Footnotes2Plato Podcast

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 Studies website. You can find a YouTube playlist of all the talks at this link. Two days of phenomenal presentations of ideas that push at the paradigmatic edges of the life sciences left me feeling nourished. But there were also a few conceptual tensions that I felt called for our collective attention. Having listened to talks ranging from biosemiotics to process metaphysics, from computational biology to philosophical anthropology, I began with two particular pressure points that stood out to me.The first tension emerged most directly in the contrasting visions of Terrence Deacon and Michael Levin. While Mike extends cognition down to thermostats and up to Platonic forms, Terry insists on fundamental differences between computation and biological morphogenesis. I don’t think this is merely semantic. It decides how we understand the relationship between matter, life, and mind.The second tension concerned the perennial problem of individuality versus relationality. Throughout the conference, we’d wrestled with the ethics of viral pandemics, von Uexküll’s enclosed umwelt, autopoietic operational closure, Canguilhem’s vitalism, Simondon’s transductive relations, Aristotle’s entelechy, Bergson’s virtual, and more. Can we maintain individual autonomy while acknowledging the profound ways organisms interpenetrate and shape each other? Autopoiesis or sympoiesis? Who decides? Another question that quickly rose to the surface was how to think about generative AI technologies. The distinction between simulation and realization of conscious intelligence isn’t merely an academic issue. It has immediate implications for cultural life, and how we relate to increasingly sophisticated designed-for-profit generative models.People are already beginning to attribute not just artificial intelligence but conscious sentience and personhood to their instance of ChatGPT. If we follow one interpretation of Mike Levin’s position—potentially canceling the simulation/realization distinction—might we invite people to relate to their machines as individual souls, persons deserving of rights? Is the genie already out of the lantern? This is concerning...I offered a Platonic perspective on LLMs, suggesting that we should approach these technologies the way Plato approached alphabetic writing: critical yet participatory. Yes, they’re dangerous tools. Yes, they can have distorting effects. But we can also use them skillfully, so long as we remain aware of how they are shaping us.LLMs mark another major shift in the long coevolution of humans and our media technologies, following on the heals of speech, writing, and alphabets. Extending Terry Deacon’s work on how language has rewired the human brain, I noted that these tools are already reshaping our cognition and social imaginaries in ways we are only just beginning to grasp. We’re focused on how LLMs hallucinate, but maybe we should pay more attention to the ways we are being encouraged to hallucinate about them. The idea of “artificial general intelligence” or “conscious machines” is more an advertising strategy than a near term engineering reality. I do appreciate and agree with Mike’s point that there are minds all around us that we’re failing to notice. And that this deficit lies in our own lack of sensitivity, not in theirs. But for precisely this reason, how we decide in any given case may not just be a matter of empirical tests but of our own psychological dispositions. As a process-relational panexperientialist, I see both mind and aim as existing on a continuum, from the least action principles governing physical processes all the way up through human creativity and moral intuition, perhaps even extending into higher forms of intelligence (artificial, alien, or angelic) that our egocentric, humanistic biases prevent us from acknowledging.This came up in our afternoon conversation when I mentioned Whitehead’s distinction between the “subjective aims” of all actual entities—stretching all the way down into the quantum structure of the physical world (and it’s worth noting here that quantum reality isn’t just “small” or “large,” but rather something profoundly nonlocal and prespatial)—and the biological agency that emerges at the level of what he calls “living societies” or organized historical routes of actual entities.There are two levels here. On one level, we have the actual entity with its subjective aim: this is a metaphysical category in Whitehead’s scheme. On another level, we have societies, or patterns of enduring organization, whether physical or biological: this is a cosmological category. What this means is that particular forms of agency or functionality that arise amidst the enduring structures of the physical world must be seen as contingent, historically emergent patterns. Even stars and atoms are products of cosmic evolution. Not even physics can escape the acid of evolutionary thinking.Biological agency, then, isn’t something wholly separate from the rest of physical nature. It emerges later in the evolutionary process as a new threshold of autonomy—a novel “bid for freedom” (Whitehead’s phrase) relative to the spatial and temporal environment. “The problem to be solved is that of a certain originality in the response of a cell to external stimulus. The theory of an enduring entity with its inherited mentality gives us a reason why this mentality should be swayed by its own past. We ask for something original at the moment, and we are provided with a reason for limiting originality. Life is a bid for freedom: an enduring entity binds any one of its occasions to the line of its ancestry. The doctrine of the enduring soul with its permanent characteristics is exactly the irrelevant answer to the problem which life presents. That problem is, How can there be originality? And the answer explains how the soul need be no more original than a stone. … What has to be explained is originality of response to stimulus. This amounts to the doc­trine that an organism is ‘alive’ when in some measure its reactions are inexplicable by any tradition of pure physical inheritance.Explanation by ‘tradition’ is merely another phraseology for explana­tion by ‘efficient cause.’ We require explanation by ‘final cause.’ Thus a single occasion is alive when the subjective aim which determines its pro­cess of concrescence has introduced a novelty of definiteness not to be found in the inherited data of its primary phase. The novelty is introduced conceptually and disturbs the inherited ‘responsive’ adjustment of subjec­tive forms. It alters the ‘values,’ in the artist’s sense of that term. … The characteristic of life is reaction adapted to the capture of in­tensity, under a large variety of circumstances. But the reaction is dictated by the present and not by the past. It is the clutch at vivid immediacy.” (Process and Reality, 104-105)But we need to be very cautious in how we try to distinguish an organism from its environment. Is there really any rational or scientific way to draw that line cleanly? If some form of special agency emerges with living cells, the question becomes: emerges from what? Was there ever really such a thing as “dead” matter? I don’t think so. In fact, it seems more likely that what we now call “dead” matter—much of the mineral content around the Earth’s surface—isn’t some primordial substrate that life arose from, but is actually an excretion of life itself.Whatever agency is, it is not simply a property of isolated bodies. It’s a relational achievement involving the whole of cosmogenesis. Whitehead affirms that there is a more basic form of aim that precedes the conscious agency of animals, a form of being and becoming as a subject-superject, enjoying one’s existence and aiming to enhance it. Vibrating energy is not just mechanical motion through empty space. Nor is evolution merely random variation and natural selection. Variation is never entirely mindless. Long before humans mathematically decoded its waveforms, electromagnetic vibration was already an aesthetic phenomenon, a natural expression of harmonic rhythm. Energy is the transmission of pulses of emotion. Agency, we could say, is what happens when energy turns itself inside out. But energy could never give rise to living organisms unless it was already aiming at aesthetic enhancement from “the beginning” (“beginning” here really signals eternity rather than an origin point in linear time; and eternity is not somewhere else out there but only ever right here and now). Throughout the discussion, I tried to identify connections and resonances between different perspectives. When Tim Feiten explored the ethics of closed versus open umwelts, I immediately thought of Katherine Peil Kauffman’s presentation on emotion as the bridge enabling genuine intersubjective resonance. This isn’t just metaphorical: if cells equalize their voltages when they touch (as Mike Levin showed), perhaps emotional resonance literally opens our otherwise private experiential worlds to each other.We had an extended discussion about Peirce’s categories—firstness, secondness, and thirdness—leading us into fundamental questions about explanation and origin. Is there an irreducible co-extensiveness of all three categories, such that thirdness is always already present “at the beginning” (another way of saying, with Whitehead, that aim or minimal mentality is cosmic in extent and not just emergent with biological organisms); or do we need to think genesis to its limit by acknowledging the ordinality implicit in any developmental scheme, with the firstness of variation being given its due?My own position is that variation is already be telically tilted, not randomly dispersed. This doesn’t require an external designer but just acknowledges that Creativity has an inherent tendency to condition itself. My question for the group was whether the existence of biological agency requires a cosmic Eros or can emerge from truly undirected variation under brute natural selection.I share Timothy Jackson’s resistance to making any particular thirdness primordial. This just serves to block inquiry with unexplained explainers. Yet I still myself drawn to Whitehead’s notion that what is metaphysically contingent (God as the first accident of Creativity) can also be categorically necessary. Whitehead intends his God concept to function as a maximally generic potential for organization without determining the specific forms that organizational potency takes.By the end of this conversation, I felt we had not resolved but intensified these fundamental tensions. The discussion revealed biophilosophy as a form of transdisciplinary research operating at the molten intersections of empirical science and philosophical speculation, technical precision and ethical concern. I invited participants to continue the shared inquiry at the International Whitehead Conference next summer in Carbondale, Illinois, where we’ll have another biophilosophy session.The path forward isn’t to resolve the tensions but to think with and through them, maintaining conceptual precision while embracing experimental openness (including experiments on language itself). The life of thought lurks in these very tensions!As hosts of life ourselves, we’re not external observers but examples of the very processes we are seeking to understand. This onto-epistemic participatory situation is precisely what I sought to address in my conference talk yesterday. More on that soon! This closing conversation reminded me why biophilosophy matters: it’s where our deepest questions about the nature of life meet our most pressing concerns about the future we’re creating together on this fragile planet. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

Marc Gafni, a philosopher and spiritual teacher known for his Unique Self theory, and Zak Stein, an educational theorist examining consciousness and culture, dive into the relevance of philosophy in today's crisis. They discuss how shared values are crucial in a world of conflict and explore the transformative nature of love and narrative in shaping our understanding of existence. The conversation highlights the interconnectedness of personal identity and divine qualities, emphasizing a new narrative that transcends traditional paradigms and values intimacy and self-awareness.

Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

The podcast dives into the intersection of data science and Neoplatonism, exploring the biases embedded in AI and advocating for a cultural counter-practice in data science. It critiques algorithmic discrimination and examines the profound implications of technology on human flourishing. Discussions on the importance of materiality, the ritualistic aspects of science, and the philosophical implications of conscious machines further enrich the dialogue. Ultimately, it emphasizes the need for a nuanced understanding of knowledge, blending historical insights with modern challenges.

Friends, fellow process thinkers, activists, and those concerned with the course of our civilization: thank you for your attention, and thank you also to Tripp Fuller and Aaron Simmons for inviting me to contribute a lecture to this summer summit focused on democracy—Democracy in Tension. I've been invited to tease out how I understand the relationship between democracy and religion.In the United States at the moment, a certain form of Christian nationalism appears to be ascendant, though the men involved in actually running the government seem to display virtues and vices that bear little resemblance to my understanding of the teachings of the gospels. We find ourselves in a situation today not unlike 1920s and maybe even 1930s Germany, when there was a populist uprising driven by economic inequalities. It was an inter-war period then, and we certainly are increasingly at war today. The wars already underway are threatening to spiral out of control towards what has twice now been referred to as a world war. The last having been ended by nuclear weapons, the next will be started and presumably ended quite quickly with nuclear weapons.So we find ourselves in quite a crisis moment. Of course, as we've all grown tired of hearing, crisis also signals opportunity. There is an opening occurring, and I think the invitation is one that I feel is really about asking us to speak into this opening, this potential. The kairos is offering us a variety of ways forward, and we have to decide which we want to take.This may in fact be a lost cause. But as Josiah Royce pointed out, to be loyal to a lost cause is not to be deceived. It is to insist that the meaning of life lies not in what we win, but in what we serve.I'm going to share some thoughts about political power and political theology. I'm going to talk about Carl Schmitt and Bruno Latour and Alfred North Whitehead and others about the situation we find ourselves in and the ways forward. What I share with you today is really a summary of a longer chapter in a volume called From Force to Persuasion: Process Relational Perspectives on Power and the God of Love (Wipf and Stock, 2024).Reimagining CivilizationThose of us wrestling possibility from the ruins of industrial civilization must confront an uncomfortable truth: every civilization before ours has been built on empire—on the exploitation of human beings through slavery and economic oppression, and on the extractive plundering of Earth's living systems. We have harvested minerals and burned fossilized sunlight to fuel this fleeting petroleum interval, this momentary flare in geological time.These finite resources approach exhaustion, yet we persist in the delusion that our economy operates as perpetual motion, somehow exempt from thermodynamic law—as if it required no fresh energy from the biosphere, as if it produced no entropy. The economy is, obviously, a subsystem of Earth's ecology, yet our actions betray a profound forgetting of this elementary fact.Civilization requires not merely reform but metamorphosis—a ground-up reimagining rooted quite literally in the ground itself. We must reconceive human society within the context of a living Earth, with Gaia as primary presence, as Latour argues in his Gifford lectures Facing Gaia (watch my lectures on Latour’s book: part 1, part 2). To cross the threshold into this new geological epoch—whether we name it the Anthropocene following the Holocene, or mark it as an entirely new era succeeding the Cenozoic—we must become earthlings in the fullest sense. This demands a new natural theology, new rituals of attunement to the wider reality that modernity has systematically obscured.Wrestling with Carl SchmittWe must grapple with Carl Schmitt, that paradoxical figure who combined razor-sharp critique of liberalism with service as crown jurist to the Nazi regime. His diagnosis of liberal democracy's contradictions demands serious engagement, even as we reject his fascist prescriptions. He illuminates genuine vulnerabilities in constitutional democracy while bending those insights toward authoritarian ends.My project here follows Schmitt's analytical arc while bending it in a Whiteheadian direction—away from dictatorship and toward a pluralistic, cosmopolitical democracy. By cosmopolitics, I mean not Kantian cosmopolitanism but Latour's Gaian natural theology, where the integration of cosmos and polis dissolves the modern liberal fantasy of sealed borders between human society and nature. Modernity imagined humanity could achieve limitless freedom through technological mastery over a separate natural realm. This bifurcated worldview has become untenable—the planet itself refuses it. We are compelled toward a cosmopolitical ground that dissolves the reified boundary between human and more-than-human worlds.Can process-relational metaphysics offer passage to an ecological civilization that transcends the imperial and exploitative patterns of its predecessors? Can it preserve democracy against the rising tide of authoritarianism while enabling just habitation of Earth?Schmitt's Five NeutralizationsSchmitt famously surveys five what he calls neutralizations in the modern period. It begins with the theological neutralization in the 16th century and then moves through the metaphysical, moral, economic, and finally the technological neutralization. For Schmitt in the early 20th century, technology had become the new anti-religion that pretends to be neutral, to be above all value. Schmitt already saw in 1929 and earlier how mass media could turn war into peace, oppression into freedom, just through the sheer power of suggestion.Print technology enabled mass mind control. Radio—Hitler would ensure every German household possessed a Volksempfänger, that "people's receiver" through which der Führer could whisper directly into every living room—inaugurated the age of manufactured consciousness at industrial scale. Before Orwell coined "Newspeak," Schmitt heard its static crackling through the Volksempfänger.His diagnosis cuts deeper in our age of algorithmic feeds that train us, through engineered addiction, to mistake tribal signal-boosting for truth-seeking. Truth is not a zero-sum competition for clicks and shares, yet our social media ecosystems reward precisely such behavior, proliferating half-truths and outright deceptions.These technologies constitute what Schmitt called the technological anti-religion. They call into question liberalism's foundational premise: that education and a free press could sustain rational public discourse. If media technologies—whether broadcast or algorithmic—function as sophisticated instruments of consciousness manipulation rather than enlightenment, then liberalism's epistemic foundations crumble.Sovereignty and the ExceptionAgainst liberal normativism, Schmitt declares: "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception." Liberal jurisprudence masks this irreducible need for decision behind supposedly neutral procedures. Yet when catastrophe strikes, someone must suspend the rules and act. Abstract systems cannot map the unthinkable; flowcharts cannot compute responses to the genuinely unprecedented. Only a person—a sovereign—can decide.Schmitt's crypto-monarchism (perhaps not so crypto, given his Catholicism) accepts democracy as modernity's fate while insisting it requires a demagogue to shape mass consciousness through technological manipulation.Whitehead's Alternative VisionWhitehead might agree that secular political categories are secularized theology, but he reverses the flow of influence. When Christendom submitted to Caesar, imperial lawyers edited God into an emperor. Against this, Process and Realityoffers a God who "dwells upon the tender elements of the world," whose power operates through persuasion rather than coercion.How can Schmitt, a Catholic, ground politics in the friend-enemy distinction when the Gospel commands "love your enemies"? Force ultimately defeats itself. As Whitehead recognizes, organisms require an ecology of mutual support to flourish.Whitehead's process theology secularizes God's function in the world, revealing each creaturely moment as a miniature miracle—an imago Dei. "The world lives by its incarnation of God in itself," he writes in Religion in the Making. Every actual occasion constitutes a locus of irreducible value, inheriting the entire past universe while contributing its unique perspective to the cosmic adventure.Each occasion—each creaturely miracle—demands recognition and reciprocity rather than domination. No creature exists in isolation; creatures are made of other creatures in an ontology of radical communion.Process thought thus converges with philosophical personalism—Mounier, Buber, Levinas—in grounding rights not in social contracts or market exchanges but in the irreducible dignity of persons. Rights possess a spiritual foundation deeper than positive law.Beyond Liberal ParalysisLiberals often retreat from acknowledging these metaphysical roots, yet even Rawls ultimately concedes that natural rights must precede legislative construction.Mary Parker Follett's application of process philosophy to governance offers a way forward. She replaces majoritarian tyranny with "relational integration," where interests evolve through encounter until creative synthesis emerges.Had Follett's insights reached Weimar's embattled liberals in the 1920s, they might have developed participatory forms that dissolved Schmitt's stark dichotomy between anarchy and authority. Her method transforms democracy from zero-sum competition into a creative process where interests discover their higher integration through relationship.Gaia and Political ChoiceThe shift toward Gaian civilization must acknowledge that freedom's ultimate enemy is not other humans but what Whitehead called "the massive habits of physical nature"—birth, death, famine, earthquake. Reconciliation with nature promises no return to Eden. Nature itself is as much a construct as the society we imagine separate from it.Latour's Gaia is not the unified system of mechanistic science but something more chthonic—animate, unruly, exceeding both conceptual grasp and technological control. Process philosophy embraces nature's Heraclitean wildness, what William Connolly calls its Dionysian rather than Apollonian character. Even if we achieve political-economic justice and ecological balance, we remain vulnerable to hurricane and asteroid.Process thought interprets catastrophe not as cause for despair but as summons to deeper solidarity. Despite potential loss, we acknowledge the lure toward creative advance and the preserving love that allows nothing to perish from divine memory.Unlike inert nature, Gaia responds. Gaia grows impatient. Gaia forces political choice, asking: "What people are you forming, and on what territory?"Climate disruption exposes the fictions of neutral economics and universal humanity. Latour marshals Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction but redraws the line: it now cuts through every boardroom and voting booth, dividing those who serve Mammon from those who serve life's community. The choice crystallizes: profit or planet.A Democracy of Fellow CreaturesWhitehead's "democracy of fellow creatures" suggests what Latour envisions: a new constitution expanding representation beyond the human, with chambers speaking for rivers, forests, mountains. Until we can represent Gaia to ourselves politically, we remain deaf to what Pope Francis called "the cry of the earth."This expanded democracy requires metaphysical candor about rights' spiritual foundation—whether conceived as imago Dei, Buddha nature, or Gaia's reciprocity. We might say: not I, but Gaia in me.Formal liberty rings hollow without economic justice—freedom from hunger and precarity. And in the Anthropocene, political projects must transcend anthropocentrism or accept extinction.Neoliberal capitalism idolizes money while centralized communism stifles freedom and devastates environments. Process-relational cosmopolitics rejects both extremes.Beyond False DichotomiesSchmitt, following Donoso Cortés, admits only two options: omnipotent God or nihilistic abyss. Process thought dissolves such forced dichotomies through creative contrast.Whitehead offers a third way: the divine as cosmic eros, as lure operating within all becoming. This dissolves Schmitt's false choice between liberal paralysis and fascist decision. Decision remains necessary—Gaian emergencies brook no endless deliberation—but it can be participatory rather than monarchical, ecological rather than imperial.What would processual sovereignty entail? Not a single decider but distributed intelligence—a mycelial network of citizens embedded in ecosystems, co-deliberating toward ongoing integration rather than sovereign exception.Weaving Democracy Back TogetherSchmitt exposed liberalism's frayed edges; Whitehead shows how to reweave the fabric—not the old pattern of atomized individuals but a democracy of fellow creatures rooted in place and history.This requires reimagining our theology: releasing the imperial god mirrored by the imperial state, embracing instead the divine as persuasive logos whose liberating rhythm pulses through law, economy, and culture toward civilization's greening.The task may be impossible—a lost cause. How do we become earthlings, citizens of Gaia? Whitehead invites every decision to resonate with the world's tender elements.We cannot await post-revolutionary utopia. The kingdom of heaven already moves among us, calling us into ecological solidarity enriched by spiritual plurality, bringing the world's wisdom traditions together in common cause: the care of creation.This is process theology's promise: to hold democracy's tensions without succumbing to final solutions, to discover mediating contrasts that preserve what is best in liberalism, socialism, and the world's spiritual traditions as we learn to inhabit our place—our only place.Human beings are not accidentally Earthlings. We are Earth becoming conscious of itself. To recognize this fully—not merely as belief but as embodied ritual, as legislative reality, as scientific understanding—constitutes our task at this hinge point in planetary history.Thank you for your attention. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

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.