I am absolutely delighted to be here today with Matt Siegel of
Twitter Notes to Playtoe, at least that's the way I know you.
You have a blog or a website called Put Notes to Playtoe.
And then you also show up on Twitter quite frequently with provocative things.
Indeed.
And recently you had a long conversation with John Berbeke.
And really great, which I will put in the comments.
And you've also written a number of books.
Would you like to say the names of the books that you've written for people?
Sure.
Great to be here with you, Karen.
Yeah, I've written a couple of books.
One, maybe eight years ago on the German idealist Friedrich Schelling called
philosophy in a time of emergency.
The Re-emergence of Schelling.
And then more recently a book on Alfred North Whitehead that's called
Physics of the World's Soul, Whitehead's Adventure in Cosmology.
And a couple other little things, but I'm working on a new book that will look at
the place of human consciousness in cosmological evolution.
So basically where did we come from and how did we get here,
which will tie together a lot of the ideas I've developed in earlier books.
That's really exciting.
When is that going to be released?
I'll have to write it first.
I have like 80 pages and hope to finish it by the end of this year.
So maybe sometime next year.
Well, so just out of curiosity, what is your writing strategy?
I mean, how do you schedule your time to actually get things written?
Because obviously you're busy with a lot of other things as well.
Yeah.
I feel blessed to be able to engage in scholarly life for my work and I teach.
But writing is still a mystery to me.
I mean, I love it, but it's a labor.
I mean, I'm like, like there's, there's a suffering involved in birthing ideas and articulating them in a way that will be digestible to others.
And so I am lucky enough to have a sabbatical.
My first sabbatical as a professor this fall.
And so that certainly helps focus on writing without having to, you know, teach a full course load.
But, you know, generally speaking, I fit it in when I can.
And, you know, the blessing of being a professor, at least for me, and maybe it's not true for all academics, but this isn't so much work for me as it is play.
And so in that spirit, you know, in a playful spirit, it's much easier to, you know, get get some writing done, because it doesn't feel like an obligation.
It feels like this is what I'm supposed to be doing.
It doesn't hurt to have deadlines.
But, you know,
What do you make deadlines for yourself?
I try to though.
You know, you probably know that the creative process doesn't always obey our, you know, calendar systems and can't easily be scheduled.
So, but it does help to have a little bit of pressure.
Because otherwise, I can sort of stay in that inchoate space of imagining what I'd like to write a little bit longer than really is necessary.
Though generally when I know, you know, it's time to write a new book, I can't contain the the excitement and it spills out onto the page so
I have much the same experience with painting because I actually haven't painted now for a year and a half maybe because I've been so involved with this channel but
at one point I thought I want to write a book about all the paintings I never painted.
And so I thought that we're just in that inchoate, you know, imaginal stage, because I could picture them in my mind's eye but I, but but for me, one of the things about painting is that if I, if I don't have a process where I just paint every day, even if I'm
not producing anything useful.
I'm at least learning about myself learning about my process and I'm making some sort of progress by doing it every day. Then if I'm just trying to think of what would be the best painting I could do and wait until I get the aha moment I never paint so
Right. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. As a writer.
A lot of people complain about Twitter, often on Twitter that is distracting them.
But for me, I love to sort of beta test ideas on Twitter and it's almost like a daily writing habit, you know, I have some ideas that are kind of, you know, only half form and I'll throw them out on Twitter and try to provoke people and see where the
people are in these conceptions and then refine them, you know, so it's like real time peer review. And over time, you try to build up a network of people who give constructive feedback.
And you kind of ignore the ones who aren't really interested in dialogue.
But yeah, it's a nice way to engage in a daily sort of writing practice, rather than thinking of it as a distraction, though it can sometimes become that as well.
Well, I mean, there is something great about Twitter in helping you to refine ideas down to the kernel.
And, and that's been good for me. But the thing that's bad for me is that when I do get into a conversation with somebody, it's really fascinating to me so then the notification comes in, oh they responded and then I respond and then the
notification and these notifications, just when I'm deep in something else that I'm supposed to be working on and my brain is right there and I'm about to come up with this great a hot thing that I'm going to do.
And then the notification and then I get distracted over here to Twitter so I've been really thinking maybe I just need to cut the thread on Twitter.
But it's a great place to meet people I never would have met you if it had.
Oh, okay, well, I wanted to throw at you a question really quick before. So, the way I want to proceed today is to have you answer this one question first and then I want you to tell me a little bit about your life story.
And I want to discuss with you some more of these ideas about Alfred North Whitehead and, and art, and the article that you wrote on your, your website called the universe as a work of art images of the cosmos in Plato, Descartes and Kepler.
So, so it's just a teaser let's talk about Descartes for a minute because he comes up in all these conversations about what happened to the world.
And he was blamed for a lot of things. And I heard you in your conversation with john.
And then you talked about how you felt like maybe Descartes' intentions in the beginning were quite different than the way they have been utilized by people, and that you felt that in one sense he was just trying to save the appearances.
And so in the last few days we've talked about quite a bit on my channel talking about barfield and barfield mentioned that whole historical thing about the early astronomers and the saving the appearances and I wondered if you could just reflect back on that conversation with john and see if
you remember what it was you had said so that you could share it with my viewers.
And so I don't remember the exact context though I do. I can say that poor Descartes does often get blamed for everything that's wrong with the modern world, whether it's this notion of a substantial self, the ego that, you know, especially like new age
spiritual types are always upset about or it's his idea of nature as merely mechanical.
But if you put Descartes back in his time and place in his historical moment. You know, he's writing in the in the 1600s. A lot of his important work, enduring work comes after the 30 years war is is is wrapping up religious war right and so he's searching for a form of a
sort of a way really to arrive at truth that everyone regardless of whether they were Catholic or Protestant or whatever could agree to. And it was the basis of what we now call the scientific method and it, you know, drew upon mathematics which is supposed to be a universal
knowledge and so his philosophical method was was really a an urgent call for a new way that people across Europe could cooperate in search of knowledge which would aid us in, you know, living well in the context of a natural
change. Turns out we can understand. And we can manipulate and reverse engineer as it were and, of course, Descartes had two simple minded and understanding of what nature is.
And so, you know, it's very clear it's also clear that technology has advanced tremendously since his day, more or less using the same method that that he articulated.
And so, saving the appearances though I think Descartes, you know, again, I don't remember exactly what I said in the conversation with john but I would say Descartes breaks with this ancient tradition of saving the appearances in the sense that he was content to
use our sensory experience, how the world appears to us as a kind of a kind of illusion and that to understand the world.
And, you know, we need to be, and accurately we need to use our intellect, and we need to resolve everything into measurable quantities. Right. And so, you know, whereas in the, in the ancient world and in a more participatory mode of consciousness, we want to see the appearances as
something that can just be jettisoned in favor of some underlying reality which would be behind the appearances the appearances themselves.
You know, and when the ancients looked at the sky, they knew they were looking at an appearance, but the appearance was symbolic of something. Right. And this, I think is how barfield is trying to talk about the, you know, the importance of what he called final participation, where
it's not original participation where we're sort of immersed in this realm of images and myth, but differentiated and able to consciously participate. So as to, as the ancients used to say read the book of nature to see the appearances as symbols with meaning
and create some higher, higher truth. I think Descartes is in some ways breaking from that tradition severing sensory experience from mind.
Let me add one little thing in here that I think might be pertinent.
There was another aspect of saving the appearances. Maybe it's maybe it's a different phrase and saving appearances but I think it's Pierre Duhem that talks about when he does his history of science, that some of the early astronomers that were willing to accept these weird
epicycles and so forth because they didn't yet understand that the orbits were elliptical and because they didn't have the telescope, that they actually came up with those epicycles as a way to
kind of put a placeholder. It says though they were searching for truth they knew they hadn't come to the ultimate truth and they were not.
They still wanted to save the possibility for future generations to see what they saw.
And so they come up with some sort of a system that will describe it even though it's not, you know, technically correct but it's a method of saving the appearances.
And that was kind of what I had heard that that's what that phrase meant and so I thought maybe that that was partly why Descartes came up with his very mathematical system that he was observing something about reality, and he wanted to describe what it was he
was seeing as a way of saving the appearances for might come afterwards rather than just coming up with something and saying it's this way it's static we're going to jettison everything else and we're going to accept this new thing.
Right. Does that make any sense.
Well, let me let's briefly just rehearse this history of astronomy right. Ptolemy, one of the most famous pre Copernican astronomers developed a geocentric model that had all these circles upon circles right with deference and epicycles in an
attempt to come up with a model that could save the appearances in the sense that the retrograde motions of the planets could be explained geometrically using this abstract model and this abstract model that Ptolemy devised with the earth at the
center, as complicated as it was, made pretty good predictions in fact, better predictions than Copernicus is model that put the sun at the center because initially Copernicus didn't include the elliptical orbits of the planets as you're saying.
Okay, that's that's what it was. Yeah.
And so that that took Kepler's genius. But for Ptolemy, and even for Copernicus, maybe though it's not exactly clear.
And a friend of Copernicus is who published on the revolutions of the heavenly bodies after Copernicus died added this preface that made it seem like Copernicus was not offering a theory for how the universe really was but rather just a new model to help the church perfect its
ritual calendar. Ptolemy was quite clear that this elaborate model with epicycles and everything wasn't how the heavens really worked.
The ancients were more humble in the sense that they accepted, you know, God's ways are mysterious.
But we have minds and we can come up with models that are useful, right predictive. And so, Ptolemy was content to save the appearances and wasn't claiming that this is reality with Descartes and with, you know, the rise of modern science.
That humility goes out the window. The idea was then note the universe really is mechanistic, our models of the solar system are in fact how the planets are moving in reality, not just in a way that's useful for us to make predictions.
And so, you know, whereas Ptolemy's model is quite mechanistic. And you could say that that's continuous with what Descartes was trying to do and his accounts of nature. Descartes was saying, No, nature really is mechanistic.
Right, it's not just a useful model. And so that's the break with this tradition, which attempted to save the appearances as I would understand it.
And so it takes, and you know, this is a to jump ahead a bit to Whitehead. In the modern period, post Descartes post this dualism between mind and matter and after this bifurcation between our qualitative experience of the world as apprehended through our senses and our quantitative understanding of it as, you know,
our calculated mathematically, Whitehead's trying to overcome that bifurcation of nature and return to a, in a sense, an approach to natural philosophy which would save the appearances in that it's not bifurcating or separating the way the world appears to us and the way the world actually is it's trying to bring those two back together.
In a more complex way than what the ancients assumed, but nonetheless, to find some integral vision of reality that wouldn't sever us down the middle as it were.
So this, I guess, comes back to where you were talking with John about a way to bring reason and reality into some sort of concordance.
Right. Yeah, exactly.
Okay, well, before we get there, I'd like to hear your backstory.
Sure.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in South Florida on the East Coast, a town called Hollywood, which was sort of an early suburb in the post-war period, sprang up in the 1950s, modeled after Hollywood, California, with palm trees lining the boulevards and everything.
Nice place to grow up, close to the beach, and went to college, did my undergrad in Orlando, Florida, at the University of Central Florida, studied cognitive science there.
And,
Okay, so you can't just do that. When you were growing up, whatever made you think that you wanted to study cognitive science? I mean, what happened while you were growing up that gave you that direction?
Well, it wasn't my first major.
So, I think I was always kind of philosophically minded. I often would find myself, you know, as a kid, hanging out with the adults and talking.
I really became kind of almost addicted to reading in high school. Not initially, maybe 10th grade, when I read a book by Joseph Heller, Catch 22, about World War II, and how absurd it was.
Not only did it hook me on reading and hook me on history and trying to understand how did human beings get to this place, and just as I learned more about history, all this crazy stuff that's happened, which had I not been reading about it, I was kind of shielded and protected from in my childhood existence.
You know, everything was pretty much okay. No major traumas as a kid. Just grew up in this pretty calm suburb, playing youth sports and what have you.
So, I got hooked on reading, wanted to learn history, discovered, I think, you know, a book on existentialism drew me into philosophy proper, but I got exposed in high school to some Jungian psychology and Eastern religion and spirituality, like through Alan Watts and DT Suzuki and others like that.
And then, yeah, I was just off and running, but when I started college, my major was journalism. I wanted to be an investigative journalist or, you know, work for National Geographic and go, you know, to these exotic places around the world and find people whose stories were interesting.
But journalism was not what I imagined when I started taking courses and then so I switched over to philosophy, which was quite interesting to me. My parents didn't want me to do that, but I kind of bracketed the idea of what I will do with this when I graduate.
But after a while, the philosophy courses got a little boring. I was interested in science and neuroscience in particular. And so cognitive science was a way of kind of being very interdisciplinary, not having to specialize too much because it draws on,
yeah, philosophy, but also the natural sciences, computer science, linguistics, anthropology, and so I got to take courses all over the place. But I was really interested in consciousness and, you know, was experimenting with psychedelics in college and
reading about like Zen Buddhism and really searching for a kind of satori experience, I wanted to be enlightened, you know, and just engage in an exploration of consciousness in an experiential way.
And there wasn't much room for that in my undergraduate study of cognitive science. Consciousness was only just beginning, this would have been the early 2000s, was only just beginning to be taken seriously as a academic subject.
That's changed now, I think it's very much.
Yeah, it's hard to even remember that there was ever a time when it wasn't like the hot topic.
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I think that gets me up to my undergrad years and from that point, you know, I knew I wanted to go on to graduate school, but I wasn't exactly sure where because I wanted to study consciousness, right.
So the University of Central Florida had a master's program in COGSI that I could have continued on into. But I ended up sort of taking a year off to figure it out.
And thought, okay, maybe I'll go into, I knew I wanted to be either a teacher or therapist.
And I ended up applying to a couple of different schools. And one of those was the California Institute of Integral Studies where I now teach, which I discovered after the fact, all of the really important books that influenced me deeply that I had been reading
was just wandering through, you know, UCF's library, picking books off the shelf from the psychology section or the philosophy section. I'd read books by people like Richard Tarnas and Brian Swim and Stanislaw Groff and it turned out that all these people were teaching in this program in San Francisco.
And so I decided to take a risk and move across the country and start a new life on the West Coast. And it worked out pretty well.
So you did your, your master's and your doctorate there?
Yeah, yeah, finished my doctorate in 2016 and had a kind of circuitous path into the faculty, you know, as I was working in administration in the Provost's office for several years, which I'm told I'm good at but I did not enjoy.
It's just, you know, obviously spreadsheets and scheduling and putting fires out in the bureaucracy of this little graduate school wasn't exactly where my passion lay.
So, but you know, I put in my, I put in some hard work there and eventually helped the program by designing and launching an online degree program.
This was before COVID. This was in 2017. And there aren't that many online philosophy graduate programs in the world.
There are more and more now I've obviously post COVID and pretty much everything has at least offered an option online but we were prepared for code because we had those online programs and I was hired to kind of shepherd those those programs along and you know now I teach in a graduate program that has students all over the world and it's it's quite,
you know, planetary in its in its approach. So it's really exciting to have such a diversity of students in the classroom, studying ideas that I think are important not just intellectually or academically but that I think are relevant and and urgently needed in our world so
Well, so I know that one of the things that you talk about a lot.
Well, maybe I should start with this. This is probably a really stupid question but could you give a brief overview of white hoods, white heads.
I know that that he had a great breadth of thought and he wrote a lot and some of it is pretty obtuse, but if you could just kind of maybe briefly do three or four minutes on white head and then I might know better where to start.
Yeah.
So, Whitehead starts as a Cambridge mathematician. He taught at Cambridge from 1880 or there about 1885 until 1910.
One of his students was Bertrand Russell, the famous British philosopher who collaborated with whitehead on the Principia Mathematica, which was this attempt to establish the foundations of mathematics.
Is that the book where they proved that one plus one equals two.
That's a joke whitehead makes later that it took them 300 pages to establish that indeed one plus one equals two.
And today to prove that two plus two equals four.
Right. These are still perennial issues right.
Yeah.
I mean, but you know the the universality of mathematics and the, the form of knowledge that it can produce is quite mysterious.
And whitehead was interested in logically grounding that truth. And it's not that mathematics is still not taken seriously as as our closest point of access to such truth but the project failed right and so you know whitehead.
As a result of the paradoxes that they ran into in that book, migrated out of just pure mathematics into physics.
This was in the 1910s and Einstein's name was was starting to be become more well known as a result of his special and general theories of relativity.
And Whitehead was trying to think through the relationship between space and time and matter and energy right alongside Einstein and other physicists who recognize that a revolution a paradigm shift was afoot.
In 1919, when the expedition led by Arthur Eddington to observe the eclipse in order to test Einstein's theory about light bending around the sun.
When that those photographic plates were revealed at the Royal Academy in London, whitehead was present. Einstein became world famous overnight as a result of this confirmation of his prediction.
And this really set Whitehead off into the philosophy of nature and metaphysics proper and he wrote a number of books in the early 1920s that were attempting to sort of engage Einstein in his philosophical presuppositions and the two of them, you know, discuss this face to face a few times.
It was it was a hot topic. You know, the French philosopher, Henri Bergson had a little debate with Einstein about how to interpret his new understanding of space and time and there's a lot of controversy but that's sort of now forgotten and Einstein is championed as this great genius which he was.
But there's there's more to the story about how we understand the nature of the universe and so, you know, whitehead accepted much of relativity, but went into the deeper metaphysical presuppositions of natural science and physics and biology and was invited to Harvard in 1924 to teach philosophy and it was.
And as in his first lecture at Harvard that this is also his first class in philosophy.
He's never formally trained in philosophy though, obviously read widely, and has this deep appreciation for the history of philosophy. He has a way of engaging in that history in a very constructive way where he pulls out in a way what all the major figures
like quantum empiricists or rationalists or idealists or materialists he pulls out scattered insights in their writing that are that he feels are true and accurate and so he's in a way, saying everybody was right about something, but not about everything.
He has this real integrative way of engaging in philosophy so at Harvard he writes all his famous books, starting with science in the modern world and then process and reality and adventures of ideas later.
And he's articulating what he called the philosophy of organism, which is an organic conception of the universe, meant to replace the old mechanistic understanding of the universe which birthed modern science and in effect he's saying that science itself has undermined its own original ontology its own
conception of what nature ultimately is, namely a collection of parts obeying fixed laws. Whitehead says, there are no parts separate parts in nature nature is composed of interrelated holes, it's holes all the way down if you want.
And then the really interesting claim that he makes is that experience, which we know most intimately in our own case as conscious human beings, that in some sense experience goes all the way down.
Even photons, electrons, atoms have a perspective on the world. There's something it is like to be an atom as a vibratory frequency of energy.
And so what he allows us to do is see the human and our human experience as an example of or an exemplification of the processes of nature.
All the way down, right, so rather than our human consciousness being some exception to the way that the rest of nature is, our human experience becomes a window into physical process at whatever scale it's occurring.
So it's a totally new method, a totally new way of doing natural philosophy and ultimately science. And of late, I think it's safe to say there's a bit of a whitehead renaissance underway a lot of philosophers but really people beyond just philosophy, artists,
designers, ecological thinkers, sociologists, a lot of people are interested in applying what his ideas to their discipline because it's so consonant with this general shift towards a more, more ecological awareness, more of a sense of human beings as part of nature rather than somehow hovering above it.
So yeah, that's that's what had in a, in a nutshell.
Okay, wow.
Yeah, that that's fantastic. That that's why whitehead appeal to me I guess because a lot of those things that you're talking about things that I saw through my experience of developing a creative process to do art.
And so that gets us back to this article that you wrote the universe as a work of art.
And at the very beginning, you say that John Dewey defines imagination, not as a specific faculty alongside other faculties, but as that which holds all other elements in solution.
And I'm just going to take a minute to unpack that the way I see what it's saying.
He may be using imagination differently than I'm using imagination but when I think of that word I think of kind of like McGillchrist idea that the right hemisphere has access to something that the left hemisphere does not have access to.
And that that something is, is essential to the creative process, and having that kind of awareness is essential to the creative process and that the way that I learned about creativity was that
not by being taught a particular process of painting, but by being taught a particular way of seeing. And, and that way of seeing was informed by an understanding of what has been observed throughout all centuries as people have seen art that has appealed to them that has spoken to them
to be or meaning or purpose. All of that art has within it, a certain set of elements that make up the work itself and then a certain set of principles that sort of interpret the elements or that
create opportunities for the elements to be visually fascinating and to draw the eye and to create meaning.
So those elements are just the simple things you see in any painting line and size and shape and direction and color and texture and value value meaning.
Sorry, value meaning dark or light.
But, but you also see those elements any place that you look in the universe, you see those things right so. And then the principles are really this for me a kind of a matrix of flexibility of how you can get a maximal mileage out of every single one of those elements.
And so the principles are unity variety harmony contrast repetition variation gradation and balance.
And I've discovered since then, looking back at good looking back at some of white heads work that these are things that they were talking about as well because that that allows for this maximum flexibility within the universe without it having to be deterministic and static.
It allows for this freedom to take place, but that freedom is also based in a stability around the elements themselves and the substrate on on which the elements are operating.
But when the artist works the artist is has a vision, or the artist is trying to represent something that they can see either seeing it visually, a thing that they're looking at, or seeing it in their imagination, both ways you can paint.
But then when you have this internalization of these elements and principles, when you begin to work, you're not thinking about those things so much it's more like learning scales on a piano, you don't think about the scales when you're actually playing the symphony.
But if you hadn't learned the scales you wouldn't be able to play the symphony. So what it basically does is it frees you up. It frees you up to just continue accessing this right hemisphere vision that you have, and to continue to create so there's this
annual flow of this creative impulse through the hands onto the paper with the paint. And so in a way the paint speaks back to you the paint may be creating patterns on the paper that are somewhat chaotic or random in their look but then, then as the
artist continues to look and see then patterns arise out of that and then images arise out of those patterns and so you get a much more evocative image then you would get if you were simply trying to recreate a photograph on the on the paper.
And that's kind of the way I look at the difference between determinism and free will that the photographic specialist who can recreate a photograph on paper and paint and then that's a tremendous skill there's no question about it and you have to be a wonderful
artist to do that but but you can also go this other route where where it's strictly completely creative work that's happening, holding the elements in solution through imagination.
So I really like that quote from Dewey.
Well that I mean that just, you know, your wonderful account of the the artistic palette as it were and everything that goes into being able to create and recognize beauty dovetails perfectly with with white heads whole picture of reality.
For him, and this is part of how he saves the appearances by bringing our aesthetic experience back together with our our understanding our intellectual reflection, because for him ultimately reality is an aesthetic achievement for something to be real for
white head in the concrete sense means for some aesthetic that is some aesthetic synthesis has been achieved.
And so, when he, you know, he uses a lot of these terms that you're talking about contrast and repetition and pattern to understand the way that perception is a process of synthesizing elements available in in in the past of any given experience and allowing them to grow together and
become harmonized and where there's any conflicts, they can be transformed into contrasts and become part of this more complex whole.
And, you know, for white head, beauty is the ultimate aim of the universe he says beauty is the teleology of the universe, and beauty is intensified when more diversity can be held in harmony, right, where more what would be conflicts
and more aesthetic conflicts are brought under contrast and so integrated into some more complex whole and every at every scale of the process of nature, whether we're talking about the harmonic frequency that holds together a proton and an electron in a
hydrogen atom, or the balance between gravitation and a sort of nucleosynthesis occurring in the core of stars that creates that star, or the balance thermodynamically of the metabolism that keeps an organism alive.
These are all aesthetic achievements in white heads view and they're about balancing contrasts and the thing is, you know, white as a process thinker and creativity is his ultimate principle and every every form of beauty which is achieved can be enjoyed in the present and there's a kind of
eternity in that enjoyment but everything created parishes. And so he talks about reality having this character of perpetual perishing but in his view, the highest form of beauty is tragedy, where you appreciate what's been achieved because you know it won't last.
It will perish. And yet, we remember. And, you know, nothing in white heads universe though it parishes is ever lost fully and this starts to get into his theology, where God is kind of like the tragic poet of the world, who isn't able to control and determine
anything that happens but nonetheless, beckons or goads or lures all finite creatures toward that beauty which is possible for them to realize in their finite situation with their finite capacities.
And so in the course of time, you know, though, any finite beauty which is achieved will perish. There's a kind of building up of a story if you want, or an epic poem that when we are capable of appreciating it just reveals the glory of God, right.
And I would just interject a second, because does he actually say that God isn't able to accomplish his purposes, or does he, because that's completely consonant with my viewpoint would would be that God is able to do any of these things but he chooses to give
him the freedom. He chooses to allow his creation the freedom to to pursue to pursue beauty, but along, along an infinite possible number of pathways that there's not just one way to that pursuit.
And when that pursuit maybe starts going down a wrong pathway he's, he's generous and kind enough to present an obstacle in the path that will teach us something.
Sometimes that obstacle may be a small thing sometimes it may be a looming large, very difficult thing but those obstacles are all gifts because they're perfectly crafted to our need at the moment to what we need to learn in order to move further along this path towards beauty.
That's kind of the way I see things. Yeah, I mean I think you can, there's enough wiggle room and in Whitehead's theology to make it compatible with a view like that though generally process theologians will say that Whitehead's God is not omnipotent
in the sense that God could intervene in the natural course of events to change what's going to happen or that if God wanted to God could assure that beauty was realized in every instance.
Whitehead says that God is a creature of creativity so his ultimate principle is not God but creativity itself which is just this, he calls it the principle of unrest, right? It's, there's nothing, creativity he says it's the universal of universals and so in one sense it's
super abstract but in another sense you can never find something that's not an example of it including God. So God though is different from all other instances of creativity because God's primordial.
God is the first creature and as the first creature God sort of sets the tone for the rest of creation to unfold but finite creatures have the freedom to decide how they want to realize themselves and they aren't controlled by God though Whitehead says God's
God's role in the creative advance of nature is to hold up to each creature a mirror which shows to that creature its own potential greatness and given that we do live in a pretty organized beautiful universe I mean there's chaos too
but there's enough order and organization that we're here to reflect upon the fact right and so more often than not creatures do follow that Whitehead calls it the initial aim right this mirror held up to each creature to say this is what you can accomplish in this moment
more often than not creatures will follow that aim but as creatures become more complex and you get to the human being creativity can then be called freedom kind of moral freedom which seems to be more or less unique to the human right we have this problem of good and evil to deal with which
Well let's explore that for a second because when you're talking about holding up the mirror I immediately got this picture of, did you get a chance to hear the conversation between John for Vicki and Michael Levin.
I listened to some of it yeah. Okay, well so in that conversation Michael Levin acknowledged.
He's a great believer in teleology but he's thinking of teleology from a strictly technological viewpoint and not not the way that you usually discuss teleology, but, but he and john were talking about the Levin's research into, for example,
when, when you have a group of under differentiated cells, and they start communicating with each other, they're telling each other, you have to go over there and build an eye you go over there and build an arm because the DNA itself does not tell them placement of these body parts it
just has within it the sub routines that describe the proteins that need to be made in order to produce these body parts but not where.
And his research has indicated that they figure out where by talking to each other through these bioelectric signals.
So they go over there and they start building an arm but he said the really mysterious thing is, they know when to stop.
They know when they've gotten to the ultimate arm. And, and if you think of the bilateral that you have a left and a right arm, both arms turn out the same size, and they, they stop and what is it that makes them stop.
And there are also oncogenes or cancer cells that will that will pull themselves away from the electrical network, sever the electrical network so that they're on their own so they can do their own thing, and then they don't stop.
They just keep growing. That's what differentiates a cancer cell from any other cell. They don't know when to stop.
So, it almost sounds as though this this holding up the mirror goes all the way down to the cell level to the formation of body parts to the formation of organisms.
But it is also possible to disengage from that plan. There is a plan of what that what that beauty could become. And it seems that outside of the human realm, most organisms follow that plan unless something like cancer intervenes.
Humans, obviously we have our own idea. We want so you can hold a mirror up to us but it's like hell no I'm not going to be that thing you know I'm going to go over here and do my own thing and that's where we get into trouble.
Right, right. And you know, cancer has always been around but I think to some extent human hubris in our manufacturing of tens of thousands of chemicals which have never existed on the planet before play some role in throwing these cells off of targets.
Well, because those chemical because the bioelectric signals can be affected by chemical.
Yeah, you know, intrusions.
Right. So let me throw another thing out here. I was listening to a clip from Bishop Baron talking to Lex Friedman. And he was talking about the essence of being. You talked about whitehead thinking that God is a creature of creativity.
So he's a creature among creatures, or is he somehow in essence different. But what Bishop Baron says when he's talking about the nature of God is he says, I'll just throw out a few quotes from it.
Everything in our experience is a being of some type. And to be a being is to be existence received according to the mode of some essence.
But God is the reason there is a contingent realm at all.
Being of this thing or that thing of galaxies or of subatomic particles would be analogous to God's manner of being, which I take to mean that anything that we look at in the universe can teach us something about God's manner of being.
We look deeply enough.
Yeah.
And then he says,
God is not a being in the world. So God can come close and actually be with us and we can still become fully alive.
He was talking there about Moses experience with the burning bush, that the bush can be burning with the fire of God and still be the bush.
Because God is not a competitive being. So he differentiates God from all other beings in the universe.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, traditional scholastic theology like in the Aquinas would say like God's essence is God's existence and that there's something transcendent about the divine nature.
Such that as you're saying God's not in competition with any finite creature. And so to some extent, Whitehead's fully on board with that.
God as a creature is still infinite and perfect, Whitehead would say.
And Whitehead's a panentheist, which is to say he thinks that God is in the world and the world is in God and the world.
Whitehead says, Transcend God just as much as God transcends the world. And so he is trying to bring some degree of parody, let's say, to God in the world.
He doesn't want the world to take on some diminished status. And he's also in a way saying that God needs the world, that the world.
There's a process theologian named Catherine Keller, who's written some wonderful books about Whitehead's challenge to the traditional doctrine of Karatio ex nihilo creation out of nothing, which is traditionally supposed to be an example of God's infinite power that, you know, God can create a universe out of nothing.
For no reason, just because arbitrarily didn't need to but did because you could say, Oh, well, because of love, God wanted creatures to experience love.
But nonetheless, it's a it's not something God needed to do. Whereas in Whitehead's view, God as primordial as the primordial creature of creativity is perfect, but unconscious Whitehead says,
And the world was necessary space and time and all of these finite perspectives realized by every creature from the photon on up to a human being and beyond.
All of that space time process, the world was necessary for God to become conscious for God to reflect on God's self through the experience of creatures.
And so Whitehead says that God experiences all of our suffering, all of our joy, and somehow atones for it makes it worthy of of God's attention by by holding it together in this this conception of beauty,
albeit tragic, nonetheless, beauty. And so it's a different, it's an unorthodox theology, let's say.
And one of the things Whitehead was was really trying to overcome was this one way relationship that exists, whether we're talking about Aristotle's conception of God as the prime mover, the unmoved mover,
or more, you know, Christian scholastic conceptions of God. The idea would be there that, you know, God's love is of a different kind than our love for God in the sense that God doesn't.
God isn't moved by our love doesn't affect God, right? God is impassive, because God is fully actual.
And Whitehead's challenging this because he wants to be he wants.
He wants to establish a two way relationship between the divine and the world between God and creatures such that in some ways God, God needs creatures to be God self.
And so Whitehead will say, the power of God is the worship that God inspires. Right. And that doesn't just mean humans worshiping God, like it could be sunflowers, worshiping God, like,
and in the way that, you know, the sunflower tracks the sun across the sky. It's it's it's a form of contemplative prayer like Plotinus says all things are contemplating the one Whitehead is agreeing with that in a sense all things are worshiping God,
though they can also stray from that. And when they stray from that God is diminished.
And so Whitehead's God is creaturely in the sense that there is a real relationship to Way Street between God and creatures such that for God to work in the world for God's love to be effective in history,
we've got to do it. Right.
So I'm going to happen without us freely deciding to love one another. Right. That's God's power through our freedom.
And there's a continual sacrifice on his part.
Yeah, that's right. In some ways, you could say Whitehead's really, really taking the incarnation quite seriously. That that's like a hint about the nature of the divine. That's, you know, God's not off above beyond somewhere.
But actually here with us vulnerable to our decisions and and to, you know, the course of history. So it's a it's a more participatory form of theology, I guess I would say, which is not to say that there's not something beautiful about the traditional form.
I mean, there's a reason that it's endured for thousands of years. But, you know, Whitehead was a very harsh critic of what he perceived to be an idolatrous conception of God as made analogous to Caesar or an emperor, the king.
Right. He's like, God's not the king. God's a carpenter. God's, you know, a poor human being who suffers and dies on the cross. Right. And yeah, I was reborn maybe but it's a it's a more human conception of the divine, you might say.
Well, so in the in the more orthodox perspective, God would be both the transcendent and the, and the imminent, the human with us. So does, does Whitehead cut out that transcendent aspect.
So this gets a little complicated, but he has.
This is super helpful because I, you know, I've wondered about these things, but it's really hard for me to figure it out without having to read all the books and I don't have time to read all the books.
So the short answer is yes, he includes the transcendent and imminent aspects of the divine. He calls the transcendent aspect the primordial nature of God, which is mostly what I've been describing as the, you know, the first creature of creativity that sets the tone.
And does this correspond to like the world soul or the
Not exactly. It's so there's the primordial nature and what he calls the consequent nature, right. And so the primordial pole of God's nature would be transcendent, perfect, the perfect realization of the best possible world.
And you can say that that primordial nature of God is in a way before all finite creatures.
The consequent nature of God is God's response to what all the finite creatures actually decide to do with with that mirror that's held up to them by the primordial nature.
So if the primordial nature is this, it's this initial aim, Whitehead says that that goads or or lures all creatures toward what would be most beautiful.
The consequent nature of God is God's response to how the creatures respond to that lure.
And so it's only in that consequent pole that God becomes conscious because God consciousness for Whitehead is a reaction to what happens physically speaking.
Consciousness doesn't exist on its own floating in its own domain as Descartes at it right it's it's responsive to the actual world though it also has access to possibilities which haven't yet occurred.
I know this is.
So, so if this consequent nature is where the consciousness begins to develop, but it's developing out of aspects of creation that are being drawn up to that which is shown to it in the mirror.
And some of those aspects of creation are like particles and molecules and however far along it's gotten before this consequent nature gains consciousness.
I know that Chris Fields and Carl Friston and Mike Levin have been working on this perspective of physics that says that consciousness goes all the way down to the particle level.
Yep.
So, that would imply that either the consciousness was there at the particle level before the consciousness was there in the consequent nature of God, or that the particles were not at first conscious until the consequence consequent nature of God developed consciousness and then the particles and the molecules
gained consciousness.
So, it might help here to consider a spectrum of consciousness that, you know, it's not just a non off switch it's a, it's a, it's a fader, right it's like a photon has a minimal awareness and not much in the way of freedom.
Right, it basically is like, you know, like a wavelength.
It repeats. It's highly repetitive.
Whereas when you get, although I have to tell you though the other day I heard Wolfram talking with Jonathan. Have you ever listened to Stephen Wolfram.
Yeah, Wolfram was talking with Jonathan Gorard and one of them made the statement and neither one of them refuted it.
I can't find the exact quote right now but the statement was that a photon in its journey from the beginning of the universe sees all of the in any moment sees all of the universe in that moment of time.
And in that sense is more like the primordial closer to the primordial nature of God and so less conscious in the sense that for so for from a white heady and point of view consciousness is all about limitation.
And so, as we become more conscious, what's happening is we're focusing on what's important to the value we're trying to realize and pushing everything else into the background.
And so you say, yeah, photon isn't actually moving through space because at the speed of light time itself doesn't even pass and so the photon is sort of has this global perspective.
Right. And in that sense, at least if we think of consciousness as having to do more with finite realization and the selection of a particular, you know, area of experience to focus on.
And it would make more sense that the that the photons consciousness is minimal, you know, given given this idea from physics that it's got the global perspective.
Well, okay, so this connects up for me with an idea that Bishop Aaron also mentioned is that some people live where they're they're always trying to grasp God, trying to get hold of God.
Okay.
And then other people are running away from him.
And he said, we need to live in the space between that trying to grasp God and running away from him.
And that made me think about McGill Chris concept of the right and left hemisphere that that the left hemisphere is more like the, the focus that a bird can have when it's trying to get at that grain, amongst the rocks on the ground.
It has this hyper focus and it's going to go right for that piece of grain because that's what's important. I mean, perfectly limited down to that one thing right.
Yeah.
And the right hemisphere is more the other aspect of the bird that is in constant awareness of everything that's around.
And so that in case there is a predator that might be of a danger to the bird or, or there may be other opportunities out there in the in this in Coate area that you're talking about.
And so that's almost like the two extremes the, the total awareness that has no focus because you haven't limited down to something that relates to whatever meaning is for you in that moment.
And then the total focus where you're just down there at that you're so limited to that one grain of sand that you can't see other possibilities that are around right so living in that in between place.
So is that kind of the thing that you're talking about in our relationship to the divine like yeah I can see what Bishop Baron is suggesting there.
But you know you're you're describing in a way white heads own account of perception here, where in each moment of our experience, his word is prehending, which means feeling basically we're feeling, we're prehending, not only everything in our environment
right now, but the entire history of the universe up to this moment.
We feel all of that and it all coalesces or congresses, concrescence is another one of his terms, all of these prehensions from the past environment can crest to give rise to our moment of experience.
But our consciousness is only irradiating some small slice of that whole history.
If we took it all in we wouldn't be conscious at all.
And but yeah like you could say with McGill chris the what the right hemisphere has this less conscious global sensitivity and our left brain is focused on what's important right now.
And when we when we shift from our understanding of perception and consciousness in each moment to you know how we relate to the divine.
I think it's very easy for someone who's just been caught in the throws of a mystical experience where they recognized as Eckhart said the eyes through which I see God or the eyes through which God sees me.
What is it dies through which God sees me are.
What is it I'm stumbling over my words but basically that when we see God we are God seeing ourselves right can't achieve Eckhart's poetic verse at this moment but it's very easy to get inflated after you've had such an experience doesn't mean it's not real but
each of us can access that mystical vision and so if we grasp after it.
And attempt to hold it and possess it for ourselves that very quickly becomes akin to a kind of evil.
Just rooted in the identification of our own ego with the divine which is not at all what what Eckhart's or any any mystics point is in trying to give voice to these experiences and so you know there's a way in which.
And this is another whitehead in move contrary to this sort of monarchic view of God and or heaven as a monarchy with God as king we need to democratize the kingdom of heaven.
This is Alan that's Alan Watts's phrase but white it in a way describes the divine as more of a community than a single being in the sense that the entire democracy of fellow creatures creatures to which we belong.
Is is is God's God's body if you want and God's eyes are infinite God has as many eyes as there are creatures experiencing the universe.
And so it's a it's a more democratized view of of the divine that would never allow any one of us in particular to to claim to possess the one ultimate truth about God's nature.
So, I mean it's my way of spinning in a whitehead in a way what Bishop Baron was trying to articulate.
Well, it seems like that the scientific community would not be fearful of that viewpoint because the scientific community has the same concept of truth that the truth is something that we are continually seeking and you can get to a certain level of a certain understanding, like maybe classical
classical physics, and it works and it's you know it perceives what needs to be perceived for the moment it has predicted capacity and all of that.
And then along comes Einstein's version of physics which contains that classic view, and that classic view is still still works.
Einstein's view is just a little bit like meta above that you know a little bit higher level, but that that's not the end there's there's another view above that another view above that because there's some sort of
a specific aspect to the pursuit of truth you can keep rising up up up, but you never really touch the, the final truth because really is so far above us how can we possibly conceive it.
Right. Yeah, or as Augustine said, God is closer to myself than I am to myself.
Both things are true simultaneously that's the very mysterious aspect of it is that both things are true. So, let me throw something else out to you that I heard the other day well there's two things that really struck me.
I was listening to some, I don't know how these things show up on my algorithm but there's a guy named David Eagleman who is a cognitive scientist. I don't know if you've ever heard of him, and maybe he's a neural, maybe he's a neuroscientist doctor, some sort.
He was having a conversation with a yogi named Sadguru. And very interesting conversation and David Eagleman was the consummate scientist but asking really really good questions and really listening.
And at some point, he mentioned memory and Sadguru said well memory is an interesting thing.
And you don't remember your great great great grandfather, but his nose rests on your face.
Yeah.
So, when he said that I immediately thought about Michael Levin cells, they know how to build that nose because it's built into that DNA which goes back through all the generations as far back as time goes as far back as there were generations of DNA.
And memory is all built into me.
All of that memory. And so there's that memory that's in me. There's that memory that's in every cell in my body. And there's also the memory that is in me of all the experiences that I've had that are different than other people's all the songs I've heard and books I've read
and the conversations I've had and relationships I've had and how all of those things have imprinted on me and have connected to everything that that I've ever thought and so on a new thought comes in or a new, a new perception comes in it.
It has more and more places to hook up inside of me.
So, in a way I get the matrix of my being gets filled up over time with all this memory. So, there's all that memory of my life there and then then there's everything that's happening to me at this moment in this computationally irreducible moment of combinatorial
explosion.
Well, so one of the things that Wolfram talks about is that almost the entire universe is computationally irreducible.
But there are these little slices of computational reducibility where we, because of the kind of observers we are we see the patterns in the universe in such a way that we're able to come up with mathematical constructs and
physical laws that that are orderly and that makes sense in the midst of all this computational irreducibility.
So those are the two thoughts that we might play with a little bit.
Yeah, I mean the whole computational perspective is, it's so powerful and applicable.
And I think that's a good and a conception of information typically that I find somewhat slippery.
You know, you were talking about memory and DNA and typically we think of DNA as a kind of code that stores information which can be read out by Robbizomes into proteins.
So attempting to use the software hardware analogy when talking about how cells read out their genetic code or when talking about consciousness and how neural activity might be related to producing it.
And I think it's, you know, that's all fine.
But often there's a it's not always clear to me when we're talking metaphorically and when we're talking literally.
DNA for example when we say that information is stored in the DNA and that the DNA is this sort of code for booting up the organism as you know some like molecular biologists might say, I think that as a metaphor is kind of cool.
But as in when you really get into the biology of it.
That's not at all how it works, because memory is distributed throughout the cell throughout the body throughout the environment.
And so if we're going to talk about information being stored anywhere, we need to consider that information as stored in a distributed a distributed way, not only throughout the whole environment, which tells the cell which strain which strings of DNA to
activate, but the whole history of the development of that particular life form going back to the origin of life and so we I'm wary of taking the sort of computational information paradigm to literally I certainly think it can be
a revelatory of important insights but I think Wolfram is not talking about that kind of computation, which is what makes it interesting.
So, I have a physicist friend on my channel who's been on a number of times and he is a mathematician and a physicist and a computer scientist and so we talked about computation.
And he says that he sees computation in a completely different way than that computation isn't necessarily code or
so computation can be looked at as, for example, musicians playing a piece of music. They're, they're reading a code so to speak but what they're really reading is what the musician put down on the paper, and they're simply executing the, the music that was provided to them,
but at the same time, everything in them is also adding to what's being done so that at the end the symphony is even more beautiful than it may have been in the imagination of the composer in the beginning.
And then for the viewers listening they're also hearing through their own filter their own lens, something that may be even more deeply meaningful to each one of them in their context than it was to the composer originally and and artworks that way to right so
Yeah, computation is not necessarily a mathematical thing or clinical thing or computation can have a much deeper meaning than that but but for Wolfram when he's talking about computation he's not actually talking about programming something in he's talking about
I think it's such a beautiful idea. He probably doesn't see it this way but for me it's such a beautiful idea that there's one rule. And this one rule is what.
So I don't know if you've ever looked at his theory.
Yeah, the really add and. Yeah, so, so there's, there's some sort of a, there are some nodes and some edges that make up space, and the nodes actually are space, they are the atoms of space which actually is what ends up being all matter.
And space and matter are the same thing in his viewpoint. And then time updates those nodes. So if it sees the nodes in a certain configuration. There's one rule that says when you see that configuration you change it to this one.
So whenever that figuration shows up you change it to this other one. And that's all that happens is continual updating of events.
And then with the idea there was one rule. And it's so it's this beautiful picture like this one rule can just keep populating and end up creating this amazing universe.
And he actually can produce a pretty amazing universe out of this one rule. But then he realized there's some implications there that weren't really scientifically friendly.
And so the idea, there's all possible rules operating in all possible ways. And so at any point that, and to me, he's not using the word choice but there has to be a word choice at any point there's a choice of which rule to operate on which figure for the next move.
So, in that sense it's a computation the way my friend talks about it as a symphony of choices over time.
And so if you think of computation as a symphony of choices over time. And if those choices are made by the created entities.
The symphony of choices over time in that sense we could be a computational entity, but not in the sense of a code that's just working out on some sort of mechanical system.
Yeah, no I when I listened to Wolfram talk about this, it does resonate deeply with my whitehead in sensibilities in the sense that, you know, white heads describing a network of events, which unfold through time in a cumulative and iterative way, right.
And so there is a sense in which.
You know, Wolfram, I haven't heard him mention whitehead but he mentions live nets a few times in passing and whitehead and live nets have some deep connections. So there's something to this and I, you know, I'm not quite, well, not at all as mathematically minded as as Stephen Wolfram so I haven't been able to really
look into the details and see how much this resemblance is actually how deep it goes but
I ran into this guy who is taking Wolfram and deeply simplifying him down into visual images that to explain this, the theory on a very simple basis so I can send you his work his videos are like seven minutes long and in three of them he explains the whole thing but but he's coalesced it right
down to the nugget.
Oh, great. Yeah, that'd be helpful. Yeah, I don't know it doesn't get into as much depth as Wolfram does and usually will from kind of avoids the theological implications but he had a great conversation with Gregory Chaitin couple of conversations with Gregory Chaitin who's a mathematician, and also a bit of a
philosopher.
In fact, his wife is a
I guess you could say a student or a follower of Paul fire oven.
Okay. And so she has a lot of philosophical ideas as well.
And they get into some of this in that conversation so it's pretty, pretty cool.
Yeah, that's cool.
Wow, this has been quite a trip.
Yeah, sure has.
You know before we wrap up let me get that Eckhart quote right. Okay, the eye with which I see God is the same with which God sees me.
My eye and God's eye is one and is one eye and one sight, one knowledge, one love. That's what my stare at heart said.
It's so what's the word.
It's such a elliptical structure that it's easy to get mixed up in one's words when you try. Yeah, I'm glad to, I'm glad to get that. That's, that's great. That's really great.
I'd love to talk again sometime if you ever have time. This is really instructive.
Yeah, thanks Karen for for having me and for asking such great questions and putting it into the context of the journey you've been on to understand all these ideas and, you know, bring more beauty into the world and I'm really enjoying looking at your I assume those are your paintings in the background during
Yeah, yeah, conversation here so yeah, yeah, lovely lovely to talk and look forward to the next time.
Okay, thank you much. Have a great day. Bye bye.