Footnotes2Plato Podcast

The Mind-at-Large Project is a three-year conference series that investigates the place of consciousness in the cosmos. The first gathering, “A New Dawn,” inaugurates our unfolding inquiry and will be held fully online from April 15–17, hosted by the Center for Process Studies. LEARN MORE and REGISTER HEREThe conference will convene leading thinkers and emerging scholars from around the planet for two and a half days of shared exploration into the deeper nature of mind—from the quantum to the ecological, from the human to the divine. Featured speakers include Freya Matthews, Iain McGilchrist, Susan Blackmore, and Philip Goff. I’ll also be speaking.The conference will feature a dynamic mix of plenary lectures, panel discussions, and community building fostering both depth and dialogue across disciplinary boundaries. If you’re wondering what comes after mechanistic materialism, scientific reductionism, and cultural nihilism, join us to help create what’s next. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

Timothy Jackson, Darius Parvizi-Wayne, and I got together to discuss Darius’ recent article, “What Active Inference Still Can’t Do: The (Frame) Problem that Just Won’t Go Away” (2025). The frame problem was our intended target, but the subject kept widening. Front and center was the relation between the everyday world of care and significance and the sub-personal mechanisms sought by cognitive scientists, or between the manifest image and the scientific image, as Sellars called them. We explored whether the Active Inference Framework is really explaining our experience as conscious agents acting in a meaningful world, or whether it is redescribing that experience in its formal terms while quietly taking the realization of relevance for granted.Darius’s paper provides an excellent internal critique of Active Inference, showing how it has not—at least not yet—provided a satisfactory solution to the frame problem. In its original classical AI form, the frame problem concerned how to encode the effects of action without having to encode all the irrelevant consequences that follow from that action. The broader issue is the problem of relevance: how agents like us somehow manage to zero in on what matters in perception and action despite the indefinite overabundance of what does not. Why this affordance, this threat, this invitation, this face, this concern, now? Darius’s argument, as I understand it, is that active inference can at best describe the encoding of relevance once relevance realizing behavior is already underway. But it does not explain how relevance is realized in the first place, especially in genuinely novel situations.The distinction between description and explanation recurred several times. One can always preserve a formalism by making it more elastic. One can say that if only the hierarchy of priors were rich enough, if only the precision-weighting were dynamic enough, if only the generative model were fine-grained enough, then relevance would be accounted for. Darius put pressure on the appeal to hierarchical motivated control, on the question of how highly weighted preferences get weighted in the first place. If every precision weighting requires some higher-order preference structure to authorize it, then one faces an infinite regress. If one halts the regress by positing a “first prior” or ground norm, one pays for that stability by rendering the system too rigid, too overdetermined, too cramped to account for the flexibility and novelty of actual life. So the theory gets caught between regress and rigidity.Tim asked whether this is really just a problem in one corner of cognitive science, or whether it is a generic problem that appears everywhere once one begins asking about the genesis of order, the origin of norms, the emergence of stable forms from fields of variation. The frame problem is not merely a technical puzzle for AI engineers or Bayesian theorists but a particular way of expressing a much older and broader question about the origins of order and the intelligibility of the world.Tim kept returning to Darwin. Darwin’s genius was to take variation seriously, to refuse to treat species or forms as primary givens, and instead to ask how relatively stable forms arise from processes that do not begin with fixed types. It is Tim’s Darwinism that leads him to resist any metaphysical move that front-loads the possibility landscape, any appeal to pre-given frames, a priori attractors, transcendent priors, or what Dennett called skyhooks. For him, speculative philosophy, at its best, is the critique of postulation. It should strip back the first principles as far as possible, not to deny the reality of individuals, teloi, meanings, and norms, but to show how their reality depends upon an immanent genealogy rather than a transcendent guarantee.This is where Tim and I always begin our tango about Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism. Whitehead is in one sense as radical an evolutionist as one could hope for. He historicizes the laws of nature, the very geometry of spacetime, the atomic elements and all forms of enduring organization. And yet he also introduces eternal objects and the primordial nature of God, which for Tim sound like precisely the sort of metaphysical posit that compromises a fully constructivist, ontogenetic account. I am sympathetic to the concern, but I think Whitehead is doing something subtler and more interesting than installing a fixed cosmic prior. The primordial nature of God is not God’s Bayesian belief-state about future outcomes. It is not a probability distribution over a pre-given state space. It is not a hidden optimization function or Maxwellian demon secretly running the universe from above. It is Whitehead’s way of biting the bullet to solve the meta-frame problem. Each actual occasion of experience feels some gradient of relevance, some lure toward forms of novelty appropriate to its concrete situation.Culturally freighted phrases like “the primordial nature of God” are not the sort of thing most cognitive scientists are trained to take seriously. One of the things I wish we had had more time to discuss in the dialogue is Whitehead’s distinction in Process and Reality between statistical and non-statistical judgment. The statistical ground is numerical. It depends upon a finite set of cases, upon ratios, frequencies, measurable likelihoods. If one wants to model cognition in Bayesian terms, this is the territory one occupies. There is nothing wrong with that as far as it goes. Whitehead is not anti-statistics. But he explicitly introduces a non-statistical ground because statistical induction, by itself, cannot explain how organisms navigate genuinely novel situations in which the relevant possibilities are not already laid out in a countable state-space. Here the ordering of possibilities is not statistical but intensive, qualitative. It concerns suitability, relevance, appetition, felt importance, in Whitehead’s terms. It is graduated, but not by ratios. Not everything that comes in degrees is numerical in the extensional sense.This is where my half serious contrast between error minimization and Eros maximization comes in. I am not proposing a rival optimization theory, as if to swap the statistical with the libidinal. Tim is right to be suspicious of optimization language when it starts pretending to be ontology. My phrase is meant as a polemical device to mark a difference between what can be calculated and what cannot. Error minimization, as formalized in Predictive Processing or Active Inference, operates within a pre-specified, extensional structure of more or less likely states. It is powerful precisely because it works within a mathematizable space. But that very strength is also its limit. Eros maximization, as I’ve been trying to think it, names not another formal objective function but an organism’s lure toward richer aesthetic contrasts, deeper satisfaction, more intense realization of value in situations where the possibility space cannot be pre-stated in advance. It concerns what Whitehead calls “intensive relevance,” not merely likelihood. It is not the inverse of error minimization. It is an attempt to think what extensional models necessarily abstract away.The Active Inference Framework can model organisms “as if” they are Bayesian calculators minimizing prediction error, and no doubt that as if can be instrumentally fruitful. The trouble begins when the model is ontologized, when the extensional formalism is taken to reveal what life and mind really are. Then the organism, and consciousness, purposiveness, valuation, and meaning along with it, start to look like mere appearances to be explained away by reference to more fundamental cybernetic machinery.This brings us back to the manifest image/scientific image issue that I raised at the start of our conversation. The scientific image, especially in its computationalist forms, seeks to get behind the world of lived experience and conscious agency, to explain these in terms of sub-personal mechanisms, eg, neurological functions, information processing, thermodynamic constraints, etc. I would hope it was obvious that all of us, including cognitive scientists, begin always and inevitably embedded within the meaning-saturated world disclosed to consciousness, what Husserl called the “life-world.” Computationalist cogsci tends to forget that disclosure. It then builds a formal apparatus it hopes might account for the relevance realizing behavior of beings that lack such worldly embeddedness. It then declares that the formal apparatus is all that is needed to explain it. The frame problem thus exposes the tremendous costs of beginning from a picture of mind as somehow separate from the world, thus needing to construct internal models in order to infer what lies beyond it.I mention Helmholtz in our dialogue, who takes the Kantian problem of how the mind contributes form to experience and naturalizes it into a theory of unconscious inference. Sensations become signs and cognition becomes the inferential reconstruction of their external causes. Contemporary Predictive Processing and Active Inference frameworks, especially in their more explicitly representational forms, inherit this philosophical move. The organism, somehow severed from its world, must re-establish indirect contact by building a self-world-model. The frame problem thus becomes inevitable. If the mind is first sealed off from the world, then it must carry a vast inner representation or mega-model for deciding which among its possible interpretations is relevant now. But the very need for such a mega-model is a sign that something has gone wrong upstream.Kant thought the scandal of philosophy was that no proof of the external world had been given. Heidegger later says the real scandal is that one thinks such a proof is needed. Dasein is not first a private interiority needing to infer its way back to the world. We are always already in the world, already thrown into history, immersed in significance, and caught up in networks of concern. This was one reason I was drawn to enactivism as a student. Enactivism resists the temptation to treat cognitive science as the search for sub-personal machinery that will explain personhood away. It begins from embodied world-involvement rather than from inner representation. But as we also discussed, even enactivism can falter if it makes too much of homeostatic self-maintenance (ie, autopoiesis) as the ground norm. Then one still struggles to explain the idiosyncrasy and occasional perversity of actual life.And actual life, as Tim rightly insisted, is not some miraculous machine for solving the frame problem. Organisms are not unfailing virtuosos of relevance realization. They are thrown into ongoing processes of selection, distraction, error, improvisation. They get eaten because they sometimes miss what matters. They are lured by mimicry and fooled by camouflage. They seize on the wrong thing. They wander. This is not a bug in life but is constitutive of its openness. Whitehead says something like this in his theory of propositions. A proposition is not first of all a true or false sentence. It is a lure for feeling. And he says that it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. That line should be framed above the desk of every cognitive scientist tempted to reduce life to error minimization. The false, the irrelevant, the not-yet-validated, the interestingly wrong, are not merely noise to be filtered out. They are what drives the creative advance.Darius has exposed a real weakness in Active Inference’s stronger explanatory ambitions. Priors, precision-weighting, and hierarchical policy control all seem to presuppose precisely the relevance they are meant to explain. Tim is right that the frame problem is one local manifestation of a deeper problem of origins. From my Whiteheadian point of view, the reason these optimization models keep running aground (at least as final explanations, if not as useful descriptions) is not merely that they need more technical refinement. It is that they remain trapped within a Cartesian, representationalist image of cognition. Whitehead gives us a way to think beyond that image, not by abandoning science, but by refusing to turn a successful formalism into a final ontology. In this context, Darius mentioned Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor’s wonderful little book, Retrieving Realism (2015), which I reviewed almost a decade ago, including a Whitehead-inspired extension: “Retrieving Realism: A Whiteheadian Wager” (2017). The frame problem is not just a headache for computationalists. It is a clue that reality is more participatory, relational, value-saturated, and improvised than the dominant modern scientific image has allowed. What is needed is not less metaphysics but better, more explicit metaphysics. Whitehead says that metaphysics is “descriptive generalization.” I take this as part of his effort to remind scientists, and really all theorists, that philosophy is not primarily in the business of offering yet another explanation of things. As Tim was suggesting, philosophy should function as a critic of the abstractions of the special sciences. Its task is avoid allowing the world we actually inhabit to be explained away.The danger is that certain scientific frameworks, when overextended, begin to explain away important aspects of the prosaic or manifest image. They forget that their own explanatory power depends upon abstractions drawn from experience, and then they start treating those abstractions as though they were the whole of reality. Whitehead’s idea of descriptive generalization is meant to resist this. He wants a metaphysical scheme broad and supple enough to apply across the special sciences, but also across the full range of human life: art, law, ethics, religion or spirituality, and the rest.Such an approach to metaphysics would help us see when an explanation is genuinely illuminating and when it has become greedy, when it slides into reductive overreach. It keeps us from explaining away realities that the scientific practice itself already presupposes, or from arriving at a view of human life that is ethically and spiritually impoverished. Descriptive generalization thus seems to me a much better way of understanding the aim of metaphysics than explanation. Metaphysics is not trying to outcompete the sciences. It is trying to provide a critical and capacious matrix of general ideas within which their abstractions can be situated, assessed, and kept in proportion. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

I came to this cityat the edge of the continentas so many dreamers before mefollowing the westward winds of timelike the gold-glinting eyesof greedy men who mistook the ocean’s endless horizonfor a promise made only to them.I was destined by a different orenot yet hardened but still molten to the core,something older than the veinstorn open for profit by 49ers.After the gold rush came the god rush. In this city, east met west, past, future,and the modern world began, at least, to meet its end.The sky was winking at mewhen I first made my home in the foggy hills of San Francisco.The planet Neptunelord of oceans, dreams, and boundary dissolving dives into the divine,was floating through Aquarius across my natal Jupiter,opening the gates of vision,47 square miles wide.The transit was initiatory:a widening of my psychic estuarywhere consciousness, cosmology, and philosophyran together as sulfur and salt meeting mercury.Everything was shimmering.Eighteen years I’ve apprenticed here,in this vale of soul-making and school for the spirit,this heir of the counterculture,of dharma bums and Beat poets,of tree hugging hand holding hippieswho smuggled East into Westand tried to make the world sing together in harmony.I learned that matter is a metaphor,that mind bends with the tides,that the voices of the prophets still echo in the Paiute desert,and that names like vows are fluid as the Tao.The city was my teacher,a temple of tech and aftershocksfull of silicon sannyasins and coding yogis, psychedelic polycules, mystic runaways,Zen masters and Jungian analysts,CEOs quoting koans,and cybernetic Sufis.My Sun is setting on this Bay,like lovers trading fluids,forever changing as we part ways.My rose here has unfolded. Another wave rises.My classroom now vaporized,sangha dissolved into screens,the school that once rooted mehas become an atmosphere I can inhale anywhere.Waking again from my westward dream,waking again,I now turn south, toward the wide belly of the earth,toward forests older than progress,toward rivers more ancient than empire.Above mePluto, lord of underworlds—prowls across my Aquarius stellium,melting to transformmy conscious self,transmute my intellect, temper my senses and deepen my relations.The god of metamorphosis, Pan placing his hand on the heart of my lifeand whispering in my ear: no more hedging,no more waiting for life to begin,Live dangerously, or die in safety.I stood at the edge as the sun sankand watched a swimmer in the Bay beneath the Golden Gate.A lone figure moving through the straitcarving a quiet path through time.Gold rush ghosts danced atop the skylineas I reflected on my long pilgrimagefrom student to teacher to wanderer again.The sacred swimmer passed under the vast red ribsof the bridge, that big metallic Bodhisattva,compassionate carrier of all our silicon sins,sacrificial site of suicide sojourns,Every new birth leaves youwith saltwater in your mouth.Any wisdom worth lovingrequires learning how to swim.And learning to swimrequires jumping in.The swimmer swam on,as the city released me. The tide loosened its grip on the shore.I will carry the wisdom work with me into new waters.What I’ve learned here is portable,potable, tended by devotional attention, nourishing enough to shepherd me abroad.The Western imagination has reached its end,the Pacific swallowed its Solar ego.It is time to go down, southward, soul-ward, ‘When that fat old sun in the sky is falling,Summer evening birds are calling,The last sunlight disappears,And if you see, don’ t make a sound, Pick your feet up off the ground, And if you hear as the warm night falls, the silver sound from a time so strange,sing to me, sing to me.’ Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

This is the beginning of a collaborative effort with Rich to give articulation to the new science in a way that has genuine cultural resonance. Below is the video of our dialogue, followed by a transcript. Rich Blundell: Have we started? If you’re gonna post this, is this it?Matt Segall: Well, I mean, I’ll cut out the beginning.Rich: Okay, okay, okay. We’re going to be doing that.Matt: Yeah, no, I do tend to be informal with recordings, but I think—Rich: No, that’s great. I love that. I just wasn’t sure if I should behave myself.Matt: I would insist that you don’t behave. I think it’s time to break some rules, actually.Rich: Yeah, let’s figure that out, actually. I have to admit, I’m hoping that a clear agenda will sort of present itself here as we give this a shot.Matt: Yeah. Well, I was grateful that we had a chance to spend some time together last August and for me to get to know your work a little bit. I’ve been reading some of your stuff since then and exploring your various projects, fieldwork, and the way that you’re bridging art and science — not just art as a way of communicating science, but art as a way of doing science.Rich: As a way of doing art, really.Matt: And science as a way of doing art. Yeah. And I know you’ve got some exciting projects that you’re building now. So, maybe a good place to start would be if I could invite you to just lay out your vision of this new approach to science that’s rooted in experience and the sensual encounter with the living world, and how you feel it’s taking us beyond the way science has been practiced historically.Rich: Sure, I could start. I mean, I would not want to ever try to claim that this is sort of my theory about science. It’s a new science that I hear people talking about — you, in particular, and others — that’s really exciting. It’s probably important to understand that my formative origin story is one that’s come through the sciences in a kind of very reluctant or, let’s say, rebellious way. I’ve always been sort of disappointed with our response to what we know scientifically, even though I appreciate and respect the scientific method. And I don’t want this to turn into just a big complaint about science.But I do get the sense that a lot of people in our space are circling around a new kind of science — not in a Stephen Wolfram sense, although partly — but a new kind of science that is grounded in nature, which is what you would think it should be, right? I mean, that was the original intent as natural philosophy.I should actually even step back a little further just to say that my onboarding into this was very much through being in the mud, in the dirt, handling the animals. Studying the humble things in nature — the invertebrates, the fossils, the processes of nature. But there’s this other conversation going on at the other end of the spectrum, which is this sort of high-minded conversation about what it is to be human and what is consciousness — that is partly, and mostly, a philosophical conversation going on right now.And I’m trying to weave or thread a way through that, that kind of reunites those two visions of what science is: the leading edge of how we perceive ourselves and think about ourselves and the world, but also reconnects it to our origins, our lowly origins through the cosmos. And somehow trying to synergize a view that is ameliorative to the many, many injustices and contradictions and threats in the world today. So, I know I’m rambling here, because I’m trying to find — what is this thread, though? Where can we start to figure out the conversation here that needs to happen?Matt: Yeah. Well, I think that in the middle of the 19th century, there were these two guys, Darwin and Wallace, that came up with this idea of evolution, which has deeper roots. I mean, Darwin and Wallace gave us a very powerful principle of natural selection, which helped the mechanistic imagination of modern science at least begin to get a handle on this idea of evolution. But the idea that human beings grew out of earth and this universe in some sense goes back earlier than Darwin. I would root it in some of these German Romantic thinkers in the late 1700s, early 1800s — Herder and Goethe and Schelling.This view of the human being as growing out of the universe is quite different from how the early scientists in the 17th century imagined the project of science, which was more this idea that God made the universe according to these laws and that God made the human being with this intellect that has this mathematical prowess so as to be able to decode the laws with which the world was made. And it was this view of the human as kind of parachuted in to this material world from another dimension.We can look back at that and see how sort of childish that vision is, but at the same time, that view is what allowed — I mean, this is Whitehead’s account of the history of science — it allowed for this particular form of rational and empirical investigation to be inaugurated. Whitehead thinks it kind of took that more or less deist theology — deism, the idea that God is this external engineer and the human being is sort of God’s emissary here on earth, that has this special kind of mind so as to understand the handiwork of God. And so science comes out of that picture. It’s a very theological picture, and a particular sort of theology that separates God and the world and separates humanity from nature.And then since evolution, we’ve realized that, well, that’s wrong. But how do we reestablish a sense of science in a context where whatever the human mind is, it actually grew out of this universe? And the universe doesn’t seem to be the sort of thing where the laws of physics just exist eternally and get imposed on dead matter. It seems like whatever the laws of physics are, they also grow out of the world in an evolutionary sort of way — more like habits that are learned over the course of billions of years. And so it’s a shock, I think, to the scientific imagination to have to all of a sudden conceive of knowledge as something participatory — that we’re not outside of what we’re trying to know. We are an expression of what we’re trying to know.Rich: I mean, that’s it. That’s the move, right? Why is that such a hard move? I don’t know. I’d like to do something to correct that. But I also want to find out from you — where do you think the current handholds are? Like, not handholds, but leverage points. Or what amalgamation of philosophical thinkers right now presents us the best opportunity to start to articulate this new science?Matt: I mean, it seems like there are thousands of us working on this, which is not that many, really, in the grand scheme of things. But it seems like the science is happening, science is changing. There are still some dinosaurs that are holding on to the old way— Rich: That’s the world that I kind of come from. And they are as dogmatic as ever, and it’s frustrating. Kind of sad to see that, but it’s progressing funeral by funeral, you know.Matt: As it always has. I think that the sciences are doing what the sciences do, which is they’re following the evidence, and sometimes it takes longer than we might want. For me, the real urgent challenge right now is actually the interface between the knowledge producers in the sciences and in academia, and the culture at large. Because if we don’t figure out how to inhabit the world that we actually live in and stop living in this imaginary world of mechanism — where we think, oh, okay, we can reverse engineer this; oh, climate change, it’s a technical problem, we can fix this with some new technology — if we don’t start living on this planet and translating this knowledge that we have, of this complex, recursive, embedded dynamic that we are participating in, then we’re going to die. We’re going to go extinct very soon.And so it’s like, how do we get from — it’s not that we need just a new myth or something. And myth isn’t the sort of thing that you can just author like a sci-fi novel. It’s a deep collective structure that’s half unconscious, and it emerges kind of chthonically from the depths. But we can help prepare the space for that to happen. And it seems to me quite urgent, not just because of the ecological catastrophe, but because of the social and political catastrophe. The cultural meaning crisis that John Vervaeke’s been referring to it. I think these are all connections. These are all expressions of a deeper unease or disease.And so it’s building that bridge between knowledge and culture. That’s, I think, become the most important task, at least for me and my skill set. And I also love digging into the details and understanding the new science and what its methods are, and the theories, and how do we integrate all of this new data, how do we deal with generative AI and its role in all of this — which is, I think, whether we like it or not, changing culture and changing how science is done. So it’s less about the names of the people than it is, I think, about these translation tasks.Rich: I agree. That’s really speaking my language too now, in terms of the trajectory that my career has brought me on — how do we initiate cultural interventions that can effectively communicate this stuff in a way that changes the habits of thought that we’re all walking around with, that can respond directly to the features of this crisis?And so, taking our cues from what we know about how we’ve gotten off the rails and how it’s gotten so ugly and dangerous and hypocritical, can we articulate a new way of being in the world, based on this science, that in its own way can ameliorate — medicate — not that we’re going to save the world, but we can do better. We can do better than what we’re doing.I’m an eternal optimist, because I look at the story that this science presents about how we got here, and just the incredible creativity and complexity and beauty that’s all around us — therein lies an intelligence there that humans are trying to understand, yeah, but also relate to. And I think our mission boils down to: how do we relate to it? And then that can sort of just play out organically through our institutions, through our culture — something better than what we’re putting out now.So maybe we should — I mean, I really want to get into this. I know there’s real meat on this. And so I want to figure out what that is, and come up with a plan to do this work.So I guess I’ll just briefly talk a little bit about how this is manifesting in my efforts these days. I’m trained in ecology — geology and biology — and I followed this curiosity through the whole academic system to understand deeply who I am and what the world is. Not so much to get a job as a professor — it was really grounded in a deep, genuine curiosity just about: what is this, and how do I fit into it? So I’ve been pursuing that since I was a kid.And so the way that I summarize the findings — and I know I pick and choose, and I go out and sort of harvest ideas from the world — but the way that I assemble them is through these three very simple principles. And the first one is continuity. What does that mean? Specifically, what does ontological continuity mean? What does it mean that we live in a reality that is on a continuum — whether you call it time, or cause and effect, causal relationships, or whatever — but there is a continuity here from which we spring. And I think establishing that as a deep and abiding way of perceiving the world can make a difference, because it precipitates out this idea that there is no subject-object divide — that that’s a fiction.And another one — these are the three — so the first one’s continuity, and the second one is relationality. Which I know, when I talk about relationality, and I end up talking about right relation, that sounds like Buddhist talk. I’ll take people’s word for it that this is a Buddhist principle. But the idea is just that nothing is kind of discrete, that there’s no really discrete anything. And I’ve got a rock here. And this seems like a discrete rock, but it’s really a system of relationships between atoms and molecules and minerals. This is a relational thing. It’s an expression of relationships. It’s not just rock.Anyway, we can get into the philosophy, but the idea is just that — again, to see everything in terms of relationality, especially on that continuum that I was talking about earlier. The continuum continually manifests through relationships. And the moment you ask that question, you can also ask: well, is the relationship right or not? And I think that there are cues — there are hints to what’s right relationship and what isn’t — in the way that complexity emerges.And the third one is entanglement. This comes out of an enactivist perspective. I use the word entanglement just because I think it’s a bit more accessible to people who don’t do philosophy. And entanglement is talking about how mind is another instantiation of relationality — that the world and the entity, the individual, together create mind, and that creates a kind of linkage, an inextricable connection to something that we experience as incredibly intimate. It’s ourself, our sense of self, and the way our consciousness narrativizes everything — and the world itself are just inextricable, that they’re actually in this niche construction relationship.That’s, like, in a nutshell, three fundamental operating principles by which I do try to communicate. Those open up lots of others — things like fractals and cybernetic principles — so there’s lots of other things in there, but boiling it down to those three essentials, I think, is where I start to do this work of cultural communication. I guess — what do you make of that?Matt: Well, it’s music to my ears. I mean, these three terms feel like variations on a theme, and the theme is process ontology. Or process-relational — which is Whitehead. But you mentioned this term continuity first, and I think immediately of the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. I don’t know if anyone’s ever brought his name up to you before. And his core principle was continuity. He liked Greek words, so he used the term synechism. But it’s exactly as you were describing it — this sense of subject and object and mind and nature being features of, or aspects of, this same underlying continuum.When it comes to relationality — that anything that appears to be separate is really a nexus of relations, and anything that endures in our world, whether it’s a rock or a particular organism or a whole species of organisms — the endurance of anything is a function of continuous relationships. And I think one of the ways we could understand evolution and natural selection is to understand it as a principle of what allows for endurance. And I think in some ways, right relationship has a lot to do with that. Like, what is allowed to endure is what fits into a niche.And in some ways, we have this mistaken idea of like, oh, “survival of the fittest” means the biggest, baddest, strongest, meanest organism is what survives — but it’s not at all the case. Fitness means fitting into a community. So those organisms that fit best into a community and help the community flourish endure. And so, that nothing is discrete means nothing endures or could endure by itself. It’s all a function of right relationship and remaining in right relationship — because we’re entangled.And I think that these three terms are nice ways of coordinating around a kind of central mystery, which is: how can we be together? With acknowledging our own sense of — there is something about individuality in human life, but also in nature. But there’s also a way in which every individual is able to endure, again, as a result of being in right relationship with every other individual in their community. So we need each other to be ourselves, in a way. And that’s a deep ecological principle, but it’s also a very important political principle. So there’s continuity here from nature to human society. There’s no need for a whole set of different principles for human beings and human politics. We can actually learn this from the cosmos, we can learn this from the earth. That’s what I hear when you say continuity.Rich: Yeah, I’m excited that you said that. I’m also excited at the fact that — where does Peirce’s continuity come from? What does he ground it in? I mean, I’m sure he grounded it in deep philosophical contemplation. But one can also ground it in the actual unfolding of the cosmos. This is one of the things that I try to do — to establish continuity as a legitimate habit of thought, as a habit of perception, really. The perceptual habit of continuity.And I’m sure you know this, given that you’re in philosophy and cosmology and consciousness — that cosmology is a way to do that. A simple, direct study of nature’s process indicates that continuity. We don’t necessarily have to go off on some complex contortion of thought to get there. We simply need to observe. And this is what natural history — the sciences that I follow — that’s what they’re saying. I mean, every syllable of the science that I was taught as a geologist, or as an ecologist, points to that as a reality. And if we’re simply paying attention to the way that nature unfolds, it becomes an inescapable insight.Matt: Yeah. I mean, I love thinking about philosophers in the history of philosophy, but I think — I don’t want to get too caught up on, well, this is what this philosopher thought. I think it’s more like, well, how are these ideas valuable to us?But Peirce’s idea of continuity erupted from several different angles. One was mathematical, because he was, like Whitehead, a mathematician, and thought — you don’t get a circle out of many tangent lines or points. It’s continuous. And that upsets the reductionistic mind that wants to be able to construct a circle out of a series of parts. He’s like, no — it feels irrational to that reductionistic mindset that, like, pi — what do you mean it’s endless? Like, what? No. But it is. It’s continuous in the sense that it’s not something that you can reduce to some finite number of digits.So initially it’s mathematical for Peirce, but it’s also — he’s a panpsychist. So he would say matter is, his words, “effete mind.” And so there’s a sort of modicum of mentality present even in the simplest form of physical process. And so that’s the continuity between mind and matter. This is the evolutionary part for him — evolution doesn’t have sharp breaks in it. It’s continuous in the sense that it’s always had an outside and an inside. It’s always had an objective and a subjective aspect to it. And so it’s not like we need to explain how at some point matter got complex enough in its configuration that all of a sudden mind was excreted. That doesn’t make sense from the perspective of this principle of continuity.Our own sense of self, for Peirce, is a function of constantly having to reinterpret ourselves in the present based on what we’re inheriting from our own past and what we anticipate or hope for or wish for in the future. And our very sense of self is this open-ended process of entanglement with everything we’re inheriting and then everything that we desire and that could be and that we’re trying to manifest, that hasn’t yet become actual. And so our sense of self is continuous with past and future, but we’re new in each moment at the same time. And so it’s a creative continuum, in that sense.Rich: Mm-hmm. I did this exercise where I sort of traced it down all the way down to the Planck constant. There’s this moment where physicists introduce the Planck time as a way to make that discreteness work. You slice time down into smaller and smaller levels until you get to the smallest possible unit of time. And it just always struck me as a kind of fudge factor, or a way to not have to deal with the implications of what true continuity would—Matt: Of infinity, yeah. I mean, it seems to me that it’s a function of the limits of our own capacities for observation and our own models. I mean, it works in the sense that statistically we can treat that scale as somehow ultimate and then the probabilities pan out. I mean, we can make very accurate predictions.Rich: The physics works. It works. So it’s a good enough approximation. Right, but it hints that there’s something more that we’re just not capable of or ready to deal with. And I understand that. And I appreciate the physics as they play out.Matt: Right. So, when you’re trying to communicate about this, it seems to me that one of your main methods is to restore people’s sense of wonder and amazement. Just the fact that all life is fed by light from the sun, for example, and that we exist, we live by virtue of that — again, it’s another form of continuity. It doesn’t mean that energy isn’t constantly transforming, but we are made of components that were forged in dying stars, and then we are fed by a still living star. And so this energy flows through us, and somehow human beings have become so — I’ll say misenchanted — with certain abstract symbolic conceptions of whatever: money and different sorts of political ideologies and identities that are very small and thin in comparison to our true nature as earthlings and cosmological beings.And so it seems that a lot of science has become so abstract and complex that the average person can’t really get a handle on it. I mean, this relates to the question of how we translate into story and myth, but also, I think, just concrete experiences of encounter with the beauty and wonder of the natural world around us. And I got a little taste of that from you, and it’s not theoretical. I mean, we can geek out about these principles and these theories — I have a lot of time for that, I love that — but I think for the average person, it’s like, well, how does this help me make sense of my own struggle to find a romantic partner in life, or to work through an argument with my loved ones or my family, or how does this relate to my ability to feed myself and to make a living?And I think we have so many ways nowadays that our imaginations get shrunken and cut off from the larger context and the point of any of this, of existing at all. And I feel like being able to broaden our horizons and shift our attention away from these very small issues — I mean, we all want to survive and thrive — but I think this deeper cosmological identity gives us a way of experiencing our continuity with something that doesn’t die.Or at least — I mean, there are many ways in which death is an essential part of life and evolution. So there’s lots of death.Rich: Obviously, it’s part of right relation, you know? I mean, yeah, we have to know when to die.Matt: Yeah. But it seems like we’ve reached the point of absurdity in this industrial, techno-industrial, capitalist civilization where it’s like, oh, we need to defeat death. Like, that’s the project now. Let’s figure out immortality. Well, there is a kind of defeat of death in feeling that there’s something in us that’s part of the continuum. But it’s the difference between a technological mastery so as to avoid personal death, versus a participatory, almost release into that larger life that includes the death of us as individuals.Rich: Yeah, I don’t want to make a judgment on what that is, but I think that part of that wanting to avoid death is part of life too — that’s an impulse that we have that serves a purpose, and I want to respect that as well. But I do wonder what we forfeit if we achieve that, or if we achieve some simulacrum of immortality. What are we missing out on?Yeah, and as far as our culture being disenchanted or misenchanted — I think it’s because we just don’t have any institutions or educational structures to onboard us. The way we do education is not set up to integrate all this stuff. And that’s just a technical issue right now that we could resolve. A lot of it is about giving people permission, because we do have the perceptual capacities to feel awe and wonder and to delight in the mystery of it all, the sense that there’s something more going on. So that’s part of our perceptual apparatus too.And that’s the work. So that’s why I do what I do — trying to create a source or an option for finding this stuff, finding this story, and let it do its work. I don’t want to get political, and I don’t want to impose some kind of doctrine or anything like that. But just to share in it is a way of instilling it.Matt: Yeah. No, I didn’t mean to suggest that the instinct to survive, and to thrive — organisms want to live. I think that’s a very important data point, as it were, that doesn’t often show up in — I mean, I guess in Darwinian pictures of evolution, you get the sense of a survival drive. I mean, that’s basic for the theory to do anything. You need organisms that want to survive.Rich: But not necessarily by eating your compadres — by relating to them.Matt: Well, I mean, predator-prey dynamics are very creative.Rich: Only one — but they’re only one type.Matt: Yeah. And sometimes you think you’re about to eat your prey and then they end up becoming part of your body and then symbiogenesis occurs.But I think that the drive — not only to survive, but, well, as Whitehead says, to live, to live better, and to live well: life seems to be dissatisfied with the status quo and is seeking, again, in Whitehead’s terms, intensity of experience, not just repetition of experience. Life isn’t content to just find a niche and then hang out. There’s continual construction of new niches. Sure, some species will last a very long time — they found a particularly more or less stable niche; there’s no fixed niche, but there can be more stable niches, and you get alligators or sharks or whatever that are around for a hundred million years.But life seems to always continue to find new forms, new niches, and to be willing to totally transform itself in the process of seeking intensities of experience.And so we’ve got all of these different mammalian species and primates and human beings, who are — I mean, human beings are quite capable technologically. We can make tools that make new tools. But our bodies are comparatively fragile relative to, say — I mean, a bacterial colony can survive nuclear winter if it’s sufficiently sequestered. Sharks, alligators — they’re pretty tough. They’ve been around for quite a long time as species, and humans barely got here and we’re already on the verge of driving ourselves and many other complex mammals into extinction.And so, what is it that’s driving evolution if we end up with species that are comparatively deficient in survival power and way more sensitive — in terms of eyes and ears, and not just physical senses, but our capacity to suffer? It’s really intense as human beings. Every organism feels pain, but we can spiral into hellish forms of suffering.Rich: But joy too. We can do joy in a way that — crocodiles, I’m not sure they can. Maybe they do, maybe they’re in touch with it in their own way, but—Matt: Yeah, I’ve seen an alligator appear to enjoy a belly rub, but maybe I’m projecting. Rich: That’s all right. That’s what we do.Matt: But yeah, so there’s this joy, this enjoyment factor, that I think often gets left out of the scientific picture of evolution — that life wants to enjoy itself. There’s this other side. I mean, you get it in sexual selection in Darwin, but that’s still kind of a reductive understanding of it. It’s not all just about reproduction. That has to happen or we wouldn’t be here, but there’s this cosmic celebration factor that I think a particular approach to science has made us — I mean, a scientist would be embarrassed to talk about that, or say, well, that’s not science. That’s just speculation.Rich: Yeah, but I think they do it secretly. And just because we’re saying that there’s this inherent joy, it doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be as intense as an orgy or anything like that. It can be — it could just be noticing the way that a bird sings or moves, or the way a bird notices you. There can be an overwhelming joy in that too — the simple sort of wholesome things that they present all the time. I think it’s trying to signal to us.Matt: Right. Yeah. And I think that the pain and the joy, they do go hand in hand. I mean, when sexual reproduction itself had to evolve at some point, it produces a whole other level of struggle between organisms to find mates, which asexually reproducing organisms didn’t have to deal with. And bacteria are functionally immortal. Sex introduces this whole other dynamic that’s quite traumatic and painful, but also — oh man, it unleashes so much creativity. And the joy of love. Humans aren’t the only pair-mating animals, but I think it’s always the good with the bad. The intensity of experience comes with both poles being enhanced. So that’s the responsibility that comes with being human.Rich: Yeah. Right.Matt: Well, I was gonna ask a big question. Human beings are continuous with the rest of life on this planet, but do we have a unique role here? And if so, what is that role? I mean, we’ve got scientists — there’s this drive to understand. We’ve got artists — there’s this drive to contribute to the further expression of beauty. We’ve got theologians who are orienting towards this creative process as a form of worship and praise to the creativity that underlies it. I mean, we have these different modes of response. And responsibility. And I just wonder from your own work and learning, how you envision the human role here and what’s our task?Rich: All of those that you mentioned — theological concerns and all of that — I think is completely within the realm of what humans are here to do. But I think ultimately we have the responsibility to represent the Earth. You know, we are — and this gets at it — if I do have a theory, I call it Earthling Theory: that we are the only species on this planet that has had a sustained and intimate and sequential relationship — if you look at the human diaspora — with every habitat on this planet.That is an exceptional origin story. Despite — and in addition to — the cosmic story and all of that, the story on Earth here is that our species is the recipient of the innate intelligence of every one of those habitats that we had those relationships with as we moved through this planet. And I hear a lot of people characterizing it as, you know, we come in and we exploit habitats, and that’s the mark of human. No, it’s not that. We’re curious enough, and we have the initiative and the motivation to go and know new habitats, and to thrive within them in right relation. And the reward of that is to perpetuate the species. And that process played out since the split with the chimps six, seven million years ago. Our species went on. And if all you need to do is look at the chimps — they didn’t do that. And they’re still living essentially the same way that we were living when we were the same species.So I think this is just sort of something that I use — it’s aspirational. It’s just to know that this is where we get our capacities, our competencies, the things that truly make us human. And instead of just saying, well, we have these capacities and we use them on planet, and we use the planet — we are in cahoots with this planet in that way. And I think when we understand that, it changes the world that we’re living in. We suddenly feel a sense of commitment that arises from our shared history and extends into our shared fate.The fact that we have this relationship with the Earth, and the fact that the Earth guided us in this way — now we have to return the favor. Now we need to speak for the Earth, because we are its special offspring. Not to say that we’re better or on a hierarchy, but the fact of the matter is that we are the recipients of the entirety of this Earth’s intelligence. And that’s why we do all these things that break the rules. This is what makes us unique, for better or for worse.And so, just to answer your question — what is our responsibility? I think that’s the first one: to simply take ownership by way of belonging to the Earth. The ownership of our humanity by way of belonging to this Earth. And we’ll see where that takes us. We’ll see if we can get to the stars that way, or to Mars. I don’t know. I’m not sure if that was the question you were asking, but it just strikes me that even our capacity to do all this philosophizing and to do all this math is a capacity endowed upon us by the intelligence inherent in the Earth’s habitats.Matt: That’s right. Yeah. I mean, it seems to me that one of the problems with environmental thought and the ecological movement since the late ‘60s and ‘70s is that it’s often been a story of retreat and a story of sacrifice or guilt, shame. Humans are bad. Humans are messing up the planet and it would be better if we weren’t here, or at least if Western industrial civilization were to go away. And there can be a romanticization of indigenous lifeways, which, yes, we have so much to learn from.And at the same time, I think there’s a certain story to be told about this human diaspora where, as humans spread to all these different habitats, it seems to me that there’s at least some evidence that the megafauna in those areas were driven into extinction. And so it’s not like human beings haven’t been having an outsized impact on their local ecologies long before industrialization, even before agriculture. And of course, there are many indigenous communities that found right relationship with their local ecology after some time, but there are also plenty of examples of the opposite — it seems like Mayan civilization collapsed rapidly because of some ecological overshoot, for example. And so it’s not just Western modern industrial societies that have done that.And so we’ve been learning, I think, over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, how to be in right relationship with the Earth. And it seems to me that an ecological worldview would need to be one that doesn’t emphasize the guilt factor, that doesn’t emphasize the need for humans to go away or disappear or that we don’t have something to contribute to the Earth, but instead allows for a new sense of adventure. And so how do we articulate that adventure?I’m less excited about going to Mars per se. I think it might be rather difficult to live on a planet with one third the gravity and no magnetic field to shield us from cosmic rays. And I think people like Elon Musk are a little bit naive about how difficult that environment is and how inhospitable to life it is.Rich: Absurd. Yeah. Well, no — it just completely ignores the deep entanglements of species and the geologic process.Matt: Right. We’re earthlings.Rich: I think, Matt, that we have a lot to talk about, and I’d love to figure out a way to really dive deep and do this in a way that’s really compelling.Matt: Yeah. Well, we have just begun to scratch the surface. I’ve got to run in a few minutes here, but we need a couple hours to really get warmed up and allow our minds to meet.Rich: Yeah. I know that there’s some synergy here that’s just waiting to find expression. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

What is being said when the wind blows through the leaves of a tree? What does it mean? Andreas and I both agreed that, whatever it is, it is of profound significance.Drawing on indigenous cosmologies and the old image of the human as microcosm, Andreas suggests that humans are meant to serve life, to learn from older-than-human beings about how to contribute to the fecundity of ecological communities. We go on to discuss the history of Western modernity, how the Enlightenment’s quest for freedom from political oppression also includes the fantasy of freedom from nature and even from death itself. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

Timothy Jackson and I were back in the saddle, this time to discuss Ezequiel Di Paolo’s article seeking an enactive ontology: Di Paolo, E. A. (2023). F/acts: Ways of enactive worldmaking. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 30 (11–12): 159-89. doi: 10.53765/20512201.30.11.159.Ezequiel will be joining us to present in the biophilosophy track at this summer’s International Whitehead Conference in China. The article attempts to carry forward Francisco Varela’s enactive approach, which sometimes gets framed as more of an epistemological stance and reduced to a kind of transcendental phenomenology. Varela says,“I’m not a realist,” but also “I’m not a constructivist.” So what is the implied ontology of an enactivist account of cognition and life? Something very near to the groundless dependent co-origination of Madhyamaka.The core of the article is an account of three modes of engagement between agents and worlds: interaction, transaction, and constitution, with constitution treated as the default (a strong reminder that “organism” and “environment” are intimately enmeshed). This implies a process-relational, scale-sensitive account of concreteness and virtuality, and a performative or expressivist theory of knowledge where all attempts at “representation” alter both agent and world. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

Reflections on this discussion, which is part of the Symposium on Platonic Space. I’ve only listened to the first 20 minutes or so of this session. These are preliminary reflections, and I expect I’ll have more to say once I’ve heard the rest. I also plan to participate live in another meeting of this symposium group, to which dozens of researchers are contributing. What follows is really just me riffing and trying to get my bearings so as to frame what I think is at stake.Chris Fields mentions the shift that crystallizes in the nineteenth century and then intensifies into the early twentieth: the emergence of non-Euclidean geometries, the foundations problem in mathematics, and the proliferation of rival programs for grounding mathematical knowledge—logicism, formalism, intuitionism/constructivism, set theory in its various axiomatizations, and later category-theoretic approaches. Whatever one’s preferred genealogy, the contemporary philosophy of mathematics has been blown wide open into a plurality of metaphysical possibilities.Levin is drawn to a broadly “Platonic” picture of mathematical reality, which is not easy to argue against, at least not decisively, and certainly not without paying a metaphysical price somewhere else. I haven’t looked at the most recent polls, but anecdotally it is no secret that many practicing pure mathematicians are Platonists by default. That doesn’t mean they’ve all signed onto a worked-out metaphysical doctrine. But in the lived practice of mathematical work, the experience feels like contact with something that has its own necessity, something participated in, rather than something merely invented. No doubt others push hard in the opposite direction and try to give an explicitly Darwinian evolutionary or “ontogenetic” account of mathematics—something my friend Tim Jackson is likely to emphasize when he joins the discussion—where mathematical cognition is continuous with biological development and the historical emergence of quasi-invariants.But as Levin suggests, science discovers that physical processes instantiate patterns that can be described using mathematics. Constants, symmetries, ratios and other invariants are not themselves empirical objects but mathematically formulated relations. Their success in application to physics forces the philosophical question of why nature exhibits such profound mathematical order. Why is nature mathematically intelligible at all, and what does that intelligibility commit us to metaphysically?Chris Fields then brought in the mystery of time. In many physical formalisms, time enters equations as a quantifiable variable. But the undeniable usefulness of treating time as a parameter for coordinate analysis does not mean temporality is ultimately measurable by clocks. Whatever clocks measure, lived temporality is obviously not simply identical with that measurement, since there’s no way to measure or read a dial except while already living through the flow of time. Atomic clocks are extremely precise instruments for correlating periodic processes, but the precision of the instrument doesn’t settle the ontological question of what time is.Bergson is relevant here. He wasn’t right about everything in his dispute with Einstein. But he was right to insist that duration or lived temporality—the irreversible, qualitative passage of nature, the thickness of becoming—is not reducible to what clocks quantify. All physical parameterizations sit within this deeper temporal context. The special sciences can never fully encompass this with formal models, because the models presuppose the very becoming they attempt to represent. Models are invaluable abstractions, but abstractions cannot explain living temporality.Metaphysics is the critic of the abstractions of the special sciences. It asks what has been left out, what has been smuggled in, and what has been unduly reified by misplaced concreteness. At the same time, metaphysics has no other data to work with than what all the specialized modes of experience provide. Its categories must remain corrigible: they must be adjusted and refined in light of what the sciences disclose. Whitehead’s project is to propose a matrix of categories adequate to what has been revealed across the whole range of inquiry—physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, and so on.But there’s a further Jamesian-Peircean move we cannot avoid: radical empiricism means we don’t get to arbitrarily exclude domains of experience that don’t fit the narrow epistemic limits of physicalism. Religious experience, aesthetic experience, moral experience are part of the data any metaphysical scheme even pretending to adequacy (if not completeness) must interpret, not because they are infallible sources of insight, but because they are part of what an honest, comprehensive account of human experience includes. If we’re going to do metaphysics and cosmology, if we’re trying to think seriously about the nature of life, the universe, and everything, we eventually have to face the weighty questions. We might even need to get our hands dirty and do some theology. Is this an intelligent universe? Well, it certainly seems intelligible. Physics gains purchase on reality by applying mathematics and technique to nature. The success of mathematical physics is not self-explanatory. Metaphysics is, among other things, an attempt to articulate the conditions that make intelligibility possible. Of course, the irreversibility of evolutionary time does put certain limits on that intelligibility. And mathematics can and had misled the scientific imagination of nature.For Goethe, the human organism, with its suite of healthy sense organs, is not a subjective impediment to objectivity but the most refined instrument for nature’s self-disclosure. That view is rooted in the older hermetic and Platonic idea of the human being as microcosm: a miniature universe, a recapitulation of the whole. And it is precisely because we are such a recapitulation that we can, in some measure, participate intellectually and imaginatively in the same patterns that produce the physical world.Schelling’s phrase autophysis philosophia (“nature itself philosophizing”) captures what Goethe is on about. The philosophy of nature is not a spectator sport. It is nature coming to reflective expression in and through the human being. Newtonian and Copernican science accomplished something essential by dislocating us from the center—by taking, as it were, a sun’s-eye view. That decentering was historically necessary. But now we have to rediscover ourselves as a “moving center” (Richard Tarnas’ phrase), not in the sense of a simple return to medieval anthropocentrism, but in the sense that the knowing subject is itself a participatory event in nature.The goal of science should not be to pretend we can stand outside the world and see it from nowhere. That “view from nowhere” is a residue of a certain deistic ideal of objectivity that was historically useful but metaphysically distorting when absolutized. The point is rather that a human being—as a microcosm—can, through self-reflexive participation, cultivate a more inclusive, more comprehensive, more “divine” mode of feeling and understanding. Not a God’s-eye view from outside, but through intimate participation, a widening of concern, a refinement of attention, a disciplined receptivity to mathematical form and to moral and aesthetic value.An analogy to with the cellular collective composing us may be helpful. My sense of selfhood—the continuity of my conscious identity—can be imagined as the emergent achievement of the monotheistic religion of my cells. Through morphogenesis, metabolism, and maintenance, my cellular collective sustains a whole that no one cell can comprehend. Their bioelectrically and morphogenetically coordinated activities (hemoglobin flowing through my veins, the rhythms of my heart, the synchronous waves of my neurons) is something like a ritual practice: patterned repetitions that sustains a living unity. They worship the whole they serve without consciously intending me. Cells are like spiritual practitioners participating in the divine life by performing prayer and ritual without intellectually understanding why.If you scale this intuition up, you get something like the process theological image: the divine is not at the beginning as a cosmic engineer with a blueprint, but at the end as an emergent fulfillment. Max Scheler quipped that traditional theology imagined God at the beginning, but it turns out God is at the end. In other words, there is something about the nature of the divine that emerges in and with the universe as it evolves. That doesn’t mean the beginning is “pure chaos.” In fact, I think it’s important to say there is no such thing as pure chaos (though I’m not getting into that here). But it does mean we should resist any picture in which the world is merely the mechanical execution of a pre-written script. The universe is still being created. And God needs our help in that effort. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

A few days ago, I sat down with my friend Jared Morningstar to ask him some questions about Islam. It was a follow-up to my earlier conversation with Jacob Kishere seeking ways for Christianity to grow “beyond itself”—not by rejecting the Christ impulse but by trusting it to guide us into more open and pluralistic forms of love and life. Mario Spassov posted a series of critical responses to my dialogue with Jared, which you can watch below:Mario polemically refers to Jared and me as atheists. If “theism” is defined narrowly as scriptural literalism or assent to a single tribally authorized picture of God and the afterlife, etc., then sure. I grant that plenty of fundamentalists will refer to anyone who steps an inch outside their narrow dogmatic frame an “atheist.” But Mario knows better, so I feel that his use of the label is neither accurate nor helpful. There is a long, culturally generative lineage of mystical and philosophical theisms (apophatic and cataphatic) running through Catholic and Orthodox sources, through Protestant mystics, and well beyond Christianity into the wider delta of perennial grammars of Spirit. My own theological orientation belongs to that family far more than it resembles either modern secular atheism or modern supernaturalist fundamentalism. Mario insists I have more in common with people like Sam Harris and Yuval Harari than I do with most theists. But I am not sure about that. Unlike Harris and Harari, I do not think meaning and value are useful fictions in an uncaring universe, nor do I see ideals like human rights as reducible to social constructions. I have explicitly criticized Harari’s nihilism. Value-experience is woven into the fabric of cosmogenesis, not tacked onto it as a late, optional human story.When I said that a dialogue like the one I had with Jared may only be interesting and accessible to something like 10% of the population, that wasn’t a gesture of exclusion but an admission of the limits of effective communication. No one can speak to everyone at once, and not every conversation can carry the whole public at the same time. Our aim was diplomatic: to model how an anarchic Christian and a progressive Muslim can speak theologically without collapsing into culture-war reactivity or reducing politics to the friend/enemy division. I’m open to dialogue with anyone, including people with whom I have profound political and religious disagreements, and I have engaged figures on the hard-right directly. For example, these posts on Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes:I’ve even spoken directly with white nationalists like Eric Orwoll (who visited me in Berkeley back in 2015 to discuss our shared interest in Plato) and Keith Woods (who apparently appreciated my work on Whitehead), admittedly initially agreeing to do so before I knew much about their politics. I had to pull back from further engagement when it became clear that their online followers (particularly Woods’) could not stomach good faith disagreement with someone of Jewish descent. While I’m obviously not politically conservative, I do not recognize in myself the generic liberal atheist progressive that Mario takes himself to be criticizing. But my purpose in seeking dialogue across difference isn’t memetic murder. I refuse to join Mario in the zero-sum social warfare frame that he’s apparently embedded himself within. Politics is not just war by other means but a laying down of weapons to attempt the difficult work of composing common worlds together using words. None of this means I refuse to take a principled stand or withhold criticisms of those I disagree with, but I try not to demonize anyone (though I admit it is difficult when they rush to demonize me, eg, in the way Woods’ followers did by reducing my cosmopolitical ideals to my Jewishness). I try to read reactionary political actors as symptoms of a diseased social organism. If liberal progressivism has a shadow, it’s not merely that it’s unconsciously tribal. It’s that it often pretends its sacred ideals—cultural freedom, political equality, economic solidarity—can withstand the winds of social change without being rooted in transcendent ideals of Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. These ideals can endure only when they’re lived as more than institutional procedures, when they’re grounded, pluralistically but genuinely, in Logos, in Spirit, in the imago dei depth dimension of our shared human beingness. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

In my recent conversation with Jacob Kishere as part of his “Christianity beyond itself” series, we attempted to navigate the ways the “Christ impulse” can so easily get hijacked by culture-war crusader energy. Spiritual renewal thereby risks being conflated with civilizational chauvinism.Midway through our dialogue, Islam came up. I felt how ill-equipped I am for that encounter, and how quickly a conversation that should be healing can instead further inflame civilizational divisions that have been raging for a millennium, more recently under the shadow of weapons of mass destruction. I’m committed to religious pluralism, to the sense that the Word speaks every tongue available to human beings, and that no single institution or language can contain the divine. But that commitment doesn’t exempt me from blind spots. If anything, it increases my responsibility to slow down, learn more about what remain foreign cultural grammars, and to be careful with the metaphors I inherit and repeat.That’s why I invited Jared Morningstar into a follow-up conversation. Jared is in a rare position: a scholar-practitioner with deep philosophical training, a Westerner and a modern subject who is also a practicing Muslim, trying to hold together fidelity to the tradition’s depth, breadth, and richness with a critical, non-defensive honesty about real internal tensions.We began with the word Islam itself, which is often translated as “submission.” Jared showed how, in Arabic, that translation sits inside a wider semantic field rooted in the same consonants as salam: peace, tranquility, rest. The connotation is less “conformity to an imposed order” and, for him, more like the Taoist wu wei: a harmony in which the active/passive dualism melts.From there, the conversation opens out into a variety of intersections: the Qur’anic reverence for Jesus as Word of God (without an incarnational Christology), Sufi Neoplatonic currents like the Nur Muhammadiyah, and the shared Hellenic grammar that makes “Athens and Jerusalem” a more accurate origin story than the usual “foreign other” framing. Jared also complicated the usual modern western frame of “church and state” by describing Sunni Islam’s decentralized institutional ecology—legal pluralism, multiple schools of jurisprudence and theology, and the crucial point that Sharia is not akin to positive law in the modern Western sense, but a transcendent ideal approached through interpretive jurisprudence. Modern Islamic nation-states have become theocratic, but Jared’s reminders about recent history helped unveil possible colonial distortions, ie, the pathological fusion produced by the Western imperial importation of the nation-state form into a very different civilizational context.I sought out this dialogue with Jared primarily because I needed it. I needed a friend who could both correct my shortcuts and deepen my sense of what’s alive inside Islamic spirituality beyond the noxious Western media environment that profits from narratives of clash and incommensurability. If Christianity is going to move beyond itself and avoid being captured by yet another instantiation of the civilizational crusade complex, then Christians (and post-Christians, and seekers circling the Christ) have to become more fluent in the other tongues in which the divine has been praised, feared, wrestled with, and loved. My hope is that this conversation contributes in some small way to that fluency. I offer it to your ears as a peace-full attempt to tune the heart to a cosmic music grand enough to include not only the more than half of humanity identified with the Abrahamic faiths, but all of humanity. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe

Why do we do all the things that we do?Why do we fear to die?Free to be elsewhere,Love holds us here,Fear of the dark encircling. Why do we do all the things that we do?Why do we die?Why do we sin when the Sun is in sight?Why do we lie under the Moon? The answer is in the rising of the tideAnd the shift of the seasonsAs much as in the beatsOf a human heart. Worlds upon worlds whirl round us,While we toil in division down below,So forgetful of where our shared soil flares from. Sleep seats the soul in eternal bliss:We breathe ourselves intoA rhythm old as time;It turns the mind off,Empties it of self,So that God may enter. Mind wakes the soul to the light of day,Where letters and spellsAnd all the markings of human hands and mouths abound,But it neglects the light in the soul behind itself,The secret source it is ashamed of,For it seeks to possess it as its own.Spinning round aboutWith stars overhead,Day after day,Night after night,Dazzled by nature’s beauty,And the swiftness of her scythe,We grow dizzy,We lose our heads.We forget whatin sleep remembers us. Into our bodies we fallfor the hunger in our belly,and the lust in our groin,until our bones our ground to duston their date of due return to dirt. But Earth is no prison cell, For out of cells we are grown. Sunlight, too, falls to EarthBut does not petrify.Its warmth a gift and not a warning.Even rocks receive it willingly.Earth is the secret source of the Sun and the Moon,Of all the stars and galaxies,and plants and animalsWho coinhabit our planetary humanity.Every soul in this worldis bound as one inThat which Thou Art. Earth has become the home of the Christ.It is no tomb, but Life. Earthbound, we learn to walk.Attuned to Logos, we talk.We understand one another,We converse together with the universe.Together, each one becomes All,We join in celestial chorusIn praise of an immanently transcendent divine,An aesthetic and moral revelationOf a once impossibly hidden,Yet now utterly naked,And undeniably present fact.Christ is not a supernatural powerRuling from heaven.Christ is present as the love in our heartsAnd the action it inspires,Or Christ is not present. Singing the song of the Lord,Our mortal mouths shape truth,And in that resonance we may joinIn celebration of creation. The way and the truth and the lightAre not opposed to the dark and stupid.Sleep and death are not apart from life;Intelligence is a learning processNot an eternal stock of knowledge.For on this terrific turning EarthEach day and night completesAnother wobbly circle of time,Albeit imperfect,Inscribing itself in the sphere of eternity.And eternity is so in love with the productions of time.Without the imperfections of time,Eternity would know nothing of death,And so nothing ofHow Love overcomes it. Holy we areWhole:awake in dream and sleep,always held,always borne. The hand of the Lord,and the heart of the Lord,and the head of the Lordare your hands and my hands,your heart, my heart,our heads put together. The Lord does not restrain usbut is our soul's release into wonder,our love of neighbor, of robin and redwood,our worship of water’s flow from stream to sea, tracking a mystery wider than the sky.   The Oort Cloud cannot contain us,The angels are raining their tears upon us;May we host their grace with honor,Collecting their sacrifice in the vessels they have forged for us,But that only we can ignite. Get full access to ☿Footnotes²Plato☀☾ at footnotes2plato.substack.com/subscribe