Footnotes2Plato Podcast

Roman and I try to wrap our heads and hearts around how it is that Christ crucified is God’s wisdom and power (as Paul has it in 1 Corinthians 1):Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to savethose who believe. 22 Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.This conversation builds on my recent reflections about God and eternal objects. We grapple with the tension between our algorithm-driven, mechanistic modern world and the ineffable mystery of the divine life hidden in all things. I found myself exploring how the “frame problem” in cognitive science—the engineering struggle to encode a sense of relevance into machines—mirrors our own challenges in expressing spiritual truths without feeling exposed or embarrassed. Drawing on Whitehead’s process philosophy, I argued that God isn’t an external watchmaker but rather an intimate lure that beckons organisms through the field of possibilities, inviting a view of life as a process of self-transcendence instead of a series of finite computations geared merely to self-preservation.We challenge conventional views of education, warning against reducing the value of our embodied, ensouled mode of existence to mere machine-like efficiency. We are struggling to re-enchant our world without succumbing to naiveté, seeking to balance intellect with heart, the finite reality of self-interest with the divine ideal of self-sacrifice, and technological convenience with genuine community. Is it possible to bridge the gap between reason and revelation? Or is it necessary to first leap into the ocean of faith before we can learn how to swim, trusting that the waves won’t swallow us and that our spirit is buoyant? …In our current cultural moment, I find myself caught between two competing impulses. On the one hand, there is the rigorous, scholarly drive to articulate ideas in a clear, rational language—a language that demands credibility and logical consistency. On the other hand, there is a more personal, ineffable urge—a longing to capture those profound, embodied experiences of the divine that defy conventional explanation. I reject the notion that these two realms—the academic and the spiritual—must be neatly compartmentalized. They are deeply intertwined, each illuminating and challenging the other.One of the core issues I explore is the “frame problem” in cognitive science. In simple terms, this problem highlights the difficulty of programming machines to determine what is relevant in any given situation. A computational system, even one fed with vast amounts of data, seems inherently incapable of making the kind of intuitive generalizations that living organisms do effortlessly. This is not just an isolated problem in artificial intelligence—it hints at a fundamental distinction between mechanical calculation and the kind of self-organizing, collective intelligence observed in living beings.I see a parallel here with a much broader, cosmological puzzle: the fine tuning of the universe. The constants of physics are set so precisely that even the slightest deviation would preclude the formation of atoms, life, or consciousness. This uncanny calibration suggests that the field of possibilities in which life unfolds is not random but is structured in a very specific way.To address both the frame problem and the fine-tuning conundrum, I propose that the continuum of possibilities is itself structured by what we may as well call a divine act. This is not the notion of God as an external watchmaker who meticulously designs each actual outcome. Rather, I draw on Whitehead’s process philosophy to argue that the divine is immanent in the world. God, or the divine character, is the attractor that shapes the network of relevant possibilities accessible to every actual occasion of experience. In other words, the divine does not dictate outcomes in a deterministic fashion but offers lures—preferred patterns or possibilities—to which living beings gravitate. This perspective does not align with traditional creationism or intelligent design; instead, it reimagines causality by distinguishing between the formal and final causes of divinely ordered, definite possibilities and the efficient causes of determinate actualities.In our era we are witnessing an unprecedented development in technology. Some voices (like Mike Levin) suggest that we are already creating “autopoietic machines” that exhibit life-like self-organization. Yet even as we build systems—such as large language models—that seem to defy our understanding of how machines should work, it becomes clear that these emergent properties are not the product of deliberate design in the classical sense. Instead, they hint at a future where the distinction between machine and organism may blur. However, I contend that even if machines develop the capacity for relevance realization and self-organization, they will likely manifest forms of mind that are alien to our human experience. Their “consciousness,” if it exists at all, might not involve the subjective feelings, emotional depth, or embodied self-awareness that characterize living organisms. In this view, the machine-organism dichotomy may be inadequate; rather than replacing life, advanced technology could represent another mode in the unfolding expression of the universe’s creative process.That said, I do see a fork in the road for human evolution. On one path—what anthroposophists would call the “Ahrimanic” route—we might embrace a purely mechanistic vision, striving to enhance and perfect our technologies until we create a new race of biomechanoid beings. In this scenario, every aspect of life is reduced to calculation and control, as if we were all just machines built to optimize efficiency.In contrast, there is an alternative “Christic” path. This approach recognizes that our true essence lies not in our capacity for calculative control but in our role as members of a larger, interdependent whole. Like cells in a vast organism, our social bonds and acts of self-sacrifice form the fabric of a deeper communal life—one that offers a kind of immortality through participation in a greater body. I referred to the old Jewish parable of the long spoons: if each person reaches out to feed their neighbor, everyone can eat; otherwise, everyone starves. When left to its own devices, the intellect can become trapped in a cage of calculation where endless data and competing possibilities lead to paralysis rather than decisive action. Pure reason, without an accompanying sense of value or purpose, would compute endlessly without ever deciding what truly matters. I believe that our ability to make meaningful decisions depends on a deeper source of value—a divine or transcendent impulse that infuses our lives with purpose.This idea finds resonance in the message of the cross, as articulated by Paul in the New Testament. The paradox that “the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom” illustrates that true understanding often lies beyond the reach of rational calculation. It is a call to integrate our intellectual capacities with a lived, transformative experience of the divine—a balancing act between the head and the heart. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

What if nature is a learning process from top to bottom? After reading Brendan Graham Dempsey’s book A Universal Learning Process, I coined the term “panmatheism.” If panpsychism means mentality or feeling goes all the way down, then panmatheism means that learning goes all the way down. In our dialogue today, Timothy Jackson and I explored this possibility by probing a recent article on “natural induction”—the idea that matter itself, even something as seemingly mindless as balls rolling on a viscoelastic network of springs, can store memory of past perturbations and gradually learn to optimize its structure. The authors of that article, “Natural Induction: Spontaneous Adaptive Organisation without Natural Selection,” propose a new process by which physical systems can exhibit adaptive organization spontaneously (including not just memory but anticipatory generalization), without relying on the classic Darwinian story of “the differential survival and reproduction of randomly varying types,” as the authors put it. One of the co-authors, Richard Watson, joined me in dialogue several months ago to discuss these ideas: I was eager to connect the article to a broader conversation Tim and I have been having for a while now about how best to generalize evolution beyond the biological realm. I suggested we start with the idea of learning itself. Most people usually assume learning is a human activity, something we do in school that involves some memorization and some degree of creativity. But of course with a little reflection most of us would also acknowledge learning is more widespread than just our species. Even hardcore behaviorists acknowledge that other organisms learn, or at least are subject to conditioning of various kinds. What’s novel about this natural induction article is its proposal that learning—and by this they mean a process involving memory and inductive generalization—exists before life even arises in simple physical systems. They argue that even basic mechanical arrangements can learn. It then follows that natural selection is not the only source of evolutionary adaptation in the living world. “Natural induction” may be more widespread, not only in the biological world but throughout cosmogenesis. Tim, of course, has a more generic understanding of selection and felt these authors were defining it too narrowly. He found their insistence on separating “natural induction” from “natural selection” rhetorically unnecessary. If we redefine selection in a more generalized way, then gradient-based models are still a form of selectionist thinking.I noted that Darwin’s original discussion of natural selection was based on an analogy with artificial selection. Richard Dawkins would still insist on a dualism here (which is why he says humans alone can rebel against their selfish genes), but if we are seeking coherent integral account of evolution (one that would include our own capacity to become conscious of it), then our artificial selections must be on a continuum with the processes of natural selection/induction operating elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Humans are not outside nature designing it. I quoted Whitehead from Adventures of Ideas: “Consciousness itself is the product of art in its lowliest form. For it results from the influx of ideality into its contrast with reality, with the purpose of reshaping the latter into a finite, select appearance. But consciousness having emerged from Art at once produces the new specialized art of the conscious animals—in particular human art. In a sense art is a morbid overgrowth of functions which lie deep in nature. It is the essence of art to be artificial. But it is its perfection to return to nature, remaining art. In short art is the education of nature.” (p. 271Thus, nature itself is already Art, already technical. The authors construct a physical model—essentially a ball rolling across a series of viscoelastic springs—and show that the system can spontaneously organize, not only retaining memories of certain arrangements via a standard local optimization (where a ball just settles into a local minimum and gets stuck), but shifting into a second-order type of optimization that achieves a kind of inductive generalization beyond prior experience. From the article:“Specifically, the system finds solutions that are lower in energy than any solution found by the original dynamics. This means that the system is not just forming a memory of low-energy configurations it had already visited, it is visiting configurations that are novel (and even lower in energy). This is possible because an associative memory can generalise—it can generate novel patterns from the same class, not just patterns it has been trained on (i.e., already visited)” (Sec. 3.1).Tim kept insisting, though, that even such models can be interpreted within a generalized selection framework, because attractors in dynamical systems effectively select the states a system will occupy. He criticized the authors for claiming that “gradient-based models aren’t selection,” because in his view, that’s just a narrower definition of natural selection than necessary. Tim mentioned how development (or ontogenesis) is the evolution of the individual, in the sense that phenotypes undergo selection—and not strictly genetic selection—throughout their lifespan. The authors of the article mention that one genotype can store and recall multiple phenotypes:“…when selection acts on the parameters of a developmental process, with complex pleiotropic interactions, it is possible to store and recall multiple fit phenotypes in a single genotype and for generalisation in this model space to produce novel phenotypes from the same class” (1.3).We agreed that phenotypic plasticity is common yet often overlooked by rigid Neo-Darwinian reductionists. Tim talked about nesting time scales—where variation, selection, and inheritance play out continuously on multiple levels, not just in discrete generational blocks.I speculated that the periodic table of elements itself reveals a story of energy landscapes and local minima on a cosmic scale. I described how, early in the universe, you only really had protons and electrons, then hydrogen, maybe a little helium and lithium—but not much else. Over time, these lighter elements passed through stellar processes—fusion in stars—and, through that crucible, emerged heavier elements. You can think of each distinct element as a new valley in an immense energetic landscape, another local minimum the cosmos stumbled into.You might assume that, once the universe finds a stable form like an atom, that might be the end of evolution. But it didn’t all just freeze there. Even atoms themselves keep pushing beyond local minima through supernova events that forge heavier elements. Cosmic evolution is a kind of nested search process, where energy doesn’t simply fall into stable configurations but builds on prior stability to leap into altogether new minima. And from these new minima, further forms become possible, whether molecules, cells, or ultimately conscious human beings.The idea of ergodicity basically says, if you give a system enough time to roam around its state space, it’ll eventually visit every possible microstate compatible with its energy. But the catch, as Tim pointed out, is that the broken symmetries and feedback loops of evolution keep the universe from being truly ergodic in that absolute sense. It isn’t like the universe dutifully cycles through all states with equal probability. Instead, by finding a local basin of attraction—like a particular atom—energy becomes organized in a way that alters the probabilities for where to go next.So while there’s always unpredictability, what emerges is not uniform wandering through all conceivable states. Thanks to the constraints that each prior state imposes, it’s a guided or inductively biased wandering. That bias is what keeps luring the universe to search further, rather than letting everything collapse into a single equilibrium or remain stuck in a low-level stability forever.Connecting this back to natural induction: just as the periodic table was not laid out in advance but was gradually revealed through cosmic history, systems at every level—be they molten metals or evolving cells—similarly explore landscapes of possibility in ways that preserve memory while still allowing creative leaps. Those leaps or transitions let new basins of attraction appear. In cosmic terms, heavier elements needed stars to fuse them; in biological terms, cells need those heavier elements to develop metabolic complexity. Each actualized state reconfigures the topos of possibilities for the next phase.We thus avoid the idea that the universe is neatly surfing one big energy curve from start to finish. Ergodicity in the ideal sense suggests a traversal of all states, but the reality is that feedback and canalization gnaw into definite pathways of potentiality. Henri Bergson was way ahead of contemporary science when it comes to the cosmic extent of memory and creative evolution:“…as regards the psychical life unfolding beneath the symbols which conceal it, we readily perceive that time is just the stuff it is made of.There is, moreover, no stuff more resistant nor more substantial. For our duration is not merely one instant replacing another; if it were, there would never be anything but the present–no prolonging of the past into the actual, no evolution, no concrete duration. Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. And as the past grows without ceasing, so also there is no limit to its preservation. Memory, as we have tried to prove, is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, or of inscribing them in a register. There is no register, no drawer; there is not even, properly speaking, a faculty, for a faculty works intermittently, when it will or when it can, whilst the piling up of the past upon the past goes on without relaxation. In reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. The cerebral mechanism is arranged just so as to drive back into the unconscious almost the whole of this past, and to admit beyond the threshold only that which can cast light on the present situation or further the action now being prepared-in short, only that which can give useful work. At the most, a few superfluous recollections may succeed in smuggling themselves through the half-open door. These memories, messengers from the unconscious, remind us of what we are dragging behind us unawares. But, even though we may have no distinct idea of it, we feel vaguely that our past remains present to us. What are we, in fact, what is our character, if not the condensation of the history that we have lived from our birth-nay, even before our birth, since we bring with us prenatal dispositions? Doubtless we think with only a small part of our past, but it is with our entire past, including the original bent of our soul, that we desire, will and act. Our past, then, as a whole, is made manifest to us in its impulse; it is felt in the form of tendency, although a small part of it only is known in the form of idea.From this survival of the past it follows that consciousness cannot go through the same state twice. The circumstances may still be the same, but they will act no longer on the same person, since they find him at a new moment of his history. Our personality, which is being built up each instant with its accumulated experience, changes without ceasing. By changing, it prevents any state, although superficially identical with another, from ever repeating it in its very depth. That is why our duration is irreversible. We could not live over again a single moment, for we should have to begin by effacing the memory of all that had followed. Even could we erase this memory from our intellect, we could not from our will.” (Creative Evolution, Ch. 1, pgs. 4-6)In closing, I reflected that success in bridging these worlds—between the free energy principle, autopoiesis, natural induction, Whitehead, Simondon—often means upsetting everybody equally. Each community has its own favored models, terms, or rhetorical stances. But Tim and I share a conviction that there’s a deeper continuity uniting physical, biological, and mental processes. Watch our dialogue below: Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

I was responding to a view videos in this podcast, including:* Marc Gafni criticizing Yuval Harari on Aubrey Marcus’ podcast. * Brendan Graham Dempsey and Layman Pascal discussing the metamodern meaning of naturalism: Thinking ‘Nature’The video conversations above are in varying ways about the relationship between human beings and nature—both external nature, as modern science has conceived of it, and internal nature, as modern art, literature, psychology, and spirituality have conceived of it. These videos include Marc Gafni on Aubrey Marcus’s podcast, engaging in a mock debate with Yuval Harari and attempting to refute Harari’s basic claim that value is fictional. In Harari’s view, concepts including human rights, money, corporations, God—all of these are made-up stories. All our political ideologies, whether communist or capitalist, are likewise just made-up stories. Harari seems to be foisting a relativistic, nihilistic, anti-philosophy upon the common mind. He is very popular: his books have sold millions of copies, he speaks at the World Economic Forum every year, and he appears to be taken up very easily by the zeitgeist, by the popular intellectual culture of our times.Gafni, a philosopher and spiritual practitioner, delivers a rebuttal to Harari’s claim that value is unreal. Gafni reaffirms that we have no scientific or religious reason—no philosophical reason—to deny the reality of value, and in fact the weight of the whole history of human reflection on these questions, for the majority of our history, has always been to affirm the ontological status of value. Gafni will admit that there have been attempts to defend the objectivity of value that became justifications for violence and even the extermination of those who denied or did not uphold that value. He emphasizes the need for a shift from a monotheistic conception of value to a pluralistic conception, where we are always relating within a field of values. This field is evolving; it is an eternal field that is evolving with us because we are participants in its creation. Yet there would not even be an “us” unless that eternal value existed in us—unless it inspired our learning, our deepening relationality, our pursuit of intimacy. We are inspired by the eternal field of value to enrich the eternal. The eternal would not be freeing us into time unless there was something to be achieved here and now, again and again, always different. Eternity is in love with the productions of time, as Blake put it.Another conversation I watched featured Brendan Graham Dempsey and Layman Pascal discussing metamodern conceptions of nature. They spoke about romanticism and how it characteristically reaches for a more integral sense of the connection between mind and nature. This made me think of Wordsworth—of his famous poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798.”I visited Tintern Abbey when I traveled through the UK in 2010. I was a kind of eco-poetic tourist visiting this site because I was inspired by reading Wordsworth’s poem and also by paintings of Tintern Abbey (especially J. M. W. Turner’s) from hundreds of years ago, when it still had all this ivy growing on it. The Park Service (or whatever organization oversees such sites in Britain) removed all that ivy at some point in the early 20th century, around 1914. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other Romantic artists, painters, and poets who traveled to this site remarked that the ivy’s presence, draping the ruins, was especially enchanting.But the thing is, already by 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge were already eco-poetic tourists. Romanticism always had this self-reflexive irony built into it. There was a long tradition, going back to the beginning of the 18th century and even earlier, of people traveling to this ruin to take in its aesthetic romance. The abbey was built in the 12th century for the Cistercian order, but it was shut down under the reign of Henry VIII when he dissolved the monasteries. The lord who was given control of that land sold off the lead from the roof and let the building decay. By the 18th century, people visited it to experience the beauty of this mixture of nature and human architecture—this sacred cathedral crumbling away, overgrown by plants, ivy, swallowed back into the earth in a sense, but still standing strong and clearly bearing the marks of intelligence on Earth, rendered in stone as a response to the real dome—the heavenly dome—above, with its sharply defined constellations of meaning.There is value radiating down from the sky, and the cathedrals we have built all over the planet—temples, mosques, other forms of sacred architecture—are a response to that value radiating to Earth. It is a response of the human I to radiate back, not just a reflection of that value but a true re-creation of it. We enjoy what we are given by the gods, and then we re-create and become as the gods are. In fact, the human being is both natural and divine (for me, these words are interchangeable, so I guess Spinoza is right), and we must come back into touch with the cosmos—our own nature is integral with external nature, cosmos and psyche are not two. Then we may intuit and participate in the world-soul. We will do this by partaking in the call-and-response of creation and the incarnational way the divine creates such that we see how we, living beings with physical and etheric and astral bodies, are made in the image of a Divine One. Nature is the image of God; nature is the body of God as well. “Incarnational” means that God is in theorganism, and theorganism is an evolving process, forever enriching both God’s eternal vision and God’s evolving world-soul. God does not only see; God feels, responds to, and becomes passive before the creative onrush of our self-differentiating pluriverse.Wordsworth was clearly having an experience of communion with nature and with himself, with his own memory of being in nature. The Harmony of the harmonies was sounding through his, what I would call, “auto-cosmological relationship” to the ground of being. This term “auto-cosmology” comes out of the work of Brian Swimme and Carolyn Cooke at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), where I teach. Auto-cosmology is what Wordsworth is doing in his nature poetry; it is what Dante does in The Divine Comedy; it is what Augustine does in the Confessions. It is the human being trying to relate themselves to the cosmos as the cosmos.…One paradox I found in the Aubrey Marcus podcast is the way in which Gafni is rightly critical of Harari for denying that human beings have any agency or freedom—Harari argues that we are basically just machines determined by various forces and embedded in memetic networks, overpowered by all the fictions we invent to bind our civilizations together. Gafni wants to refute Harari’s scientific materialism and nihilistic relativism, which I think is an important task. Harari’s ideas, in my view, are quite damaging. But it is not just that materialism is false; it makes itself true. I have to credit Rudolf Steiner for opening my eyes to this. It would be bad enough if all we had to do was theoretically refute materialism, but the problem is that once people take it seriously—once they believe nature is a machine and the human is a machine—they begin to surround themselves with machines that treat us like input-output machines. Then we become, in effect, conditioned through the “Skinner box” logic of social media algorithms on the internet.If we do not recognize a real field of value, then we cannot help but descend to the level of machines. This is what Gafni worries about in terms of the technosphere, social media algorithms, and how easily (despite our potential for freedom and creative agency!) humans can be manipulated by machine learning algorithms. There is a “value alignment” problem with AI: we have to give AI some sense of what is important—of ultimate significance. But if Harari is right and everything is relative, then there is no solution to the alignment problem. Human beings will become pets of the superintelligent machines or of the elites who control that superintelligence.Gafni insists that we are free, that human beings possess genuine agency and want to express it so as to enter into ever more intimate relationships with others. It is always agency and communion; always autonomy and communion. The law is never fixed. The self-law-giving, self-legislating being that we are as autonomous organisms is always in relationship to and embedded in a network of agreements with others. When we believe in materialism and try to build a civilization on it, we make it true by creating and surrounding ourselves with machines that degrade us to a machine level. It would be simpler if we only had to theoretically refute materialism; instead, we must also ethically and practically show it to be untrue—by exemplifying the power of spiritual ideals that recognize death is not the end (in every sense of end), and that human existence is meaningful because we have an important role to play in cosmogenesis and the process of creation.Harari would deny all of that as mere fiction. He’s not wrong: there are ways in which we truly are creatures of symbol and story, with the capacity imaginatively to construct alternative realities or simulations. Such constructions can sometimes distract us from the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. We must proceed with caution. Still, saying that value is real means that it is part of our perception; it inheres in nature and in our bodies. Value is not merely a human cultural construct. Human culture itself is an emergent product of the values that we inherit from the cosmos.Materialism poses a danger to our mental and ecological health because it attempts to make itself true. When people believe there are no cosmic values, no real field of values, then we become brain-bound capitalists and reduce the entire world to a competitive market economy, a mere struggle for existence among separate, selfish individuals. We forget that to be an individual is already to be in relationship, to be undivided from others. That relationality undermines any sense of selfishness even being possible. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

Below is a ChatGPT summary of the transcript of my conversation with Richard Smith and Adam Shields. I reviewed and lightly edited it for accuracy. Substack also automatically creates an exact transcript if you’d prefer that. I admit I feel profoundly ambivalent about using AI for these purposes. Part of me worries that by even using these “tools” (which of us is the tool?) for transcription and summary purposes I am contributing to the corporate colonization and extractive commodification of the last remaining inner vestiges of free human cognition. Another part of me finds it tremendously liberating to let the machine produce these sorts of transcripts and summaries, since I certainly don’t have time to do this myself. For now I feel like it is important to stay involved in digital culture and not pretend I might retreat from our current trajectory and remain relevant. So I remain in it but not of it, or at least am holding out for faith not just in better messages but in the redemption of the medium itself. It may be that our civilization is spiraling into cultural and ecological suicide. Or maybe the digital is indeed a new form of life. I’d rather participate in shaping a pro-human and ecozoic future for the technosphere than cede its design to the transhumanists. Matt Segall begins by reflecting on his schedule of recorded conversations, explaining that he accepts as many invitations as he can manage because discussion and expression are integral to how he learns. Adam Shields thanks him for being so prolific, saying that Matt’s work has served as a “big door” for his own growth over the past year. Matt reflects on how dialogue is inseparable from knowledge in his view: true understanding for him only emerges in an interplay with others. Richard Smith then describes his aspiration for this particular conversation, mentioning that it will center partly on quantum information theory and on themes that stretch back to Wolfgang Smith’s ideas.Richard recounts his own work with Wolfgang: he ran Wolfgang’s foundation for a couple of years and got him online, recorded numerous hours of private conversations, and convened a discussion group around Wolfgang’s work. Hearing that, Matt praises the archival preservation of Wolfgang’s ideas and observes how valuable that kind of preservation will be for future influence. Richard confirms his intention to keep Wolfgang’s contributions alive in some form, recalling how Matt interviewed Wolfgang in the past and how Whitehead’s philosophy emerged as a point of intersection during that interview.Richard asks Matt where he sees Whitehead overlapping or diverging from Wolfgang Smith’s perspective. Matt answers that Wolfgang shared Whitehead’s rejection of the “bifurcation of nature,” the idea that the physical world is distinct from the realm of qualities and interiority. Both thinkers refuse to treat mind as a mere byproduct or epiphenomenon. However, a key difference, according to Matt, is that Wolfgang saw time and history more as an appearance—the real is the one eternal wholeness—whereas Whitehead, a pluralist, balances the many and the one. Whitehead preserves genuine novelty in each evolving moment, which for him includes the possibility that even the divine does not fully know what arises next. Matt suspects Wolfgang, as a Catholic, might have supported some sort of historical narrative, but his emphasis on the eternal oneness fundamentally differs from Whitehead’s picture of an evolving cosmos. Adam chimes in with how Wolfgang spoke about “vertical causation” and was struck by Wolfgang’s statement that vertical causation occurs “instantaneously.” Coming from a physics background, Adam finds that jarring, and he wanted Matt to compare Whitehead’s notion of concrescence to Wolfgang’s vertical causation.Matt explains that Whitehead revitalizes formal and final causation—dimensions largely abandoned by modern mechanistic science—and holds that each moment of experience (each “actual occasion”) unfolds in a process of ingression, prehension, and concrescence. That process includes not only external physical interactions but also the ingress of timeless forms and an ongoing aim or telos. While Wolfgang ties nonlocal phenomena to a single wholeness transcending time, Whitehead describes a cosmos in which every occasion recapitulates the entire universe in its own creative act. Both approaches reintroduce a holistic sense of causality beyond standard “push-from-behind” mechanics, yet Whitehead puts more weight on genuine becoming, whereas Wolfgang underscores a single underlying eternal ground.Richard turns the conversation to personal history, asking Matt how he came to do what he does. Matt recounts discovering a love for reading and philosophy in high school, shifting his ambitions from professional hockey to voraciously exploring historical and philosophical texts. He studied cognitive science as an undergraduate, then entered the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), a program founded by thinkers like Richard Tarnas and Brian Swimme. Richard, for his part, studied math at Berkeley and became interested in Gurdjieff, Jacob Needleman, and other figures bridging spirituality with rational inquiry. His own path eventually led him to convert to Catholicism, guided in large part by Wolfgang’s thought, which helped reconcile his mind with what his heart already felt to be true.The conversation shifts to Catholicism’s place in science. Richard observes that Catholic scholastic theology arguably contributed to the idea of a rationally ordered universe, a perspective inherited by modern science, though science eventually set aside the theological underpinnings. He laments the modern notion that we can stand outside the world as pure observers. Meanwhile, Adam raises the topic of quantum information theory, referencing Chris Fields and the notion of “quantum reference frames,” where certain quantum states are expressible in finite bit-strings (speakable or fungible information) while other aspects remain non-fungible (unspeakable) and would require an infinite description. Adam interprets these distinctions in a process-relational way, suggesting that entangled quantum systems define each other without reference to an external observer, and that measurement must inevitably break this open-endedness by halting the infinite possibilities.Richard takes that as confirmation that there is a gap between what is finitely computable and what is genuinely infinite. To him, vertical causation clarifies what can never be reduced to purely horizontal, mechanistic processes. Adam clarifies his view that “computation” in the quantum world may be a non-halting process, whose completeness remains out of reach for any finite measurement, but that does not make the quantum realm unreal. Matt connects this to Whitehead’s two modes of analysis—coordinate (the measurable, data-oriented side of reality) and genetic (the interior, concrescent process)—and suggests that science’s usual coordinate analysis cannot capture the inward reality that is aesthetic, experiential, and ceaselessly creative.All three grapple with how religious experience addresses genuine relationality and personhood. Richard explains how Catholicism draws him because it places the human person at the center of value. He sees it as a spiritual community that welcomes everyone, including those with profound disabilities, as equals in a shared liturgy. He voices frustration that modern, technology-driven society treats consciousness as an emergent or computable phenomenon and might even imagine sentient machines, which he finds deeply dehumanizing. Matt concurs that many people will likely seek stronger community ties and spiritual grounding as technology grows more alienating. At the same time, Matt acknowledges a personal struggle to find an institutional religious home; he sees truth in Catholic thought and sacramentality, yet remains open to broader ecumenical possibilities and respects other paths. Richard reminds him that the institutional form itself, even if not perfect, can be valuable as a container that nurtures practice, discipline, and understanding.They contemplate the historical and cultural shifts brought about by communication technologies, citing Marshall McLuhan (himself a Catholic) and the printing press’s role in the Reformation. Matt compares each epoch-changing medium—alphabet, printing press, radio, television, internet—as reshaping collective consciousness. He and Adam note that postmodernism, metamodernism, and other theoretical frameworks also track these changes, as new media alter the flow of information and human self-understanding. Richard speaks about the continuing draw of the Church, citing the revival of interest in traditional forms like the Latin Mass among younger Catholics, who find meaning and community there. He also sees in Catholicism an unbroken thread of centuries of thought—an immense historical dialogue dealing with the same spiritual realities that puzzle modern seekers.Adam circles back to the tension between novelty and tradition, referencing metamodernism’s focus on new forms of community and sense-making. He acknowledges the power of technology to introduce genuine novelty, which spurs cultural transformation, but also wonders how small communities can scale or avoid the pitfalls of institutionalization. Matt introduces “chaosmogenesis,” a term inspired by James Joyce and later Deleuze and Guattari, combining the notion of a cosmos with creative chaos, and suggests that Christ can be understood as mediating between order and chaos—not simply enforcing one side or the other, but transforming what he calls “the all-nourishing abyss” into new forms that integrate love and novelty.They end with reflections on the Incarnation and the Christian narrative that the Creator enters creation, implying a profound shift: God is no longer solely transcendent but also deeply immanent within history and humanity. Matt imagines that in the future, scientific textbooks might one day include the logic of the Incarnation as part of a more participatory, holistic view of reality. He sees religion and science converging in a new sense that the cosmos is ongoingly created and that personhood, rather than being a byproduct, stands at the heart of it all.As the conversation concludes, the three men express gratitude and the hope that they can reconvene. Matt praises how fruitful it has been to hear everyone’s backgrounds, doubts, and commitments. Richard returns once more to Wolfgang Smith, thanking him for resisting the purely mechanistic worldview, even if Wolfgang’s stubborn style caused friction. The conversation closes on a note of mutual curiosity and respect, with Matt, Adam, and Richard all committed to exploring the mysterious union of mind, matter, personhood, and the divine. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

Below are some quotes taken from this dialogue:Roman:"The ones who last in monastic life are committed to their prayer life. The core of the thing has to be the monk's own commitment to their personal relationship with the divine.""When you're modulating the electrical signals these cells are sending to one another, in some sense, you're turning the dial of their imagination.""For me as a little cell, I need to be worried about interpreting my electrical signals... making sure I'm looking for the vision or the spirit behind each electrical signal.""The overall effect of 'you are God' is an amplification of narcissism... the people who stabilize that sense, who it doesn't do that to, it's because they're sitting completely still in a quiet place.""I feel like I have an alternate version of myself that's living at Mount Athos... trying to find my version of monasticism in the place that has fallen furthest from that search."Matt:"God could be perfect if God was just the One, but still incomplete... to be fully complete means entering into a relationship and not being totally in control of everything.""Each cell type has its own ritual performance that maintains our organism... I am the monotheistic religion of my cells."“The human being seems to be at the nexus of this cosmic process, in the middle of it, and so having a vantage point on the whole in a way that might not be available either at levels below us or perhaps even levels above us.”"What is prayer... it seems like it's analogous to a kind of attempt to tune ourselves to that larger field, to be in sync with... the theoelectric field that shapes our collective humanity.""Church should be... like you and people you're close to in your community meeting in someone's living room every Sunday morning and talking to each other about what you think all these ideas mean." Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

I began by referencing a conversation that Simon was recently involved in convened by Tim Adalin (Voicecraft about the question “Is the earth enough?”). I invited Simon to share any lingering ideas or questions from those conversations. Simon reflects that the second episode was packed with “a lot of broad frameworks for thinking about the world,” and by the end of it he was quite full, trying to feel into what still seemed relevant for him. He explains that he is drawn to the question of the direct experiencing of concepts such as the noosphere or “earth’s consciousness.” If the universe is alive and everything has an interior, how might we communicate with these beings?Simon then introduces the topic of nonphysical astral beings by talking about Carl Hayden Smith, who is involved in “DMTx” explorations, an extended DMT experience that Simon describes as “super sci-fi” yet “very, very real.” He calls it “a form of space travel” that is totally different from the materialist framework. He finds it exciting that, rather than building computer interfaces, people are “installing psychotechnological interfaces or energetic interfaces” for human consciousness to communicate with what some esoteric traditions call astral beings. I responded by considering the idea of portals being opened through practices like extended DMT, mentioning that some people encounter alien intelligences (or what McKenna famously called “machine elves”) who seem surprised to see humans—almost as if the humans got there by mistake. I wondered if there is any risk of disturbing other dimensions that we don’t belong in, which prompts Simon to recount a journey in which he literally saw a portal above him and sensed the beings within it thinking, “Oh, he’s seeing us!” before the portal closed. Simon jokes that humans might be bumbling fools in these realms, and therefore not quite capable of serious harm.Sam poses the question of whether these astral encounters induced by psychedelics are the same places we go at night in dreams. He also wonders if we are practicing “spiritual colonialism,” barging into territories uninvited. I see the dream state as more of a regular part of the human rhythm and suggested that psychedelics, especially something as potent as DMT, might represent a different type of portal that can lead people to engage in a kind of “gate crashing” into astral realms they are not spiritually prepared for. We discuss the possibility that encountered entities might want to teach or engage, or might resent the disturbance if we show up with the wrong intentions.Simon recounts Carl Hayden Smith’s report of repeatedly encountering the same entities in extended DMT sessions. At one point, they seemed to think he was coming too frequently, telling him he needed to integrate whatever they had already shared with him. I asked whether there is any attempt in these DMT experiments to coordinate experiences—do different people see the same beings or not? I wonder if the rules are all different on the astral plane, and whether we can build a science of the astral realm. Simon then imagines a frightening possibility of “multidimensional colonialism,” where humans apply “the same strategy as the Europeans did” centuries ago, but this time in other realms. Matt jokes that if karma applies, “the Europeans should be careful.”The conversation turns toward the notion that meme complexes or certain energetic patterns might be infesting humans as a result of astral journey’s without pure intentions. Perhaps we are already in a sort of full-on infestation when it comes to parasitic ideas portaling in from the astral realm. Intentions matter: Are we coming with open hearts or simply to take something from these realms? Might the evolutionary process be guided by the desire for deeper connection, such that bridges ought to be built between dimensions, but only at the right pace and in the right way?Simon muses about the amnesia that comes with incarnation in a human body. I connected this to the challenge of bringing back DMT experiences: “Memory and intellect fail to follow me there,” reminding him of Dante’s struggle to describe his vision of heaven in The Divine Comedy. Simon mentions dreams-within-dreams, a “buffering layer” for experiences. Sam then asks what role artists might play in bringing back what is otherwise difficult to translate, noting that art can circumvent rational routes and embody these revelations in ways that do not rely on conventional memory.The subject of the Incarnation of Christ arises, with Rudolf Steiner’s view that this cosmic being, the Christ, descended into the body of Jesus of Nazareth during his baptism in the Jordan and that the intensity could only be sustained for three years. We discussed the second coming of Christ as radically distributed, leading Simon to observe that “a large amount of people who have psychotic breaks proclaim themselves to be the second coming of Christ,” and that perhaps “they’re all right” on some mystical level.The conversation shifts to the role of music as a “psychotechnology,” controlling or guiding emotions. I point out that we can become architects of our own emotion in a way no prior generation could have dreamed of, given our capacity to stream any music instantly. Yet much pop music is very much an extension of the advertising industry, aiming to keep our desires oriented toward sex, status, and money. This, in turn, makes people ill-equipped for making sense of deeper astral realms. We live within a vast spiritual ecology, with beings of light feeding off compassion and dark beings feeding off fear and selfishness. We must cultivate relationships that serve our evolution.Sam wonders about the possibility that entities are also doing their equivalent of psychedelic journeying to reach us, an interesting inversion. We then explore how AI-generated art and music may complicate things further. We imagine a future in which anyone with imagination can produce sophisticated art without years of training. I express some concern that this might lead to a loss of appreciation for the artistic process, the agony and joy of genuine creation, and an over-emphasis on the product. Creativity requires embodiment and surrender, while AI emphasizes only the final product. Sam describes a work of art as a “portal to a different reality,” a “relic” of the unique place an artist visited. Simon agrees that “creation is as much about listening as doing,” and that the mind can intrude through the need for control, which parallels the challenges of fully surrendering in psychedelic experiences.I concluded by pointing out that humans seem torn between preserving tradition (treating human nature like a “museum”) and rushing toward ceaseless novelty (treating the human being as “raw material to be shaped and reshaped”). I suggested a middle path, and that as human beings, we may be destine to be “beings of the between.” Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

From New Atheism to Renewed Engagement with ChristianityWe discuss how the early 2000s were dominated by the New Atheists. This phase of cultural development was weighted in favor of the atheist point of view, making religion seem simplistic and stupid, and leading many young people to embrace secularism. Now, there appears to be an intriguing shift in which it suddenly became cool to convert to Christianity, even among individuals who once held prominent positions in the New Atheist movement.Brendan notices that while there may be a cultural oscillation, he sees only a minority moving through a genuine process of deconstruction, or rational working-through of their prior faith, before eventually seeing some sort of reconstruction. He notes how people grappling with a lack of religiosity in their lives might be experiencing a reaction to the excesses of secularism. Instead of a full developmental move that includes and transcends atheism and nihilism, many are simply reaching for more concrete religious forms or reverting to fundamentalism.We discussed Richard Dawkins unexpected claim that cultural Christianity is not so bad, and lamented the way Jordan Peterson, initially recognized for his Jungian archetypal nuance, has increasingly been pulled into more conservative theological circles and into reactionary politics. Brendan and I both welcome moving beyond simplistic atheism, but we call for a deeply philosophical, metaphysically robust conversation rather than allowing ourselves to become stuck in reactive culture-war camps or old school conversions to parochial dogmas. We must embrace a developmental approach that genuinely acknowledges the limitations of both a purely rational atheism and a naive religious literalism.Deconstruction Before Reconstruction and the Developmental PathI affirmed the importance of a deconstruction process of one’s traditional faith before trying to rush into a reconstruction, suggesting that atheism is actually a necessary stage in the emergence of genuine faith. We must genuinely grapple with the prospect at least of atheism, if not nihilism, so that a more participatory approach to meaning-making can emerge on the other side. Brendan characterizes this potential path as still a minority phenomenon but one with transformative power. Postmodern Logic, Jordan Peterson, and the Culture WarI described Jordan Peterson as reflecting precisely the kind of postmodern logic that he’s always railing against. I see him as a postmodern conservative who is basically saying, because all knowledge claims are indeed relative and perspectival, one must be prepared to forcefully re-impose order. Peterson’s appeal to certain conservative or patriarchal frameworks captures a defensive posture in a moment of chaos and breakdown and confusion, which has caused many disenchanted and alienated young men to gravitate toward him.Ultimately, if we cannot find some basis for normative reconstruction, the progressive breakthroughs made possible by postmodern critique—such as an emphasis on diversity and the complexity of social power—risk being undone by reactionary moves that just want to return to previous norms. A new kind of “hieros gamos” or synthesis must emerge, rather than reverting to a kind of more imperialistic morality or slipping back into New Atheism 2.0. Christ After Christianity, Universal Ethics, and Beloved CommunityI attempted to recover some sense of the pre-Christian Christ impulse. While a religion built up around Jesus as a historical figure (and perhaps also around Christ as a newly revealed cosmological power), there remains a still implicit moral seed that is just beginning to take root. The deeper transformative aspects of Christianity are not yet fully realized, exemplified by the tension between an ethos of forgiveness and the continuing cultural gravity of rituals of sacrifice and mob (in)justice. I believe an aspect of the Christ impulse involves recognizing the individual soul as the locus of value, such that using violence against souls to achieve justice ultimately undermines the very basis of justice itself.Brendan then expands upon Christianity’s cultural legacy, referencing scholars like Tom Holland and his argument that Western ethics, human rights, and democratic ideals have Christian origins. Christianity in some sense generated secularism and even fostered the scientific mindset, illustrating how the waning of religiosity ironically springs from Christianity’s own universalizing impulse. This same impulse can be seen in other Axial traditions, as the move to universal ethics is not uniquely Christian but an evolutionary expansion of humanity’s moral horizon.I then introduced Josiah Royce’s concept of the “beloved community” (which became very influential for figures like Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King, Jr.), where individuals hold a “loyalty to loyalty as such.” Individuals may be the primary locus of values like justice, but individuals are not parachuted into this world already fully formed. Free individuals only arise in the context of loving communities. I emphasized that real psychospiritual and moral transformation cannot be legislatively imposed upon a society by the state, but rather is incubated in cultural life out of inter- and intrapersonal relations. The beloved community is an experiment in “the task of inventing and applying the arts which shall win men over to unity,” as Royce puts it (The Problems of Christianity). If America is to be a truly “Christian nation,” it must be in that universal and multicultural sense, dedicated to “love of your neighbor,” rather than tribal identifications based on blood bonds.Metaphysics and the Cosmic Significance of the Christ EventFinally, we explored the coordinate perspectives of a “naturalistic Christology” and a “Christological naturalism.” Brendan framed this around the idea that “implicit, immanent in the natural world is a law-like pattern or Logos.” Rather than positing a supernatural incursion from “outside,” we both see the Christ event as something almost “unavoidable” once evolutionary and cultural conditions ripened. I reference Teilhard de Chardin and Jung to argue that humanity’s intuition of some sense of a moral world order is not an arbitrary fluke or biopower play but a reflection of deeper patterns of complexification and evolving cosmic compassion. We both wrestled with the problem of theodicy, noting that a God who is “large and in charge” would seemingly have to take responsibility for evil and suffering, whereas a God who is “along for the ride” (or a “fellow sufferer” in Whitehead’s sense) may be more credible. If God is co-evolving with humanity, then perhaps God needed embodiment in order to become conscious. An originally unconscious spirit is gradually waking up, learning through the contingencies of the evolutionary process how to manifest deeper love.In this post-Nietzschean vision, morality emerges from below but also points to a transcendental horizon. I think Jesus is already post-Nietzschean, beyond good and evil, in that his teachings (“hate your family,” “love your enemies”) call us to overcome conventional codes. Brendan notes that reading the Bible through a Jungian lens—where God is a literary character going through personality transformations—is a fruitful approach that integrates science, psychology, and mythopoetic imagination. We conclude that a coherent, integral cosmology must acknowledge the ongoing mutual transformation of God and humanity, leading to a more expansive sense of Christ’s evolutionary role. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

Below is a summary of our conversation that I have heavily edited but that was originally generated by ChatGPT:I proposed the idea of discussing “The Spiritual Mission of America.” I liked the word “mission” because it evokes both a guiding purpose and, implicitly, something that might carry religious or spiritual weight. We agreed that “mission” felt more active than alternatives like “dream” or “vision,” which struck me as passive or too ephemeral. “Mission” suggests something we must collectively strive toward. Before moving deeper, I thanked Edward for engaging with me. We’d first connected over a contentious Facebook post I had made, suggesting (in short) that no reasonable person would vote for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris. Edward’s thoughtful pushback opened a space for genuine conversation rather than shutting it down, and I wanted to publicly acknowledge and appreciate that.Both Edward and I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, a well-known center of progressive politics. Kamala Harris’s career and figures like Gavin Newsom have roots here, so it’s fertile ground for thinking about the current state of American political life. We planned to start personally, with our political autobiographies, and then move to grander questions about the nation’s deeper purpose.Edward explained his background. His parents were academics who started off in California but ended up in Nebraska. He grew up amid a mixture of progressive family ideals and a community deeply influenced by intense forms of evangelical Christianity. His family leaned strongly left, valuing progressive causes and working-class democratic traditions—his grandfather was even involved in union organizing efforts against Reagan. Edward’s education and interest in religion, philosophy, Kingian nonviolence, and Buddhism made him a committed progressive. He admired Cornel West, Chris Hedges, and Howard Zinn, and he’d voted Green more than once. Over time, though, he became disillusioned with the Democratic Party as he recognized that administrations like Obama’s continued many of Bush’s worst policies—foreign wars, surveillance, and the persecution of whistleblowers. He also noted the heartbreak of supporting Bernie Sanders, only to see the Democratic establishment squash his movements. Edward came to see justified resentment toward the American “establishment,” and he began to challenge simplistic party loyalties and liberal assumptions.I reflected on his story and recognized many parallels. For me, the Bush years and the Iraq War were also a political awakening. Having read Chomsky and Zinn in high school, I learned America wasn’t simply “the good guy” internationally. We were involved in deep moral complicities, and our media was too often theatrical, feeding fear and propaganda. What puzzled and troubled me recently was how figures like George W. Bush, once rightly condemned for torture, preemptive war, and lies about weapons of mass destruction, were being rehabilitated by some Democrats simply because Trump seemed worse. Similarly, I noted the odd shift in attitudes toward the FBI and CIA—from the left seeing them as villains up to and including the Bush and early Obama years to embracing them when they appeared to oppose Trump. This struck me as a stunning reversal.We shifted to the 2024 election. I showed demographic data revealing significant shifts in voting patterns: younger Black and Latino men—and working-class people in general—moved more toward Trump. The expected identity-politics logic, which might have predicted stronger support for Harris, didn’t hold. Instead, there seemed to be a growing perception that Democrats were ignoring the struggles of ordinary working people, focusing too narrowly on cultural issues or niche academic language that alienated many. We both understood that cultural struggles matter, but turning them into litmus tests and injecting them into national politics seemed counterproductive.From there, we contemplated the deeper question of America’s purpose. I proposed that the nation’s psycho-spiritual conditions of possibility involve a balance between two core ideals: individual freedom and social justice. Both the right and the left champion freedom and justice in their own ways, but the forms differ. On one side, freedom might mean gun rights; on the other, freedom might mean the right to self-determine one’s gender identity. Likewise, conceptions of social justice differ—some see it in Christian moral values underpinning individual dignity and community responsibilities, others in historical redress of oppression. Holding these tensions in a single national project requires a kind of spiritual maturity that we have yet to fully develop.Edward pointed to America’s tragic and complex origins—slavery, genocide, and the uprooting of peoples—while also recognizing that our ideals involve striving for something greater. We saw literature and mythology as guiding lights. Edward quoted Martin Shaw’s distinction between “vision” (conscious intention) and “dream” (the unconscious mythic reality). He cited Moby-Dick as the first major American work to plumb the deep mythic psyche of America—chaotic, multi-ethnic, uprooted, and forever journeying. I mentioned Walt Whitman, who insisted that democracy’s history remains unwritten and must still be enacted. Both of us believe that America, as a project, is not finished.Edward mentioned Heidegger’s idea of homecoming and the need for a central mystery around which a culture can gather. In America, perhaps because we are so plural and so young, we haven’t found a single organizing myth. We have symbols like the flag, but many find patriotism awkward or suspect. Yet, we still share a currency, laws, and a peculiar sense of possibility. Could our shared spiritual mission be located in art, in beauty, in the way tragedy and comedy combine? Could jazz, with its blend of improvisation and diversity, be a model for democracy itself?At one point we contrasted the aesthetics of democracy with the aesthetics of fascism. I emphasized their differing approaches relating the whole and its parts. Democracy thrives on a dynamic balance where individual parts maintain their independence yet harmonize in tension with the whole, creating a form of beauty akin to jazz—an improvisational art form that celebrates individuality while integrating it into a collective composition. This process highlights the democratic ideal of dialogue and integration of values, which preserves the social fabric and nurtures unity without erasing difference.In contrast, fascism (and any kind of totalitarianism) embodies a reactionary and reductive aesthetic, seeking safety and uniformity by collapsing individuality into an undifferentiated whole. This approach, driven by fear of dissonance, results in a rigid and simplistic form of order that stifles creativity and complexity, rendering it intellectually and aesthetically impoverished.We both hope that America can become what it aspires to be: a pluralistic democracy that honors individual dignity while pursuing social uplift. This aspiration is not just for our own sake. If we fail, the human species will lose a crucial experiment in managing the political tension between the values of individual freedom and social justice. As climate change accelerates and global migrations swell, the ability to hold different peoples together under shared values becomes ever more critical. If the US can’t manage to pull this off, who else can?As our conversation wound down, we both felt more prepared to think about the future. I appreciated Edward’s thoughtfulness, which helped me reaffirm my sense that America’s spiritual mission remains vital, unfinished, and worth striving for. Video of our dialogue: Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

Tim and I turned our attention to Guattari’s book Chaosmosis and in particular chapter 2 on machinic heterogenesis. I shared a few thoughts yesterday about the same chapter:Tim and I discuss Varela’s concept of autopoiesis, Guattari’s machinic assemblages, Whitehead’s relational ontology, and the need to recover a new from of truth sensitive to singularities.The distinction between autopoietic machines and machinic assemblages becomes central. While Varela emphasizes organizational closure and structural coupling, Guattari critiques this for lacking evolutionary and cognitive openness. My suggestion that we shift from ontological “relativity” to “relationality” results from my deeper concern to uphold a concept of truth that resists absolutism yet avoids nihilistic relativism. We must reconstruct a concept of truth as emergent, participatory, and situational—a shared event rooted in singularity and ongoing processes of mutual implication. Relating this to political action, the framing of truth as incarnational and contextually bound could empower resistance to oppressive ideologies while fostering pluralistic solidarity. Tim’s discussion of molecular evolution and the pharmacological effects of exogenous substances (e.g., psilocin) highlights the porous boundaries between the autopoietic and machinic. These substances disrupt established neural patterns, fostering new configurations—a vivid example of machinic processes in biology. This dovetails with Guattari’s machinic heterogenesis, where disruptions lead to the emergence of new systems, assemblages, and truths. Guattari’s critique of Heidegger’s deterministic view of technology as a “malefic destiny” introduces a hopeful, non-totalizing alternative. Machinic assemblages are singular, open-ended, and precarious—a source of multiple potentials rather than inevitable doom. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

I’m sharing some thoughts after reading a chapter from Felix Guattari’s book Chaosmosis (1995). Turning again to the work of Guattari and his frequent collaborator Gilles Deleuze felt important as the US enters a dangerous moment in its own history. Fascism is not just an external threat, not just about those bad people over there. As Michel Foucault says in his preface to Anti-Oedipus (1972), we must beware of the way our own desires can be captured, of the little fascist in each of us that causes us to love power, even to love our own domination and exploitation. “We must die as egos and beborn again in the swarm, notseparate and self-hypnotized, butindividual and related.” -Henry Miller, Sexus“To be cured,” Miller continues, “we must rise from our graves and throw off the cerements of the dead. Nobody can do it for another—it is a private affair which is best done collectively.” Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe