Footnotes2Plato Podcast

Tomorrow, I’m talking to the philosopher of physics Ruth Kastner, who has developed the Possibilist Transactional Interpretation of quantum physics. I’ve also been talking to the developmental biologist Michael Levin. Both of them are exploring the space of possibilities in different ways—Ruth from a quantum physical point of view and Mike from a morphological, developmental biology point of view. In both physics and biology, science is beginning to wander into a new kind of territory.But it is no longer a spatiotemporal sort of territory. It’s not even measurable. It’s a “space” of possibility—if you can even call it a space. Maybe topos or extensive continuum is a better term. It’s not measurable; it’s not a Euclidean space, and it’s not in any higher-dimensional sort of geometrical space either. It’s some other kind of reality. It is not material—it’s mental. Or at least, that’s the philosophical direction I would say this sort of inquiry is inevitably headed. And I think both Ruth and Mike are comfortable acknowledging that this continuum of possibility is “where” minds hang out, where intelligences and agencies live. Crucially, this realm of possibilities is constantly transacting with the space-time realm of actuality. We already live in both of these realms. So don’t think of “quantum land,” as Ruth calls it, or Mike’s “Platonic morphospace,” as being somewhere else. No, we’re in it. Each and every thought, each and every movement that you make, that you are, is right at the interface of these two realms. Really, what exists is the interface, the interplay, the transaction between possibility and actuality. Neither one exists independently of the other, now or ever.So, when we’re doing science—when we’re trying to know nature—we have to take a few things into consideration. First of all, while actuality and possibility are inseparable, part and parcel of the same process, they’re nonetheless related asymmetrically. This is because there’s an irreversibility to the creative process. The interplay between possibility and actuality is going somewhere. It’s a creative advance.And so, when we consider scientific knowledge in this context, what does it mean to know ontologically? Not just what are the conditions of the possibility of knowledge, but what must the cosmos be, what must being be, in order for knowledge to be possible? And I think, to begin to answer that question, we have to start with perception. We have to perceive, and then try to describe what’s going on as we do so.Some would say perception is always of the past. That’s just a fact of physics—because of the finite speed of light, the finite speed of causality. What our retinas receive, what our brain processes, is something that has already occurred external to us. We receive light, sound waves, or other kinds of vibrations from the environment: those vectors of energy take time to travel through space and then take time to be interpreted by our nervous system. So, in this sense, we’re always perceiving the past.That would be the more realist perspective, at least. Even if we’re not perceiving what’s happening out there now, simultaneously with our experience in here now, we are at least perceiving what did happen out there in the past.But then, there are also the predictive processing approaches—an alternative way of thinking about perception—which suggests that, no, we’re not perceiving the past, we’re perceiving the future. Or rather, our prediction of the future. This is more of an anti-realist position, or at least, it considers the real potentiality of our environment in a different temporal direction.As those who listen to and read my stuff can probably guess, I think we need to bring these two perspectives together. There is a sense in which what we perceive is what we expect to perceive, but there is also a sense in which what we perceive is what has already occurred in the environment around us. And the distinction between these two—between expectation and reception—is, classically, the distinction between mind and matter.Matter is what is in the past. Mind is what is in the future. But they’re not separate. They’re just poles, held taut across what can appear to us like an interdimensional rift but what is really just a difference in degree or intensity.If perception has to be understood both in terms of a vector out of the past and a vector into the future, then knowledge is time-situated. We must recognize the time-developmental context in which knowledge is possible.We’re always situated. There will always be something more that comes after us that we can infer something about but not everything. And there is always something that has come before us—and to know it is really a kind of memory. But not just a personal memory—a cosmic memory, a cosmic anamnesis. Cosmology is in this sense an attempt to recollect the prior stages of the universe’s evolution—the same stages that produced us, that gave rise to us as perceiving, conscious beings.Gaining true scientific knowledge of the universe means remembering how we came to be who and what we are. The problem with scientific materialism and standard Big Bang cosmology is that they describe the evolution of the universe as if consciousness was incidental. Now, maybe you can construct some kind of “as if” approximation of the universe without us by leaving consciousness out. But scientific materialism constitutively elides the “as if” hypothetical nature of such approximations. In reality, consciousness does exist. It is the only reason there is such a thing as science to begin with! Life and mind did in fact evolve on this planet. The universe is not simply physics (or if it is then physics must have been already pregnant with life and mind).To understand the history of the cosmos as if it only had an outside—as if there was no inside—is not just leaving out half the picture. It’s distorting the whole picture. Because the inside is where the knowing happens, where agency happens, where decisions occur, where value is harvested and enjoyed.As Whitehead would say, actual occasions of experience ingress eternal objects—potentials that lure actuality forward. Again, there’s always this interplay between actuality and possibility. These aren’t two separate realms; they’re two intensities of one reality.There is a dipolarity to reality that throws the universe into forward motion, that allows for history, for evolution, for irreversible creative becoming. It’s not an eternal return. There aren’t a finite number of positions that the bits of the universe can take. There is open-ended transformation. No two moments are ever the same. Nothing ever repeats.And yet, knowledge is possible. So there is some degree of definiteness to things. There is something that can be recognized as recurring across occurrences—but only as an abstraction. Concretely speaking, no two moments are identical. But abstractly speaking, we can identify recurring patterns.That’s why scientific knowledge is possible. But it’s always a knowledge situated in time—it’s always caught between time zones, inheriting a past and anticipating a future.When we talk about the continuum of possibilities—whether in morphogenesis, where cellular collectives harvest the latent potentiality that haloes their biochemical activity, or in physics, where atoms become excited and try to figure out where to send their photons—there’s always a transaction occurring, a relation unfolding with determinate actualities.While it sounds odd at first, it is important to note that this transaction is not happening in an already constituted space-time. Quantum transactions do not involve some kind of retrocausality, where absorbers are sending signals backwards in time to emitters. Nor are emitters capable of precognition. It’s more like a quantum entanglement of intentionality, a synchronicity. It’s the universe deciding, microcosmic moment by microcosmic moment, the most efficient, least-action pathway forward.There’s a basic tendency toward beauty—mixed with stochasticity, chaos, and chance—that gives rise to endlessly complex forms at varying scales of the cosmic fractal. That’s why we’re here. And our knowledge of the fact is our resonance with and prehension of the same quantum patterns that made and are making us. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

My discussion with Jonathan Cobb about his book Logos and Liberation: The Path of Kenosis (2024).Jonathan, who is the grandson of the process theologian John B. Cobb, Jr (who recently died at 99 years old, and whose memorial was held over the weekend), explained that his book is the culmination of years spent exploring how transformative experiences, such as his awakening during the Occupy movement, reshaped his understanding of society. This awakening not only propelled him into radical politics and activism but also stirred a deep spiritual conversion. Amid the turbulence of protests and his own personal trials—notably, the painful witnessing of his mother’s dignified surrender to terminal illness—Jonathan discovered what he describes as a process of kenosis, or self-emptying, a concept that has come to embody his vision of liberatory politics intertwined with spiritual renewal.Jonathan recounts how his early intellectual life was marked by a flirtation with libertarianism and scientific pantheism, later enriched by explorations into psychedelics and diverse expressions of Christianity—from Gnosticism to the mystical strains of Kabbalah. These experiments, coupled with a growing disillusionment with purely individualistic modes of thought, led him gradually toward a more communal and politically engaged spirituality. His eventual embrace of a form of Catholicism—one heavily influenced by liberation theology and figures like Oscar Romero—reflects his belief that true Christianity must champion the cause of the oppressed and challenge systems of domination rather than merely offering personal salvation.Jonathan emphasizes that the quest for spiritual betterment cannot be separated from the struggle against political and economic injustice. He critiques the reductionist approaches of contemporary thinkers who dismiss transformative change as mere self-help, arguing instead for a synthesis in which the pursuit of individual enlightenment and the demand for collective liberation are mutually reinforcing. He explains that the “false Logos”—the idolatrous worship of power that has historically underpinned hierarchical orders, from divine kingship in ancient times to the modern capitalist market—must be supplanted by modeling divine kenosis. In this vision, power is not hoarded but shared, mirroring the organic, cooperative processes observed in nature and traditional forms of craftsmanship.Jonathan contrasts early egalitarian communities with the later rise of centralized, hierarchical civilizations that built monumental structures to legitimize despotic rule. He traces the evolution from the decentralized, mutually supportive guilds and communes of medieval Europe to the competitive, growth-driven imperatives of industrial capitalism, which were powered by fossil fuels and marked by the commodification of nearly every aspect of life. In his view, capitalism’s relentless drive to appropriate the commons—the natural environment, cultural knowledge, and social bonds—creates a tension that is both its strength and its undoing. Drawing on ideas from scholars like Eleanor Ostrom, he suggests that genuine democracy must be rooted in local, participatory decision-making processes rather than in the abstract notion of “voting with our dollars.”As the conversation turned to the present, Jonathan spoke with a cautious yet hopeful urgency. He envisions an “apocalyptic faith” not as resignation to an inevitable end but as an active, transformative stance that recognizes the latent potential for societal rebirth. This perspective is undergirded by his belief that while the current system appears to be in free fall—witnessing the excesses of capital and the erosion of communal life—it also creates a rupture through which a more just, community-oriented order might emerge. In his eyes, reclaiming the commons is both a practical and a spiritual imperative; it is a means of rediscovering our interdependence, of nurturing creativity, and of building a future that values human connection over profit.My Foreword to Jonathan’s book: In our fragmented and disconnected times, it is rare to find a heart-mind courageous and radical enough to argue that religious, scientific, and political renewal are all interconnected. In this book, Jonathan Cobb attempts to weave the world back together guided by the light of the incarnating Word.Cobb’s book begins with the Biblical account of creation in Genesis, which he reads as a mythic metaphor for what science now understands to be an evolutionary universe. I am reminded of Owen Barfield’s remark in Saving the Appearances (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1957/1988) that posterity will wonder why it took modern Western civilization so long to recognize “that it had, on the one hand, a religion which differed from all others in its acceptance of time...[and] on the other hand, a picture in its mind of the history of the earth and man as an evolutionary process [without supposing] any connection whatever between the two” (167). Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Alfred North Whitehead, both inspirations to Cobb, also intuited deeper resonances between the Biblical mythos and evolutionary science.For Christians, it is the person and deed of Jesus Christ that transfigures myth into history, symbol and metaphor into flesh and blood. But Cobb’s book is not narrowly advocating for a single religious doctrine. Rather, he argues that the Logos is a transreligious cosmic and societal organizing principle that shows up in all the world’s great wisdom traditions, even if by other names (such as Tao, Dharma, Ma’at, Om, or Asha). Whether we are engaged in the scientific study of nature, ritual communion with the sacred, creative expression through beautiful works of art, or active resistance to political injustice, we are making vessels of ourselves for Logos to transfigure the world.Apocalypse is an event within the soul, and is not simply a disaster—it is also an unveiling. Since Paul of Tarsus’ ministry and John of Patmos’ penning of Revelation, there has never been a generation of Christians that failed to imagine its own times as the end times. This is hardly surprising, since empires have risen and fallen before. But our nascent planetary civilization, still ruled over by Mammon, may be uniquely poised at the edge of self-annihilation. The megamachine of modern techno-industrial capitalism has seized powers on par with super volcanoes and meteorite impacts. Humanity now has the ability to destroy itself along with much of the community of life on Earth in a matter of minutes. And even if nuclear war does not break out in the coming years, our business-as-usual economy of exploitation has already declared total war on people and planet by seeking to maximize ROI above all other values, undermining Earth’s life support systems in the process. The worsening ecological catastrophe is not incidentally related to the social catastrophes of nationalism, materialism, alienation and nihilism. All are symptoms of a lack of attunement to Logos.Logos is not, in Cobb’s vision, a coercive order imposed from without. Logos is rather a kenotic or self-emptying activity, a creative-relational interplay otherwise known as Love. We know we are in its presence whenever we join in free association with others to build a wiser and more compassionate future together. Logos and Liberation is a prayer for this future. Cobb remains hopeful without being naïve, fired by faith in the human spirit that we might remember amidst all our frailty and fallenness that we are made in the image of a Creator, and that we and the world can be saved. “The good of the Universe cannot lie in indefinite postponement,” as Whitehead said in Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1933/1967).“The Day of Judgment is an important notion: but that Day is always with us. […] The effect of the present on the future is the business of morals. And yet the separation is not so easy. For the inevitable anticipation adds to the present a qualitative element which profoundly affects its whole qualitative harmony” (269).Small or large, the acts of faith and love we perform in the present feed the growth of Spirit in the world, granting Logos ever more intimate passage into the flesh, blood, breath, and bone of everyday life. Political revolution, if unaccompanied by spiritual transformation at the level of individual souls and the loving communities they form, is likely to amount to little more than the spinning of wheels, replacing one dominator hierarchy with another. We cannot expect to build a just eco-social order out of foolish and selfish people, such as we know ourselves to be. We might do well to consider how the lilies grow. They do not spin, nor toil, but delight in the gifts of sunlight and soil, celebrating the splendor of creation while still groaning in expectation that we might learn to do the same. 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Timothy Jackson and I discuss Michael Levin's new pre-print "Ingressing Minds: Causal Patterns Beyond Genetics and Environment in Natural, Synthetic, and Hybrid Embodiments" (which will eventually end up in the anthology collecting papers from the “Metaphysics and the Matter With Things: Thinking With Iain McGilchrist” conference at CIIS last Spring). Also in the mix: Daniel Smith's article "The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism"; James Bradley's article "Whitehead's Transcendental Cosmology: The Speculative Transformation of the Concept of Logical Construction"; Evan Thompson's book Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind; and Tim's discussion with Michael Levin and Robert Prentner about Platonism in biology. Tim and I (as usual) had a wide-ranging and complex discussion. There are a lot of ideas to untangle here, and there is never an easy place to begin. Indeed, in process metaphysics, all we can hope to do is begin again in media res. We orbit around the re-emergence Plato’s Ideas in biology. Tim and I are seeking to avoid the rigid Platonism of perfect immutable forms (originals) hovering above physical bodies (pale imitations or copies) and instead seek to invert or overturn Plato, offering a more processual approach that invites us to think beyond traditional hylomorphic schemes. Mike Levin's work, and particularly this pre-print, presents a dramatic challenge to the reductionist paradigm, which attempts to explain biological form and agency in terms of collections of discrete material parts or biochemical laws, or in terms of more-or-less hand-wavy accounts of “emergence.” His pre-print is calling for a more layered or textured ontology: laws and patterns that operate not only on multiple scales, but even in realms that are not purely physical.I’m grateful to both Tim and Mike for reaching out to philosophers in their attempt to grapple with these problems, which are both scientific and metaphysical in nature. In a time when many scientists—think of Neil deGrasse Tyson—dismiss philosophy as irrelevant, the collaborative spirit on display here feels like a hopeful new trend. Tyson and other prominent physicists perpetuate the cliché that philosophy of science is of no scientific use, that it is as irrelevant as ornithology is to birds. But Levin’s engagement proves otherwise. 20th century philosophers like Simondon, Whitehead, and Bergson sought to help scientists keep up with the metaphysical implications of their own scientific discoveries. Their efforts were aimed at reminding scientists that their own discoveries—evolution, quantum nonlocality, and spatiotemporal relativity, for instance—cannot be reconciled with mechanistic materialism. The mechanistic worldview inherited from Descartes, which dominated the scientific imagination for centuries, has been undermined by science itself.That said, philosophers must continue evolving alongside science, integrating new findings into our speculative schemes without clinging to outdated assumptions. There is no final resting place in this journey. Reality is a perpetual flux (which is why I half-jokingly call it “Creality” in my book). The best we can do is to meet our ever-evolving reality with humility, continuously refining our conceptual schemes in sympathetic response with the rhythms of an environing cosmic community. It is a sobering but liberating task. There is no point of arrival in philosophy or science, only a creative advance into deeper understanding (Inshallah!).Within this larger project, I believe it is crucial to distinguish between cosmology and metaphysics. Whitehead’s insights on this distinction are essential here. Cosmology concerns the empirical study of contingent phenomena—patterns and regularities that emerge within our particular cosmic epoch. These patterns are historical and subject to change, to evolution. In contrast, metaphysics seeks the principles that condition the possibility of any cosmic epoch. These are not empirical findings but regulative ideals, philosophical principles or categorical conditions. We should not presume to have definitively grasped these categories, for they remain forever subject to revision in light of new experience.If we understand Mike’s work to be operating within the domain of cosmology, then I am largely in agreement with him. He posits the existence of what we might call transphysical agencies, non-physical yet organizing forces akin to Plato’s animating deities. For the ancient Greeks, stars and planets were not dead material bodies; they were living beings with their own intelligence and agency. Today, we might call them complex self-organizing systems, but the underlying intuition remains: there is something living or at least life- and mind-like about the cosmos at all levels. Thus, I affirm Mike’s generally panpsychist orientation when it comes to cosmology.However, my reservation arise if we shift to considering Mike’s proposal at the metaphysical level. He attributes agency to the Platonic forms or possibilities themselves, suggesting that they possess a kind of active intelligence that presses into the actual world. Here I diverge, leaning instead on Whitehead’s view. In Whitehead’s metaphysics, agency belongs not to eternal objects but to actual occasions—events that prehend possibilities and creatively actualize them. Forms do not impose themselves from without; they are taken up and transformed by occasions in the ongoing process of becoming. This distinction may appear subtle, but I see it as crucial. If we imagine forms as autonomous agents, we risk reducing potentiality to actuality by canceling any real distinction between them. Whitehead avoids this over-simplification by way of a dipolar ontology, in which eternalities and actualities exist in a relationship of mutual conditioning, mediated by a divine actuality.This is where Whitehead’s notions of the primordial and consequent nature of God come into play. The primordial nature conceptually prehends the infinite realm of eternal objects and can be said to shepherd all pure possibilities—forms that are not yet actualized in spacetime—into a unified (maximally simple) organizational continuum. The primordial nature carries the scent of both Heraclitus’ Logos and Plato’s Eros. The consequent nature, on the other hand, gathers together the creative achievements of actual occasions and the ideal possibilities refracting from them, weaving the dipole into a coherent whole. The consequent nature is like a cosmic memory, a tragic poet compelled to reconcile the wretched wreckage of history with the ideal judgment of the cosmic aesthete. Despite its macrocosmic significance, the divine dipolarity of primordial mental pole and consequent physical pole is just another instance (the first though still entirely accidental example) of Concrescence, and like all currently concrescing (in “unison of becoming” with one another) finite microcosmic spatiotemporal occasions of experience, God lives, dies, and is reborn eternally in and through the ever-ramifying and creative NOW. In this way, eternal forms are never free-floating substantially existing essences; they are dynamically entangled here and now and everywhere with actuality (ie, entangled with both the divine actual entity and all other actual occasions).Mike’s notion of “pointers” represents an important attempt to articulate how biological (and possibly future AI) systems interact with what might be called latent space—a domain of potential forms that have not yet been actualized. I would suggest that these pointers are not merely passive conduits; they engage in a dynamic process of selection and transformation, drawing out and enabling certain potentials to ingress into actuality. Mike explicitly borrows the term ingression from Whitehead, who used it to describe how eternal objects—possibilities or patterns—are synthesized into concrete actual occasions and the historical routes or societies they form (all enduring physical bodies are “societies” in Whitehead’s terms).Both Tim and I diverge from approaches that treat latent space (ie, the realm of eternal objects) as fully predetermined. We cannot assume that latent potentials simply exist as brute facts, waiting to be revealed or discovered. Rather, the process of actualization is itself relational, shaped by the creative tensions between past inheritances and the relevant novelty brought forth as historically situated actual occasions dip into eternal possibility from their unique perspectives. The relationship between actual and potential is one of ongoing negotiation and mutual transformation.Mathematics provides a powerful analogy here. It is tempting to think of mathematical truths as eternal and unchanging, existing independently of human discovery. Yet history shows that mathematics evolves through a complex interplay of discovery and creation. When Whitehead and Russell attempted to construct a complete formal foundation for mathematics in Principia Mathematica, they encountered paradoxes that required significant revisions. Russell introduced the doctrine of types to avoid paradoxes in some logical statements. However, as Ronny Desmet has described it, this solution was insufficient, leading to a more complex “ramified” theory of types, which itself proved too restrictive. To address these issues, Russell added further measures like the “axiom of reducibility,” the “axiom of infinity,” and the “multiplicative axiom.” This extensive patchwork undermined his goal of logically reconstructing mathematics from the bottom-up, from basic principles, forcing he and Whitehead instead into a more inductive, top-down approach to mathematical research.The mathematical imagination is an example of what Whitehead referred to as conceptual prehension in action. Actual occasions of experience, including those composing mathematicians’ streams of consciousness, do not simply uncover pre-existing or pre-individuated terms; they engage with a tensive field of potential patterns that is conditioned by both the subjective aim of their mental pole and the social environment inherited in their physical pole. There is also a divine “lure” or initial aim that orients this engagement, guiding which potentials become salient. I think Mike’s pointers can function in a similar way—they are systems that interact with latent space, selecting and actualizing certain possibilities based on their interface with the environment. The process is neither purely one of discovery nor pure invention; it is an emergent relationship that transcends that dichotomy.This entangled interplay between discovery and invention highlights the participatory nature of both cognition and morphogenesis. In morphogenesis, forms are not imposed from without (whether by genetic information or pre-determined Platonic Ideas) but arise through the complex causality of self-organizing activity (with various causalities at play, including material, efficient, formal, and final). Similarly, in cognition and perception, we do not passively receive information from the world. This is not a one-way imposition of order but a reciprocal exchange between the actual and the virtual.This feedback loop echoes Whitehead’s understanding of Creativity: a transcendent-immanent principle that sustains the dipolarity between potential and actualization. Creativity is a close analog of what Deleuze describes as "difference in itself"—a field of pure difference that generates new actualities without relying on static templates.Some words of caution: If this latent space is treated as a pre-existing reservoir of fully determinate possibilities, we risk falling into a form of actualism (defined by physicist Tim Eastman). Actualism transposes brute facts from the domain of the actual to the domain of the virtual, thereby canceling the difference and eliminating the polarity. Without this dipolarity, the dynamo of cosmogenesis would lose its dynamic charge. There is no purely autonomous, determining realm of forms; rather, potentialities are continually reconfigured within the larger process of evolutionary becoming. This is why the concept of a divine lure or initial aim is central to Whitehead’s philosophy. It provides a minimal structure of relevance—a pre-tuning of indeterminate tensions in the web of potentials, if you will—that guides the emergence of new actualities without determining them outright.This brings us to the broader philosophical problem of transcendence and immanence. Whitehead’s Creativity functions as a transcendent-immanent principle: everything actual exemplifies it, and yet in and of itself it is never fully graspable. Without some guiding aim—what Whitehead calls the divine lure—there is a risk of losing ourselves in endless difference: simulacra all the way down. For Whitehead, this divine aim does not dictate but persuades, offering a horizon of relevance that shapes each occasion’s becoming.This ethical dimension is vital. Philosophy, especially process philosophy, is not about asserting final answers. It is about participating in the creative advance of life, remaining open to new insights while critically interrogating the concepts that guide us. Transcendentals like Truth, Beauty, and Goodness serve as regulative ideals—not fixed absolutes but lures toward deeper realization. Even when we encounter aporia, when our concepts fail, we are called to lean into that uncertainty, to live without the comfort of final explanations.Ultimately, this is the task of speculative philosophy: to articulate the conditions, tensions, and transformations that structure our world, knowing that this work is never finished. We are embedded in a vast cosmic history, yet always called to creatively transform it in the present. Philosophy’s task is to help us navigate this process, not by positing grand explanatory systems but by attuning our thinking the evolving rhythms of cosmic life.Video of our dialogue: Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

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