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Three Academic Philosophers Sitting In A Tree: S-M-I-L-I-N-G

Just came across this fun reply to my conversation with Pedro and Jack. Gentlemen, your enriching dialogue was as music to my ears and a Dionysian feast of the senses. By Zeus a lot has been covered in this interview, and… Three Academic Philosophers Sitting In A Tree: S-M-I-L-I-N-G

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Infinite Intimate: Dialoguing with Marc Gafni and Zak Stein

Matt Segall: Hi Marc, pleasure to meet you. Marc Gafni: Good to meet you, Matt. Matt Segall: Really, as I said in my email, it’s an honor and it’s humbling to get to talk to you and Zak. I’ve had a chance to spend a little time with Zak. But yeah, great to connect with you. Where are you right now? Marc Gafni: I’m in Vermont. The think tank is in a big old Vermont house up in the northeast…

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Whitehead's Evolutionary Theology: Reflections on Process-Relational Panentheism

Below is a lightly edited, somewhat abridged transcript derived from a conversation I had earlier today with Jack Roycroft-Sherry. The podcast should be posted on YouTube and elsewhere in about a month. The Polysemic Nature of God What do we learn about God from Whitehead’s metaphysics? This is a difficult question because the term “God” is polysemic. Whitehead has a concept of God as a…

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It from Bit from Chit: Philosophizing at the Threshold of Artificial Intelligence (dialogue with Robert Prentner)

Summary of my dialogue with Robert Prentner: I apologize for the sound quality, but there is a full transcript below! Robert began by explaining his shift from skepticism to engagement with AI. Early versions of ChatGPT struck him as underwhelming, but newer models like GPT-4 and Claude impressed him with their linguistic and problem-solving fluency. This sparked his deeper interest—not in…

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Imago Machinae: Made in the Image of Our Machines, Rethinking God, Technology, and Consciousness at Edge Esmeralda

Introduction by Janine: All right, we’ve got two more talks this evening for the next hour. I’m really excited to welcome Matt Segall. He is a transdisciplinary philosopher, associate professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness department at the California Institute of Integral Studies. And I first came across some of Matt’s work both online, and now in person last night, and both…

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"Philosophy in the Age of Technoscience: Why We Need the Humanities to Navigate AI and Consciousness"

I ended up giving a brief (10 minute) impromptu talk at Edge Esmeralda today, and this is a transcript of what came out:  Hey, everyone, can you hear me okay if I speak at this level? Great. So, yeah, I’m Matt Segall and I am a philosopher. I teach in this wonderful graduate program in San Francisco at the California Institute of Integral Studies in the Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness…

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Human Consciousness and Machine Intelligence

I sat down with my friend Kent Bye earlier today to discuss the intensifying entanglement of human consciousness with machine intelligences. He read my recent chapter on the philosophical implications of AI and asked some great questions that elicited fresh thoughts. The podcast should be posted soon, but for now below is a preview of some of what we discussed (based on my own extensive editing…

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The Invariance of Variation: Or Why Metaphysics Must Become Ungrounded (Dialogue with Tim Jackson)

Tim Jackson and I dialogue about a number of conversations we watched, including: Full Transcript of my dialogue with Tim: MATT SEGALL We didn’t read anything, but we did listen to a whole bunch of conversations. I guess three. Okay, four: I threw another one in there. So there’s the Levin and Deacon dialogue about evolutionary biology, and there’s the Bernardo Kastrup and Jay Garfield…

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Goals Go All the Way Down: Responding to the Deacon-Levin Dialogue

I’m grateful to Tevin Naidu for getting Deacon and Levin together. They only had 90 minutes but still managed to cover a lot of territory, including where they overlap and where some tensions may exist. I first met Deacon back in 2011 during a lecture he gave on his then new book Incomplete Nature. Regular readers may not be surprised to learn that I asked him about Whitehead’s eternal…

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The Essence of Evolution: Reflections on my dialogues with evolutionary biologist Tim Jackson about God and Eternal Objects

 My friend Timothy Jackson and I have been engaged in a rich interdisciplinary dialogue for nearly four years now. Where does the time go? After a bit of an email correspondence in the summer of 2021, our first podcast conversation occurred back in March 2022. We discussed the importance of generalizing evolution beyond biology so that the whole universe can be understood as an evolutionary…

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Reality is a Process: Dialogue with Maitreyabandhu at the London Buddhist Centre

Slightly abridged transcript: Maitreyabandhu: So what we’re going to do this evening is have a conversation—obviously between Matt and me—about process philosophy and Buddhism. Really simply, that’s what we’re doing. To put it very simply, the central act of Buddhism—what Buddhism is really about, whether it’s here in Bethnal Green, Tibet, Burma, or wherever—is that a Buddhist goes for refuge to…

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Prehensions, Propositions, and the Cosmological Commons (dialogue with Tevin Naidu)

Tevin Naidu recently hosted me on his Mind-Body Solutions podcast. Below is the video and an edited and somewhat condensed transcript. Tevin: I have shaped today’s episode around your paper, “Physics Within the Bounds of Feeling Alone.” It is a wonderful piece—a beautiful read. One thing I often ask my guests to do is give a brief philosophical history of the mind-body problem. I know that is a…

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An Anthropocosmic Approach to the Nature of Consciousness (My Talk at the UTOK Conference on Consciousness)

“What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his ‘soul.’ Man wants his physical fulfillment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.…

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“Psychedelic Realism”: My presentation at Breaking Convention

Below is an audio version and edited transcript of my talk at Breaking Convention last week, hosted by the University of Exeter. Video should be available in the coming weeks.  Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes (Introduction) It is my pleasure to introduce our next speaker, all the way from California: Dr. Matthew David Segall. Matt is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness…

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Boundless Body Podcast with Brian Tierney

My conversation with Dr. Brian Tierney traces a winding path through the imaginal dimensions of philosophy, beginning with the etheric imagination as the subtle medium through which connection between self and world is actualized. Imagination emerges not as fantasy or escape, but as an onto-epistemic link between our inner life and cosmogenesis. Our discussion touches on the trickster’s role in…

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Plotinus Without Emanation: Dialogue with Pedro Brea and Jack Bagby

Pedro Brea, Jack Bagby, and I decided to continue digging into Plotinus—specifically the Sixth Ennead—focusing on the relationship between the One and the Intellect, and between the World-Soul and individual souls. Why and how does the One overflow into the Many? We also read a helpful chapter by Gina Zavota titled “Plotinus’ ‘Reverse’ Platonism: A Deleuzian Response to the Problem of Emanation…

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Is a Metaphysical Revolution Afoot in Natural Science?

In this conversation, Mahon McCann invited me to reflect on what he referred to as a metaphysical revolution in natural science—gesturing toward the shift I and others have been tracking across disciplines including physics, biology, and cognitive science, where the old mechanistic, substance-based ontology seems increasingly inadequate to account for what’s actually being discovered and needing…