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Alfred North Whitehead: Ideas and Influence

Below is an article I’ve just finished that will eventually be translated into German and published in The Whitehead Handbook (Verlag). Whitehead Handbook Chapter on Process Philosophy 4000 wordsDownload

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Generalizing the Function: Process Ontology and Free Energy

Summary by ChatGPT4 based on the YouTube transcript: This conversation between Tim and Matt revolves around their philosophical exploration of process philosophy, the Free Energy Principle, and Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, with a particular focus on how these philosophical frameworks intersect with personal health experiences and broader biological and environmental contexts. The…

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Schelling and the Return of Organic Science

Below is a transcript of my talk yesterday for the Scientific and Medical Network. I’m hoping to be able to share the video at a later date. … David Lorimer: This evening, we are looking forward to Matt Segall’s talk about Schelling and the return of organic science. There has been significant interest in the Network regarding Goethe and science, particularly reflecting on the contributions of…

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Schelling on Myth and Revelation

I’m sharing a rough transcript below of a question I framed for a doctoral student during a presentation yesterday. The student is approaching Schelling’s philosophy as a novel means of interpreting psychedelic experience.  You point out, with Schelling, that consciousness cannot self-ground. Reflective self-consciousness, let’s say, cannot ground itself. This is because, as Schelling points…

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Open and Relational Christianity

Jonathan Foster invited me on his podcast today. The audio will be released in a few weeks. For now, I’m sharing a rough transcript of our conversation.  … Jonathan Foster Listeners of podcasts and watchers of YouTube’s people out in the internet. Thanks so much for hanging out with us today. We are continuing what I’m calling season eight, where we’re talking about open and relational…

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"In Defense of Truth as Participation," my McGilchrist Conference Presentation

First, here’s a clip of Iain McGilchrist’s impromptu remarks on the opening night of our “Metaphysics and the Matter With Things” conference (which happened to be Good Friday). Next, my welcome and opening comments about the conference (partial transcript to follow):  Welcome to CIIS. I’m Matt Segall. I’m an associate professor here in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program. I’m…

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Jim Rutt Show on the Metaphysics of the Origin of Life

Here’s a link to Episode 232 of the Jim Rutt Show, wherein I join Jim to discuss the metaphysical presuppositions and cosmological implications of the Hot Spring Hypothesis of the origin of life. You can find a PDF of the chapter that Jim and I are discussing here: “The Cosmological Context of the Origin of Life: Process Philosophy and the Hot Spring Hypothesis.” The chapter was coauthored with…

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Transcendent Love and the Possibility of Revolutionary Political Change

I’ll be joining Cadell Last on Philosophy Portal next week to discuss the relationship between politics and love. At least as I relate to the topic, this is fundamentally a question of political theology. I’ve explored this terrain frequently over the years (eg, this process theological response to Carl Schmitt).  In this post, I’ve dug up some old exchanges with Levi Bryant to serve as…

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Whitehead's Panprehensionism: A Feeling For Reality (Dialogue with Tim Jackson)

Video timestamps are available on YouTube. Below is Claude 3 Opus’ summary of the transcript (with a few edits by me):  In this detailed conversation, Matt, a philosopher, and Tim, a biologist, delve into various philosophical topics related to perception, consciousness, and the nature of reality, with a particular focus on the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead. The discussion begins with an…

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The Future Impact of Artificial Intelligence

On Wednesday evening (March 13) at Grace Cathedral, I’ll be in dialogue with the Rt. Rev. Dr. Marc Handley Andrus, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California; Brian Behlendorf, CTO of Open Wallet Foundation; and Zann Gill, author, former research scientist on collaborative intelligence at NASA, and a founder of Generative AI Lab & Library in an effort to explore the future impact of AI, from…

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Descendental Philosophy and the Confrontation with Nihilism (dialogue with Roman Campolo)

Roman has been reading my book Crossing the Threshold. In this dialogue, we explore Whitehead’s mathematical imagination, theory of perception, and attempt to overcome the nihilism that Nietzsche marked out as a pathological transition stage. Watch on YouTube for timestamps. ChatGPT summary: 📘 Perception and Reality: Perception is not merely passive reception through the senses but involves a…

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Plato and Platonism: Dividing the Line and Completing the Cirlce

To listen to the live recording from which this transcript was produced, visit: https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1OwxWYrEnznGQ?s=20 I’m driving home from a talk that AE Robbert just gave at The Alembic in Berkeley. Adam’s a good friend of mine, and he’s finishing up a dissertation on the role of askēsisor training/exercise/practice in philosophy. He’s reading a lot of Pierre Hadot, and thinking…

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Fantasy, Science, and Beauty in an Evolving Universe (dialogue with Tim Jackson)

Tim and I continued our dialogue about the Free Energy Principle and Whitehead’s cosmology. I began by recounting a short video of Karl Friston saying all human perception is fantasy. From there we discussed FEP’s instrumentalism, the Peirce-James pragmatist difference, and explored the implications of evolution as a general principle extending beyond just biology. We also returned to…

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Agency and Perception in Whitehead and the Free Energy Principle (dialogue with Tim Jackson)

Tim and I continue to explore how Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism might intersect with contemporary scientific theories, especially the Free Energy Principle (FEP). The FEP suggests that organisms strive to minimize the surprise of sensory inputs by adjusting their internal models of the world, which resonates in some ways with Whitehead’s account of perception as the flip side of causation…

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Processing Process Ontology (dialogue with Bonnitta Roy and Gregg Henriques

Bonnie, Gregg, and I met to discuss the interplay between process philosophy and UTOK. We begin by unpacking the status of metaphysics vis à vis science in order to head off some common misconceptions. I make the point that physics has been without a widely accepted metaphysical underpinning since the quantum and relativistic revolutions of the early 20th century. Physics has become increasingly…

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Whitehead and the Free Energy Principle: The Physics and Metaphysics of Information (dialogue with Tim Jackson)

Tim Jackson and I met for another thought jam to explore the interplay between contemporary physics, information theory, biology, and Whitehead’s process philosophy. We got into the ontology of abstraction and in the end found ourselves ruminating on the nature of reality in an increasingly technologically mediated world. Our conversation unveiled a shared concern: as physics has become…

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The Metaphysics of Psychedelics (thoughts on Chris Letheby's new article)

Here is a fantastic new publication on psychedelics by Chris Letheby: “Psychedelics: Recent Philosophical Discussions.”It will appear in T. Schramme and M. Walker (eds.), Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine (Springer, forthcoming).  The whole paper is worth a close read, as it provides a digestible summary of the major philosophical questions that have arisen during the last couple decades of…