Diamond Mind
Science, philosophy, spirituality, technology, green energy, current affairs. Hosted by scholar, activist and author, Tam Hunt.
Diamond Mind
Diamond Mind #6: Matt Segall explores the nature of reality...
Curious about how philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead's revolutionary ideas have shaped our understanding of the universe? Whitehead was an incredible thinker whose work touched on almost every aspect of modern physics, philosophy and spirituality.
Our guest from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) offers a deep dive into process philosophy, where science, spirituality, and philosophy intersect. From redefining religious studies to influencing modern consciousness, physics, and cosmology, discover how Whitehead's journey from mathematics to metaphysics is more relevant today than ever before.
I've long been a bit of a "Whiteheadian" and his work strongly influenced the development of my own philosophical system that I've developed in a number of books and papers over the last decade.
I interviewed Matt a few years ago here and we have maintained over the years a loose dialogue.
In this episode of the Diamond Mind podcast, we explore, among other things, the fascinating implications of Whitehead's cosmological approach to God and how it resonates across different faiths and even with atheistic viewpoints. We unravel the philosophical complexities of thinkers like David Ray Griffin and John Cobb, Jr., delving into discussions on Kant, Schelling, and the anthropic principle. Through these insights, process philosophy emerges as more than just a bridge—it becomes a transformative perspective that challenges traditional views of identity, existence, and our place in the cosmos.
Join us for a journey that also touches on the history of scientific thought, revealing the dynamic nature of knowledge as a participatory endeavor. From the impact of Bergson and Einstein's debate on the nature of time to the profound question of panpsychism, we explore how Whitehead's ideas inspire new ecological and moral values. As we redefine civilization through the lens of the "creative advance," this episode promises to transform how you relate to the universe and engage with the challenges of today's world.
I'm really excited to talk to you live because, a I love your work and, b it's been really nice to just dive back into the world of process philosophy and Whitehead, because I fancy myself a bit of a Whiteheadian but I'm nowhere near as deep into it as you are. I'm more of a dabbler and I have really enjoyed Whitehead's work and David Ray Griffin over the last I guess now 13, 14 years and definitely see it as a key part of my personal philosophical system and what I've used in my academic work also to some degree. So let me just dive into your work and what you do. Can you maybe say a few things about your work at CIS and what you do there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I teach process philosophy and its applications. I usually don't just teach straight up whitehead. I do an advanced seminar on process and reality. Usually I'm applying process thought broadly construed, mostly whitehead, let's be honest other process thinkers, contemporary and in the past, and I apply it to consciousness studies, or I apply it to contemporary physical cosmology and biology, or I apply it to religious studies, or I apply it to consciousness studies, or I apply it to contemporary physical cosmology and biology, or I apply it to religious studies, or I apply it to economics and sociology. And so I really want to avoid talking to philosophers as much as possible.
Speaker 1:Why.
Speaker 2:I just find it more interesting to talk to people outside of philosophy, either scientists doing scientific work, or theologians, mystics, yoga instructors, whatever it is, just to see if these ideas are actually relevant. I like to say I'm a transdisciplinary researcher because of the way that I want to reach outside of the discipline of philosophy and speak to people doing other things and looking at the world in other ways.
Speaker 2:And I see I'm still a philosopher, of course, course, and I see my role as and the role of philosophy is just trying to put the pieces back together and not lose sight of the whole and the big picture, because we we lead very distracted lives nowadays and and on many levels, and it's easy to lose sight of, of the big picture so, yeah, I and yeah, my motto lately has been that the world is going rather mad in many ways, and we could probably spend a whole podcast talking about that and why.
Speaker 1:But let's not, let's focus more on the positive aspects here. I wanted to ask you if you could just to introduce what is process philosophy? Who is Alfred North, whitehead, david Griffin? What is process?
Speaker 2:philosophy. Who is Alfred North Whitehead, david Griffin, john Cubb Jr? Who are these people? Whitehead was a British mathematician who was born in Ramsgate, england, and went to the Sherbourne School. King Alfred went there, a very prestigious high school. He played rugby, he was a captain of the team, star of the team, and then he goes to. Cambridge and he studies mathematics. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles and ended up teaching at Cambridge for 25 years, and while he was there, he collaborates with Bertrand Russell, of course, if people have heard of Whitehead know he wrote Principia Mathematica with Russell.
Speaker 2:Russell started as a student, quickly became a collaborator with Russell. Russell started as a student, quickly became a collaborator and from there they publish three of four planned volumes of Principia, the last one published in 1911. But in 1905, einstein's special theory of relativity and other papers are published and by the second decade of the 20th century was in complete disarray. There was a paradigm shift, unfolding a second scientific revolution, and whitehead was drawn. He was always interested in the application of math to physics and he had written a bit about it already.
Speaker 2:Actually in 1905, the same year as einstein's couple of papers, whitehead published a paper called mathematical concepts of the material world, totally independent of Einstein, and he's beginning to think about relativistic space and time and how to work with that. And so he's drawn out of math into physics as a result of relativity and then quantum theory, which was also already underway. And Whitehead was especially well equipped to deal with this revolution because he had studied not directly with James Clerk Maxwell who invented and established electromagnetic theory, but he studied with Maxwell's student. So he's one remove from Maxwell and he has this deep understanding of field theory and so he knows what Einstein's up to, but he has a different philosophy of nature for Einstein and he has a more organic conception einstein's more of a mechanist and he's a holistic mechanist, which is interesting.
Speaker 2:Or like spinoza say, who sees yes, the universe is one, but we as parts of that universe are totally determined by the laws of physics and it was right.
Speaker 1:I will ask you to get more into relativity theory and how whitehead differed a bit from Einstein's thinking down. Yeah, we can try to think down the road.
Speaker 2:So this is what starts to draw whitehead out of math. Right, he gets really interested in physics and the foundation of physics, because relativity and quantum theory really whitehead would say, cannot be understood mechanistically anymore.
Speaker 2:So the old mechanistic metaphysics is defunct and he sets to work, initially trying to correct some mistakes he saw in Einstein we can can get into that. But then he gets deeper into metaphysics, I mean the philosophy of science, and then eventually metaphysics and cosmology, cosmology in the ancient greek sense, not just physical cosmology. What are the basic categories in terms of which we can make sense of our experience of this world, including science, but also religious experience and politics and art and everything?
Speaker 1:and so he writes process in reality in 1929 which is a famously difficult book, which we'll get into a little bit it's difficult.
Speaker 2:All monumental works of philosophy are going to be difficult to read because new thoughts are occurring, and so, in order to express a new thought, you're going to need to use words in a weird way that people aren't used to, and he definitely does that. And so, yeah, at that point he's doing process philosophy. He's thinking of the universe in terms of this concept of organism. The universe is itself an organism and it's made of organisms and it's unfinished. It's a very important aspect that makes his cosmology different from einstein's. Einstein didn't want the universe to be expanding, right. There's this whole thing about the cosmological constant. Initially, he wanted the universe to be eternal, right, and whitehead's definitely on the side of no, it's continuous creation, and that's white ed.
Speaker 2:in a nutshell, we can dig in wherever. I don't know if you want to go into relativity next or where you want to go Maybe say a word real quickly about John Cobb Jr and David.
Speaker 1:Ray Griffin, who are his main intellectual heirs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the Center for Process Studies was started 51 years ago now and John Cobb Jr, david Ray Griffin, who was initially a Cobb student, founded it and Cobb had studied with Charles Hartzorn University of Chicago, I believe and Hartzorn had studied with Whitehead.
Speaker 2:He wasn't ever actually a Whitehead student, he was more like his research assistant and at Harvard in the 20s and early 30s Hartzorn was working on editing Charles Saunders Peirce's work at Harvard and sat in on all of Whitehead's classes and told him a lot about Peirce and they're very convergent and a lot of their thinking independently, and so Cobb learns from Hartzorn about Whitehead and Hartzorn's a theologian mostly, as are Cobb and Griffin are theologians, and so for the last 50 years or so Whitehead's thought has been kept in in print and he's been to the extent that he has been part of the conversation because of process theology and the work of the Center for Process Studies, formerly at the Claremont School of Theology, but now it's independent, and Griffin over decades hosted all of these conferences with scientists and physics and biology and psychologists, other religious scholars, economists, and really tried to apply Whitehead's thought across the full gamut of civilized inquiry that human beings engage in.
Speaker 2:And there's dozens and dozens of books that collect the papers at these conferences and it's really wonderful what he, almost single-handedly, was able to do. And Cobb, of course, has written many books For the Common Good is one of my favorites, with the ecological economist Daly. And he's written about theology, of course, and has just done a wonderful service articulating the application of Whitehead's thought but also living in accord with the values of a process mode of thought, I'd say. And I think I didn't know David Ray Griffin very well at all I met him once but I know John Cobb quite well. He's 99, going on 100 and still sharp as a tack and it's hard to keep up with him actually.
Speaker 1:Yeah, good lesson in there somewhere, right, keep your mind active and your body will follow, and vice versa, perhaps. Yeah, actually I did meet Griffin a few times and he lived in Santa Barbara where I was based for 15 years until seven years ago. Really interesting, friendly guy, real seminal thinker, and he was my entree slash gateway into Whitehead, because I think almost no one reads Whitehead originally or as their first introduction because he's just, he's hard to grok. But Griffin wrote an amazing book called Unstarling the World Knot which I read back in probably 2010 or something, and for me it was like a thing that finally found a system. That kind of made sense for me. But I'll leave it at that for Griffin. I wanted to turn to your work. You've got a fairly new book out last year called Crossing the Threshold with a really good subtitle Ethnic Imagination and the Post-Kyentian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead Care to talk about your book and what it contributes.
Speaker 2:Sure, I'm trying to approach Kant and the idea that there are certain limits to what human beings can know about themselves, about the world, about the origins of the world and themselves. Kant referred to these as the three big ideas of reason, the human soul, the cosmos as a whole and God, and a prior title of this book that I didn't go with used the word cosmotheanthropic in the title, which wouldn't have helped with the long subtitle, but it's a term that the philosopher and theologian Armando Panicar comes up with that tries to show the entanglement of the cosmos, god or Theos, and the Anthropos and the human and the way in which and even Kant admitted this we cannot but help think. When we do try to think and do philosophy of our situation in terms of these three elements, there's something about the human being that it makes it so that we can't understand the universe or god without somehow making reference to ourselves, and that you could say it's like the anthropic principle in cosmology, which can be articulated in a really almost tautological way. That makes it seem trivial, but it's also quite a deep and important methodological principle to keep in mind that we can only know that which we are capable of knowing, and so this is part of the source of Kant's sense that there are limits to knowledge.
Speaker 2:And what I try to do in the book is examine Kant's three critiques very carefully and to show places where there are certain unexplored possibilities. And I use the philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead sensitive accounts of the nature of experience to reestablish science like natural science and natural scientific knowledge, as well as a kind of justification for religious experience, epistemological justification as to why a speculative cosmology like whiteheads or like shellings is actually really important for science and can give us real knowledge of the nature of the universe, not just instrumental knowledge based on a model that works sometimes but we know, is it actually true because of certain contradictions or whatever? Like no. I think we can do better than just a model that works. I think we can know the truth about the universe and we can also relate authentically to the divine.
Speaker 1:Let me ask you a question there. This makes me think of a really good five-sent word, soteriological and we often distinguish philosophy and science from religion and spiritual practices by talking about soteriological purposes, which is to help us achieve the divine or to develop our own spiritual practice. One thing I really like about process philosophy and its process theology incarnation is that there's a nice bridge there between traditional kind of just philosophy and soteriological meaning finding. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
Speaker 2:Yeah, process philosophy is a kind of meta philosophy in the sense that it's forcing us to ask what even the point of philosophizing is. Analytic philosophy often is divorced from the larger context of human existence and focused on narrow, manageable problems. It's not useless. You can actually do important logical work, clarifying concepts and whatnot, using these analytic methods, but it doesn't. To be an analytic philosopher is not to engage in philosophy as a way of life or as a spiritual path. It's a profession, usually, or it's a skill that you have, and so I think process philosophy does lend itself more to the sense of soteriology.
Speaker 2:It's most process philosophy and or I should say process theology, rather, has been done in a sort of christian register, so you you just because the you know, cobb and griffin happen to be a cobb's, uh, wesan, and I don't know actually what Griffin's affiliation was, but they're both.
Speaker 1:Christians yeah, I think Episcopal, but I could be wrong.
Speaker 2:Episcopal. Yeah, salvation right, that's what it's about. And Whitehead is, I think, speaks to people of all faiths and even potentially to atheists, though as long as you don't take the G word. As as long as you don't take the g word as he uses it to be in a religious sense, which he is quite explicit. He's not using it in a religious sense except when he talks about the consequent nature of god, because when you talk about the consequent nature of god, you're talking about our human response to the fact that this principle of divine order exists. He thinks you the principle of divine order or the prime.
Speaker 2:I'm getting into it, I'm just going to go there the primordial nature of god is like a cosmological fact that if you're going to do science at all, you're presupposing it's the intelligibility of nature. There is a unity, system and order to the world. If you weren't making, there wouldn't even be science, if you weren't already, if you hadn't already bought into that and world means universe, in this case right universe, universe right.
Speaker 2:And so for whitehead, the g word god can be used in this cosmological sense. It's just a basic fact that nature is intelligible and he just goes ahead and calls that god, as a metaphysician would, and he says this is a dispassionate consideration of the facts. There is this principle, but then when you get into the consequent nature of God, that's how do I respond to that? And I have an emotional and even religious response to that fact that the world exists and that I exist and that there's some kind of order that I can be in alignment with or out of alignment with.
Speaker 1:That generates religious emotions, both the sense of sin, the sense of ignorance, the sense of not living up to what is expected of me by this situation I find myself in. Would you agree, though, that those words you just used are, in process philosophy and process theology, typically not the same connotation as in Christianity, for example? Even though there's some overlap, they're used quite differently in most contexts.
Speaker 2:I don't think Whitehead ever uses the word sin, but he does think that there's a value vector to every moment of our experience and that there are better and worse experiences. Some are more beautiful than others, and so we're judging.
Speaker 2:We're aesthetically judging and morally judging all the time, and so sometimes we judge ourselves and so there's room in white heads cosmology and his translation of that into human psychology, I think, for some sense of sin. But there's a certain kind of shaming that often accompanies the use of this word in certain religious, in church communities say. That's not not often emphasized in among process christians because it's more of uh, the emphasis is more on grace and divine creativity rather than on sin and fallenness, because there's a totally different understanding of evil. Of course that comes out of Whitehead's cosmology, which is a byproduct of creativity and unavoidable in a sense. And of course there's the admission that God is not all powerful too. And when it comes to salvation, for a lot of Christians the fact that God is omnipotent is really important. Otherwise God couldn't save me, couldn't save the world, if God wasn't omnipotent, and Whiteheadians are. And one thing we all agree on is that God is not omnipotent. And so what is salvation if God can't do it for you? It's a very different situation.
Speaker 1:Let's come back to the G word in a minute and I'll just note right now that I think a lot of people today, including me until I began reading Whitehead, any invocation of God and theology was a turnoff, because I grew up basically agnostic, became a pretty militant atheist, gradually came back to some version of theism, but it's not your grandfather's theism in any way.
Speaker 1:It's not like the white bearded dude in the clouds, you know dispensing judgment in any way at all. So let's get into that in a minute. But I wanted to ask you've got a great dedication to your book Crossing the Threshold to all the creatures who have been and who are yet to become. May we continue to co-create eternally. So this to me is really, you know, at the core of what I'd say, a new co-creation, of a new vision of spirituality and theism in a scientific and deeply logical philosophical framework. So could you explain both what a few things, what creatures means in this context, what organic means in the process, policy context, and then see the big one, how this body of work helps you find personal meaning in the context of being a rational, scientifically based, rigorous thinker? That's a lot, I know. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, creatures. It's a word White Whitehead does use and it's synonymous. It's a more poetic way of talking about his one of his core categories the actual entity or the actual occasion. Sometimes he just calls them creatures. God is an actual entity too, and so in Whitehead's scheme, god is a creature, not the creator. This is part of the not being omnipotent thing. And what kind of god is it that's a creature like? Again, usually christians get quite upset at this point, but what's ultimate for whitehead is actually creativity, and god is a creature. Every finite actual occasion and society of occasions, which for whitehead, is most of what we see around us. The enduring entities are different than the occurring entities.
Speaker 1:The series of instantiations is a society.
Speaker 2:It's a genetically related repetition, the endurance of a pattern that's rhythmically repeating because it's valued, and so the form of an animal species or an individual animal is a complex value that's been achieved by this society of actual occasions, of experience. That's valuable enough that they all want to keep repeating it to some extent. But the thing about there are different kinds of enduring bodies or creatures and you can. So an organism and a creature, you might say those are just synonyms. But this distinction that Whitehead makes between an actual occasion and a society is very important and it's very easy to talk in a way that we confuse that distinction. So an organism, as we usually think of, a biological organism, is actually a society in Whitehead's terms. But there's also something organic about an individual actual occasion, and one of the hardest parts of explaining whitehead's philosophy is really defining what an actual occasion is, because it doesn't have a size it has a locus, but it's also everywhere.
Speaker 2:It's potential and actual, it's physical and mental. It's what does he mean by that? That's why the process in reality is 450 pages or whatever, because he tries to. It's physical and mental. It's what does he mean by that? That's why the process in reality is 450 pages or whatever, because he tries to. It's all about defining the actual occasion or the actual entity.
Speaker 2:But the idea here is that we are embedded in a community of other creatures. But to say that god is a creature is not to say that god is not also a creator. To say that I am a creature and you are a creature is not to say that we is not also a creator. To say that I am a creature and you are a creature is not to say that we are not also creators. An actual occasion, whitehead says, is self-creating right, and he always speaks in these elliptical ways. And so there's another half to that statement. We are other-created, I am made of you and you are made of me, and actual occasions are constantly feeding and being fed on by one another through what he calls prehensions. There's no easy way to introduce Whitehead's tactical terms, so I'm just going to throw them in there.
Speaker 1:You're doing good.
Speaker 2:And that those lines at the beginning of my book, the dedication, is me speaking to the first film meeting. I get out of this way of thinking. It's that we're profoundly historical beings and are inheriting the achievements of countless creatures who have suffered and enjoyed their existence beforehand and have really given me everything that I am almost, but I'm also what's being decided. I am this process of decision occurring moment by moment, as to how I'm going to inherit all of that. And so I know I am a co-creator with all of these beings who have come before me and that what I decide to do in the present is going to ramify into the future, and everything I do has a moral and aesthetic as well as a causal influence on the future, on what happens next.
Speaker 1:For the whole universe, not just for you.
Speaker 2:For the entire universe. Yeah, and then the whole question of personal identity. If Whitehead's ontology and cosmology is true, or if we want to take it as true, it becomes really interesting, right? Because who am I? Moment by moment, moment, there is an occasion of experience arising and perishing. Whitehead says consciousness is actually a late phase in each of these concrescences or these occasions of experience, and there's no substantial me that persists. Through all of these pulses of experience, there's a, there's some kind of, maybe, devotion to a sense of somebody who may be. That the stream of living occasions that constitutes my stream of consciousness is almost like trying to evoke, but it's not a substantial ego, right, it's a process. And so when we talk about the future, in a really unselfish sense, I think I will be there and I and a deeply like reincarnation sense of I will be there, but I won't be who I think I am now, but the, I think there's this do you mean your energy?
Speaker 1:your energy, your ideas, not your personality, right? You're not suggesting, not?
Speaker 2:yeah, no, my personality depends on this body, in this situation, these parents, these friends. When I, when this body decays, I won't be that personality anymore, but but something will persist. You could say my energy, but it's energy is an abstraction from physics. I, I don't know. It means the ability to do work and we can quantify that. That's not really what I'm talking about. Energy in the more spiritual sense, maybe Just that sense of like. Ultimately, whitehead's saying there's one experience happening from many perspectives and who am I in that kind of a context? And we get into some deep mystical moods when we ask questions like that. And I think that kind of a context and we get into some deep mystical moods when we ask questions like that, and I think that's appropriate at this level of what white-head is up to. It relates again to the consequent nature of God. It's not that white-head is saying that I am God or any individual is God, but God only exists in each of us. God's not out there, separate from each of us.
Speaker 1:Let me go to this, since you broached it I'm also a big fan of Alan Watts.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:Alan Watts was not explicitly a Whiteheadian but I think he certainly was aware of what he thought and I think he would generally probably say I agree with that. Watts was fond of the Vedanta view, which is shared in part with Buddhism and many other kind of mystical traditions, that thinking about god or source or ground of being brahman, whatever you want to call it, it's important to recognize in our personal spiritual and philosophical journey that we are that thou art, that tatvamasi. That was one of his primary messages. Whitehead, as far as I know, does not make that kind of soteriological connection but it seems to me fully congruent with whitehead's thought.
Speaker 1:In the same way you're saying that the notion in watson vedanta is that we are that not in any kind of ego. I'm amazing way it's often taken that way. It's not at all that. It's a recognition that we are part and whole at the same time. And if we are part and whole at the same time we are numerically more the whole. So I am far more God, source, brahman than I am Tam in this moment, in this body, in this context. So to say, I am far more God, source Brahman than I am Tam in this moment, in this body, in this context. So to say I am God is not in any way an indication of gargantuan ego. It's a recognition of just pure physics and myriology and spiritual insight. So I'm curious how that notion fits in with your version of Whitehead's thought.
Speaker 2:Yeah, whitehead has his mystical moments, right, and Watts wasn't just familiar. We have several copies of Whitehead's different books in the CIS library as part of the Watts archive. With his marginalia, so he was reading them closely. And Whitehead needs more poets and mystics and spiritual teachers to bring his thought to life, to, to bring his categories into people's lives so that they can do their soteriological work. He doesn't. He said he was an academic. He was, you know, he lived to, to teach really, and to uh, and to write and to think, and he wasn't necessarily trying to be understood by everyone, he was trying to be understood by specialists and so he really needs to be translated. He wrote in english, but not really his own version thereof yeah, and watts is watts?
Speaker 1:writes in english yeah, he's a great communicator. That's why I think he's so popular still today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'd forgotten. This is all implicit in Whitehead, even if he didn't say it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'd forgotten, actually temporarily, that I think Watts was one of the founders of CIS right, or at least he was there in the beginning of the process of founding and he taught there for some time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he was the first dean of what was then called, actually, the American Academy of Asian Studies, which lasted for about five years, and it's like the I call it the institutional, the prior institutional incarnation of CIIS.
Speaker 1:It's the same president.
Speaker 2:Aridas Chowdhury, who founded the prior actual academy of Watts, yeah, and he became president of CIIS later.
Speaker 1:Yeah, got got it. Let me dive into your personal background a bit more here. I'm always really interested in how people got to where they are, and I think you've got a great position where you're a full-time academic, you're doing what you love, job security, you get to think all day and teach all day and get paid to do it. What was your journey through? I know you went to cis. I think I met you when you were there.
Speaker 2:Talk about your story a bit. Yeah, every day I have to remind myself, when I have five meetings in a row or whatever, that I'm so lucky to do what I do. Those five meetings are with students who really care about ideas that I love to talk about. It's really a privilege and a dream come true and I knew pretty early on that I wanted to teach. And it's really a privilege and a dream come true and I knew pretty early on that I wanted to teach and that I loved ideas.
Speaker 2:I also considered going into counseling psychology because part of what I love about ideas is actually talking to people about ideas and I know this was my 21-year-old mind thinking when I do therapy with people I could really just get all philosophical with them and that's not necessarily the best approach for some people. But I didn't get into some of the counseling programs I had applied to because my undergrad was in cognitive science and they're like maybe you should volunteer at the shelter or something or the psych ward for a year and then apply next year and I thought about that, that. But I ended up just applying for this philosophy program at cis, pcc philosophy, cosmology and consciousness it's called, and I discovered it googling as one does, and but I had also read about it a book by william erwin thompson called coming into being. He's like a integral philosopher and he had taught a course at CIS for PCC in the 90s and he mentions it there. And I had also been as an undergraduate reading books by Brian Swim, the cosmologist, and Richard Tarnas, the cultural historian and philosopher, archetypal, astrologer, and I didn't know.
Speaker 2:And Stanislav Graf I was reading his books and I didn't know. And stanislaw groff I was reading his books and I didn't know. They all taught at the same school until I found cis online and, yeah, I went there, got my phd and when I graduated the program, the chair of the program, robert mcdermott, was looking for somebody to create this online program masters, master's and PhD programs and because I had all through college and grad school been really involved online, doing podcasts and blogging and kind of my way around the philosophy scene online a little bit, and so I was asked to design this program and it launched in 2017, the master's and then 2019, the PhD program started and slow start and then covid happened. Everyone wanted to go online and that's how I find I've found my way and onto.
Speaker 2:The faculty is teaching online predominantly for this program, which affords me a lot of freedom, and students are increasingly international, which is wonderful, because I really do. We want to do planetary philosophy, and so it helps to have students who are all over the place on different continents, but I miss being in the classroom with bodies.
Speaker 1:I really miss that how often do you teach in person?
Speaker 2:not very often, a few times a year. Oh, wow, okay, yeah, try to do more of it. I moved recently right into downtown Oakland so I could be closer to the campus. It's actually in San Francisco but it's a quick subway ride. But we're trying to revitalize the in-person, the residential. But COVID really changed things for higher ed and also the Bay Area is just way too expensive for students to be able to move here.
Speaker 1:So is CAS overall doing pretty well. I took a big hit, it sounds like in the pandemic, but you bounced back pretty well.
Speaker 2:I should fill in the details there. No, the pandemic was actually wonderful for CIS because we had already moved online our program and we were able to pivot a lot of other programs online which are now back to being in person. But cis, unlike many small universities in the area and in the us, came out of that couple of years in really good shape. Actually, other other places were closing, going belly up. I would say cis is more financially stable than it's ever been before, which doesn't mean we have a huge endowment yet, but we have an endowment which is Wow, yeah, that's big.
Speaker 1:So yeah, cool. Let me turn back to your work. I want to talk a bit about your. I think this is your second book, I'm not quite sure, but Physics of the World's Soul, subtitled Afro-North Whitehead's Adventure in Cosmology Can you talk a bit about that book and what that subtitle means.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's my attempt to apply Whitehead's cosmology to the contemporary scene in physics and biology and what are called the sciences of complexity. In other words, if Whitehead were alive today, what would he be saying about how all these pieces fit together Relativity theory, quantum theory, evolutionary theory and complex systems theory? And so I go through all of that. I do a little bit of history. I talk about what's occurred in the 20th century in physics and Whitehead's roll in that. I talk about the Berks and Einstein debate, which was this pivotal moment, 1922. Einstein is famous now because only a few years earlier, the eclipse that Eddington had recorded proved that light bends around the sun, around a large mass, to the exact degree that he had predicted.
Speaker 2:And Bergson they're in Paris and Bergson is asked to comment on Einstein's theory of time and basically says there's something about our experience of time that clocks don't measure. Relativity theory is only clocks can measure, and so Einstein's theory of time, or rather Einstein's theory of space-time, is incomplete and Einstein didn't like that very much. And this is a pivotal moment and it shapes the narrative in the book. It's a pivotal moment for like how science and society relate and how our culture understands what science is telling us. Because it's really Bergson saying there's something about human experience that can't be explained away by science and Einstein is saying, no, it can be explained and there will be a mechanistic account.
Speaker 2:Time is ultimately, and time in a deep existential sense. Bergson called it duration. That's part of what gives our lives meaning, that grow. We have memory, where there's a sort of accumulation of value through the course of a life, because of this real creative time that Birx is pointing to and that Whitehead also wants to defend.
Speaker 2:And Einstein is saying that in nature, when you take the human being out of the equation, in our consciousness, in nature, there's no time. In that sense, there's one thing after the next and we can place it all in a block of this four-dimensional manifold called space-time. And the future's already out there somewhere. It's already happened, it's no different than what's gone on in the past. Your perception is a stubbornly persistent illusion, einstein would say. And so I'm trying to marshal Whitehead and some allies like Bergson to enter into the current scientific conversation, to resist the materialistic interpretation of science that is less dominant now than it was 100 years ago but is still more or less dominant in the academy especially, and in our common sense in many ways, and so there's still a lot.
Speaker 2:I think there's a lot of work to do to further draw science in the organic direction and more participatory direction that it's already headed of its own accord. Why? That just helps us speed that process of worldview transformation up a little bit that science itself has initiated.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you use the word participatory and that's one of the ideas I really found appealing in process philosophy, because in my understanding and interpretation of process philosophy, the universe is radically participatory in each moment. It's all one vast web of fluxing and flexing potentiality becoming actuality in the ongoing creative advance into novelty, and to me that's a really beautiful worldview. So I think it was radical participation. Would you agree with that framing and how do you see that framing in the context of modern physics?
Speaker 2:Yeah, participation is another way of thinking of co-creativity, right. Co-creation or mind and nature is being overcome, so that we see that every attempt that we make to know the world is actually eliciting a different facet from the world and that knowledge is a creative undertaking, right. We're not simply attempting, when we do science, to mirror a pre-given objective world that it could be understood as if it didn't include us Can't do that, that's not possible. The human being is part of the universe. To understand the universe is always going to mean to understand it from a human perspective, and that's not an admission of the limitation of our knowledge. It's this participatory affirmation which is to say that the universe has become human. We are the universe in human form and so we are an exemplification of the deepest dynamics of the universe and so participatory.
Speaker 2:For me also has a platonic source Whitehead on plato, and specifically mentions his theory of participation, which which whitehead reforms in important ways. But the basic idea is that, as whitehead puts it, the things which are temporal arise by their participation in the things which are eternal, and for plato this meant that there was a realm of perfect forms and that all of the world of sensory experience, the physical world was a pale imitation of those eternal forms, and Whitehead's not saying that. He's inverting that picture in some sense. And so participation for Whitehead is more about the way in which the actual physical universe is pregnant with possibility. And to participate means to recognize that you're, as a scientist, let's say, your attempt to know the world needs to incorporate the fact that world is never the same twice and that your act of knowing is contributing something new to what that world is becoming. And so knowledge and the activity of seeking it and teaching it, you know it gains this. You have to take responsibility for the consequences of your knowledge.
Speaker 2:The way that we know has an effect on the world, on the world, and that raises profound ethical, a different ethical context for science, which I think is really necessary because of the way in which, without a participatory, participatory approach, when science thought that nature was just something out there, uh, that it could observe neutrally, and whatever technologies or instruments they created to observe it, we're not fundamentally changing.
Speaker 2:It turns out with the ecological crisis that by the application of science and through its application, the technological transformation of nature, we can actually fundamentally change what the world is, shift the whole climate of the planet, and so we need to take more care with our knowledge, with how we know, because it affects the world.
Speaker 2:And that, to me, is part of the tangle of ideas that is signaled by participation. And you could put this in other terms, coming out of inactive cognitive science, like Francisco Varela's work, evan Thompson's work or Humberto Maturana as well, where they say every act of knowing brings forth a world. And it's getting beyond this cartesian split where you, you would think of knowledge as a subject just trying to mirror a world which it's fundamentally separate from without interfering with it. And we know, from quantum physics on up from quantum physics to ethology, like the study animal behavior, we know we can't observe a natural being, let's say whether a photon or a bird, without interfering with it. It sees us. And you could say it's more obvious in the case of animals, when you're out there in the field. If that troop of baboons knows you're watching them, they're going to behave different, but photons are the same way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's participation yeah, and I'm going to get into that notion in a minute of panpsychism, the notion all stuff or process has some modicum of awareness or experience.
Speaker 1:But let me go back to your comment about whitehead, updating or adopting a changed view of platonic ideals or forms and you and I had an interesting written interview I don't know how long it was, maybe eight years ago, um and I conveyed my my disc with whitehead's version of platonic ideals which he calls eternal objects, and I've been thinking then and now still percolating slowly, about how best to modify whitehead's approach to limit or even eliminate the notion of eternal objects. You at that time said oh, can't do it in the same way. You can't take a magnet, cut off the negative pole and have only a positive pole. He's got a new negative pole. Can you elaborate a bit on what your view on that and do you share that view today?
Speaker 2:Yeah, a lot of people come to Whitehead's thought, liking the process, the organism, the flux, and then they hear about these eternal objects and they're like what WTF, didn't know this was in here? Like how did this get here? But it's actually core. Whitehead says actual occasions and eternal objects are the two primary categories of his scheme. And so to remove one you're gonna. It's like taking out the foundation stone or the keystone of an arch, like it's not going to stand anymore, which you know whitehead would want us to tinker with his scheme. But you have to remember, with eternal objects we're not just tinkering with some idea off on the side that you know could easily be replaced without the whole jenga set pottering. Uh, this is, this is a bottom piece, and so everything changes if you take eternal objects out. And but there are certain ways of imagining what he means by that are problematic and that he doesn't intend. And I've written a long paper on this, hopefully not too long, but appropriately long, trying to iron out what he really means by eternal objects and what he doesn't mean and how it's different from platonic forms, because he's trying to make sense of abstraction, which is essential for science, but it's also essential for just life, like every organism, when it has a sensory organ which it has evolved, is abstracting from the flux of information in its environment, some layer, some aspect, and that's so. There's processes of abstraction going on everywhere, not just in human thought and language and math and stuff.
Speaker 2:And in order to account for it at the human level, or to account for it at any other level, whitehead thought he needed a category eternal objects, which are pure possibilities, which are, yeah, how to characterize them? Colors, right, redness, it's redness obviously requires certain physical conditions and biological conditions, certain atmospheric conditions even, and it needs a light source. But color itself, the color of red, he says, it appears when it is needed. He says it's like, what is this phrase? It's a ghost of time or something. And what is he using this weird language for? To talk about color? Because it's, it's something that is not physical the experience.
Speaker 2:Of red you mean the experience the qual red red, as a certain wavelength of light is physical, but experience of that wavelength light is not physical per se I'm not talking about a quantitative metric, of something called a wavelength of light, which is a construct in our minds. I know it's a theory about what light actually is, but it's what light actually is. I would say we're going to get closer to in our experience of it, not in a mathematical equation which might help us predict and build technologies and stuff, but what light actually is. Not an equation, not a quantity, it's. We don't even see light, we see color.
Speaker 2:And to say, yeah, red is not physical is to say, even though certain physical conditions are needed for it to manifest in and of itself, of itself, it's a different category of existence, as is to switch over to the mathematical side of the spectrum of eternal objects. Two or two-ness, it's not a physical thing. I could hold up so many examples of two things. I could have two elephants, I could have an elephant and a pencil, I could have an apple and pickup truck. Two-ness is equally manifest in no matter what the particular instances are which represent it. Where does that come from? Eternal objects are the mode of existence, the category of existence that Whitehead includes in his scheme to account for these types of objects redness, two-ness and the full gamut of other adjectives that we might use to describe. Whenever we describe how something is occurring or what is occurring, we're using these descriptor words that Whitehead would call eternal objects.
Speaker 1:Let me clarify that real quick just for sake of discussion. I think one could, and if one was a modern scientific materialist one would suggest that the notion of two-ness, an experience of red or any other example of eternal objects could be explained quite well through the process of evolution of material reality through space and time and biological natural selection, to the point where we have brains and experiencing beings, mammals, humans, etc. And then that experiencing being is able to entertain the notion of tunis or of red, and then we create a category of eternal objects to explain our mental experience of those ideas. Does that not work for you or for Whitehead?
Speaker 2:Again, certain physical and biological conditions are necessary for redness, but also for an animal to entertain the concept of tunis, to entertain the concept of two-ness, and so I agree with everything you said. We need an evolutionary account of how a creature became capable of doing math. But two-ness itself and mathematical relations themselves. You can't say that they emerge when animals get smart enough, because we're using the same numbers to tell that whole story about the physical universe unfolding in that way. Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1:But it only becomes a category and an experience once minds evolve In our corner of the universe. Obviously it could have happened and probably did elsewhere, but in this part of our galaxy it seems to have evolved as we evolved, right, or that's one version of explaining it.
Speaker 2:One could certainly attempt to explain math in this way, right, or that's one version of explaining it. One could certainly attempt to explain math in this way, but I feel like it's presupposing the that math can deliver objective knowledge about the past, that the calculations that were running on the deep past, that would you know be part of the narrative for how math, as a skill that animals could learn, evolved, and so I feel like it's presupposing what it's saying.
Speaker 2:It's presupposing has been operative in the universe long before human beings evolved to become conscious of it. Like these ratios, these numerical relationships really need to be out there in the world in a sense for the story we're telling about the history of the universe to be accurate. And so if that story is saying that the numbers we're using only evolved as a kind of associative like we abstract two-ness as a category for many experiences of different kinds of things, our brains just became capable of categorizing the world in that way when they got complicated enough, I think it undermines the very scientific picture which would allow us to argue evolutionarily in that way, if that makes sense. These are ancient debates, right? The debate between realists and nominalists about the nature of number and forms, ideas, universals, is. We're not going to get to the bottom of that today. It's a deep mystery and I think. But it does really matter where we come down on this.
Speaker 2:If math is merely conventional which on many levels it's conventional in the sense that I don't know that we should be looking for the one true geometry of the physical world. There are many geometries which apply in different situations. It depends what our purposes are and there's apply in different situations. It depends what our purposes are, and there's conventionalism in that sense, and whitehead would agree with that. But when we talk about the math itself, it has an order. That's not. It doesn't seem merely constructed. That it's. We discover mathematical relationships and once we've discovered them we see that they've always been true. We just didn't know about them yet. That's part of the phenomenology of being a mathematician.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a similar debate there about discovery versus invention right of mathematical truths. I think maybe we'll leave it in that on that very deep debate, and I'm thinking also it might be fun to do a part two with you down the road at some point kind of deal with these ideas. But I want to. I've got a couple more questions I want to ask you and then we'll close. But I wanted to return to a bit more practical focus for philosophy and whitehead and process philosophy, and you've written before in context about ecological civilization. I think the last time I actually saw you in person was at a conference, I think down in Southern California, looking at how process philosophy can in fact help us get toward a more ecological, sustainable, regenerative future. So maybe can you flesh out your thinking on those ideas.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's hard to be hopeful about the project of civilization these days, but I haven't lost hope. But I think what Whitehead offers is a sense of the cosmic context of civilization. There's a chapter in his book Modes of Thought that's called Civilized Universe and it's his attempt to understand human societies as something. And it's his attempt to understand human societies as something. He wants an understanding of the universe where the fact that human societies are part of it would be not surprising. That's just oh okay. Universes do this Great. We are part of a much larger and older process that's self-organizing and intelligent and capable of achieving great beauty.
Speaker 2:Intelligent in a in person or bleeding in a personal way, both, both. Both in a personal way, in the sense that the universe gave rise to persons, personality was a possibility for this universe and it realized lots of them, but also impersonal. Whitehead's God is amenable to both interpretations, impersonal and personal. It's the primordial, consequent nature's thing. Again, the primordial nature is impersonal, it's more like the dao. Consequent nature is responsive to our personal, emotional stake in existence, and so it's both personal and impersonal. And so, yeah, whitehead's trying to. Whitehead provides us with a, I think, a renewed sense of adventure and that the civilizational project doesn't need to be about war and toil, but that we can actually inhabit this planet in a mutually enhancing way, not only human beings relating in a more cooperative way, but actually humans relating to non-humans in a way that allows for the whole community of life to flourish. I think Whitehead provides us with the ideas that would feed into the deep motivational structure for such a civilizational transformation, and he speaks directly to the Harvard Business School at one point, and it's later published as an essay called Adventures of Ideas.
Speaker 2:Our civilization right now is dominated by the marketplace, by capitalism, and Whitehead's not anti-capitalism, but he's definitely trying to put capitalism down a few rungs on the ladder in terms of what the goal of a civilization should be. It's like increasing GDP is not living up to our exchanging of goods and services, in a way that actually it doesn't automatically serve what's best, just to let the invisible hand do it all, just to let the market do it all, just to let the market do it all we need anyway. He's not advocating for philosopher kings or anything, but he's advocating for educational reform. Ultimately, that would allow everyone to take a more philosophical attitude towards life, so that there are, so that we can appreciate values higher than money. And we've entered into a situation where our civilization can only value money. It's not that we value money more than this. It's like we literally at a civilizational systems level, like economic level, we anything that doesn't have a monetary value doesn't even register, doesn't register right.
Speaker 2:So that's a problem. So ecological civilization depends on the introduction of these new values and I think that's downstream A new moral sense of responsibility for the planet and for each other. And I think some of that's downstream from the ideas that Whitehead is introducing. It says as we think we live and it might seem like some of these abstract ideas that he's introducing aren't relevant, but there is a logic and a deep structure to the human unconscious and metaphysics is how we interface with that deep structure and his ideas need to percolate out as we get to the public consciousness. More any poets and other artists and storytellers for that. But I do feel inspired by the vision that he provides and whether or not it takes root, I don't know.
Speaker 1:things might get worse before they get better yeah, there's a lot there, and and I feel like part two could definitely delve into that topic alone quite productively. But let's leave it at that for now. I want to ask you one final question, and one of my real inspirations in Whitehead's work and process philosophy more generally is this notion you raised already of open endedness, of incompleteness, of eternal co-creation and what Waheg calls more generally or most generally, the creative advance, the ongoing process of co-creation into novelty, which is fundamentally a free process. So could you riff a bit on what the creative advance means and how we can incorporate it into our lives? How does it affect ideas like free will and modern physics and philosophy, etc.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the creative advance is this sense that I think I mentioned earlier, that every moment is new. There's this Borges line where he says everything happens for the first time, but in a way that is eternal. And I think that captures Whitehead's sense of creative advance perfectly. Because at the level of the whole shebang, at the level of God right, there's one eternal concrescence. It's always underway, always has been, always will be. But that one eternal concrescence. It's always underway, always has been, always will be. But that one eternal concrescence is also many finite concrescences.
Speaker 1:And the concrescence is a process of becoming concrete or actual in each moment, at every level of reality.
Speaker 2:And so there's a sense in which, in order for the one concrescence to remain itself, paradoxically, what itself? Is a process of the production of novelty. And in order for that one concrescence to never finish becoming itself, it needs to be infinitely pluralized into all of these partial perspectives on itself, which are the finite actual occasions. And Whitehead says, the universe grows drop-wise. The universe, he says, lives through its incarnation lives through the incarnation of itself into itself.
Speaker 2:So the one becomes many and is increased by many. Sorry, the many become one and are increased by one. Got it reversed? And so creative advance is this attempt, and it's a very logically rigorous, and it's consistent with space-time geometry as white had understood it that how the universe actually does this, from the quantum scale on up, where, in a kind of holographic way, every moment is unifying everything that's come before it with everything that remains possible for it in the future, and no two moments are over. The same universe is never the same twice, and yet nothing is ever forgotten, right.
Speaker 2:And so time for whitehead becomes this cumulative process. It's not, it's not simply a block, like einstein had it, it's not simply a single timeline either. Whitehead talks about multiple time systems, and so creative advances is his way of really emphasizing the proliferation of reality. That reality is alive and it's growing in these drops of experience in every direction, all the time. And so, again, it's an invitation to a transformed sense of our own experience and an invitation to a new way of understanding nature scientifically and, as we've also discussed, a new way of relating to the divine that follows from this idea of creativity. Creative advance.
Speaker 1:Yeah, beautiful. Thanks so much much. Yeah, I think this has been really good and I definitely will follow up with you about doing a part two, maybe this summer sometime or fall. But yeah, thanks so much. And, as it turns out, I did not hit the right button for recording, but I got all the audio. So that's fine, because it's mainly a podcast. It doesn't have to have the video too, but I have some nice clips here, at least at the last part and again, it's user, my fault. I thought I'd hit recording. I thought I was looking at the recording window. It said recording, but it wasn't actually recording.
Speaker 1:So there you go but like I said, yeah, exactly, the audio was there and we're good, so y'all be in touch. I'm going to start dropping these, probably next week actually, and so I'm hoping to have you in the first five or so. I think this is really good. I love your ideas, so I will be in touch and thanks so much.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this was fun. Yeah, All right, see you soon.
Speaker 1:Thank you.