.I turn to the role of Logos, linking it to the mediation between the One’s unity and the multiplicity of bodies, but I suggest we consider how the Incarnation might reconfigure that relationship in ways Plotinus might not have fully accounted for. I mention Plotinus’ stirring comment about erasing bodily boundaries through contemplation—“the lines which bound bodies come to be as if they fell from my contemplation.” It is as if he is stepping into the perspective of the Soul, as the power that shapes living bodies, and through contemplative activity he is in a sense “unfalling” or reversing the fall by remembering that the boundaries between bodies are ultimately illusory.I return to Pedro’s mention of Plotinus’ psychological method, stressing that we must invert our attention, first going inward, not to retreat from the world but to understand it aright—recognizing that if we view extended sensible bodies as the ultimate or even just as an independent reality, we fall into delusion. Instead, Plotinus calls us to grasp how Soul gives shape to bodies. So to interpret the physical world properly, we need to go inward and see that the intelligible nature of the Soul stands at the root of perception. At the same time, I suggest that if we read it freshly, there might be a “co-creative” dimension: physicality need not be a mere reflection of intelligibles but the expression of an ongoing metaxy were the sensible domain is not so much illusion as it is the play of light on the surface of astral waters, a reflection of the superabundant luminosity of the One. If we can calm the surface of the soul via contemplative practice, it becomes transparent to what lies beyond it. Pedro and I both mused on whether time-based metaphors are better than spatial ones for describing Plotinus’ hypostases. In Whitehead, we could say real potentiality is in the past; actualization is in the present; pure potentiality is in the future. Events do not unfold in a fixed container of space—space arises out of the wake left by events or actual occasions. From the World Soul’s perspective, time is a whole; from our bodily perspectives, we see it in parts, as if it were a line, just one damn day after the next, rather than as a moving image of eternity. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

In a thought-provoking dialogue, Philip Goff, a philosopher dedicated to panpsychism and consciousness, explores the intricate dance between science and faith. He shares his journey from physicalism to embracing the idea that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of nature. The conversation highlights how Goff reconciles panpsychism with his Christian beliefs, advocating for a dynamic view of God that evolves. They also delve into metamodern spirituality, emphasizing the blend of traditional wisdom with contemporary thought, pushing boundaries within religious contexts.