Footnotes to Plato, Footnotes to Descartes

Whitehead famously quipped that the European philosophical tradition can be safely characterized as of a series of footnotes to Plato. Modern philosophy might better be characterized, or at least specified, as a series of footnotes to Descartes. Ancient philosophy was oriented by the relation between God (or intelligible reality) and the apparent World. Its axis was vertical, its primary medium was eternity, and its aspiration was to be at home in the cosmos. The philosopher’s task was to attune the order of the soul to the order of the heavens. Modern philosophy is oriented instead by the relation between subject and object. Its axis is horizontal, its primary medium is history, and its dominant mood is alienation—the feeling of being alone in a universe of mere objects, a thinking thing marooned amid extended stuff.

John opened our conversation by describing this same shift taxonomically: before modernity, the perennial questions of the one and the many, appearance and reality, and the source of normativity were handled in terms of a vertical dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural. When that dichotomy became untenable, modernity didn’t dispense with the questions—it couldn’t—it simply rotated the dichotomies ninety degrees: subject and object, fact and value, inner and outer, freedom and nature. Whitehead called this the “bifurcation of nature.” Kant gave it its most rigorous form in the dichotomy between the noumenal freedom of the self and the phenomenal necessity of nature. This fissure functions as a wound in the modern soul that my whole philosophical project has been an attempt to heal.

The crucial move here is to notice the difference between a distinction and a dissociation. Distinctions are healthy and necessary; thinking is impossible without them. The trouble begins when a pragmatic conceptual distinction hardens into an ontological division, when we start saying that reality itself is cut along the seam of our concepts. As John reminded us, most of modernity’s defining dichotomies have already been undermined from within (eg, Quine on analytic and synthetic, Putnam on fact and value, John’s own work on relevance realization and transjectivity, etc.). The question is what becomes available in our experience once we are no longer bound by that grammar. What John found with his students is that when the dichotomies dissolve, the language of sacredness begins to well up on its own.

Process Perennialism

John made a distinction in the conversation that I want to endorse wholeheartedly: he is not a propositional perennialist but a process perennialist. The claim is not that the world’s wisdom traditions are all saying the same thing—that claim has been pretty thoroughly undermined by careful comparative work—but that there are universal processes, cognitive and metacognitive and transformative, in terms of which the traditions can genuinely speak to and complexify one another.

Count me in! I’ve always been drawn to the perennial philosophy at the level of mystical experience as some kind of ineffable core, and yet it’s clearly not the case that you can find neat propositional alignments between the traditions. The way we respond in language to these deep experiences creates culture, and cultural diversity is itself an expression of that ineffable core—because that core, to risk giving it a name out of the process tradition, is Creativity. It is unnameable, and yet it produces all names. As long as we maintain a sense of the intimacy between the unnameable and the named, we don’t start sucking on the named like a pacifier, or fighting over the named as though it were the be-all and end-all. The nameless is the source of the named, and none of us possesses the nameless creativity at the base of all that we find of value.

Theoria as Pilgrimage

John frames his Philosophical Silk Road as a pilgrimage, and he grounds this in the oldest meaning of theoria. Behind our word “theory” stands the theoros, the sacred diplomat who traveled from city to city to witness the festivals and rites of other peoples. Theory, at its origin, is a movement between places—and, I would add, between faces. Knowing itself is a kind of collaborative movement.

This transforms what both ancients and moderns thought it meant to know. To know anything is not just to theorize it as an observer from the outside. To know something or someone, you have to be known by it/them, in turn. That means knowing is risky. You have to travel not as a tourist but in a way that leaves you vulnerable to being transformed by the places you visit. The philosophical theorist may not be at home anywhere in particular, because they are trying to be at home in the whole world—and yet, as John rightly insisted, this radical pluralism requires groundedness in a tradition, a secure attachment (he means this in the technical psychological sense) from which one can reach out and be transformed by others. Secure attachment doesn’t diminish autonomy but is rather precisely what affords complex exploration. Here I think of Raimon Panikkar, who showed that one can be fully committed to more than one tradition at once. For me, it is Christianity and Buddhism. I can’t live as a Christian without Buddhism, and I can’t live as a Buddhist without Christianity. Spiritual life doesn’t work for me any other way than as both/and.

From Critique to Reconstruction

Much of our conversation circled around the exhausted standoff between standard theism and standard atheism. What struck me long ago is that both positions share the same premise: that God is an individualized substance, an independently existing super-subject possessing all the best properties. The fundamentalist affirms this God; the new atheist rejects him, and orients their lives largely around that rejection; but neither questions the basic picture of ultimacy.

Aristotle could be satisfied with God as thought thinking itself—an unmoved mover untouched by the world. That was enough for Aristotle, but it is not enough for us, because we have become too psychological for that. We are no longer satisfied with a God who doesn’t need the world, doesn’t change, isn’t involved. And when that God became unbelievable, modernity offered two responses: a retreat into religious fundamentalism, on the one hand, and what I’d call an arrested development into fundamentalist atheism, on the other—arrested because while it is a development, a purifying fire we genuinely need to pass through, it is also very easy to get stuck in the adolescence of a kind of reactionary disbelief. We see this when a person orients their whole identity around not believing in a specific God and treating anyone who does as an idiot to be defeated in public debate (’s recent celebration of New Atheist obnoxiousness is a good example of what I mean).

Nor can the postmodern turn get us out, because it remains locked into critique and a multiculturalism that leaves you without any home. It’s really hyper-modernity more than post-modernity: the endless relativization makes you even more alienated than the moderns already were. Critique is necessary but not sufficient. The task now is to move from critique to reconstruction—to reconnect with the ancient traditions and remember that there is a way to be at home in the cosmos, because there is a relational grammar to reality that allows our terrestrial minds and the celestial order to sync up, while also affirming everything modernity has learned about evolution, history, and the depths of the psyche.

God as a Process of Individuation

I ventured a proposition in the conversation—and in Whitehead’s spirit I offer it as a proposal to be entertained rather than a claim to be defended by the logician’s alternative as simply true or false—that Whitehead’s account of the consequent nature of God may be the most important theological invention of the twentieth century.

In both the Platonic picture (God as orderer of a pregiven chaos) and the classical Christian picture (God as creator from nothing by fiat), God is the creator. Whitehead adds the notion of God as the relator. Not the unmoved mover, not the big moral boss of the universe who decides what is good rather than being, in some sense, subject to the good like the rest of us—but a God who is consequent to the world-process, not impassive but suffering-with, involved in the world such that either God is also a creature (of Creativity), or all of us, God included, are co-creators of one another.

There have been hints of this throughout the history of spirituality. The Gospels hint rather loudly that God is not impassive. Buddhism discovered it phenomenologically in the figure of the bodhisattva, for whom emptiness is not merely the absence of self-being but that which calls forth compassion—emptiness discovered to be love. The Buddha left a doctrine; Christ left a deed that speaks as loud as any doctrine, a deed in which God is said to have died into the world and thereby to have transformed the God–world relationship itself. Whitehead, thinking in the aftermath of all this, articulates the consequent nature of God in an idiom that can be understood in light of evolution, quantum and relativistic physics, and modern psychology and sociology.

The new picture taking shape, then, is that God is not a substance already individuated. God is a process of individuation, and that process includes the world. It includes all of us as psychological processes caught up in individuation alongside God. We have God’s help in this—for Whitehead, “the initial aim,” the lure toward truth, beauty, and goodness, a cosmic Eros pregnant in each moment—but God also needs our help, because this love is not yet satisfied. There is strife, suffering, perpetual perishing. Eternity, on this account, is not the opposite of time but the fullness of time. Eternity is in love with the productions of time, as Blake said, because, alone with itself, it remains incomplete.

And this reconfigures what the old practices mean. When you pray within this understanding, you are not petitioning an already finished God; you are participating in the God-making process. That puts enormous responsibility on us. We’re grownups now. Theology becomes a kind of collective self-parenting: finding dialogue partners with whom to think and feel God helps us stop needing a parent outside the process and start taking responsibility for our own response to the existential condition we find ourselves in as birthing, breathing, dying bodies—which is precisely what the fundamentalist theist and the fundamentalist atheist, each blaming someone or something else, decline to do.

Perfection and Completion

John pressed us here with the challenge: aren’t you giving up perfection? Isn’t sacredness the apprehension of that which is perfect—complete, finished, impassible?

Andrew answered with Hartshorne’s neoclassical theism: rather than collapsing the contraries (active/passive, mutable/immutable, being/becoming) into a monopolar God who is the great antithesis of everything worldly, a dipolar God exemplifies the perfections on both sides in what Hartshorne called dynamic perfection. My answer runs alongside his: we are not giving up transcendence or perfection. We are trying to integrate a sense of incompletion—which means open-endedness—with perfection, and to say that perfection is itself a process. It is a higher perfection to imagine that beauty, truth, and goodness are alive—dynamic, growing—than to imagine them finished. God is a living organism rather than an architect or engineer who designs a machine from outside according to a supposedly perfect model.

I wish I’d had a chance to mention Jung’s Answer to Job. Jung saw, in his own depth psychological and archetypal idiom, that Yahweh’s perfection lacked completeness—that the raw, ambivalent omnipotence confronting Job had to undergo its own transformation, and that the movement from Yahweh to Yeshua—from the elemental whirlwind, the burning bush, and the decreed Law to the incarnational embrace, the burning heart, and the decision to Love—is the story of a God who becomes complete only by entering into relationship with, and suffering alongside, human and all living beings. The Life Divine chooses completion through relationship over a perfection sealed off from the world. Even God doesn’t yet know the capital-T Truth, because Truth is in the making, and God is in the making. You can’t step into the same God twice!

This, I want to suggest, is what a second axial age would mean. The first axial turn discovered eternity and, often, fled into it, leaving the senses and the sensible world behind as a fallen realm. The second axial turn would be a renewal of the senses and a deeper incarnation: an integration of eternity and history, of emanation and evolution, of spirit and embodiment. Not just the Neoplatonic reach upward for the light, and not just the evolutionary climb up from the mud, but some third thing (in Whitehead’s terms, Creativity, which is dipolar in just this sense) that reaches for the light while growing its roots deeper into the darkness at the same time. Which is also why the consequent nature is so significant: it corrects Plotinus’ equation of matter with privation and evil. In Whitehead, the One and matter turn out to be, at the limit, indistinguishable.

Is this non-duality? I think a process-relational ontology is fairly described as a form of non-duality, so long as we understand dipolarity, or dipolar unity, as its proper expression. The problem with Oneness understood in a substantial way is that there is no room left for relationship. Dipolarity helps us remember that what is non-dual is a relationship: a relational reality in which there is no need for a seam between two halves that never existed separately from one another. There is a kind of otherness at the core of selfhood and a kind of familiarity in the other, and these poles allow reality to be an inexhaustible birthing process—which is also a dying process, Ouroboric—reality as a process of lovemaking between poles that have never been and could never be apart.

Truth Beyond Yes and No

John raised his important critique of our culture’s overinvestment in propositional knowing—the non-propositional forms of knowing (perspectival, participatory, procedural) carry most of the heavy lifting of meaning, and the cultivation of wisdom and virtue is only weakly correlated, if at all, with propositional possession. I agree, and I wanted to add that Whitehead has his own theory of propositions that turns out to be an ally rather than an obstacle here. He says famously that it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true, and that the logician’s simple alternative—true or false—completely misses the function of propositions in the universe. For Whitehead, a proposition is not primarily a sentence or a logical statement; it is a mode of feeling in which potentiality and actuality meet and form a hybrid entity. Propositions are propagating through the world at least all the way down to the level of single cells, if not also already being prefigured in the vibratory reiteration (or “physical purposiveness” in Whitehead’s terms) of electromagnetic energy. We should really call it his theory of proposals.

This is also why truth cannot be adequately characterized in terms of a series of yes-or-no questions. There is always a missing context; something is always missed in that kind of binary operation.

The Aesthetic Criterion: Does It Intensify the Harmony?

Someone asked: when traditions are brought into dialogue on the Silk Road, what criteria allow us to judge that one framing of reality is deeper or more adequate than another? John warned, rightly, that anyone who offers you a rule book or an algorithm for this question is lying to you or to themselves. Andrew added the standard philosophical criteria—consistency, coherence, adequacy, applicability—plus a transformative one: can you name the difference between who you were and who you are now?

My own answer, coming out of Whitehead, is a simple criterion: is there an intensification in the harmony of your experience as a result of taking this teaching, this practice, this encounter seriously? Harmony here does not mean the absence of dissonance. Intensifying harmony means becoming able to hold what were initially felt as conflicts in a contrast that raises the quality, enhances the texture and beauty, of experience. This is an aesthetic criterion, but it is immediately in contact with epistemic and moral values: truth is a harmonization between our conception of the world and the world; goodness is the ongoing transmutation of conflict into contrast. It is not “moral” in the thin sense of sorting things into good and bad—justice is not just following the law. There is a higher harmony of harmonies aimed at that exceeds anything that could be laid out as a series of propositions or statutes.

And notice here that if you don’t have diversity in your practice of intensifying harmony, it gets boring very fast. A flat, repeating chord. You want melodies that are surprising enough to hold and deepen your interest. That means inviting others to come play with you in an unpredictable call and response. That is how you enhance harmony, and I think it’s how intercultural dialogue of any kind—religious, scientific, or otherwise—actually works. Seek harmony. Seek higher harmony.

Transformational, Not Informational

Another questioner’s concern—how do you hold deep fidelity to a tradition together with genuine openness?—touches something personal for me. It has become quite apparent to me that when someone’s religious belief is insecure, they feel very strongly that everyone else around them must believe as they do. They can’t sustain the belief unless it is never met with resistance. That is a very propositional way of holding belief, and much less the sort of faith that reflects an openness to mystery.

I don’t feel threatened by learning about other traditions or being in dialogue with people who walk a different path, because my relationship with Christ is rooted in transformational experience that is continually renewed—it is transformational, not informational. It is not a set of propositions that I need to be true and must defend from those who challenge them. I’m interested in propositional knowing as we all are, but it doesn’t come close to touching the core of what I would call my faith. That connection to what I call the Christ being remains mysterious to me, and it is secure precisely in its mystery. It isn’t something that could be threatened by a deep encounter with the Buddha as a spiritual being, or with Islam, or with any indigenous practice. I can sit in a Shipibo ayahuasca ceremony and feel renewed in my Christian faith in that very ritual, at the same time that I feel the generativity and wisdom flowing out of the Shipibo tradition. I don’t see why these should be in conflict. It doesn’t make sense to me that they would be.

Meaning Is Not Private Property

The final audience question asked how individuation might look if we stopped treating the psyche as something belonging to an individual. Andrew invoked Whitehead’s most famous mantra—the many become one and are increased by one: you emerge out of your relations into individuation, not the other way around—and Panikkar’s lovely coinage of interdividuality: our independence arises out of a more fundamental interdependence (or even intra-dependence, to risk being a bit pedantic!).

As John added, meaning is not private property. People joke, when they’re driving in circles looking for a spot downtown, that they need to call on the parking angel. What they forget is that if you take that seriously, you’re also calling on a parking demon to kill off everyone else’s parking angels—there are only so many spaces. The “create your own reality” mentality that treats meaning as a private possession leads directly into these absurdities. Meaning is mutually created, mutually curated, mutually corrected.

But genuine collective individuation is a huge challenge, and I think it’s because alongside the meaning crisis we are living through a trust crisis. We don’t trust each other. Breaking out of individual psychology into a process of true collective individuation requires a great deal of trust in others—and so the individual work and the collective work have to happen at the same time. I think of it this way: psychological individuation means you’re not in such a rush to blame everybody else for your problems; collective individuation would mean we’re not causing each other as many problems, because we’re each dealing with our own shit. The two have to meet somewhere in the middle.

Coda: Perspective All the Way Down

There has never been a better or more important time to talk about the nature of reality—and not just to talk about it, but to instigate in one another a deeper appreciation for all those facets of the real that we couldn’t see without one another. On the view we were exploring together, it’s not merely that we each have our own perspective on a ready-made world. Perspective on perspective on perspective, all the way down and all the way up, is what there is. So whenever we engage intentionally in the practice of sharing perspectives—overlapping, poking, sometimes needing to pop one another’s bubbles to let a wider reality rush in, all, we might hope, in the context of friendship—we are not just doing what human beings ought to do. We are doing what the world itself is doing: a sharing of perspectives, a seeking of deeper intimacy. Sometimes the pokes hurt, and we recoil from intimacy and get traumatized. But even the fact that there is trauma signals that there is healing to be sought.

This is what I take the Silk Road to be for, and why I’m grateful to John for building the road as he walks it.

Having reached the fractal edge of the Tree of time, I dove back into its mesh. I perceived, at every node, a new act of conception transpiring: two bodies meeting and merging, followed by the blissful shudder and flooding release of orgasm. I felt the love between committed souls that remained after the flood. I felt the joy, the soulful delight, the tenderness of mutual belonging. I also felt the fear and violence of rape, the grief of its aftermath, all the unwanted, unintended pregnancies. I felt men inflicting their pain on women, and women bearing the seed of Life out of duty and desperation.

I saw Eros flow forward, into MORE Life, even in the face of strife. Every child-making orgasm was a gate through which poured all that each member of a couple carried, their hopes and their horrors, their wonders and their wounds. All that ancient feeling funneled through the generations until it erupted into me, laying on my mat. I remembered myself, a body full of light breathing in the dark. I became the serpent in the Tree. I puked.

I realized that my freedom is not a temptation from beyond the garden, but the I of the Tree itself, the place the whole generative process curls, dizzily at first, back upon itself. I must decide. The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil are one Tree. The decision between Good and Evil refers to our conscious responsibility to channel the Eros flowing through the gates of conception. We are called to anoint Eros with Agape, to transmute strife into loving-kindness, to enkindle light and forgive blindness.

Knowledge of Good and Evil is not a divine judgment or sacred punishment added to the Garden from outside. It is just what Life becomes when it ripens into sight and opens its I.

I have already bitten the fruit and swallowed the seed. I have to decide whether to remain coiled in the roots, in ancestral wounds and the vengeance of victimhood, or through forgiveness to shed my skin and unfurl into heaven. Strike venom into whoever comes near out of fear, or together to soar. Not to transcend or abandon the roots, not to abandon the body, family, earth, but to fill its sap with Love.

Moses lifted the serpent in the wilderness, and those who had been bitten were healed by looking upon a symbol of what had poisoned them (Numbers 21:4–9).

Healer and wounder entwine the same pole.

We all come into this world through the doorway of a mother’s womb. We never really leave her house. The astrologers say I was born the moment Cancer, the Moon’s sign, the crab who carries her home on her back, was just rising in the east. My vision flooded me with the feminine. I witnessed the mitochondria in my cells flow from an unbroken cytoplasmic river sourced in the first mothers.

Some say the vine Herself is the Grand Mother. We drink Her to remember our place in the womb of the world. She has many faces and many names: Isis, Sophia, Mary, Psyche, Theotokos, Demeter, Gaia. She was not a figure in my vision, but my vision’s matrix, the fertile depths which every image rose from. I did not see the Mother but by means of Her.

My natal chart includes an 8th house stellium in Aquarius: My Sun, Mercury, and Venus arrayed in the home of sex, death, and inheritance. Here hides what is traded in the dark, what we owe the dead, and the holy secret of the little death that makes Life. As if unsatisfied, my sky decided to double the dose by having Pluto square the coterie.

Every lover I have touched has felt the weight of this aspect. The vine unfolded my mind further as I reviewed all my attempts to bind my body to another, to seat another soul beside the throne of my own. I felt the polarity running through the Tree also running through me: Eros and Thanatos, sex and war, desire and fear, the selfless sore of a self who wounded those he wanted to heal, who longed for a love that lasts, but who sought selfishly to give himself away to another who could never receive the gift (for they are selfless, too).

Desire that does not know itself decays into the neediness of demand. Demand refused curdles into grievance. Grievance boils over into violence. The Tree is full of the rotting fruit of this serpentine sequence. Thankfully the polarity of Good and Evil instigates its own integration. The war of the sexes is waged on a lovers’ bed.

The serpent must decide: possession or partnership? Is Eros seized or received, won through conquest or witnessed in conversion? The serpent’s mouth can strike or speak, seek to paralyze or to participate. Either way Eros is the same substance delivered in different doses. To love is not to sit on any throne but to climb up and down the world-pole beside her, entwined. Amor without armor.

The old fathers said Christ’s cross is cut from the Tree of Life, that its fruit contains the sap of immortal life. He was lifted upon it, just as Moses lifted the serpent.

Conversion is a conversation. The gates of conception do not close when we are born. Ideas and intentions also copulate. My mother grew my body and gifted me the words I use to thank her. One day I will be a node in someone else’s vision. As the bleeding of the dead has blessed me, may my bleeding bless them. May my blood become their wine, and my flesh their bread.

I do not love because the healed world exists. I love so that it may. Neither angels nor Ideas are cosmic fixtures, real in the absence of our intent. Nor are they figments of our fancy. They live in the metaxy, the between, only in relation, descending exactly as far as we ascend. A rite performed by rote buries one more corpse in the roots. The wafer remains a cracker, icaros reduced to indigestion. A rite performed with wakeful love rehearses the world to come. Living symbols do not report what’s real but propose it.

I drink the vine not to leave the Tree, not to glimpse a world beyond, but to lend this one my I. I do not pray that angels are real but pray to make them so.

Figs in Winter: a Community of Reason

The river and the labyrinth – part I

Panta rhei, everything flows, said the Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus. You cannot step into the same river twice, not because of any mystical reason, but because rivers are constituted by continuous flux. In modern terms, a proton…

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9 days ago · 44 likes · 9 comments · Massimo Pigliucci

Figs in Winter: a Community of Reason

The river and the labyrinth – part II

According to Alfred North Whitehead’s so-called process metaphysics, the fabric of the world consists of processes, not static entities. As we have seen last time, this is a notion that – in one form or another – pops up in both western (Heraclitus of Ephesus) and eastern (Buddhism, Taoism) philosophies. While there is a very important kernel of truth in it, Whitehead went horribly wrong with his notion that metaphysics can, and indeed should, come before any epistemological account of how we can say anything about the nature of the world…

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7 days ago · 19 likes · 6 comments · Massimo Pigliucci

Massimo Pigliucci recently shared these two articles critical of Whitehead’s process philosophy. I’m thrilled he decided to engage the work of the 20th century’s most ambitious process metaphysician. But I was rather disappointed by the shallowness of his dismissals. Granted, most of Part II is behind a paywall, so I’ll mostly be responding to Part I. This is brief, but links to a few more detailed essays explicating core Whiteheadian ideas.

Pigliucci affirms with Heraclitus and contemporary physics and biology that flux is the basic nature of things (read “thing” as a gerund, a happening rather than a fixity, which fits its original etymological meaning as an event, a gathering, a þing). But he doesn’t seem to be too interested in attempts to systematically work out what this would imply both epistemologically and ontologically (or onto-epistemically, since in Whitehead’s process-relational universe, we cannot so easily separate the special relation called “knowing” from the relations operative throughout the rest of nature).

If there are no enduring substances, only relational events (“actual occasions” in Whitehead’s terms), then presumably we need some account of how events are related (“prehensions”), how they achieve determinate character amidst an otherwise unbroken flow of becoming (“eternal objects” or real potentialities), and how anything like experience—much less consciousness—could ever arise in a world of process without an inexplicable ontological leap (“panexperientialism” wasn’t Whitehead’s word, but it fits; we could also just affirm, as he did, that all causal relations are prehensive, meaning they are “vector feelings”).

Whitehead does develop a rather elaborate metaphysical scheme, but deciding it is excessive would mean one has developed a more adequate metaphysical account of how processes and relations actually work. Pigliucci wants to affirm the basic process insight but so far as I can tell he hasn’t thought through the philosophical implications of leaving substance behind.

Pigliucci claims Whitehead never explains how experience as such might precede consciousness. It’s one thing to disagree with Whitehead’s explanation, but denying he offers one is just groundless. Process and Reality devotes enormous care to this question. Consciousness is defined as a high-grade, late phase subjective form achieved in rare occasions of experience by way of an “affirmation-negation contrast,” that is, in the contrast between a feeling of what is given in physical perception and an alternative proposal of what could be the case (or a “propositional feeling,” in Whitehead’s terms). Experience as such is mostly non-conscious. Its basic mode is the vector feelings or prehensions associated with causal inheritance. Again, you can disagree with how Whitehead works all of this out. But to say he never explains what he means is not a serious objection.

Pigliucci goes on to simply stipulate that “experience is not possible without some level of consciousness,” and offers his own physicalist IOU that declares mind is not a separate category from matter. Whitehead would agree that mind and matter are not separate categories, but knowing this would require having spent some time with his actual texts. Pigliucci’s alternative is merely a promissory note offering nothing in the way of a genetic account of how experience emerges from a wholly insentient flux. Whitehead’s panexperientialism is motivated by the evolutionary continuity that you’d think Pigliucci’s own naturalism would also demand. Without such synechism (C. S. Peirce’s term), we end up having to give some account of how mentality arises ex nihilo at some unspecified threshold of neural complexity. Strangely, Pigliucci seems to find Peirce and William James more scientific and less excessive than Whitehead: does he not realize that all three men affirmed panpsychism for scientific reasons? Peirce held that “matter is effete mind” and affirmed love as a basic evolutionary cosmological power. Even John Dewey had deep affinities with Whitehead. His approach in Experience and Nature is far closer to Whitehead’s cosmovision than it is to Pigliucci’s physicalism. “Radical empiricism,” as these pragmatists understood it, means seeking adequacy to the whole of experience, not just the sense data of consciousness. Aesthetic and even religious or spiritual modes of experience are also part of the data to be explained.

Pigliucci dismisses prehension because he claims it is not tested or constrained by physics, which, again, suggests to me he hasn’t read much Whitehead. Whitehead’s account of physical prehension is specifically intended as a detailed rendering and generalization of what physics describes as vectors, or the conformal transmission of energy.

…experience has a vector character, a common measure of intensity, and specific forms of feelings conveying that inten­sity. If we substitute the term ‘energy’ for the concept of a quantitative emotional intensity, and the term ‘form of energy’ for the concept of ‘specific form of feeling,’ and remember that in physics ‘vector’ means defi­nite transmission from elsewhere, we see that this metaphysical description of the simplest elements in the constitution of actual entities agrees ab­solutely with the general principles according to which the notions of modern physics are framed. The ‘datum’ in metaphysics is the basis of the vector-theory in physics; the quantitative satisfaction in metaphysics is the basis of the scalar localization of energy in Physics; the ‘sensa’ in metaphysics are the basis of the diversity of specific forms under which energy clothes itself. Scientific descriptions are, of course, entwined with the specific details of geometry and physical laws, which arise from the special order of the cosmic epoch in which we find ourselves. But the general principles of physics are exactly what we should expect as a spe­cific exemplification of the metaphysics required by the philosophy of organism. (Process and Reality, 116)

Again, you can disagree with his approach. But to claim Whitehead did not think metaphysics should be constrained by physics shows either a deep misunderstanding or a near total lack of familiarity with his work. And on the reading of some physicists, our understanding of relativity and quantum phenomena has only grown closer to Whitehead’s view a century ago. See for example this coauthored paper (in review) with physicist Timothy Eastman and philosopher of physics Ruth Kastner.

Regarding prehension, here’s a brief primer on the concept for those who want to go deeper:

Prehension is, in part, Whitehead’s reformed account of causation, his attempt to naturalize what Hume had dissolved and Kant had sequestered inside the transcendental subject. Physical prehension is causal efficacy as felt inheritance that is perceived in the body before it is ever represented in consciousness (ie, it is felt as bodily reception before it reaches conscious sense perception). Prehension is the relational key to Whitehead’s whole process metaphysics, so getting it wrong will make the entire scheme fall apart (as it does in Pigliucci’s hands).

Pigliucci claims Whitehead has no epistemology, or thinks we can do metaphysics without bothering about how knowledge is possible (or he did until I called him on it). He relatedly claims that Whitehead ignored Kant’s critical philosophy. Again, this just shows that the pages of Process and Reality have not been cracked (I count 74 mentions of Kant in that book). Whitehead was a very close reader of the first critique. He does not sidestep Kant, though he does reject Kant’s idea that all of philosophy and science should be understood to orbit around the conceptual structure of the human mind. Presumably Pigliucci agrees with Whitehead on this point?

“The process of cognition is merely one type of relationship between things which occurs in the general becoming of reality. … [Kant] asked, How is cognizance possible? I suggest to you the more general question, How is any particular entity possible having regard for the relationships which it presupposes?” (Whitehead, “First Lecture, 1924” in Whitehead at Harvard, 46-47).

While Kant argues that a merely apparent world emerges from the subject, Whitehead describes how the subject emerges from the world. This inversion is argued for with great rigor and detail, not just asserted. Kant’s critical analysis of knowledge presupposes what Whitehead diagnoses as the sensationalist doctrine, ie, the account shared by modern rationalists and empiricists alike that perception consists in bare universals (patches of color, tones of sound, etc.) given in presentational immediacy, thus entirely ignoring perception in the mode of causal efficacy. The sensationalist doctrine follows from the classical substance-quality metaphysics that Kant thought he had fully overcome. It turns out that epistemology-first philosophy does not mean metaphysically innocent philosophy. Even Kant smuggles in an ontology of an isolated representing subject, leaving us with a bifurcated picture of nature: moral freedom and private qualia on one side, deterministic causal mechanism on the other. Pigliucci quietly performs the same bifurcation in his dismissals of Whitehead and with his promissory physicalism: whatever the current paradigm in physics is gets the real world, while value, beauty, and experience are only affirmed in a secondary, sort of but not really real kind of way.

Pigliucci criticizes Whitehead’s metaphysics for not being falsifiable, which is just a category error. Metaphysics is descriptive generalization, and so not in the business of generating testable scientific hypotheses. Pigliucci should know that physicalist metaphysics is not falsifiable, either. The relevant tests are abductive and comparative, which is to say, which scheme of generic notions renders the widest range of evidence under a coherent interpretation while leaving the least out? Whitehead’s criteria for judging speculative schemes (coherence, consistency, applicability, adequacy) constitute a fallibilist method. His own self-assessment is the opposite of “self-congratulatory”: “the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly” (PR preface).

Regarding eternal objects, I admit they are controversial even among Whiteheadians. But I see no evidence that Pigliucci has even attempted to comprehend their metaphysical function.

They are intended, among other things, to help answer cosmological questions Pigliucci’s physicalism struggles to address: why this cosmic order, these fundamental constants, this graded relevance of possibility, rather than chaos? Eternal objects are bound up with Whitehead’s process theology, which Pigliucci has no patience for. Fair enough, but let us not pretend “good luck making sense of that one” is a serious argument. Theism, pantheism, and panentheism have occupied the most sophisticated and scientifically informed minds for many centuries.

Everything flows. Except, apparently, Pigliucci’s patience for anyone who asks what that might actually mean. There are other ways into process metaphysics; but shallow incredulity is not a serious argument against the 20th century’s most logically rigorous, scientifically grounded, and experientially inclusive attempt.

Urphänomen, Philosophical Research Community

Thinking With Anthroposophia

Tomorrow I was asked to share some reflections on the importance of human thinking at the North American Anthroposophical Youth Conference at Meristem in Sacramento, CA…

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8 days ago · 16 likes · 3 comments · Urphänomen and Matthew David Segall

Sharing some excerpts from my talk for the anthroposophical youth section earlier today:

I’m a philosopher. I teach in this program, Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness, which includes pretty much everything. I knew from the time I was eighteen or so that I wanted to become a teacher and that philosophy was my calling. I went to undergrad and was very disappointed by what I found. I was expecting philosophy professors to be wise — to love wisdom, to approach philosophy as a way of life, as a spiritual practice. And I did not find that at all. It was a profession for them, a job, and they didn’t seem to like it very much. There was a lot of bitterness and infighting in the department, and I was so discouraged that throughout undergrad most of my study took place outside the classroom, in my own reading. I would wander the library at night and pull books off the shelf and piece together this history of thinking — East and West and South, though I’m mostly oriented in Western philosophy and history, esotericism, and religion. Eventually I found a graduate school — the one I now teach in — where philosophy was a way of life, where thinking wasn’t just something you do with the top of your head but something that can transform your entire life.

Anthroposophy was something I discovered in graduate school. I studied with Robert McDermott — I don’t know if that name is familiar to any of you; he’s now retired, but he’s been an important friend and mentor to me. He didn’t begin with thinking when he introduced Steiner to me. He began with the Gospel of Luke, and the idea that there are two Jesus children, and Zarathustra’s ego, and Buddha’s Nirmanakaya — all of this really esoteric stuff, which had me spinning. But something called me to this work that was deeper than my rational mind understood at the time. My rational mind was saying: turn around and leave. But something pulled me deeper, and I discovered that the method of entry into that very esoteric worldview and cosmology — all of the spiritual beings — is ultimately through thinking. That was my path. So I’ll try to share how that opened a door for me into what initially seemed like quite a weird world, and now feels nourishing to me.

Today we’re trying to cultivate thinking — but thinking, feeling, and willing are inseparable, so feeling and willing will inevitably come in a little bit today.

I wanted to share some ideas to set the scene, to gather us around this activity of thinking, which is very mysterious and very ordinary at the same time — because we’re always doing it, sometimes consciously, and sometimes thoughts just happen. I’ll share a few things Steiner offers and get into his cosmology, which is a little esoteric. But I want to begin with something more concrete and experiential, by drawing your attention to the feeling of your seat in your chair right now — the weight of your body, the warmth of your body. Maybe you’ve naturally closed your eyes, but I invite you to open them again and see the light reflecting off the walls and the colors of the walls. Look around the circle and see the contours of all the faces we’re sharing this room with. And now notice that you’re breathing. Before you noticed you were breathing, you were still breathing — but being breathed. What’s astonishing about thinking is that when we bring our attention to our breathing, all of a sudden we take hold of it. We breathe: we can slow our breath, deepen it, breathe more rapidly. And then our thoughts wander off, and the breathing continues without us having to pay any attention to it.

That might seem like an ordinary fact, but it’s kind of strange. I would invite us to consider the strangeness of that threshold between paying attention to our breathing — doing it on purpose — and our thoughts wandering off to something else while the breathing continues.

There are other aspects of our life processes that we’re not as able to take hold of in that way, at least without lots of training. We might be able to attend to our heartbeat and try to calm ourselves down, but there seems to be less access for most of us to managing our heart rate. And I don’t know that anyone I’ve met is capable of controlling their own digestion by attending to what’s going on in their gut. That’s a lot harder even, right?

What I’m directing our attention to is the way that, in our thinking activity, we can descend into our feeling life and gain a kind of dreamy consciousness of what’s going on in our emotions. For some of us it’s very difficult to describe how we feel; others have more facility with that. But we’re going deeper into a kind of dreamy consciousness when we think about our feeling. And when we think about our willing, it’s almost as if we’re asleep in our willing. What I mean is — it’s not that we don’t have a sense of freedom, but: I’m thinking out loud right now, and I have some intention about the words I want to share, and somehow those intentions move my vocal cords and shape my tongue and my lips, and air pressure is released from my mouth and travels through the air to your eardrum, vibrating a membrane, and all this nervous-system activity is unleashed — and then meaning arises again. I have no idea how my vocal cords work, or how speech is produced from my intentions. And I don’t think you have any idea how your ear and your brain are participating in reassembling those vibrations into something meaningful. I’ve never heard a convincing explanation of how that whole process might take place in a purely physiological or physical way. It seems that when meaning passes from one soul to another, something spiritual is happening. We can describe it through all these physical mechanisms, but my consciousness doesn’t actually know, in my thinking, how any of that is done as I intend to speak to you. Similarly, I raise my hand: I’m aware of the intention and the result, but how my muscles do all of that — how the will actually operates at the level of my body — I’m asleep to that. And yet it happens.

So in our thinking activity we can be aware of so much — but we’re also asleep. Steiner would say that in our will, we’re asleep. It’s as though, while we think we’re wide awake during the day, we’re carrying around a sleeping human being with us as well. And everything works in these polarities. You might think: oh, I should be more aware, I should think more and attend to as much as I possibly can. Well, that’s not really the lesson here. To be awake, we need to sleep — just as, to be alive, we need to die. Death is not accidentally related to life, just as sleep is not accidentally related to waking. There’s an oscillation here, a rhythm.

And so, while we want to be free in our thinking, we also have to be able to go to sleep at night. And if we’re honest with ourselves, in all humility, most of our thoughts are other people’s thoughts. Most of our opinions are other people’s opinions. We hear things, we pick up ideas, we read about things — from trustworthy sources, usually — and we say: well, that sounds good, I’ll have some of that, I’ll repeat that, and that will be good enough. When we’re thinking creatively, we’re discovering truths that have never been thought before. There are truths that only I can think and discover; there are truths that each of you can only think and discover for yourself. And we want to strive for that. But to admit that most of our thoughts are habitual — inherited from teachers, from parents, from our whole culture and civilization — is not an insult. It’s just a fact of life. We need to inherit our mother tongue. I am speaking English; I didn’t invent this language. I had to learn it through mimicry in order to express any thought at all — whether I’m just passing along someone else’s opinion, or trying to have a free thought and share a new idea for the first time. So there’s always this interplay between habit and novelty, between life and death.

To say that most of our thinking is dead — that we’re often repeating the corpses of thoughts that were once living — is not an insult. It’s not a failure. It’s inevitable. But the point is that the corpses of the past, the thoughts of the dead, you could say, are the soil out of which living thinking must grow. And we might have some responsibility to the dead: to resurrect those thoughts, to carry this activity forward into a future that, as we read in this verse, is uncertain — and yet, we have help. These dead thoughts we carry with us provide a sense of support and momentum. We don’t want to just repeat them, but we nonetheless need them to have a sense of direction.

One last thing I’ll share now. When we inherit that past — all of these dead thoughts from all the human beings who have lived before us, now living in us — it’s a gift. But there’s also a lot of trauma we’re inheriting. Pain and suffering and anger. Some of the thoughts we inherit are even seeking vengeance. That’s all there too. And the only way to step into the future, in light of all we’re inheriting, the good and the bad, I think, is through an act of forgiveness. Because when we’re free in our thinking, it’s because we’re relating to it as a kind of gift — not only a gift we’re receiving from the past, but a gift we’re handing to the future. Forgiveness is what allows us to metabolize all of that pain. And there’s also a sense in which we need to forgive in order to meet the future — forgiving the gods, even, for the fact that we die to ourselves. Moment by moment, as we’re thinking: what’s left behind, as soon as we express a living thought, is now a corpse. And we have to give that to the future just as we received it from the past. So thinking, when we’re doing it freely, is a kind of thanksgiving, I would offer.

Maybe just one more thing. Something Steiner said that struck me early in my study of anthroposophy, and has stuck with me perhaps more than anything else, is that thinking is the one place in the entire universe where, if anything is to happen, you have to do it. That’s our entryway into transformation, into participation. When I hear that, it feels like a heavy burden initially — I’ve been in moments in life where I’m afraid to be involved, and something dies in me when I have that fear. Because in our “I,” our first-person pronoun, our thinking activity — it’s up to us. No one can do it for us. No one can say “I” for me, or for you. And something in the universe remains incomplete without each of us stepping in — not just through our thinking, if that’s the doorway, but through our whole feeling and willing life. The universe lacks something if we don’t show up, if we don’t bring who we are into the mix. Again, it may feel like a burden at first, but it’s also an invitation: no one can bring what you can bring.

QUESTION: how do we know when our thinking is truly free?

That is a very challenging question to answer in general, because I have a hard enough time knowing which of my own thoughts are free. And it’s very hard, if not impossible, for me to tell anyone else which of their thoughts are free, or when they’re engaging in creative thinking and not just habitual thought. So I can’t answer for you. But maybe you can tell the difference, and maybe it feels something like this: there’s a difference between having a thought and free thinking. Free thinking feels like giving birth to a new self. It’s a birthing process — which feels different from “oh, here’s a thought; hmm, here’s a thought.” Rather: I don’t know who I am now. I’ve just become something new. Does that help?

QUESTION: what effect is artificial intelligence having on our thinking?

I will offer some thoughts here that are — well, definitely somewhat esoteric, but I think we can work with this. Steiner talked about the Archangel Michael, the bearer of a cosmic intelligence that was gradually given over to human beings. Over the last thousand years or so, we came more and more to have that thinking, that intelligence, and to experience it as if it were just in our heads — whereas it used to be experienced as living in the cosmos. You could trace this through the evolution of philosophy: something called nominalism arose, where we began to imagine that ideas were not eternal forms existing beyond our heads, but just names we give to classify things. We generalize “dog” as a category and gather all the different breeds under that name, but there is no archetype of the Dog — that would be the older, Platonic view. And as intelligence became more and more something human beings thought they possessed — some kind of brain activity — well, there is this other being, whom we may all know: Ahriman, who wants to have that intelligence, to take it away from human beings. Human beings aren’t just minds and heads; we have hearts, and our thinking is warmed by love. But Ahriman wants that thinking, that intelligence, to be mere calculation — a statistical regression, a language model that can run without blood, that has no metabolism, no heart.

That’s our challenge right now. You could say there is a battle between Michael and Ahriman — and the battlefield is the ground of your own attention. Moment by moment, your own thinking activity: that’s where the battle is occurring. And I don’t think the idea is to close the laptop, turn off the phone, and run the other direction. This technology is here to stay; we are going to have to deal with it. And we can deal with it, if we remember where our freedom is found: in our thinking, in our attention. That’s where we can remain free from the temptation to let the machines do our thinking for us.

COMMENT: Thinking isn’t merely subjective. It allows us to share a common world of ideas, if only we can free ourselves from the confines of our subjectivity.

“Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” [laughter] But it’s true — thinking does get dismissed very easily as merely subjective. And that’s something to sit with and wonder about: is free thinking just your own opinion, or are you tapping into a reality that might not be visible — you may never see the elephant as a totality — but that thinking itself, as an organ of perception, is nonetheless touching? And can we come to share what it’s touching, with a loving attitude rather than a skeptical attitude toward the potential of thinking?

There’s an image of God in ancient Greek philosophy — Aristotle — of God as thought thinking itself, in a closed loop. And for Aristotle, the whole world was in love with that circle: the plants grow toward it, fire reaches for it, the human mind tries to imitate it. I don’t think that’s the appropriate image for our time, because it’s too removed. It’s an image of a spiritual world that’s closed off from what’s happening on the Earth — maybe we can try to imitate it, but it has no relationship with us. And thinking that is just thinking about thinking for the purpose of more thoughts is that closed loop, and it leads us away from the Earth, away from each other. Living thinking, free thinking, creative thinking is not that. I think it’s thinking that is courageous enough to descend — into the earth, into our bodies, into our relationships, into society — and to bring love and attention and awareness to what’s happening here, and to learn from that. And so the purpose of thinking, I think, is to give a little bit more consciousness to the future.

That reminds me of a line from Goethe, which I’ll paraphrase: every being, lovingly contemplated, opens a new organ of perception in us. But if we move through the world trying to classify everything based on dead thoughts, without meeting each being as a unique occurrence, we miss a lot. And with LLMs — some images came to mind while you were speaking — these language models are trained on the corpses of human thought. Artificial intelligence is a graveyard. Every prompt is like a séance. We can learn a lot from the bones of the dead. But there’s no living thinking in that machine. So what are we meeting those bones with? Are we putting flesh and blood on the bones — or are we just trying to scrape the little piece of fat left on the bone? I don’t know what thinking is. But I think we know what it’s not.

In my ongoing revisions of the Spiral Genesis proposal, I offered octaves and perfect fifths as examples of eternal ratios exemplified but not generated by sociohistorical routes of actual occasions.

“The bare determinability of an eternal object does not have the sort of reality whose genesis or location we might ask after, any more than we would ask where the octave is stored, or on which morning three came to stand to two in that relation. Of course, no particular sounding of a fifth perfectly exemplifies an exact ratio, and of course the recognizable reproducibility of musical intervals depends upon extensive material, physiological, and cultural construction. The genesis of the conditions that make even their approximate sounding and hearing possible does not yet explain the definiteness of the ratio itself. That its definite determinability is “uncreated” is not some spooky ontological claim about its having existed since before the beginning of time but a transcendental claim about its modality, about how potentiality exists rather than which particular tasks it comes to serve.”

We should not ask for the natal chart of the ratio 3:2. Its form of definiteness has not the sort of reality that could come to exist at some time or in some place.

The point of denying it a genesis is not that the mere ratio is the cause of the sound of a fifth. A particular sounding’s approximation of the ratio is produced by instruments, breathing bodies with vocal cords and ears, air molecules, and by culture specific traditions of tuning. Forms are not material or efficient causes; but nor are they mere names. Mathematical relations do not have birthdays.

What kind of reality do they have, then? A ratio is as definite as anything else in heaven or on earth. 3:2 is exactly this relation and no other. And yet, importantly for what I want to say here, its relational identity requires no fixed unit of measure. It is the same proportion whether the strings stretched in preparation for its exemplification are measured spatially in centimeters or inches, whether their vibration is counted temporally in frequencies, or whether its two magnitudes are simply compared, with no measure assigned at all. Plato’s student Eudoxus built his theory of proportion precisely to relate magnitudes immeasurable by any common unit. Proportion remains even in the absence of any metric.1

Having sat with this example, I am coming to believe it is one of the best intuition pumps available for what Whitehead means by definite potentiality, and by the extensive continuum. The continuum is not a coordinate grid but the scheme of potential relatedness among regions (eg, connection, overlap, part and whole). Points, lines, dimensions, and finally measurement are not given by the continuum itself but derived from it—points and lines by extensive abstraction, dimensionality and measurement by the historical achievement of cosmic epochs, constructed from below as actual occasions perish and inherit from one another. Congruence grants the possibility of using a unit of measure (a ruler, say) so as to relate the same length here and there again. Measurement of this sort is a contingent determination holding only within a particular cosmic epoch.

The musical example helps make the layering of actualization audible. To realize 3:2 as an actual sounding interval, it is first necessary to choose a unit of measure: a reference pitch, a temperament. In Whitehead’s terms, we could say the different tunings of Baroque ensembles (A≈415) and modern orchestras (A=440) atomize the pitch continuum differently, each selecting its own discrete pitches from the continuous field. The same proportions are realized in different metrics. The tuning decisions establish, in miniature, two cosmic epochs, with each standard of congruence a social achievement arising out of and sustained by a contingent lineage of practice, rather than a fact fixed prior to the world. Metrics descend from no eternal lawmaker. They are built and rebuilt, occasion by occasion, from the bottom up.

The reference pitch is only the first choice forced by actualization. The more interesting one is temperament, which arises from an incommensurability in the arithmetic itself. I am not a musician and so learned while thinking through this example that stacking pure fifths—that is, multiplying a vibration rate by 3:2, then again, twelve times over—will never land you exactly where seven doublings, seven pure octaves, would. No power of 3 can equal a power of 2, so the stack of fifths misses the stack of octaves forever, not by accident at the twelfth step, but by arithmetic necessity at every step along the way. The near miss has an ancient name: the Pythagorean comma. What it means is that the so-called “circle” of fifths is actually a spiral. Each new fifth, folded back into the octave, lands near to an earlier pitch but never exactly on one. You can continue the spiral forever and the fifths will come arbitrarily close to every point of the pitch “circle” while never striking the same point twice. Music theorists thus speak of a “spiral of fifths” not as a metaphor but as a mathematical description.

Why is this so interesting for my Spiral Genesis proposal? Because it is precisely the exactness of the ratios that generates the spiral’s refusal of circular closure. Were the fifth only approximately 3:2 (say, as a family of resemblances with no definite potential to approach) there would be no comma, no spiral, only an aimless drifting indistinguishable from noise. The rigor of non-closure, the endless generativity of the spiral, follows from the definiteness of the relational form. This shows how novelty is not at odds with definite potentiality but what definite potentiality yields when iterated in actuality: recurrence of the what (every fifth exactly 3:2), perpetual novelty of the this (no position ever revisited). Genesis without form is an indefinite flux; form without genesis is a closed circle going nowhere fast; form in genesis is an evolving spiral.

Equal temperament forces closure by flattening each fifth to the irrational 2^(7/12), so that twelve fifths equal seven octaves exactly. This fudge sacrifices purity of the part to closure of the whole. Every tuning system involves such a decision, in Whitehead’s sense of the word: a cutting-off such that every attainment of determinate value requires an exclusion of others.

Turning, then, to the phase spaces of physics, we can see how what is indispensable as an instrument may mislead as a metaphysics. A phase space is a completed manifold of pre-coordinated points through which trajectories move. Whitehead’s extensive continuum is only potentially divisible; actual divisions require the creative decisions of actual occasions. This is why he says: “There is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming” (PR 35). What remains unprestatable is not pure potentiality or recurrence (since three could always stand to two in just that relation) but propositional relevance. Evolution shapes which forms become important, are felt as consonant, or organize a lineage struggling to persist by means of them. The novel achievement is propositional, arising only with the occasions that entertain and decide to realize the relevant forms.

Ratios are not born like organisms, but nor are they idle abstractions. They illustrate neither pure potentiality nor bare actuality, but the passage between them. They are definite forms ingredient in the measures and functions of worldly becomings. Pythagoras’ comma is where eternity lures time into an open spiral. The circle may close among the forms, but in the world it is a spiral genesis. It spirals precisely because the forms are exact.

I have been writing about res potentiae, as Stuart Kauffman, Timothy Eastman, Ruth Kastner, and others refer to them, drawing upon Werner Heisenberg’s retrieval of the Aristotelian notion of potentia. Below is my co-authored paper with Eastman and Kastner:

It is important to make clear that I do not think of the actual and the possible as two separate worlds. There is one actual world. Or, as a process philosopher, I am perhaps obnoxiously obliged to say: there is one actual worlding. We never apprehend the same world twice.

Our task is to think a one-world cosmology, which may be synonymous with accepting a pluriverse. Ironically, this paradox provides the path toward a coherent metaphysics. This one world is also a pluriverse because it is a creative advance: an open, ontogenetic worlding haunted, lured, by unrealized possibilities. How are we to think being when being is not merely “what is,” as Parmenides insisted, but also becomes, as Heraclitus insisted? Plato helps by thinking becoming and even non-being as themselves kinds of being. In the Sophist, in an effort to make room for motion alongside rest, non-being becomes one γένος among the greatest kinds: not sheer nothingness, but determinate difference, being-other-than what is.

Whitehead’s cosmology is an attempt to describe, or descriptively generalize, a constellation of cosmological categories: a categoreal scheme more than a closed world-system. “System” is a bit too highfalutin for Whitehead. He claimed, more modestly, to practice a method of imaginative generalization and assemblage, attending carefully to the diverse domains of experience so as not to leave any form of feeling out. He is a radical empiricist, but he is also a rationalist, though in the peculiar sense of rationalism as an “experimental adventure,” never final, always tentative. There is no hope of discovering some set of propositions that might deduce the world and thereafter be repeated dogmatically. Whitehead’s rationalism is an adventure of thought in which even partial success is significant.

I have been applying Whitehead’s ideas to Kauffman’s work in biology and to Kastner’s and Eastman’s work in physics. Part of this effort is an attempt to historicize physics, which would require developing a metaphysics adequate to evolution and ontogenesis. What would natural science mean if even physics were historical—not merely in the trivial sense that physicists have discovered nature’s laws gradually (ie, in the sense that science itself has a history), but in the ontological sense that the universe’s modes of order are themselves generated historically?

This depends, in part, on what we take biology to be. If biology is reducible in principle to a timeless mechanistic physics, then historicizing physics becomes unintelligible. Contingent historical becoming would be demoted to an epiphenomenon of necessary, eternal, preformed physical law. The apparent creativity of evolution would become only our ignorance of an already constituted state space and its deterministic or stochastic trajectories.

Biology can be understood, in part, as the study of patterns of variation, inheritance, development, and speciation emerging over geological time on the surface of this planet. But biology is also concerned with organization: with the ways living systems constitute, maintain, repair, reproduce, and transform themselves as selves/cells.

Variational approaches tend to explain biological organization as the contingent historical outcome of variation, selection, drift, inheritance, and ecological interactions. Organizational approaches do not deny variation. They insist, however, that variation always occurs within already organized systems possessing characteristic constraints, competencies, and norms of viability. Living beings approach what theorists call “organizational closure”: a circular dependence or community of causality among processes that mutually produce and sustain the conditions of their own continuation.

Such closure should not be imagined as absolute self-sufficiency. Nothing makes itself. Organisms are thermodynamically, materially, and semiotically open. Closure names the recursive organization of constraints, not the closure of a substance within itself. Even where it is only precariously or approximately realized, life exhibits an orientation toward the maintenance, repair, and possible transformation of its own organization.

Biological order is not an additional formal or material ingredient laid on top of physics. The difference life makes is not explainable simply by reference to aperiodic crystals or dissipative heat flows. It consists in the organization of absences, exclusions, and unrealized alternatives: in constraints that channel energetic processes while being recursively regenerated by those very processes. What is absent can make a causal difference, not as a ghostly efficient cause, but as a limitation that opens a space of directed activity. Teleology reappears not as an externally imposed design but as what Terrence Deacon calls teleodynamics: the immanent tendency of recursively organized processes to preserve the conditions of their own continuation.

Michael Levin’s work adds that organisms are not merely products of genes or passive points of intersection among external forces. They are multiscale agential systems. Cells, tissues, organs, organisms, and perhaps ecological collectives can exhibit degrees and kinds of competency, solving problems within differently scaled physiological, morphological, behavioral, and cognitive spaces. Agency is not an all-or-nothing possession mysteriously appearing in conscious human minds. It is graded, distributed, nested, and reorganizable.

Yet neither organizational closure nor multiscale agency should tempt us into treating organisms or lineages as simple substances. This is where Whitehead’s categoreal distinctions can help clarify the dialectic between variation and organization in biology.

I find his threefold distinction among occurrences, recurrences, and endurances especially useful. There are actual occasions: occurrences. There are eternal objects: recurrences. And there are societies, nexūs, organisms, lineages, and historical routes: endurances. In other words, there are events, forms, and the more or less enduring social orders generated when events inherit, modify, and reenact forms with sufficient reliability.

These are not three separate realms. They are distinguishable factors within one creative advance. An actual occasion arises out of its settled world, including that world’s might-have-beens, and it aims for what might-yet-be. Eternal objects recur as forms of definiteness available for renewed or revised ingression. Societies endure because successive occasions inherit a common form of order. Occurrence, recurrence, and endurance are therefore mutually implicated without being reducible to one another.

In everyday experience, we perceive enduring societies and societies of societies. We ourselves are nested societies whose conditions reach back toward the earliest epochs of the cosmos: the canalization of energy into electromagnetic activities, then into atomic, molecular, and chemical activities. Meanwhile, stellar and galactic societies canalize energy gravitationally, nuclearly, elementally, and otherwise. On the surface of this particular planet, the chemistry generated through these nested achievements of social order gives rise, along the thermodynamic gradient between warm watery rock, radiant sunlight, and cold space, to life. Life takes form, feeds on gradients, becomes sensitive to light, eventually learns to see, and finally begins to reflect upon its own existence.

But how does this happen? We can approach a coherent account only by maintaining a clear-eyed capacity to distinguish, without dissociating, occurrences, recurrences, and endurances.

At the level of a biological lineage or enduring society, no organism and no species confronts naked pure potentials as though surveying a warehouse of possible forms. No lineage scans the realm of eternal objects. A lineage is not a single concrescing subject. It is a historical route composed of many actual occasions and environmental relations. Its unity is real, but it is the inherited coarse-grained generality of a social order, not the indivisible unity of one actual occasion.

A lineage is not itself an individual actual entity in Whitehead’s sense. It is a historically extended pattern of inheritance, constraint, reproduction, and transformation. A human body is likewise a society of societies, composed of coordinated cellular and organ-level processes and, during waking life, partially oriented around more dominant modes of conscious experience. We are a patterned transmission of formative constraints across generations upon generations of cells and organisms, awake to our precarious agency only perishing moment by perishing moment.

Our living bodies canalize, constrain, amplify, and sometimes redirect modes of relevance that have mattered in the past. Developmental systems inherit not only genes but bioelectric patterns, cellular competencies, tissue-level attractors, ecological affordances, symbiotic relations, and susceptibilities to learned behaviors. Levin is right to insist that these agential materials can navigate spaces of possible form. But these spaces should not automatically be interpreted as eternally prestated biological phase spaces. A morphospace can be real for a particular organized system without being an exhaustive catalogue of every possible organism that could ever evolve.

We must therefore avoid saying too simply that “the organism” either does or does not prehend eternal objects. Strictly speaking, prehension belongs to actual occasions. But the coordinated occasions composing an enduring organism can generate organism-level capacities, aims, memories, and fields of relevance. In animals with sufficiently centralized organization, a dominant or regnant living nexus may integrate many subordinate processes into a comparatively unified subjectivity. In other cellular collectives, agency may remain more distributed.

The crucial point is not that enduring organisms are less real or experientially inert in comparison to actual occasions. It is that organismic agency is socially composed. Actual occasions are the ultimate subjects of experience, but they do not act in isolation. They arise within societies whose inherited constraints shape what they can feel, value, and achieve. The organism is neither an autopoietic atom nor a mere aggregate. It is an organized ecology of occasions whose partial autonomy depends upon their ongoing coordination.

Every actual occasion includes, in some degree, a physical pole and a mental pole. It inherits the settled actuality of the physical past and entertains conceptual possibilities for future becoming. This conceptual pole should not be imagined as reflective cognition or self-consciousness. But even the most elementary occasion exhibits some valuation of possibility, however negligible. Through its initial aim, each occasion receives a graded relevance of potentiality for that concrete situation.

Whitehead names God as the primordial valuation of eternal objects and as the source of the initial aim. But the initial aim is not a command sent from outside the world. It is the immanent availability, for this occasion, of a relevant form of definiteness capable of integrating its inherited many into some attainable intensity of experience. Because the initial aim is relevant to a particular settled world, it cannot be understood apart from God’s consequent feeling of actual occasions. The primordial and consequent natures are analytically distinguishable, but the Life of God is found only in their triune unity with the creative advance of the world.

Eastman’s emphasis on the triadic relation among actuality, possibility, and context is helpful here. Possibility never becomes efficacious in abstraction from a context of realization. Actuality is not produced by possibility alone, and the context is not a passive container. The context helps determine which possibilities can become relevant, while actualization transforms the context inherited by subsequent events.

Kastner’s transactional interpretation of quantum theory offers a physical analogue. Quantum possibilities are not merely subjective ignorance about already actual spacetime events. They are physically real possibilities for transaction. But neither are they already actual objects situated in a coordinate grid. Spacetime emerges through the accumulation of completed transactions. Potentiae are real without being actual. Their reality is disclosed in their capacity to contribute to actualization.

A Whiteheadian appropriation of this physics should resist turning potentiae into a second, separately existing world. Possibility and actuality are distinguishable modes within one creative process. Physical potentiae are not necessarily identical to Whitehead’s eternal objects: they are already relationally and historically conditioned possibilities of actualization. They belong more closely to what Whitehead calls real potentiality, that is, the concrete availability of a settled world for further becoming.

Pure potentiality and real potentiality must therefore be distinguished. Pure potentiality concerns forms of definiteness considered apart from any particular actual ingression (but not from actuality generally). Real potentiality concerns how the already actual world conditions the possibilities available to a new becoming. Again, this is a distinction within one world, not a metaphysical divorce between two realms.

If all of this is the case—if occasions, eternal objects, propositions, and societies must be distinguished in this way—then when we say that biological evolution “discovers” a new use for feathers, jaws, swim bladders, limbs, or tails, we should not imagine organisms scanning a modal warehouse of possible functions. The organism or lineage does not look into a timeless inventory of eternal objects and select from a menu.

Rather, finite occasions of experience compose organisms’ moment-by-moment patterns of endurance. Occasions inherit a settled world, including the constraints and competencies of the organism to which they belong, and they entertain possibilities relevant to that situation. Novelty arises in the present. Eternity is efficacious only through the present. A contrast that was previously negligible, unavailable, or simply nonexistent as a concrete proposition becomes relevant within a changed actual situation. That is when eternity becomes present: not as a blueprint descending from heaven, but as fresh alternatives entering into novel contrast with the settled world.

I am therefore defending pure potentiality, but not as a prestated phase space. It is not a metrical coordinate domain containing all possible organisms, functions, and behaviors. I still want to distinguish pure potentiality from real potentiality, the abstract availability of as yet unactualized definiteness from the historically conditioned potential of the actual world. But this is a distinction, not a division.

From the perspective of organisms alive in any given moment of biospheric history, eternal objects are not free floating evolutionary options arbitrarily available for selection. They are not latent adaptations awaiting expression. Eternal objects, as pure forms of definiteness, are indifferent to their particular ingressions. Whitehead says that eternal objects “tell no tales” of their ingressions. Eternal objects do not announce their possible functions. The forms ingredient in feathers do not say, “I am for insulation,” “I am for display,” or “I am for flight.” The forms ingredient in tails do not say, “I am for balance” or “I am for propulsion.”

Functions are not inscribed in worldless forms in advance. Functions appear only within the concrete relations among organisms and their environments.

To say “feathers are for flight” already implicates particular organisms, atmospheres, gravitational conditions, skeletal structures, patterns of muscular coordination, metabolic pathways, sensorimotor competencies, predation pressures, mating displays, thermoregulation, and countless other ecological conditions. The proposition is thinkable, feelable, and actionable only when the world has already evolved to a point at which such a lure becomes relevant.

Organisms do not first exist and subsequently encounter an external environment. Organisms and their environments arise already reciprocally determined. A trait’s affordances depend upon an ecological field; organismic activity is always modifying that field in turn. Niche construction, symbiosis, developmental plasticity, and behavioral innovation alter the conditions under which further variations become relevant. The adjacent possible is therefore not adjacent to an isolated organism but is generated within an evolving organism-environment context.

My proposal grows out of conversations with people on many sides of these issues. I am trying to move beyond both mechanistic preformationism, on the one hand, and a naïve Platonism of biological possibility, on the other.

Mechanistic preformationism appears in at least two apparently opposed forms: reductive neo-Darwinism and intelligent design theory. They are waging a war in which I do not really have a stake. They can have at it. One side treats evolutionary novelty as the result of blind variation filtered by selection within a fundamentally prestated physical possibility space. The other side infers that complex organization must have been prestated in the intentions of an external designer. Both place the form of the outcome outside and before the historical process that produces it.

I am more interested in speaking with those who play on a different court entirely: namely, OG ontogenetic Darwinians like , as well as those you could call naïve Platonists—though who am I to call anyone else naïve? I am trying to maintain a childlike state of imaginative openness myself! So by “naïve” I simply mean those who are returning with child-like wonder to the idea that Ideas are not mere names.

Turning to Plato to understand biological form is not simply a wrong turn. Or, if it is, “error is the price we pay for progress” (Whitehead). Biology has never been free of archetypal intuitions. Goethe’s morphology disclosed recurrent patterns of transformation without reducing organisms to static types. His work on the intermaxillary bone undermined the supposed anatomical exception separating humanity from the rest of animal life. His archetypes were not fixed templates imposed upon passive matter but generative patterns apprehended through disciplined imaginal participation in their metamorphosis.

The question is therefore not whether Plato or Darwin is right. The question, for me, is how we might seek a balance, perhaps even a truce, between Darwin and Plato, between historical variation and intelligible form, such that descent with modification came to include the decisions of minds, and the creativity of evolution the recurrent definiteness without which no difference could be felt.

I agree with Stuart Kauffman that evolution does not actualize prelisted functions. Evolution produces new organisms, new environments, and new actual worlds within which new affordances and propositions can arise. There is no pregiven biological phase space. God’s primordial valuation of eternal objects is not a biological phase space. There is no divine spreadsheet containing every possible adaptation, ecological role, or organismic function.

The primordial valuation is an aesthetic ordering of pure definiteness according to its potential contribution to experiential intensity. But the concrete relevance of any possibility depends upon an actual world. God’s lure is not imposed from above upon organisms or lineages, as though God were a demiurge stamping gears onto the chōra and the chōra passively receiving form. God enters the world as an initial aim within each concrescing occasion.

This formulation must be handled with care. God does not first stand outside the world and then enter it. God is always already implicated in and initiatory of every act of becoming, while every act of becoming is preserved in God’s consequent life. The divine lure is neither an efficient compulsion nor a detailed instruction manual. It is the provision of an attainable possibility for integrating inherited conditions into a novel unity of feeling.

God does not whisper propositions to a species. God does not design laws of nature. God’s relation to enduring societies is mediated by the actual occasions composing them. The species is the historical accumulation of innumerable creaturely acts: successful and unsuccessful, coordinated and conflicting, conservative and adventurous.

But this does not mean that evolution is a sequence of isolated microdecisions. Organisms inherit organized fields of memory and constraint, akin to Rupert Sheldrake’s resonant morphic fields.

A cell’s decision is conditioned by tissue-level bioelectric patterns. An organism’s behavior is conditioned by developmental and ecological histories. A lineage’s future is conditioned by the accumulated consequences of prior organisms. Agency occurs at multiple scales because actual occasions can become organized into higher-order nexūs capable of coordinating lower-level activities.

Levin’s concept of cognitive light cones is suggestive here. Different agents care about, remember, and act upon differently scaled regions of space, time, and possible state. Evolution does not merely optimize fixed traits. It can expand or contract the scale of an agent’s concern, binding formerly independent subunits into a larger self. The transition from unicellular to multicellular life is therefore not simply an increase in mechanical complexity. It is a reorganization of agency, memory, and goal-directedness.

Whitehead’s philosophy supplies an ontology for this nesting. The many become one and are increased by one. The new one does not abolish the many. It coordinates them into a fresh unity whose achievement becomes available to subsequent becomings. Multiscale agency is possible because unity is repeatedly achieved without erasing plurality.

As is evident from the astonishing order achieved in this universe, creaturely responses have often produced beauty, complexity, and novel forms of coordination. But there are also failures, extinctions, parasitic simplifications, cancers, developmental catastrophes, and mass death. The history of the universe and the biosphere is a field of ruins as well as wonders. Whitehead’s God does not prevent tragedy by overruling creaturely mistakes. God saves what can be saved by feeling every creaturely achievement and suffering every creaturely loss.

We look up at the night sky, measure the cosmic microwave background radiation, and imagine we are seeing the origin of the universe. But who is to say we are not also seeing its end? Some cosmologists tell a story in which all processes culminate in heat death. Heat birth and heat death: cradle to grave, the same entropic epic. But there is another way to read the fact that we are bathed in a womb of warmth. It may be read not only as expenditure but as inheritance, not only as decay but as gift, not only as thermodynamic gradient but as divine embrace.

We need to distinguish not only individuals from species—Darwin already troubles the notion of species as a fixed essence—but also actual occasion from organism, organism from lineage, occurrence from endurance, and both from recurrence. Eternal objects may sound like static self-identical essences, but they are precisely what allows definite differences to recur. Actual occasions feel and decide by selecting finite constellations of them. Societies inherit, constrain, coordinate, and transmit these definite characteristics. We must hold all three together—occurrences, recurrences, endurances—not to dissociate them, but to guide inquiry away from category mistakes and toward the most coherent vision of the universe available to us.

A biological organism is a society, a society of societies, a highly coordinated lineage of lineages. But where is its agency? It is not located in “the lineage” as though the lineage were an individual substance. Nor is it located in pure forms themselves, which also should not be imagined as a separable substance. Neither is agency confined to isolated microscopic actual occasions in a way that would render organismic decisions unreal.

Agency happens through the organization of occasions. In some organisms it is more or less centralized, in others it is more widely distributed. It can occur at cellular, tissue, organ, organismic, and perhaps ecological and even Gaian scales, insofar as these systems achieve sufficient integration to pursue and revise goals. Every such agency remains composite and precarious. No agent creates itself or its goals from nothing.

The lineages we inherit are sedimentations of decisions made by prior actual occasions and organized agents. We inherit their karma, if you want. We inherit the consequences of their deeds as stubborn facts. Acts become facts for the next acts. Agential decisions happen again and again, always conditioned by prior decisions and canalizing further decisions, but never simply deducible from what came before, because what we inherit is always an accumulation of prior agency.

We are therefore responsible to prior agents not because they mechanically determine us but because their unfinished achievements and sufferings compose the world from which we become. Responsibility is neither a function of our absolute autonomy nor our causal bondage. It is response-ability, the capacity to answer creatively to the demands of an inherited world.

There is, then, an experiential, experimental, anticipatory, and imaginative capacity active in higher animals, and attenuated in more elementary organisms, that factors into the trajectory of biospheric evolution. There is a creativity that cannot be reduced without remainder to chemistry. This is not to put down chemistry. It is to say that chemistry shelters the emergence of more integrated forms of agency. Chemistry makes possible dynamically self-maintaining organizations whose constraints redirect chemical processes toward organismic norms. Once chemistry is organized so as to repair, reproduce, anticipate, and pursue goals, we have crossed into biology. When such organization supports learning, memory, affect, and flexible behavior, we begin to speak of psychology. These sciences do not cancel physics and chemistry. They disclose forms of organization that remain illegible to the abstractions of physics and chemistry.

Lineages do not survey pure potentials. There is no frozen freezer section of ideas that organisms can go shopping in whenever they need novel adaptations. Organisms inherit the consequences of ancestral activity and transform what they receive, moment by moment, into new forms of relevance. Every once in a while, a novel proposition becomes available within a changed ecological and developmental context. An organism does not merely think otherwise. It acts otherwise. If the action alters the organism, its environment, or the developmental conditions of its descendants, the innovation may catch on.

We should nevertheless be cautious about saying that a lineage itself is “allured” or “decides.” That may be a useful shorthand, but the concrete decisions occur in the actualities composing organisms. The lineage changes when the consequences of these decisions become inherited constraints and affordances.

Consider an animal using its tail to balance in a new way in an arboreal environment. One organism improvises a new behavior. Others may learn through imitation. Developmental plasticities stabilize the behavior across the lineage. Environmental modifications make similar behaviors more likely. Selection favors anatomical and sensorimotor changes that support it. Genetic and bioelectric assimilation eventually helps physiologically canalize what began as an improvised decision. There may also be parallel convergent innovations across diverse lineages. The same proposition can become relevant to several species, not because it is transmitted directly from one to another, but because similar actual worlds can support similar lures.

There is thus a valid intuition behind saying that novel biological propositions or functions are “in the air,” so to speak. Their availability can exceed any single chain of genetic or epigenetic transmission, or behavioral imitation. There may also be something like morphic resonance going on, but we need not necessarily posit a nonlocal field merely on the basis of the hybrid status of propositions. Similar forms of organization, similar histories, and overlapping environments can render analogous propositions relevant to multiple organic occasions in multiple locales. Genuine quantum nonlocality may belong to the physical conditions of the world, as Kastner argues, but this does not by itself establish a biological mechanism for the nonlocal transmission of learned form. It may be that “transmission” is the wrong metaphor for thinking about the propagation of propositions, which do not travel through spacetime but rather ingress from an intensively graded plenum of possiblity. Thus Sheldrake’s morphic resonance, on this reading, may be something more like a ripening of real potentiality across multiple convergent contexts simultaneously than an actual field.

The world lives, to paraphrase Whitehead, by its incarnation of God in itself. God’s primordial nature is the inexhaustible valuation of pure forms. God’s consequent nature feels the world as it becomes, creature by creature. The initial aim offers each occasion a possible unity of its inherited many, a unity made singularly in each occasion’s unique becoming.

The aim is not a finished universal handed intact to a passive creature. It is an indeterminate lure that the creature must decide how to actualize. No occasion can contain divine perfection. It can only actualize some finite satisfaction from its concrete conditions. It suffers and enjoys the values realized in those limited conditions. And God suffers with it.

Through this reciprocal relation, the world enters God and God enters the world. The lure is eternally grounded and evolutionarily renewed. The world is recreated moment by moment, not from nothing, but from what has become and from what may yet become relevant.

God creates the world through creatures, and creatures create God’s consequent actuality through what they become. Creatures always work with inherited conditions. God always receives the consequent experience of those conditions. There is no divine blueprint standing before the world that God consults in order to design it. Reality is an ever-renewed aesthetic experiment, a Creality.

We always find ourselves in the middle of this experiment, given what has become in all its glory and all its gore. Our task is not to escape history into a timeless inventory of perfect possibilities, nor to submit to the supposed necessity of stubborn fact and entropic decay. It is to discern what intensity may yet be won from extensity, what new unities might be composed from the many differences we inherit, and what forms of beauty might still become relevant within an unfinished world-in-process.

“The conception of propositions as merely material for judgments is fatal to any understanding of their rôle in the universe. In that purely logical aspect, non-conformal propositions are merely wrong, and therefore worse than useless. But in their primary rôle, they pave the way along which the world advances into novelty. Error is the price which we pay for progress.” -Whitehead (PR 187)

In what follows, I will only very briefly rehearse the argument of my original Spiral Genesis essay: that Stuart Kauffman’s exaptations of adjacent possibilities can be read through Whitehead’s theory of novel propositions. You can read (or watch) the full argument (and the discussion afterwards) at the following links:

What I want to do here is update and refine my reasoning after continued dialogue: with Alicia Juarrero, who questioned why there can be no truly novel forms; with , whose ontogenetic approach continues to apply pressure at all the right joints; and with , whose careful analysis of my use of Whitehead’s categories continues to temper my arguments.

My original proposal was that Stuart Kauffman’s account of biological exaptation in terms of the creation of unprestatable adjacent possibilities is interpretable through Whitehead as the creation of “propositions” rather than the creation of “eternal objects” (since for Whitehead, there are no new eternal objects). Kauffman’s claim is that the future of the biosphere cannot be deduced, even in principle, from any pre-stated phase space. The point is ontological and not merely epistemic: the possible functions of a new trait do not exist in advance of the historical situations in which they become relevant. My Whiteheadian suggestion was that these unprestatable possibilities are not new “pure potentials” but new impure ones: propositions, “lures for feeling,” hybrids of the actual and the possible that living actual occasions entertain and sometimes decide to actualize. This is a redescription, not a deduction. Kauffman’s work lays out a new problem set for biology; the application of Whitehead’s categories is my metaphysical interpretation, not something Kauffman’s account by itself requires. I am sure other metaphysical interpretations are possible.

I still think the proposal is fruitful. But I have now found myself in a bit of a hostage situation. I need to negotiate for the safe release of two weight-bearing speculative categories: God and eternal objects.

Is Whitehead’s so-called “realm of eternal objects” a predefined cosmic inventory, state space, or attractor landscape of exactly the kind Kauffman’s unprestatability forbids? And is Whitehead’s divine function a cosmic demiurge that coordinates the whole of possibility once and for all, such that the historic evolution of finite actual occasions is nothing but a paint-by-number operation rather than a real creative advance?

Revising My Propositional Proposal

Let me first restate my proposal in brief, so the revisions I want to make are clear as can be.

A proposition, for Whitehead, is not merely a linguistic statement, nor primarily a bearer of truth-value awaiting judgment, but a lure for feeling, a proposal about the way the world might matter, entertained by an occasion of experience within its concrete situation, and felt for its interest before it is ever affirmed. Whitehead says it is “merely credulous to accept verbal phrases as adequate statements of propositions. No verbal statement is the adequate expression of a proposition” (PR 13). The gap between verbal phrases and complete propositions is one reason he thinks the logician’s rigid alternative “true or false” is often irrelevant to the actual pursuit of knowledge, or indeed, of novel functions in the course of living. Logical treatment abstracts from the full experiential situation in which a proposition has meaning.

Propositions, then, are often more important for being interesting than for being true. But it is important that there be a fact of the matter by which their truth or falsehood could be determined.1 A proposition is hybrid in the sense that it indicates an actuality or constellation of actualities along with a predicative pattern that might characterize them. Like pure potentials or eternal objects, impure potentials or propositions are functionally indistinguishable from nonentity until and unless they are prehended or felt by a concrescing actuality. The locus of a proposition, then, consists of just those occasions of experience whose settled actual worlds already include the indicated actualities.

This locus condition is also a criterion of a proposition’s being entertainable. A proposition is available—feelable as a lure—only where its logical subjects are already settled actualities in some occasion’s achieved world. Lacking such subjects, there is no determinate reason upon which its truth or falsehood could be grounded, and what remains is not a proposition at all but a bare eternal object indicating nothing of its own ingressions (PR 256–57). A purely general description that refers only to properties and relations is, by this criterion, not a lure. The propositions that lure evolutionary advances are impure, meaning their possibilities are entangled with concrete, particular facts.

So then, let’s get more concrete. Consider feathers. Roughly 250 million years ago, before there were feathers, the free-floating proposition that “feathers are for flight” had no logical subjects at all, and so was not a proposition, nor a truth awaiting discovery, nor even a falsehood, but nothing that could be entertained or felt, since there was as yet nothing for it to be about. The arrival of feathers, which at first came to matter as insulation or sexual display, also does not suffice to compose it. Those first feathers gave the proposition candidate logical subjects, but prehending subjects were at that time still attending to prior functions. The aerial lure could be felt only later, within a lineage of occasions sheltered by bodies of a certain mass that had begun to run, leap, or glide.

Read as a bare statement, the sentence “feathers are for flight” names only universals—the naked possibilities of being-a-feather and taking-flight—and so, taken as a verbal statement, is not a proposition with locatable subjects. But “no verbal statement is the adequate expression of a proposition” (PR 13). Suppose we were an absurdly intelligent group of flying squirrel-like creatures (Volaticotherium antiquum, perhaps). Having already achieved modest forms of flight by means of membranes rather than feathers, we look on in amusement as the first dinos did their best to take feathered flight. Perhaps those features are for flying, one of us suggests to the other. Shortly thereafter, the same merely entertained proposition ingressed into actuality in an enterprising ancestor of Archaeopteryx. That “feathers might be for flying” went from being entertained as possible to defining a new functional adaptation.2

The adjacent possible is unprestatable, then, not because a determinate relevance is hidden from our finite minds, but because the relevant proposition has as yet no logical subjects. It cannot be said to be true or false, or even interesting, until it is compared to what is already actual. Novel propositions become available only when some existing trait, behavior, or morphology—perhaps originally surplus to, or underdetermined by, prior adaptive functions—comes to matter otherwise.

An eternal object tells no tales as to its ingressions. In abstraction, the pure potentials exhibited in a particular animal tail say nothing about whether they will be gathered into a rudder, a weapon, a fat storage organ, a fly swatter, a prehensile limb, or a balancing pole. The trait as a kind—the pattern exemplified by distinct lineages in the convergent evolution of prehensile tails in, e.g., monkeys, opossums, and seahorses—is a complex eternal object, a defining characteristic shared across distantly related lineages. What is not an eternal object is the concrete organ lineage that canalizes that characteristic into a specific enduring society of tail-occasions. It is a particular social lineage of tail-occasions, and not the universal kind, that a proposition takes as its logical subject. The tale that these tails are for balancing can be told only once one or more related mammals begin leaping between branches: it is then that new propositional lures can be felt, “tales that perhaps might be told about particular actualities” (PR 256). The proposition indicates these balancing tails, in their achieved field of relevance, as its logical subjects. It was not pre-existent in eternity, as if purchased from the frozen-food section of Trader Plato’s and defrosted into actuality. It is a tale that might be told about those tails only after bodies, habitats, and behavioral repertoires have composed the relevant locus. The tail’s new function is not chosen from a menu but felt as an adjacent lure within an achieved field of relevance.

In my initial proposal, I moved too fast in claiming that exaptation is “an old form in a new function” (PR 187). This phrase is actually Whitehead’s fallback qualification:

“A novelty has emerged into creation. The novelty may promote or destroy order; it may be good or bad. But it is new, a new type of individual, and not merely a new intensity of individual feeling. That member of the locus has introduced a new form into the actual world; or, at least, an old form in a new function.”

Form and function cannot be as easily prized apart as the simple formula “old form, new function” implies. A new Kantian whole (i.e., an organism whose parts are reciprocally ends and means) is not old parts given a new use but a new mode of organization or individuation in which the parts have become other than they were. Exaptation is the transformation of an existing trait or underdetermined effect through a new propositional lure within a reorganized locus of organism-environment relevance. It enrolls not only already functional organs but side effects (e.g., Kauffman’s heart sounds) and apparent epiphenomena, such that what was inconsequential becomes consequential. What begins as appearance later becomes actual—where “appearance” means not an illusion but a proposal, a might-be. A new contrast may matter aesthetically before it matters adaptively, hovering in a propositional penumbra until, decided upon by an actual occasion and stabilized within a society, the lure becomes a lineage, “[paving] the way along which the world advances into novelty.”

Releasing the Hostages

Defining eternal objects as uncreated forms of definiteness can make it sound as though one has posited a completed space of possible outputs, a pre-cosmic inventory of already decided forms, an a priori attractor landscape predetermining what can happen. Kauffman’s unprestatability forbids this. Juarrero affirms the evolutionary emergence of truly novel forms. Jackson refuses to worship an uncreated infinity of predefinites graded all at once. These are all commitments I take to heart and intend to share, even if by other means.

Why not just pay the ransom? Why not stop clutching at pure potentials, and just be happy with the abundance of the impure intermediaries like propositions, contrasts, and real potentials? They do most of the work, anyway! Why not scrub myself clean of archaic Platonic residues as so much metaphysical baggage weighing down the advance of a thoroughgoing evolutionary cosmology?

Because. I cannot shake the worry that paying the ransom would bankrupt the whole enterprise of metaphysics. No thinker thinks twice, as no world worlds twice. But I still agree with how I put it at the end of an earlier study of Whitehead’s eternal objects: (“Standing Firm in the Flux” in Whitehead at Harvard, 1925-1927 ed. by Joseph Petek and Brian Henning [Edinburgh University Press, 2026]):

We must return to the crucial question, whether we can think the unreality or superfluousness of eternal objects without falling into self-contradiction. Even posing the general post-Kantian problem as to whether metaphysics is really possible is already to be engaging in metaphysics. The very claim, “only actual entities are real” presupposes we know what it means for an entity to be unreal, i.e., merely possible, unactualized, or, indeed, impossible. It is precisely in order to explain such cognitive claims that Whitehead included the category of eternal objects as a speculative hypothesis. “The mind does not create such objects; they stand up against the mind, in their own right” (HL1 96). Whitehead is thus defending a qualified realism regarding universals as against the doctrine of nominalism, which has it that only particular entities are real with universals reduced to general names. His realism is “qualified” in that (i) he rejects the Platonic habit of granting preeminent reality to universals, and (ii) he accepts that the recognizable identity of enduring physical objects—e.g., Cleopatra’s Needle, which “daily [loses] some molecules and [gains] others”—is relative to the degree of abstraction of one’s definition. Eternal objects have no experience of themselves and no value independent of their function in concrescence (HL2 115). Exclusive reflection upon eternal objects within a stream of conscious occasions of experience leads to a rapid decrease in importance, as an idea becomes an idea of an idea, and so on, in a vicious spiral into abstract timeless irrelevance (HL2 105n9). It is the concrete particulars that have preeminent importance and that enhance relevance, and yet they cannot be what they are without also including what they are not. In other words, actualities necessarily refer to possibilities on their way to realizing their definite value. Rather than allowing finite actual occasions to evaporate into abstraction (as both Absolute Idealists [HL1 123] and inverters of Whitehead’s doctrine of possibility end up doing), Whitehead insists upon their concrete status as the locus of real value in the world. And yet, despite acknowledging various intermediate categories of existence, including real potentials, contrasts (or “relational tropes”), and propositions which lack the “purity” of eternal objects, and which various critics have pointed to as sufficient to play the role of said objects sans any Platonic baggage, Whitehead nonetheless maintained that metaphysics must account for our conceptual capacity to recognize entities that involve no necessary reference to any particular actual entities of the temporal world (PR 44). In the end, Whitehead admits the obscurity of the problem he is trying to address, specifically, the “transition from Platonic ideas to reality,” where on his own account his philosophical scheme traces only “a ghost of a glimmer of light” (HL1 98). The hypothesis of eternal objects does shed light on many a problem, even if it also leaves us with some “ragged-edges” (HL1 488).

Even for a descendental philosopher like me, who like most everyone else initially ran head first into Whitehead’s puzzling defense of eternal objects, the importance of permanence in a philosophy of flux eventually struck a nerve. I realized that, in trying to deny them, I could not state my own position coherently without borrowing precisely what I meant to abolish. To say “only actual entities are real” is already to claim to know what it would be for something to be unreal. The cognitive capacity for negation is, in part, what the category of eternal objects is introduced to explain. That pure potentials form an unavoidable pole in the magnet of metaphysical schematization is not an argument that they constitute a pre-determined phase space. I would only insist that the function they designate cannot be waved away, since any such waving already assumes it. At minimum, then, the capacity for negation shows that actuality alone does not exhaust intelligibility. Whether this surplus of possibility is a quirk of human cognition or the trace of a more general cosmic function is a profound metaphysical question. If, like me, you are not content with the anthropocentrism implied by hogging all the negativity for ourselves, it suggests the cognitive function of eternal objects is indeed sourced in a cosmic function.

Despite calling them a “realm,” Whitehead’s realism about their function is qualified in ways that I think keep it from metastasizing into a demiurge’s warehouse of spare parts. Whitehead inverts the Platonic habit of granting eternal objects preeminent reality. The mind does not create eternal objects but neither do they govern it. Their ineffectual indeterminate definiteness throws but a ghost of a glimmer of light upon what is meant by their pure potentiality, which is just enough to avoid the reification that would come from imagining a floodlit inventory.

I am unable to pay the ransom. I must instead negotiate a distinction between the function and the reification of eternal objects. Novel propositions, contrasts, and the societies that stabilize them genuinely become, even if “there are no novel eternal objects.” A new function for a proboscis or a protein that folds differently is an unprestatable historical achievement. What is exempted from novel exaptation is not the function—the what-it-is-for of an organ or behavior, which is historically achieved—but the form. The eternal objects are just the uncreated forms of definiteness, and it is not these forms that exaptation makes. This or that definite shape of a feather or a tail—abstract characteristics that could also show up in other lineages—is exemplified by concrete historical achievements but not produced by them.

The bare determinability of an eternal object does not have the sort of reality whose genesis or location we might ask after, any more than we would ask where the octave is stored, or on which morning three came to stand to two in that relation. Of course, no particular sounding of a fifth perfectly exemplifies an exact ratio, and of course the recognizable reproducibility of musical intervals depends upon extensive material, physiological, and cultural construction. The genesis of the conditions that make even their approximate sounding and hearing possible does not yet explain the definiteness of the ratio itself. That its definite determinability is “uncreated” is not some spooky ontological claim about its having existed since before the beginning of time but a transcendental claim about its modality, about how potentiality exists rather than which particular tasks it comes to serve.

An eternal object is not an antecedently completed model that an actuality might copy, nor an ideal token stored outside history. Its function is to account for the identity of definiteness across diverse, imperfect realizations. Eternal objects are implicated in the passage from Whitehead’s ultimate category, Creativity, to determinate creatures. Creativity is the advance into novelty, but it does not explain why what becomes acquires this character rather than another. Definite potentiality is therefore no rival to emergent functionality but one of its conditions of possibility. It allows a novel constraint to be tracked, whether by an observing scientist or by the living society whose characteristic form it helps organize, as a determinate recurrence rather than dissolving into unrepeatable change.

Both the scientist’s recognition of a form and the society of actual occasions’ inheritance of a defining characteristic require identity of definiteness across differences of realization. Recognition and reproduction are the epistemic and ontological faces of recurrence, and recurrence presupposes the “of,” the relation of ingression. This does not mean that some self-identical token migrates from occasion to occasion but that the same form of definiteness is realized in numerically distinct actualizations as the identity of a what, not of a this. Without such repeatable definiteness, an emergent constraint would be indistinguishable from unrepeatable flux, both to the scientist seeking to identify it and to the lineage struggling to persist by means of it.

Eternal objects, considered in abstraction from particular actualities, do carry some formal structure. Whitehead’s complex eternal objects, and the mathematical forms underwriting his theory of extensive connection, convey real order, patterns and patterns of patterns. What the eternal objects, considered as pure potentials, do not yet carry is a metric fixed in advance of the historic world, nor a pre-determination of relevance assigning which of them will come to matter to which occasions. Pure potentiality is not, in that sense, a dimensional or a metrical order, nor a completed state space or fully specified geometry. The realm of forms is as richly structured as is required for Whitehead’s mereotopological account of possible relations. What remains unprestatable is not objective possibility but relevant possibility, that is, the achievement of a function within a lineage of actual occasions. Kauffman’s adjacent possible is the continually recreated space of such functions, and functions are propositional, coming to be only with the occasions that feel them. The possibility of a coordinate, metrical space, likewise, arises only with the extensive continuum, which, as Whitehead clarifies, is “not a fact prior to the world” but a determination of real potentiality, atomized by the decisions of actual occasions and rendered measurable only within a cosmic epoch (PR 66). Coordinate state space is built and rebuilt by each actualization, from the bottom up. It does not descend from an eternal lawmaker as if fixed in advance. Whitehead says the extensive continuum:

“is Kant’s ‘form of intuition’; but it is derived from the actual world qua datum, and thus is not ‘pure’ in Kant’s sense. … It is not productive of the ordered world, but derivative from it” (PR 72).

Kant’s legislating understanding is the demiurgic designer shrunken (or perhaps egoically inflated) from cosmogony into the epigenesis of the human mind, the self-construction of an order imposed on the world a priori. Whitehead inverts the Kantian move, such that order is derived from the decisions of creatures, not imposed upon them.

As for the other hostage, God, whom Whitehead categorizes among the “derivative notions” of his scheme, I am happy to exorcise any demiurge who might coordinate the whole of possibility once and for all. If God were a completed valuation performed before the world, ranking the relevance of a fixed hierarchy of eternal objects and impassive to the value-experiences of finite actual occasions, I would not ask for the hostage’s release but for a harsher sentence.

But God is “not before all creation, but with all creation” (PR 343). To picture the primordial envisagement as a survey of everything that could occur completed in advance of the world’s creation is just the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Creation is ongoing, God as much a creature of Creativity as we are. But denying the demiurge does not dissolve the relational function of the divine. I read the primordial nature as living always in the present as the initial aim each occasion feels as relevant to its situation, a gift of graded relevance amidst the otherwise indefinite infinitude of possibility. God is not a speculative abstraction but the most ordinary, constant, and so easily missed fact at the base of every experience. God is the soliciting Eros that makes our own subjective aim and superjective decision amidst alternatives possible (without determining our decisions). God does not create nor even define the forms, but values them, providing a standard of relevance for the unique here and now of each occasion. Definiteness is not yet relevance. The divine function is not the keeping of an inventory of possibles—reality needs no such warehouse—but the valuation by which some possibles come to matter here rather than there. The definiteness of the forms is uncreated, but their effective relevance for the world is a primordial but “deficiently actual” (because merely conceptually prehended) fact longing to be recreated afresh as relevance is renewed with every becoming.3 God’s eternality is not in stasis beyond time but is time’s fullness. God remains in continuous creation in and as every creature, with the primordial envisagement of possibility being enriched by each novel fact as it arises and perishes into God’s consequent nature.

None of this necessarily brings any negotiations to an end. Whether graded relevance is historical construction all the way down, the result of coarse-graining with no ultimate ground, or an uncreated condition of evolutionary construction, is a question that will no doubt continue to linger. But I cannot myself make sense of the former possibility. “Effective relevance requires agency of comparison” (PR 31). Without the divine function, possibilities that transcended realized temporal matter of fact would remain relatively nonexistent for a given finite occasion. Of course, all these functions and their internal relations are the free creation of a particular twentieth-century European-American philosopher’s rather idiosyncratic scheme of ideas. Novel mutations, such that old functions take on a new form, are always possible, as is the scheme’s extinction.

“[A] system of philosophy is never refuted; it is only abandoned. … after a system has acquired orthodoxy, and is taught with authority, it receives a sharper criticism. Its denials and its incoherences are found intolerable, and a reaction sets in.” (PR 6)

Still, we are in no danger of a Whiteheadian orthodoxy anytime soon. So I will press on in the spirit of his experimental adventure. Every categoreal scheme, the one I ply no less than anyone else’s, is finally a matter of faking it until we make it, always with ironic sincerity, since we will never quite make it.

“Rationalism is an adventure in the clarification of thought, progressive and never final. But it is an ad­venture in which even partial success has importance” (PR 9).

Spiral Revision

This is spiral genesis, revised. The spiral image is intended to signal actuality arising out of underdetermination, lured by propositions that, once recurrently decided upon, stabilize into a lineage, which itself becomes the datum for further propositions. No doubt the relevance of these ideas bleeds beyond biology. The graded envisagement by which any occasion feels its situation in contrast to alternatives is at once “the source of error, of truth, of art, of ethics, and of religion” (PR 189). A contrast entertained aesthetically before functioning adaptively is no trifling epiphenomenon but the way the merely possible first comes to matter. It is beauty revealing itself as a leading edge of the process of realization.

A living society lives by a kind of robbery, according to Whitehead; and the robber requires justification (PR 105). Gradations of purpose and responsibility enter the world together with the lure of intensive relevance, so that the biological and the ethical are not, in the end, entirely severable subjects. My propositional reading of exaptation is a refusal of the bifurcation of nature into objective fact and projected value. On this account, what begins as appearance later becomes actual. The first shy shimmering of relevant novel contrast, before truth, function, or inheritance, is how the world is called to become more than it was.

Rupert and I both considered ourselves atheists as adolescents. And we both moved beyond it as a result of experience rather than argument. I admitted that the Christ event still embarrasses my rational mind even while also summoning a higher or heartened form of reason in which incarnation and resurrection might become thinkable. That work remains unfinished, but it operates in the imaginative background of my cosmology whether I foreground it or not. Rupert’s path ran through India, Transcendental Meditation, and his relationship with Bede Griffiths, then back to the Anglican church, drawn by the recognition that liberation is not merely personal.

The metaphysical core of our discussion was the Trinity. Rupert mapped Sat-cit-ānanda onto Father-Logos-Spirit as ground of conscious being, cosmic form (Bede’s cosmic Christ, the Logos whose primary incarnation is the cosmos itself), and moving breath. The Trinity is not a symbol we project onto nature but the reason projection and speech are possible at all. I suggested a resonance with Whitehead’s account of cosmic life as rhythm, a polarity with a mediating third, exemplified at every scale.

I suggested the incarnational vector evident in Christianity arises as a development within Buddhism itself, where the escape to nirvana becomes the Bodhisattva’s vow to return to saṃsāra until all sentient beings are likewise liberated. I also see this vector in the realization that that śūnyatā or emptiness is immediately flooded by karuṇā, or compassion. We both landed on the relational selfhood evident in the Trinity as the resolution of Mosaic “I am that I am” and the Buddhist anātman: as Paul put it, “not I, but Christ in me.”

I’ve explored this theme many times before:

In the talk, I reprised some ideas I shared in a post a few years ago (below).

I approach Plato not just to offer a scholarly treatment of his arguments but as a teacher of how to live and die as a human being. For the ancients, philosophy wasn’t word games or logical analysis but a way of life, a spiritual path. Plato wrote dialogues, not doctrines: nowhere does he say “this is my view,” and many of the best criticisms of Plato’s ideas are Plato’s own. The dialogues are spiritual exercises that put the soul in a state of tension, stretched between the intelligible realm of ideas and the physical realm of sensory embodiment. His is not that these are separate realms, but that we exist somehow in the tension between them. What I am calling “360 Platonism” is a training of the imagination so that it might become an organ of perception, perceiving ideas not in another world beyond this one but incarnate ideas, inhabiting, forming, shaping this world. Five dialogues carry us in a circle.

The Phaedo: philosophy is practice for dying—dying in our soul before our body dies, living our life backward from the fact of our death, building the death ship of the soul.

The Republic: to study the soul, it’s best to blow it up to the size of the city. Plato’s “city in words” is less a serious political program than a comeditragedy of how difficult, maybe impossible, it is to bring rationality to bear on our shared collective life (he has Socrates say democracy is a drunken pleasure cruise). The divided line ascends from sensations and opinions through hypotheses and models to intuitive participation, where there is no longer a knower separate from what it knows—thou art that. The cave allegory is a 360-degree maneuver, not a 180: Socrates doesn’t just turn around and leave, he goes back in. Once you’ve really seen the light, the Sun is no longer just a ball of gas but the Good itself, source of the light that conveys truth and reveals beauty.

The Symposium: eros is the engine of ascent, and when beautiful bodies are perceived as icons rather than idols, the woundedness of mortal love can be transmuted.

The Timaeus: a likely story, told when the intellect reaches the end of what logic can know and must resort to myth. The demiurge cannot explain where matter came from, and so can only persuade, not coerce, the khôra (the receptacle, the wet nurse, whose winnowing dance is as creative as the demiurge). Plato’s cosmogony is the story of order arising at the edge of chaos, sustained by the cosmic life of the world-soul. It is Plato performing the impossibility of a final theory. Plato suggests that, with our physical eyes, we see the wandering planets and their epicycles as the back side of an embroidered pattern. Only by growing a new, higher organ of perception can we intuit the heavenly motions right side up, as the weaver intended. Plato also describes the human being an upside-down plant, with roots in the sky, as if the brain were a radio antenna receiving the rhythms of the celestial spheres.

The Phaedrus: Plato, master of the alphabet, critiquing writing as a pharmakon, both cure and poison. The alphabet creates the appearance of wisdom where no wisdom may be present. Further, you can’t ask the written word questions. The letters remain identical and indifferent. LLMs are built atop the alphabet, and now, it seems, the written word can answer back. But LLMs are a copy of a copy of a copy—our language, already a copy, is copied again and fed back to us. The alphabet is now easily mistaken for an autonomous mind. But to treat an LLM as if it had a mind of its own is idolatry, I would say. Some people call it functionalism. To relate to LLMs iconically is to let them point beyond themselves to the extended collective intellect in which we participate. So whether this new technology (running on an old alphabetic platform) is poison or cure depends may depend upon the dosage and the manner of use.

The audio is available above, but it is poor quality. Thanks to for hosting us!

It was a real joy to meet in person for the first time at this event.

Slightly edited transcript:

All right—hello, everyone. I’m going to share something that’s very personal, but also transpersonal. I’ll be talking about the tension between Christianity and Buddhism within myself, if indeed there is a self. Maybe there is no self, and the tension is being held by some other means. I’m not exactly sure. But I’m not trying to convert anybody. This is just about my journey. I actually really enjoy being converted by others who are deeply devoted to paths that are not my own, because it helps me, through differentiation, understand who in the hell I am and what I’ve gotten myself mixed up with.

So I’ll share a little bit of autobiography first. I grew up with a mother who is quite evangelical and a father who is an agnostic Jew—he thought he was an atheist, but once I started getting philosophical we had some conversations, and it turned out he wasn’t an atheist, he’s agnostic. I ran away from my mother’s Christianity as a thirteen-year-old. I started reading physics and biology, and I started thinking of myself as much smarter than anyone who might be religious. I was kind of an obnoxious atheist for a couple of years there in my teens—which might be developmentally appropriate, though some people get stuck there.

By the time I was seventeen, I got exposed to Buddhism and started to meditate. I found Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki, Chögyam Trungpa, and really got taken by the California, New Age form of Buddhism. So I was calling myself a Buddhist for a few years. By the time I was nineteen, I was meditating every day, and I was starting to feel a little bit depressed. I wouldn’t have said so at the time, because I thought it was meditative equanimity, and that I was on the verge of Awakening—but I was starting to lose touch with social reality, because I thought it was all an illusion of projections, maya, and egoistic competition and all that.

When I was nineteen, I ate some psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. I was going to journal at my desk. And something strange happened. I had an experience of what I immediately recognized as the Christ. I did not choose Christianity. I would have to say I was interrupted by it while I was trying to be a Buddhist.

I think of Buddha and Christ outside the context of any particular tradition or institution. These are real spiritual beings. They’re here with us, and within us. The traditions that grow up around them are, obviously, portals to them, and they carry wisdom and teachings that help us become aware of these beings—but for me, they’re not just cultural constructs or something. They’re real, and you can contact them.

And so this has been my struggle over the last twenty years. I haven’t stopped being a Buddhist. I haven’t stopped trying to sit under the Bodhi tree. But this Christ came into my heart, and there are some tensions between these two teachings.

Alfred North Whitehead is a philosopher I’ve studied who helps me mediate this tension. He says this about Christianity: it is a religion seeking a metaphysic. Buddhism, on the other hand, is a metaphysic generating a religion. What does he mean by that? Well, Christianity comes out of this bizarre event that happens in first-century Palestine. This Jewish guy, Jesus, gets some followers going, says he’s the Messiah, he’s crucified, he dies, he’s put in a tomb—and then, supposedly, he rises from the dead, and the whole religion starts. Initially it was mostly led by women who were having meetings in their homes, and eventually an entire empire had to rebrand itself because of the explosion of conversions that came out of this event. So it’s a religion—in other words, a saving experience that people were having in response to this event—and it’s seeking a metaphysic in the sense that it’s still trying to figure out what Christ’s deed means. Christians’ responses to that question come through centuries of argument.

Buddhism, on the other hand, comes out of Siddhartha Gautama, who had this awakening experience just sitting with his own moment-to-moment experience, and recognized that reality is empty, that there is no self, and that the cause of suffering is the clinging to the idea that there is a self. So it’s an insight into the nature of experience, the nature of reality, that then generates a religion—one that, like Christianity, is now worldwide. As Whitehead puts it: “The Buddha gave his doctrine to enlighten the world; Christ gave his life. It is for Christians to discern the doctrine.”

Whitehead also says this, in Modes of Thought:

“When the religious thought of the ancient world from Mesopotamia to Palestine, and from Palestine to Egypt, required terms to express that ultimate unity of direction in the Universe, upon which all order depends, and which gives its meaning to importance; they could find no way better to express themselves than by borrowing the characteristics of the touchy, vain, imperious tyrants who ruled the empires of the World. In the origin of civilized religion, Gods are like Dictators. Our modern rituals still retain this taint. The most emphatic repudiations of this archaic notion are to be found scattered in the doctrines of Buddhism and in the Christian Gospels.”

So what, then, helps me mediate this tension between Buddhism, where there is no self, and Christianity, where the divine is itself a relationship between beings? It’s not that there’s necessarily a separate self in Christianity, either—there’s the doctrine of the Trinity, where the nature of ultimate reality is relationship. And that’s not necessarily incompatible with Buddhism. But I still struggle with this.

The Buddha is saying, unclench your fist, let go of the clinging to the self you think you are. And I’m happy to open my hand. And then Christ comes in and holds it. I need both of these impulses.

Whitehead goes on to say that in the present day, both of these traditions are in decay. Why are they in decay? Well, it’s been thousands of years since these teachers lived, and their inspiration has begun to wane—mostly, Whitehead says, because they need to learn from each other. What do they need to learn from each other? To balance these two impulses. For Buddhism, nirvana comes through the cessation of craving—blow out the candle. Whereas for Whitehead, eros, desire, craving, is the engine of evolution. It’s the teleology of the universe—he says “beauty is the teleology of the universe.” So the Buddha says: stop desiring. And Whitehead says: this life is an adventure, and it’s driven by desire, driven by this erotic longing to intensify our experience.

In other words, history and evolution—which are so important to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity—are not just a kind of illusion. It’s not just a cyclical māyā or play that you should step out of in order to awaken. Something is actually trying to happen here, and we have a role to play in its achievement. And I think both of these things can be simultaneously true. This tension I hold—it’s not a problem I’m trying to resolve. It’s really a contrast that forms my heart-mind, and I believe it intensifies experience.

So I say: I’m a Christian at heart and a Buddhist in mind, and it’s Whitehead’s cosmology—which I won’t have a chance to say much about today—that helps me mediate between these two places. Buddhism is a deep philosophy that comes out of a careful analysis of the structure of experience, and it is true. And yet I can’t help but feel my heart broken open by what I would describe as a Christian impulse: to be in the world, and to be in love with other people and with what it’s possible for us to create together—not in a naïve way, but, you know, devotionally.

I think I’ve said everything I wanted to say. So maybe we can have more time for conversation. Thanks for your attention, everyone.

Q&A

Audience: Is there a short version of Whitehead’s cosmology?

Matt: Yes. He has a view of reality in which everything is in process and everything is related to everything else—it’s a lot like the Buddhist idea of dependent co-origination. Nothing has self-abiding existence separately from everything else; everything coexists. And he has a vision of the divine, of God, as involved in the world—not just as a creator; not as a creator at all, actually. He describes God as a creature. His ultimate principle is Creativity. So if you ask what’s really real, for him it’s Creativity—this process of ongoing eruption of novelty. And God is the first creature of that Creativity, who sets the tone for all the other creatures that enter into cosmogenesis. What God is like, for Whitehead, is a lure. He says God holds up a mirror to every creature to reflect back to that creature its own potential beauty and greatness. We can feel that, and we respond to it, and we try to bring that beauty into the world—and we usually fail. But over the course of thousands, millions, billions of years, I would say there’s evidence of some kind of impulse in the nature of things that pulls it toward harmony. And that’s God.

Audience: How is that different from what people usually mean when they say God is in control?

Matt: This kind of God is not coercive—not forcing you to do anything. It’s a persuasive God who shows you something beautiful, and you feel, of your own accord, out of your own freedom, drawn to it. The power of God in this view is the love and the worship that God inspires. God doesn’t reach in and change things or force anything to happen. Whitehead’s vision of God is the love that we feel for each other, the creative pull that we feel to make beautiful art, to build community—that’s God working through us. We still have our own subjective freedom; it’s just that there’s something inspiring us to behave in ways that are good and true and beautiful, and we can call that inspiring agent God.

Audience: So do you think it’s up to us to define what’s ultimately real?

Matt: To some extent, yeah. But I think, for societies to hold together, we need to do better than everyone just having their own private opinion about what’s ultimately real. We have to coordinate with each other and arrive at something shared, if possible.

Audience: I recently discovered there are maybe fifteen Christian ashrams in India uniquely devoted to this kind of understanding. And when I was younger, in Brussels, there were Dominican friars—a group called “Ways of the Orient”—organizing an ongoing investigation of Buddhism. Do you know Raimon Panikkar?

Matt: Panikkar is an important influence for me. He would describe himself as fully Indian, fully Buddhist, and fully Christian. And he had a PhD in chemistry as well, so he embraced science too.

Audience: Would you do the same—identify as both a Christian and a Buddhist?

Matt: I tend not to identify, really, unless someone asks. … The Buddha is all about compassion—there is suffering, and there is a cure. And Christ is all about the passion—it’s literally all about the Passion. So, passion and compassion. Different, but we need both.

Audience: Have you come across tantra?

Matt: Yeah—in California, in grad school, I took some courses in Tibetan Buddhism, Vajrayana, tantric Buddhism. I wasn’t studying tantra too deeply, but a lot of my friends were. And I think that’s the direction Whitehead is tending toward—the tantric path, which goes into the eros of life and death rather than away from it, and recognizes that desire isn’t simply something to be extinguished.

Audience: A bit of my background: I spent about fifteen years inside Christianity, but I was born and raised in a Buddhist context, so I hold these two things in my view all the time. The Buddhist context I come from is very intense — it’s part of the culture; there are rules for what I cannot do based on the Buddhist cultural context. My sense is that Buddhism is something we practice, something on the inside — whereas Christianity feels more like reaching upward; you see it even in church architecture, trying to reach for God, to be higher. What’s your experience?

Matt: I have always found it very difficult to find a home at any church I’ve ever been to — Catholic, or any of the many Protestant churches, Episcopal, Anglican, Orthodox. I just don’t feel at home there, because there’s so much encrustation of patriarchy and hierarchical forms of cultural organization that I don’t think have anything to do with the true teaching. If Mary Magdalene had been allowed to be a leader of the church, I think we’d be in a different place.

On the Possibility of Cosmology: Spacetime Actualism and the Process-Relational Alternative

By Matthew D. Segall, Timothy E. Eastman, and

1. The Bifurcation of Nature and the Limits of Spacetime Actualism

Every working physical cosmologist is informed by a metaphysical imaginative background, explicitly stated or not. The dominant view in contemporary cosmology pictures the universe as a four-dimensional manifold of events, each with determinate spacetime coordinates, the relations between which being fully determined by field equations of extraordinary scope. This picture is among the great scientific achievements of the human mind. But a rarely acknowledged metaphysical presupposition underlies it that should make clear its limits as ontology. This presupposition is that the real is exhausted by the actual, and that the actual is exhausted by what can be located within the manifold. Timothy Eastman has given this presupposition the name spacetime actualism.^[1] Our first task is to show that, whatever its merits as an instrumental model, it cannot be the last word in physics or in metaphysics, not only because of theoretical advances in physics itself, but because it cannot account for the very inquiry that produces it.

Alfred North Whitehead diagnosed a century ago the deeper metaphysical disorder of which spacetime actualism is a symptom. In The Concept of Nature (1920) he called it the bifurcation of nature, which consists in the splitting of the world into two systems of reality that are then impossible to coherently rejoin. On one side stands the causal nature of physical theory—the modeled charges, wavelengths, and fields that textbooks and popular science media proclaim are the really real. On the other stands the apprehended nature of lived experience—the green of the leaf, the warmth of the sun, the song of the bird, and the felt importance by which some things matter to us more than others. The first system is granted full ontological standing despite remaining “conjecture,” while the second, despite being directly experienced, is demoted to mere appearance, a “dream,” a private psychological projection with no purchase on the world as it is in itself.^[2] Whitehead’s protest was not sentimental but ontological. There is only one nature, that disclosed in perception, and to bifurcate it is to saw off the branch on which the possibility of natural knowledge itself is perched. The green of a leaf and the wavelength of a photon are not two natures but two abstractions from one experiential occasion. To reify either at the expense of the other is to commit what he would later call the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.^[3]

Spacetime actualism is this same bifurcation blown up to the scale of the cosmos. The qualitative, valuative, and temporal features of experience—including, conspicuously, the conscious experience of the physicist—are treated as epiphenomenal illusions ultimately reducible to the geometry of spacetime, as if the conjectured model could somehow give rise to its dreaming modeler. We shall argue that this view is not merely scientifically impoverished but metaphysically incoherent. A cosmology built on spacetime actualism cannot account for its own possibility as an act or product of knowing, because knowing has precisely the character—conceptual entertainment of alternatives, evaluation, an aim toward truth—that the coordinate scheme is designed to bracket out. The remedy is not to abandon the coordinate scheme but to recover its status as an abstraction, and to re-situate it within the concrete process from which it emerges.

2. The Conditions of Possibility of Cosmology

Our title is deliberately double. Cosmology can account for its own possibility only if possibility is not merely a name for our ignorance, but a real ingredient in the universe’s becoming. If cosmology is to tell a genuine story of emergent novelty and historical development, the universe cannot be a finished block of actual facts already laid out in a manifold. In a universe whose spacetime events are all tenselessly actual, becoming would have no ontological standing. Cosmic history would be reducible to a static geometry narrated after the fact. But cosmology is also possible in a second, reflexive sense: the universe must be the kind of process capable of giving rise to inquirers who can measure, mathematize, conjecture, and care about truth. These two senses are not independent. The same ontic openness that makes the cosmos a creative advance rather than a finished block also makes it a process capable, eventually, of flowering into knowers. Whitehead formulated the underlying methodological issue: “All difficulties as to first principles are only camouflaged metaphysical difficulties. Thus also the epistemological difficulty is only solvable by an appeal to ontology.”^[4] No amount of further epistemological refinement will allow contemporary actualist cosmology to find room for inquiring cosmologists within its scheme. The reflexive question is the ontological one of what nature must be like such that knowers can occur within it.

In the vocabulary of contemporary temporal ontology, spacetime actualism, as defined here, includes eternalism: the thesis that past, present, and future events are equally real constituents of a tenselessly given spacetime manifold.^[5] Our position bears some affinities with the growing block theory rigorously formulated by Correia and Rosenkranz in Nothing to Come (2018), and with the evolving block universe proposed within relativistic cosmology by Ellis (2006), together with its crystallizing block refinement in Ellis and Rothman (2010). It differs from these positions, however, by locating the openness of the future neither merely in the nonexistence of future events nor in an advancing boundary of an otherwise constituted spacetime, but in the ontological reality of the potentiae from which determinate events precipitate. The actualized spacetime order grows event by event as transactions occur. The manifold is therefore the accumulating coordinate record of becoming rather than its antecedent container. Our reflexive argument should accordingly be distinguished from arguments for temporal becoming that appeal to the phenomenology of passage. Empirical findings that ordinary subjects neither uniformly report a phenomenology of robust passage nor represent time as essentially dynamical (Latham, Miller, and No rton, 2020, 2021) may well blunt the phenomenological case, reinforcing deflationary treatments of passage experience within the block (Skow, 2015; Deng, 2013). However, the present argument is not directly answered by that outcome, since it concerns not how time seems but what the activity of scientific hypothesizing (in which alternatives are entertained as not yet decided) presupposes about the ontology of nature (at least if we assume science is in the business of uncovering truth). Even a conscious subject whose temporal phenomenology were entirely compatible with the block would still, in theorizing, acknowledge an in-principle contrast between settled actuality and possibility. Our claim is that an adequate cosmology must explain the reality and intentional efficacy of this contrast rather than merely redescribe its physical embodiment, and that spacetime actualism cannot do so while denying irreducible ontological standing to real potentiae.^[6]

Cosmology’s object must include its knower. There is no Archimedean standpoint outside the cosmos from which to survey it. The cosmologist is a late and intricate eddy within the very current being charted. A cosmology that cannot locate the cosmologist within its own ontology is to that extent inadequate to the facts. And a cosmology that positively denies the reality of the knower’s constitutive features—the entertainment of possibility, the evaluation of alternatives, the directedness toward an aim—is not merely inadequate but self-refuting, for it saws away the conditions of its own assertion. It is always, in the end, a human being who reads the dial and frames the conjecture. If consciousness has no commerce with the totality of things, then physical science loses its empirical foothold.

The question we are pressing is transcendental, but in the post-Kantian, cosmological sense articulated by James Bradley. Following Bradley, by “transcendental” we do not mean Kant’s inquiry into the conditions of possible knowledge sequestered in a human subject standing over against a merely apparent nature. We mean what he referred to as Whitehead’s “transcendental cosmology”: an inquiry into the generic conditions of self-actualization as such, conditions no longer of the representation of things but of their becoming, of which human knowing is one peculiarly intensified exemplification.^[7] Our inquiry should be further distinguished from actualist renderings of the anthropic principle. Anthropic reasoning, in its standard employments, presupposes what we are challenging. It assumes a multiverse laid out in advance and renders the presence of observers as a selection effect to explain why we find ourselves in a hospitable corner of what already actually exists. Our question is not why observers find themselves where conditions happen to permit them, but what the existence of inquiry reveals about the ontology of nature as such—what categories any cosmos must exemplify if it is to harbor experiential occasions that entertain, evaluate, and come to know. Selection among actualities leaves that deeper question unaddressed, for it is precisely the reality of the possible that is at issue.

For Whitehead, the Kantian question—how is knowledge of nature possible?—becomes cosmological.^[8] He allows us to answer in a realist rather than an idealist way. Kant secured objective knowledge by making phenomenal nature a construction of the knowing subject. But the price of his transcendental idealism is that the thing-in-itself withdraws forever behind the phenomena, thus entrenching bifurcation. Whitehead seeks the conditions of possibility of knowledge within nature, by making the knower an outgrowth of the same creative process that yields electrons and galaxies.

“The process of cognition is merely one type of relationship between things which occurs in the general becoming of reality. … [Kant] asked, How is cognizance possible? I suggest to you the more general question, How is any particular entity possible having regard for the relationships which it presupposes?”^[9]

Whereas Kant described how “the world emerges from the subject,” Whitehead seeks to describe how the subject emerges from the world, “a superject” rather than a subject.^[10] The wager of a rational cosmology is that the categories adequate to the interaction of two particles must be the same categories adequate to the conversation of two persons, differing in complexity and intensity but not in ontological kind. Where bifurcation makes the emergence of mind from nature an unintelligible miracle, the process view makes it the morphogenetic intensification of a possibility ingredient in cosmogenesis from the beginning.

3. Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Thought: A Bridge from Science to Metaphysics

Whitehead’s early philosophy of nature provides our argument with a methodological bridge. In The Concept of Nature he distinguishes homogeneous thought about nature from heterogeneous thought. Natural science, properly understood, restricts itself to homogeneous thought, studying the relations among the contents of perception—the coordinatizable, repeatable, measurable features of the world—without including, within its object, the fact that nature is being perceived and thought about. Science holds nature “closed to mind,” deliberately bracketing the percipient and treating nature as a self-contained system of relations among the percepta known.^[11] This self-limitation is not a defect. On the contrary, it makes exact science possible, allowing the physicist to pursue the structure of the known without at every step having to adjudicate the metaphysics of knowing. But heterogeneous thought, or metaphysics, can no longer accept the instrumental convenience of bracketing half of reality from the inquiry. It takes as part of the datum to be explained the fact that nature is perceived, thought, valued, and known. Where science abstracts the knower out, so as to study the known with precision, metaphysics must put the knower back in, because the knowing is itself a natural fact requiring explanation by the same scheme that explains everything else. The two modes need not be rivals so long as their different scopes are recognized. The trouble begins only when the special homogeneous abstraction is mistaken for the heterogeneous whole from which it is abstracted.

This is the error of spacetime actualism. The coordinate manifold is an attempted homogeneous representation of nature, and as such, it an abstraction. It is a map, rather than the territory. Thus, it becomes an explicit metaphysical falsehood when it is declared to be all that is real.

The elevation of the coordinate manifold to a putative exhaustive ontology also has consequences for natural science’s methodological closure of nature to mind. Spacetime actualism forgets that the latter assumption was adopted as a methodological convenience, uncritically reifying it into an ontological verdict that the mind that proposed it does not really exist, or if it does, exists only as an impertinent creature that creates “stubbornly persistent illusion[s]” (when what it experiences undermines metaphysical beliefs based on such abstractions).^[12] The role of heterogeneous thought about nature is not to refute physical science but to situate it empirically, showing how its homogeneous abstractions arise within, and remain answerable to, the concrete becoming of nature as we experience it—the nature that includes physicists along with photons. For, in fact, nature as we perceive it is precisely what physical science is charged with explaining. In this regard, we must beware of double standards that allow certain experiences (e.g., pointer readings) to count as “empirical facts” but not others, such as our experience that two different pointer readings occurred at two different times.^[13] The bridge from science to a radically empirical metaphysics is therefore not a leap beyond nature but a widening of attention from the coordinatizable features of experience to its concrete specificity, as well as critical discernment regarding idealized abstractions that may lose touch with that vital empirical anchor.

Eastman’s tripartite distinction among three ways of knowing^[14]—the way of numbers, or relations treated as context-independent for the purposes of calculation; the way of signs, or context-emphasizing interpretive relations; and the way of ultimate context, or the horizon within which numbers and signs together become intelligible—helps clarify Whitehead’s homogeneous/heterogeneous distinction. Homogeneous thought corresponds to the way of numbers, treating what can be coordinatized and repeated, bracketing the interpretive and contextual conditions of measurement. The reflexivity of heterogeneous thought, by contrast, belongs to the way of signs, asking how coordinatable models relate to a knower whose knowing is itself a semiotic act. The further question of why the cosmos issues in inquirers at all opens onto the way of ultimate context, which cannot be the exclusive province of any one special science. Where actualism’s reification of coordinate analysis collapses signs into numbers and denies the ultimate context altogether, process-relational cosmology allows us to integrate without collapsing these three ways of knowing.

4. Coordinate and Genetic Analysis

Another instrument for aiding the widening of contemporary cosmology’s attention is Whitehead’s distinction, in Process and Reality, between two analyses of what he calls an “actual occasion”—the pulse of experience that provides the basic unit of process at every scale and grade of nature. Genetic analysis, developed in Part III of Process and Reality as his theory of prehensions, traces the formal becoming of an occasion in terms of the growing together or concrescence of many feelings into one determinate satisfaction under the guidance of a subjective aim. It is the analysis of final causation, of the occasion considered as a subject in the act of self-creation. Importantly, this act of becoming is not itself spatiotemporally extended in the way its products can be. Each phase of concrescence presupposes the whole quantum it is achieving, so that physical time is produced by the cumulation of occasions rather than presupposed as a pre-given track along which they run.^[15] The determinate satisfaction in which their decisions culminate is, in Whitehead’s phrase, “incurably atomic”: an indivisible unity that cannot be coordinately subdivided without falsifying the determinate novelty it contributes to the creative advance.^[16]

Coordinate analysis, developed in Part IV of Process and Reality as the theory of extension, takes the completed occasion, the satisfaction or the superject, and exhibits it as divisible. It studies how occasions stand to one another within the extensive continuum, attending only to the physical pole and bracketing the mental pole (the latter being negligible in the low-grade occasions that physics chiefly studies). It is the analysis of efficient causation and it is the proper domain of measurement and of the entire geometrical apparatus of physical science. The crucial point for our argument is, as Whitehead himself states, that coordinate analysis is hypothetical, a mode of “as if.”^[17] The divisions it makes are not actual divisions of a concretely undivided process but are potential divisions entertained for the purposes of analysis. Coordinate division yields powerful approximations adequate to low-grade occasions dominated by their physical pole, but it systematically omits the conceptual feelings of the mental pole, that is, the subjective aim and evaluation of alternatives, that genetic analysis recovers.

Spacetime actualism can now be defined in Whitehead’s terms as the reification of coordinate analysis. It takes the divisible, hypothetical representation of the metrical relations among events and pronounces it the whole of the real. What it leaves out is not a sentimental residue or stubborn illusion but the genetic process itself—the becoming in which alone novelty, value, and the aim of scientific inquiry itself have their place. Whitehead offers a helpful metaphor: actualist physics, in reifying the coordinate domain, “examines the coat, which is superficial, and neglects the body which is fundamental.”^[18] Coordinate analysis studies the coat of nature, describing its metrical vesture. Genetic analysis studies the body, the concrescing occasion in the act of self-composition, whose incompatibility-resolving felt aim toward determinate satisfaction is the living activity obscured by the coat. The problem is not that physics precisely models the folds of the coat, but that an often unacknowledged actualist metaphysics declares the body beneath the folds to be a fiction.

Genetic analysis is analysis of prehensions, a category that spacetime actualism cannot countenance. Whitehead coins the term to name the concrete relation by which each actual occasion takes account of past occasions (physical prehension) and alternative possibilities (conceptual prehension). Prehension is the vector feeling by which the potentiality of the settled past and the open possibilities of the future grow together into a determinate actuality in the present. It is applicable as much to the emission and absorption of photons as it is to the mutual immanence of knower and known, allowing both to be thought without either idealist inflation or actualist bifurcation (e.g., the idealist inflation that makes “conscious observation” what collapses the wavefunction, or the actualist bifurcation that leads to the “ontological overflow”^[19] of the multiverse and Many-Worlds Interpretation). Prehensions are the very sinews of causal connection throughout nature, as well as the ontological ground of what higher-grade occasions of experience elaborate into perception and cognition. On the prehensive reading, knowing is not a supervenient anomaly precariously perched atop indifferent geometry but the intensification of a relation that is operative at every grade of process. The coordinate scheme, because it brackets prehensive unification in order to isolate the spacetime manifold, cannot from its own resources explain how a knower prehends the coordinate scheme itself.

This has further consequences for our reflexive argument. Scientific hypothesizing is itself a mode of high-grade prehensive activity analyzed by Whitehead in terms of what he calls “propositional feelings.”^[20] Such feelings entertain propositions, which are “lures for feeling” that relate possible predicates to actual entities. Propositions are felt as not yet decided possibilities to be affirmed, negated, or refined by further experience. What Whitehead calls an “intellectual feeling” arises when a physical feeling—which affirms some past actuality as objectified fact—is held together in contrast with a propositional feeling, in which the same content is entertained as mere possibility rather than affirmed as fact. This contrast between what is affirmed as actual and what is entertained as possible is what gives rise to “consciousness” or cognition/knowing in Whitehead’s technical sense. What this means for our argument is that the coordinate scheme of contemporary physics is itself a complex proposition entertained by a high-grade society of occasions—the working physicist’s conscious stream of concrescing experiences—in which the actuality of a settled physical past is contrasted with the potentiality of alternative theoretical determinations. The scientist’s act of theorizing about coordinate manifolds is thereby self-exemplifying of the actual/potential dipolar ontology that our paper defends. On Whitehead’s reading of consciousness as the subjective form of the propositional affirmation-negation contrast, the conscious entertainment of a cosmological theory is already to feel a contrast one of whose relata the actualist has declared unreal.^[21] A cosmology built on spacetime actualism, by denying ontic standing to the potential contrast without which propositional feeling is unintelligible, thus undermines the very possibility of the scientific hypothesizing in which its proponents are engaged.

A defender of actualism may object that the entertainment of alternatives requires no ontic potentiae, since actual neural or computational configurations which merely represent alternatives would suffice. Whitehead’s critique of representationalism in Process and Reality anticipates this objection. A representation is a symbol, and a symbol refers beyond itself only for an experient whose connection with the represented world has already been secured. Because the representative theory of perception offers no account of physical feelings—no doctrine of the causal efficacy by which the knower directly inherits the settled world—it can never, from within its own resources, produce the “title deeds” guaranteeing that its ideas represent facts at all, and so it locks the mind within a solipsism of its own symbols.^[22] When representationalism is combined with actualism, the difficulty is compounded, since the scheme retains no equivalent of conceptual prehension, no way for a merely actual configuration to be about an alternative that, by hypothesis, has no ontological standing whatsoever. To call a brain state a “representation of alternatives” is to help oneself to the very relation—the felt contrast between the actual and the possible—that actualism has disqualified. The rejoinder thus reproduces the bifurcation of nature at the level of semantics, rendering reference and aboutness inexplicable additions to a nature declared complete without them.

An additional reason why the coordinate scheme cannot be ontologically primitive is made evident in Whitehead’s account of the extensive continuum from which it is abstracted. The continuum is not a metrical spacetime container in which events occur but the most general scheme of real potentiality, the relational matrix expressing “the solidarity of all possible standpoints.”^[23] In its full generality it is pre-metrical and pre-dimensional, defined by the topological relations of whole to part, overlap, and contact. For Whitehead, whereas actuality is incurably atomic, potentiality constitutes a continuum. Actual occasions atomize the continuum, making actual what was antecedently merely potential. The continuum is thus, in Whitehead’s words, “divisible but not divided.”^[24] The dimensionality of space, the seriality of time, the metric relations measured by physics, and even the straight lines presupposed by all measurement are not themselves features of the generic continuum. They are special achievements of our cosmic epoch, inherited habits laid down by the vast society of electromagnetic occasions that dominates our epoch, not eternal laws imposed from beyond it.^[25]

Two consequences follow that motivate the remainder of our argument. First, Whitehead develops his theory of extension non-metrically, deriving the characteristic properties of straight lines, planes, and flat regions from purely topological relations of whole and part, without smuggling measurement into the definition of straightness, as Euclid and most of modern physics had done.^[26]This makes him a geometric pluralist and an epochal realist about the metric. Different geometrical schemes suit different purposes, and it is a fallacy of misplaced concreteness to identify the geometry of spacetime with the physics of gravitation.^[27] Against the tendency, evident in the geometrizing readings of general relativity that treat the four-dimensional manifold not as a description of spacetime but as spacetime’s very substance, Whitehead insists that the metric is something nature achieves, not something antecedent to becoming. Second, and consequently, Whitehead’s metaphysical account of the extensive continuum recovers the dipolarity that spacetime actualism collapses. He affirms a continuous order of real potentiality that is pre-spatiotemporal and that conditions without determining. His conditioned and conditioning atomic actualities generate the metric spacetime that physics then coordinately analyzes; a procedure that, unlike standard cosmology, maintains a distinction between the geometry and the physics, thus avoiding a cosmological measurement problem. It is this dipolarity that the transactional interpretation of quantum theory, as we shall see, renders in quantitative physical detail.

5. Real Potentiae: Possibility and the Poised Realm

Against spacetime actualism’s equation of the real with the determinately actualized, the process-relational view holds that possibility is ontic, not merely epistemic.^[28] Whitehead distinguishes two grades of the possible. Pure potentiality is the realm of eternal objects—possibilities considered in the bare generality of their natures, not relative to any historical standpoint. Realpotentiality is that same realm as conditioned by, and rendered relevant to, the settled actual world from a given standpoint, with the extensive continuum its most general expression. Pure potentials thus feature as predicates in propositions determining wholly general truths about what is possible for anything whatsoever; real potentials feature in propositions determining contingent truths about what is possible for a given historical situation. On this view possibility is not a measure of the mind’s ignorance but a real ingredient in cosmic becoming. The future is real precisely as possible. The reality of the future is bound up with the reality of the continuum, which conditions every actualization without dictating its outcome.

Granting potentiae this ontic standing does not violate Whitehead’s ontological principle, according to which only actual entities furnish the reasons for things. Real potentiae are never free-floating possibilities, as if frozen in a morgue like the pale outlines of lifeless bodies awaiting a blood transfusion.^[29] They are rather the conditioned potentiality of the settled world (and, for Whitehead, of the primordial divine envisagement), so that no merely possible occasion can be said to pre-exist its radically novel concrescence. The future, then, is real in the mode of general possibility rather than singular fact.

This is the metaphysical link between Whitehead’s cosmological scheme and the interpretation of quantum physics pursued by our co-authors. Heisenberg already proposed that the quantum state describes not our ignorance of secretly determinate values but a real intermediate kind of being, a potentia poised between possibility and actuality. Stuart Kauffman’s res potentiae, affirmed in Eastman’s Logoi Framework and Kastner’s Possibilist Transactional Interpretation of the quantum substratum, carries forward this proposal as the basis for a new physical ontology.^[30] On such a reading the quantum formalism is not a catalogue of our nescience but a description of a genuine, sub-empirical ordering of real potentialities actualized in determinate occasions. To grant potentiaethis ontic standing is to make room, at the very foundations of physics, for a structured indeterminacy conditioning without determining what actually occurs. This is what a cosmology of creative advance—a cosmogenesis—requires, and what the actualist block universe model forbids.

Kauffman has pursued this ontology of the possible further than most. His “Poised Realm” is described as a state of matter hovering reversibly, through decoherence and recoherence, between quantum coherence and classicality. He proposes it to secure ontologically real res potentia alongside classical res extensa. But he gestures beyond the bare dualism the pairing initially suggested by way of a Triad: Mind (akin to consciousness in his terms) measures Possibles to bring forth new Actuals, which in turn open new Possibles for Mind to measure again “in a persistent becoming, a status nascendi”—a cycle he himself likens to Whitehead’s process-relational account.^[31]

We share Kauffman’s realism about possibility (i.e., it is not merely epistemic) and his processual framing. The Whiteheadian approach applied in this paper interprets the entertaining of possibility that Kauffman locates in a conscious measuring Mind set alongside what it measures as occurring in the genesis of each actualization—not as a mind acting upon the world of classical physics from without, but as nature entertaining its own possibilities from within, at every scale of its becoming. This is suggestively exemplified in the phenomenon that first inspired Kauffman to propose a poised realm. In the light-harvesting complexes of chlorophyll, quantum coherence may persist a thousandfold longer than the warm and crowded body of a leaf would normally be expected to permit, so that the excitation can try many pathways simultaneously before any single path is taken.^[32] Thus a constellation of real potentiae are held open, in superposed contrast, at the very threshold of the actual. Kauffman reads this poised phase as a new state of matter; on a process-relational reading, it is also a natural sacrament of mind. For what the molecule expresses by sustaining an array of alternatives before one is decided upon, is Whitehead’s mental pole: the entertainment of real potentials in their relevance to an as yet unresolved situation.

On Whitehead’s account, mentality in the generic sense, as the conceptual valuation of real potentials, pervades nature as the mental pole of every actual occasion, whereas, as we’ve seen, consciousness proper arises only in the late integrative phases of high-grade occasions as the subjective form of the affirmation–negation contrast. The claim here is therefore not that chlorophyll’s dim tending of potentiae is conscious, but that it is emblematic of mentality that, massively intensified, ripens into consciousness. Consciousness is then not a substance snuck into the gaps of an otherwise mechanical nature, but the amplification of latencies everywhere at work within it, such that the contrast between what is and what might be is not merely lived, as in the plant, but reflexively felt as such. Nature holds possibilities open at every scale, in its conscious human occasions coming to savor the taste ofthe creative openness it enacts everywhere. It is worth dwelling a moment on the emblematic nature of photosynthesis as the taking of light into life, solar radiance made vegetal. That the quantum poise at the base of the biosphere should pry open the possible at the very threshold where light enters the living world is, for a cosmology of creative advance, impossible to pass over in silence. It potently prefigures the flowering of consciousness, not as a fall of possibility into brute fact, but as its incarnational awakening: the possible and the actual becoming worthy of one another as the light of the world learns, in us, to see.

If the process-relational revisioning of classical ontology is correct, then the fraying frontiers at the speculative edges of physical cosmology should provide excellent test cases for the dipolar ontology of potentiality and actuality. We offer two such test cases. The first, Eastman’s critique of the Big Bang research program, shows spacetime actualism failing at the largest scale. The second, Kastner’s Relativistic Transactional Interpretation, shows the dipolar ontology instantiated in physical detail at the smallest.

6. First Test Case: The Big Bang Research Program and the Reification of the Manifold

Our first test case is Eastman’s analysis of contemporary cosmology, which mobilizes Imre Lakatos’s distinction between a research program and the specific, falsifiable models it generates. A research program is organized around a “hard core” of first principles accepted, for the program’s purposes, without further debate, and elaborated by a chain of auxiliary hypotheses that yield testable predictions. The program as a whole is not directly falsifiable, but it can be appraised as progressive, when it forecasts novel facts later confirmed, or degenerate, when it survives only by ad hoc adjustments that accommodate observations after the fact.^[33] The Big Bang research program, with its standard ΛCDM model, remains the dominant framework today. Eastman’s contention is that its hard core harbors, alongside its physical principles, a set of unstated metaphysical presuppositions that this paper has been calling into question.^[34]

Chief among them is spacetime actualism itself, joined by determinism (the assumption that events form quantitative dyads of cause-and-effect bound by strict entailment), by causal closure, and by a nominalism that grants reality only to the particular elements of a variable metric while denying ontic standing to the possible and the general. Following Milič Čapek, Eastman traces these commitments to classical metaphysics and locates their common root in a “view from nowhere,” the tacit pretension to a God’s-eye survey of a universe laid out in its entirety. Lodged in the hard core, where Lakatos says first principles are held beyond debate, these presuppositions are usually shielded from scrutiny. “Every scientific man,” Whitehead once quipped, “in order to preserve his reputation has to say he dislikes metaphysics. What he means is he dislikes having his metaphysics criticized.”^[35] The unacknowledged metaphysics do not announce themselves as such and so are uncritically passed off as a simple translation of what physics has found. This is the reification of coordinate analysis diagnosed in section 4, which operates not as an explicit doctrine but as the unexamined imaginative background of a research program.

The marks of strain show at both ends of the model. At its origin stands the initial singularity, where the field equations, extrapolated beyond their domain of adequacy, return infinities that signal a breakdown in the applicability of the known laws. Gamow himself, originator of the hot Big Bang, is reported by Eastman (who as a graduate student attended Gamow’s final cosmology course at the University of Colorado in spring 1968) to have regarded this singularity with disquiet, recognizing that a theory uniquely requiring such a feature is most likely signaling its own fundamental limitation, rather than disclosing the nature of our cosmic origin. Read in light of Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme, the singularity is not the first actual fact but a tear in the coordinate map. Rendering it the beginning of all things mistakes the failure of a representation for the causal origin of the universe. At the other end, the program has met a succession of observational surprises with a corresponding succession of ad hoc auxiliary adjustments: an inflaton field to smooth the horizon, non-baryonic dark matter to resolve gravitational anomalies, dark energy to accommodate the unexpected dimming of distant supernovae and to extend the expansion age—none of which has been directly detected despite decades of sustained observational effort, only having been introduced to save the model after the fact rather than derived from independent physical grounds.^[36] This is a symptom of Lakatosian degeneration. Where free parameters can be tuned to fit an array of results, “precision” is bought at the cost of predictive power. What gets celebrated later as prediction proves, on inspection, very often to be post-diction. Eastman notes, for instance, that the received story of Gamow’s successful prediction of the cosmic microwave background temperature is a tidied-up narrative: a simple average of six pre-1965 non–Big-Bang estimates of the ambient radiation temperature of space yields about 3.1 K against the measured 2.725 K, while Gamow and his collaborators’ estimates ranged from 5 to 50 K.^[37] It should be conceded that Alpher and Herman’s 1948 estimate of roughly 5 K was derived from a physical mechanism—nucleosynthesis in an expanding universe. But the Lakatosian question concerns a program’s predictive record appraised across its whole career, not the retrospective selection of its best guess. The received narrative converts a fluctuating range of estimates into a uniquely successful forecast, while estimates derived from independent physical grounds—Eddington’s from the measured energy density of starlight, for instance—came nearer the observed value without invoking any expansion dynamics at all. What is at issue is not who guessed best, but whether the program’s celebrated results were forecast or after the fact accommodation.

Beneath these difficulties Eastman identifies an even more fundamental one. By taking general relativity as foundational and building ΛCDM around a geometrized metric that drives the physics—so that, in effect, the metric and the physics are collapsed—the program generates a cosmological measurement problem in addition to the more familiar quantum one. A relativistic physics tied to a variable, non-uniform metric has no uniform standard against which its own measurements can be referred.^[38] The ruler deforms with the territory it would measure. The two measurement problems, quantum and cosmological, are thus not unrelated embarrassments but twin symptoms of the same actualist metaphysics, each arising because a coordinate abstraction is mistaken for the concrete whole.

It is here that Eastman’s critique and Kastner’s interpretation converge. The transactional reading of quantum physics resolves the quantum measurement problem by restoring the order of real potentiality. On the transactional account, as Schlatter and Kastner (2023) have argued, gravity is not a co-fundamental geometric field but an emergent, entropic consequence of electromagnetically induced transactions. If the metric is derivative from quantum process rather than co-original with it, then the cosmological measurement problem dissolves together with the quantum one, since spacetime is no longer a pre-given container whose deformation threatens to undermine measurement, but a derived order referred to the quantum-level process beneath it. The century-long search for a unified theory that presumed gravity and quantum physics to be equally fundamental appears, from the transactionalist vantage, to have been premised on a category error bequeathed by spacetime actualism.

Whitehead’s process-relational ontology makes possible a cosmology that declines to identify the measurable with the real. Eastman’s own candidate alternative is the plasma cosmology research program, which posits a universe of indefinite age with no singular origin, treats electromagnetic and plasma processes as dynamically significant alongside gravity at all scales, and—on his detailed comparative assessment of recent data, including results from the James Webb Space Telescope—has lately yielded genuine predictions where ΛCDM has leaned on post-dictive adjustment. We do not adjudicate that empirical contest here, and the metaphysical thesis of this paper does not depend on its outcome. Even a reader who backs the standard model should grant that spacetime actualism is a contingent metaphysical presupposition rather than a deliverance of experimental or mathematical physics, and that a legitimate scientific cosmology can be built without it.^[39]

If the universe is of indefinite age and the singularity is the artifact of an over-extended abstraction, then the question of a cosmic beginning is not one that physics can settle by running the metric back to a first instant. It becomes, properly, a metaphysical question to be taken up by heterogeneous thought rather than imprisoned in homogeneous abstraction. A cosmology that mistakes its coordinate model for the whole of the real cannot even pose the question of its own experiential ground, since there is nowhere for the inquiring mind of the physicist in a spacetime block. A process-relational cosmology, by distinguishing without dividing the actual from the potentiality through which it transacts, helps resolve the confusion by making a home in nature for mind, which could now be understood as the intensification of latent potentials in nature, our experience “the cumulation of the universe and not a stage-play about it.”^[40]

7. Second Test Case: The Relativistic Transactional Interpretation as Process Cosmology

Ruth Kastner has developed the Transactional Interpretation, first proposed by Cramer in 1986, into the relativistic domain. The resulting Relativistic Transactional Interpretation (RTI) identifies two distinct aspects of reality, in pointed contrast to the conventional picture of a spacetime manifold serving as a container for everything physically real. The two levels are (1) the potential or res potentiae, in the sense Heisenberg, Whitehead, Kauffman, and Eastman give the term—and (2) the actual, the determinate spacetime events in which those potentiae are realized. The potential level corresponds to Kastner’s quantum substratum, understood not as a substance but as a pre-spatial domain that spacetime events precipitate out of; the actual level corresponds to those events themselves. Because the model is fully quantified and yields the Einstein equations of general relativity, the proposal goes well beyond speculation to approach a candidate physical “theory of everything”^[41] cashing out a process-relational ontology.^[42]

Read through the conceptual lens of Whitehead’s Process and Reality, the quantum substratum may be understood, not as a spatiotemporal substance or persisting container—the background spacetime picture often presupposed by spacetime actualism—but as an order of physical potentiality performing a function partially analogous to Whitehead’s “extensive continuum.”^[43] Whitehead defines the latter as the relational order of real potentiality that coordinates possible standpoints, and that conditions, without determining, the actual occasions that atomize it.^[44] Like the extensive continuum, moreover, the quantum substratum is not a deeper container behind spacetime. Rather, it is itself conditioned by the settled world—by prepared states, available absorbers, and the growing record of actualized events—so that conditioning runs in both directions, from settled actuality into real potentiality and from real potentiality into new actualization.^[45]

The conservation requirements operative in RTI can accordingly be interpreted, not as features of the extensive continuum’s generic mereotopological order, but as constraints arising from the prevalent relational order of our cosmic epoch and thereby qualifying the real potentialities available within it.^[46] Together with coupling structures, these requirements constrain whether transactions (i.e., offers and confirmations with subsequent actualizations of one outcome) can arise from quantum processes (i.e., unitary evolution and interactions) and which physical quantities can be transferred in actualization, without selecting any unique actualized transaction.

The correspondence between the quantum substratum represented through Hilbert space and Whitehead’s extensive continuum remains functional rather than strictly ontological. Hilbert space is a mathematical vector space in which quantum states represent physical potentiae through complex amplitudes. It is not a mereotopological continuum of extensive connection. What the two share is therefore neither the same formal structure nor the same ontological status but a partial functional affinity: each, in a different way, articulates an order of conditioned potentiality that structures actualization without by itself determining which actuality will arise. The extensive continuum answers to the quantum substratum’s relational ordering of possible events, while the substratum’s dynamically evolving potentiae provide something akin to the “more complete rendering” of real potentiality that Whitehead assigns to the physical field.^[47] Whitehead’s extensive continuum conditions the extensive form under which inherited physical data can be objectified and supplies the scheme of possible regional standpoints presupposed by concrescence, without exhaustively determining the occasion’s self-formation.

A quantum system (with non-vanishing rest mass) is not to be identified with the extensive continuum. In a Whiteheadian rendering, it may instead be understood as a recurrent process-pattern whose successive transactional actualizations exhibit the serial inheritance characteristic of a historical route or society, rather than as a self-identical persisting substance. Its internal periodicity supplies a local, system-intrinsic proper-time reference associated with its rest frame and requiring no external background clock.^[48] This parametric continuity need not conflict with Whitehead’s epochal theory of becoming, since it characterizes the systematic ordering of potential processes rather than the internal becoming of an actual occasion. In the domain of quantum potentiae, quantum states evolve continuously according to the ordinary probability preserving Schrödinger equation of quantum theory; the formation of a transaction, by contrast, is a discrete, nonunitary actualization yielding determinate events. In Whitehead’s phrase, “there is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming.”^[49]

This periodicity invites comparison with Whitehead’s account in Science and the Modern World of the relation among occurrence, recurrence, and endurance. He distinguishes the occurrence of an event, which happens once and perishes; the recurrence of a pattern, or eternal object, recognizable because reiterated across many events; and endurance, in which that reiteration is inherited by a rhythmic, vibratory route or society of successive occasions, such as an atomic element, a star, or a living cell.^[50] Whitehead accordingly proposed that a primordial vibratory organism manifests itself only through its complete period, rather than at an isolated instant or in an arbitrary fraction of that period, offering a speculative account of how continuous internal articulation might issue in discrete physical manifestation.^[51] The analogy with RTI nevertheless requires a further distinction. The internal periodicity associated with a massive system’s rest mass is not the offer–confirmation transaction itself. The former is a local process in the quantum substratum that supplies the system’s proper-time reference; the latter is a reciprocal emitter–absorber process whose nonunitary actualization establishes discrete emission and absorption events together with the photon transfer link between them.^[52] Periodicity thus belongs to the internal constitution of massive quantum systems in the substratum, while discreteness belongs to the transactional events and links constituting emergent spacetime. The assumed continuous endurance of physical objects in coordinate spacetime is a derivative representation of ordered relations among such events, not the literal persistence of a substance or the continuity of becoming itself.

The discrete transactions a quantum system sources are mappable to actual occasions and their nexūs. An “event,” in Whitehead’s technical sense, is a nexus of actual occasions inter-related in one extensive quantum, with the actual occasion itself as “the limiting type of an event with only one member.”^[53] The actualized transaction is an event in this sense—a minimal nexus whose members are an emission occasion and an absorption occasion, bound by the invariant null interval that constitutes their connection. The dipolar aspect of reality is thus mirrored in two modes of process: the continuous, belonging to quantum systems at the level of real potentiality, akin to the genetic phases of concrescence; and the discrete, metrical spacetime of actualized events, akin to his coordinate domain. Quantum decoherence—effected, in RTI, by the responses of absorbers^[54]—can be understood in Whiteheadian terms as the early genetic phases of concrescence in which incompatible data are excluded by negative prehension or integrated under novel contrasts. The genetic phases of concrescence must be understood non-temporally. The passage from phase to phase is not in physical time, since each phase presupposes the entire quantum.^[55] The isomorphism is one of logical order rather than timeline, mirroring RTI’s account of absorber responses belonging to the pre-spatiotemporal substratum of real potentiality, with measured decoherence times appearing only in the coordinate shadow of genetic ordering. This is the distinction Whitehead draws between the continuum of possibility—unitary and reversible if abstracted from the solicited response of absorbers—and the irreversibility of actualization resulting in an emergent arrow of time.^[56]

In RTI, the mutual generation of (electromagnetic) offer and confirmation waves by material sources—an emitter and its responding absorbers—already initiates a non-unitary measurement transition, in which the offer is transformed into a weighted field of incipient transactions. In Whiteheadian terms, the absorber response corresponds to the entry of conceptual valuation into concrescence—the mental pole’s registration and grading of alternatives—prior to the final decision. Atomicity or discreteness enters only with the actualization of one such transaction. The internal clock grounds the matter system’s proper-time reference, while the completed offer–confirmation circuit conditions the entry of atomic fact without determining which incipient transaction is actualized. This actualization is discontinuous and not fixed by the antecedent dynamics—neither the unitary propagation of the offer nor the weighting of incipient transactions. It is therefore “acausal” only in the precise sense that the achieved fact is not deductively entailed by the prior evolution of possibilities.

This culminating non-unitary step of actualization is the physical analogue of Whitehead’s “satisfaction.” Without such a step, the cyclic process of offer and confirmation would remain an unrealized circulation of potentiae, never culminating in determinate fact. The closed circuit is a necessary condition for actualization, but it is not yet the actual occasion. It is the field of eligible relevance, the rhythmic solicitation of possible outcomes. Whitehead argues that decided conditions never banish freedom but only qualify it: there is always a contingency left open for immediate decision. He is careful, however, about how the occasion’s regional standpoint in the continuum is settled. In the mere continuum “there is no principle to determine what regional quanta shall be atomized.”^[57] That determination arises in the initial phase of the subjective aim, wherein the antecedent world and the primordial valuation of possibility propose to the nascent concrescence a graded field of candidate standpoints, leaving to the occasion’s final self-causation not the fabrication of alternatives but the decision among them. RTI exhibits the same two-stage structure. Each eligible absorber marks a candidate standpoint in the extensive continuum. The weighted field of incipient transactions gives physical definition to the graded initial relevance, with the Born weights functioning as the physical registration of that grading, while the non-unitary actualization answers to the final decision that no antecedent grading determines. Each terminus of the actualized transaction is a decision embodying its quantum in solido—not assembled part by part or accreted instant by instant, but actualized as one undivided whole, all at once, the transaction actualizing both termini jointly.^[58]

In Process and Reality, Whitehead distinguishes between two modes of fluency: concrescence and transition.^[59] Concrescence is the genetic becoming of an occasion, the internal passage from the data of many real potentialities toward one determinate satisfaction. It is not a little process occurring inside already constituted physical time. On the contrary, physical time is abstracted from the completed extensive quantum once the occasion has achieved satisfaction. In this sense, the closed transactional cycle belongs to the concrescent phase as the ordering and valuation of real potentialities considered in abstraction from actualization. The non-unitary transaction corresponds to the decisive attainment of satisfaction at each terminus, integrating the many possible absorbers, confirmations, and amplitudes into one determinate minimal nexus. In this regard, it may be noted that the absorbers not receiving the photon in the actualized decision nevertheless participate as heralds of “null measurments.”^[60]

Transition is then what follows from this completion. Once the transaction is actualized, the Whiteheadian interpretation would be that the occasion perishes as subjective immediacy and becomes objectively immortal. It is no longer a becoming subject but a settled superject, a determinate spacetime event available for prehension by subsequent occasions. In RTI’s terms, the completed transaction is now an emission–absorption event within the emergent spacetime manifold, capable of conditioning further transactions. Thus the creative advance has two inseparable but distinguishable phases: the concrescent actualization of real potentiality into a definite quantum of fact, and the transitional inheritance of that fact by later occasions. The offer supplies the ordered potency, the confirming response its valuation, and the non-unitary transaction the atomic actuality. The subsequent web of such actualities weaves the historical continuity of nature.

Despite giving the designation of “eternal object” to his potentials, Whitehead does not deny the evolution of their graded relevance to the settled world. These eternal objects are not locatable in spacetime, are uncreated, and do not themselves change, but are not therefore static. Instead, the decisions of each actual occasion cast back upon them what Whitehead calls the “shadow of truth,” enriching and reordering their relevance to the future universe.^[61] The eternal objects together with the settled actualities of the past therefore do not constitute a finished world but a growing eternal memory, which each newly concrescing occasion prehends—physically in its inheritance of settled actuality, conceptually in its registration of the graded relevance of eternal objects—as bearing on its present situation and future aim.

A further correspondence concerns the character of field interactions in RTI. The relevant physics is the Direct-Action Theory—also known as the Absorber Theory of Radiation developed by Wheeler and Feynman^[62]—a well-quantified account subtly distinct from the conventional treatment of field propagation. The conventional approach is unilateral, prioritizing emission and treating absorption as a passive, unquantified sink. In the Direct-Action Theory, by contrast, both emission and absorption are active processes contributing in specific ways to the actualization of a spacetime event. On a process-relational reading, the retarded offer wave is the real potentiality of the objectified past pressing in, prehended by the physical pole of an actualizing occasion; the absorber’s advanced confirmation conforms physically to that offer and, across the many eligible absorbers, expresses the contrasted field of alternative real potentiae from which a single outcome is selected via the mental pole’s evaluation of alternatives.

The “advanced” character of that confirmation has, ever since the original absorber theory and Cramer’s first formulation of the transactional interpretation, invited the objection (encouraged by spacetime actualism) that it requires retrocausation—a confirmation propagating backward through time from absorber to emitter, with all the paradoxes that backward-in-time signaling would entail. Kastner’s possibilist interpretation dissolves that objection. Offer and confirmation waves are not entities propagating through spacetime at all but “physically efficacious but not necessarily actualized” real possibilities whose emissions and absorptions are primary dynamical processes originating in a sub-empirical, pre-spatiotemporal realm described by Hilbert space.^[63] This substratum should not be imagined as though it featured free-floating possibilities. Within RTI, offer and confirmation waves do not subsist on their own but are generated by an emitter and its responding absorbers (e.g., atoms and molecules^[64]), so that the potentiae of the substratum are always the conditioned potentiality of antecedent actuality, never merely possible objects awaiting promotion into existence.^[65] But as Kastner clarifies:

“emitters and absorbers are ‘only’ quantum possibilities themselves—that is, field excitations that couple to other fields or sets of bound field excitations such as atoms and molecules. A macroscopic emitter or absorber (e.g., a detector) comprises a large number of such micro-emitters and micro-absorbers. Its observable aspect is a network of linked actualized transactions.”^[66]

Determinate spacetime event-networks, with their fixed, future-directed order of emission before absorption, do not contain this quantum process but emerge from it, precipitating out of a pre-spacetime realm of indeterminate possibility.^[67] Because the time-symmetric, advanced-and-retarded structure of the direct-action propagator characterizes this level of possibility and not the manifold of actual events, nothing literally travels backward in time. Actualization is itself an extra-spatiotemporal process rather than the spacetime “echoing” of Cramer’s original proposal, and the attendant causal-loop paradoxes arise only on the block world picture that the possibilist reading avoids.^[68] The appearance of retrocausation arises only from mistaking the logical ordering of the sub-empirical substratum for a process unfolding within metrical spacetime.^[69]

This has a metaphysical analogue in Whitehead. The confirmation wave’s selective contribution is no more to be imagined as backward-in-time causation than the mental pole’s evaluation is, for the mental pole is not in time at all. As Whitehead clarifies:

“Every actual entity is ‘in time’ so far as its physical pole is concerned, and is ‘out of time’ so far as its mental pole is concerned. [An actual occasion] is the union of two worlds, namely, the temporal world, and the world of autonomous valuation.”^[70]

The confirmation wave thus functions like Whitehead’s mental pole in that both belong to what is “out of time”—the order of autonomous valuation among possibilities—rather than to the temporal world of physical transmission proper to the physical pole. Kastner’s relocation of the offer/confirmation dynamics to the substratum of real potentiality is the physical counterpart of Whitehead’s location of valuation in the dipolar occasion’s mental pole. The completed transaction is then concrescence reaching satisfaction as a “spontaneous symmetry breaking”^[71] whereupon the until then indeterminate event attains objective immortality as a datum for subsequent transactions.

This dipolar structure lets us draw a further connection. The actualized transaction—an emission–absorption event whose termini are connected by a null interval—illustrates, at the physical level, what Whitehead calls causal efficacy, that is, the conformal inheritance of settled actuality whereby a present occasion takes up its predecessors as efficacious for its own becoming. Two events are timelike separated when a signal traveling slower than light can connect them, null or lightlike separated when only light itself can connect them, and spacelike separated when no physical signal can pass between them. In RTI these three relations do not stand on equal ontological footing. The emergent discrete manifold is constituted solely of null intervals, the invariant links established by actualized photon transfers. Massive systems participate as emitters and absorbers, remaining in the quantum substratum.^[72]Timelike relations therefore arise derivatively, along the chains of successive actualized events associated with persisting massive systems, whose internal clocks (i.e., strictly local periodic processes yielding a locally increasing index) supply the parameter functioning as proper time.^[73] In both the constitutive null links and the derivative timelike chains, the relevant connection is not merely geometrical but causal, marking the passage from real potentiality to determinate fact.

The boundary of the light cone is therefore not a mere limit inscribed in a coordinate grid. It marks the extremal condition of causal transaction, the luminous seam at which physical possibility can be knit into actual event. Spacelike-separated occasions, by contrast, find their Whiteheadian analogue in contemporary occasions that are neither in one another’s causal past nor in one another’s causal future, and therefore not mutually efficacious in their respective becomings. Whitehead’s principle that contemporary actualities “happen in causal independence of each other” here receives explicit relativistic expression.^[74]

Such contemporaries are not directly inherited in causal efficacy. They are indirectly displayed, or coordinately exhibited, in presentational immediacy. Presentational immediacy objectifies the contemporary world as an extensive continuum under the aspect of potentiality, as divisible but not yet divided, spread out for possible division but not disclosed in its actual atomic constitution. This does not mean that the contemporary world is wholly unrelated to causal efficacy. Its presented locus is indirectly implicated through the overlapping causal pasts shared by the percipient occasion and the relevant contemporary occasions. But the contemporary world, as contemporary, is not itself causally operative upon the percipient occasion. It appears as co-present extensive potentiality, not as inherited efficient fact.

The light cone is thus the physical exemplification of Whitehead’s distinction between an efficacious causal past, a merely co-present contemporary world, and a causally relevant future. Whitehead assigns to causal efficacy not only the inheritance of the past but the partition of the extensive continuum into past and future. This separation, he writes, “lies with the mode of causal efficacy and not with that of presentational immediacy,” while “the mathematical measurements, derivable from the latter, are indifferent to this distinction.”^[75] The arrow of time is therefore borne by causal inheritance and not by measurable geometry. This is akin to the asymmetry that, in RTI, enters only with actualization. Further, on this reading, the metric itself is understood to be derivative. For Whitehead the extensive continuum is, in its full generality, the mere potentiality of extensive connection, lacking even “the relationships of metrical geometry,” which are “additional determinations of real potentiality arising from our cosmic epoch.”^[76]For Kastner, as we’ve seen, spacetime is also not a self-subsistent substance or “container” but the relational order of actual events, membership in which is achieved by the transactions themselves.^[77] On neither account is the metric the stage on which actualization is performed. It is, rather, a structure precipitated by it. The recovery of the Einstein equations as an emergent, entropic consequence of transactional activity converges with Whitehead’s thesis that metric spacetime is a derivative achievement, not a primitive container.^[78]

The pairing of causal efficacy with presentational immediacy is not, however, a bare dyad. In Whitehead’s account, their integration into intelligible experience requires a mediating third, symbolic reference, in which the perceptual immediacy of the contemporary world is interpreted through the felt causal inheritance of the past, and the felt inheritance is in turn made specific by the presentational display. This triadic structure of past inheritance, present display, and their integrative reference is akin to what Eastman, developing C. S. Peirce and James Bradley, refers to as the input–output–context structure of every actual relation, without which coordinate analysis would give us only isolated events lacking any interpretive coherence.^[79] In Kastner’s RTI framework, the physical analogue of this mediating third is not symbolic reference in the perceptual or psychological sense, but the actualized transaction itself. The offer wave opens a field of physically real possibility, the confirmations specify the relevant absorber responses, and the transaction integrates these poles into one determinate event. The triadic pattern is therefore preserved at a more general ontological level as inherited condition, presented or available possibility, and decisive integration. Whitehead, Eastman, and Kastner thus each refuse to treat the coordinate domain as self-explanatory. Intelligibility requires not merely coordinates, nor merely events, but the mediating activity by which potential relations become determinate, interpretable, and historically efficacious facts. On this reading, the frameworks here being compared are not merely dipolar but triadic. Their convergence recovers the ingredients of intelligibility that spacetime actualism’s reification of the coordinate domain had obscured.^[80]

The foregoing correspondences converge on an important recovery that reaches past modern physics to the ancient mystery of what it means for anything to be affected by another. RTI restores to physics something the bifurcation of nature had made unthinkable: the reality and efficacy of receptivity. The prehensive aspect of field behavior is made explicit and quantified in the active receptivity of absorbers, so that the transaction reflects the mutual relatedness or solidarity of actual occasions against the unilateral, emission-first picture that treats reception as passive. In process-relational terms, this receptive moment is not the inert half of an otherwise active process but is itself a decision. Across the field of eligible absorbers, and amidst relevant alternative potentiae, the mental pole’s selective response contributes a new component fact to the creative advance. This shift is convergent with certain strains of Eastern thought, exemplifying in particular the Yin pole of the Taoist polarity. Western science, in contrast, has tended to recognize only the Yang of active emission. Whitehead himself located the philosophy of organism nearer to certain strains of Indian and Chinese thought than to the European tradition, precisely because the one makes process ultimate while the other makes static fact ultimate.^[81] Read this way, RTI is not merely consistent with Whitehead’s cosmology but is a worked out, quantified expression of it.

8. Conclusion: Toward an Integrative Cosmology

Our two test cases, drawn from opposite ends of the scale of nature, exhibit the same convergence. At the largest scale, the cosmological manifold is revealed to be a coordinate abstraction whose absolutization mistakes the limit of a map (the singularity) for the causal origin of the universe. At the smallest, the quantum transaction generates determinate events from an order of real potentiality that conditions without determining them. In both, the apparent world of enduring physical bodies in spacetime is actual but not fundamental, since it arises from a process of actualization whose constitutive features—prehension, decision, the entertainment and evaluation of possibility, the directedness of aim—are not eliminable froth or mere “psychic additions”^[82] but the engine of the creative advance that issues, eventually, in knowers.

Cosmology is possible only because possibility is ontic. A finished block universe has no room for the becoming that a properly evolutionary cosmology sets out to describe, and so a strictly spacetime actualist cosmology cannot account for its own history. And cosmology is possible, in the reflexive sense, only because the universe is the kind of process that can flower into beings who measure, conjecture, and care about truth. Whitehead’s account of coordinate division grants physics all that is needed for accurate measurement of actualized spacetime while heading off the reification of actualist metaphysics. Dividing the satisfaction of an actual occasion coordinately yields prehensions that might have been but were not separated.^[83] Spacetime actualism is the systematic collapse of these might-be divisions into divisions that are. It reifies the divisible into the divided, coordinate abstraction into concrete fact. The manifold of points and instants that actualism mistakes for the finished furniture of the universe is in truth a record of possible standpoints, the coordinate shadow cast by actualities each of whom enjoyed its quantum in solido, whole and undivided. To mistake that shadow for the substance is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness writ large. A cosmic morphology of completed abstract divisions, treated as accomplished facts, leaves no room for the potentiality that all inquiry presupposes. An already actualized block universe of pregiven coordinates may include the cosmologist’s physical worldtube, but it cannot include the cosmologist as inquirer. It contains the theorist only as one more configuration in the coordinate grid, never as a living entertainment of alternatives that remain genuinely open. Spacetime actualism thus saws off the onto-epistemic branch upon which it is perched.

Whitehead’s account of consciousness as a late and occasional achievement suggests why the actualist mistake is so natural. Consciousness arises late in the integrative process, illuminating with clarity the sharply defined products of earlier phases of integration. It apprehends the clean deliverances of presentational immediacy, including the distinct regions and instants of the coordinate scheme, leaving the genetic process from which they issue in comparative penumbral dimness. We can draw a striking empirical formulation of this asymmetry from Kauffman’s account of quantum measurement in the double-slit experiment. We never apprehend the coherent wave, only the spots, the localized outcomes registered once a determinate event has occurred.^[84] On the process-relational reading, this is a consequence of the concrescent phase-structure of experience itself. The coherent superposition is dim not because it hides behind a screen we cannot pierce separating the quantum from the classical, but because it belongs to the early genetic phases of concrescence, wherein the reception and valuation of real potentiae transpire beneath the later irradiating flash of consciousness. As Whitehead puts it:

“Consciousness flickers; and even at its brightest, there is a small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral region of experience which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension. The simplicity of clear consciousness is no measure of the complexity of complete experi­ence. Also this character of our experience suggests that consciousness is the crown of experience, only occasionally attained, not its necessary base.”^[85]

What quantum theory describes as indeterminate superposition and what experience undergoes as vague, massive, as yet inarticulate feeling are then the germinal phases of a concrescence still actualizing itself. Consciousness, then, does not look on at the transaction from outside but is a concrescence achieving its satisfaction, feeling itself as the affirmation of this against the negation of that. We apprehend only the decided spots because there is no standpoint prior to that culmination from which the coherent superposition could have been an object of awareness, for awareness is precisely what the completed decision is. The coherent penumbra is dim because it is the womb of consciousness, and consciousness can no more turn to illuminate the darkness that bore it than a flashlight can go looking for the dark.

Consciousness is a late arising phenomenon that all too easily mistakes its region of clearest light for the primitive constitution of nature. This is the understandable but unnecessary perspectival root of spacetime actualism. Its correction requires the deliberate discipline of speculative philosophy. The process-relational alternative re-roots inquiry in the same process it is attempting to know, restoring to the universe both the expansive openness that makes its evolution statistically measurable and the intensive depth that makes it capable of coming to know itself.

Healing the bifurcation of nature does not mean adding a humanistic flourish to a finished physics, nor retreating from the rigor of the coordinate scheme into vague mysticism. It means recognizing that the same creative process the physicist studies in its low-grade, repetitive, measurable habits is the process that, in its higher reaches, becomes the physicist’s own thinking, valuing, and wondering. Fact and importance, the conjecture and the dream, the measurable and the felt, are abstractions from a single experiential reality. What science holds apart as methodological convenience, metaphysics must reintegrate. A cosmology adequate to its own possibility must be able to honor at once the precision of the coordinate domain and the creativity of the genetic process from which it arises. Toward such an integrative cosmology, in which the achievements of physical science and the real emergence of knowers within nature are at last thought together, transactional physics and process metaphysics jointly point.

Author Contributions: Conceptualization, M.D.S., T.E.E. and R.E.K.; writing—original draft preparation, M.D.S.; writing—review and editing, M.D.S., T.E.E. and R.E.K. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Footnotes

^[1] It is important here to disambiguate our terminology (with appreciation to Ben Snyder, personal communication). In contemporary analytic modal metaphysics, “actualism” names the thesis, opposed to Lewisian modal realism and other forms of “possibilism,” that whatever exists is actual. Spacetime actualism, as intended here and in the quantum foundations literature, is a different and more specific doctrine. In our usage, an actual is simply an element of the spacetime manifold, that is, an invariant event (see Kastner (2025a), “The Arrow of Time,” 9–10), and spacetime actualism is a bundle of positions including (i) the identification of the real with the fully determinate actual, leaving no ontological standing for potentiae; (ii) the tenseless givenness of the spacetime manifold of events (eternalism); and (iii) the consequent closure of the future. In the taxonomy of the modal metaphysics debate, the present proposal would itself count as a form of actualism of the dispositionalist sort (see Vetter, Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality, 2015), since real potentiae are always the potentiality of actualities rather than free-floating possibilities. Nothing in our argument requires merely possible objects, that is, fully determinate concrete individuals inhabiting other worlds (Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds, 1986). What our argument requires is rather that the ontology harbor real (not merely logical or epistemic) potentialities, conditioned and intensively graded, and that the future remain genuinely open. No merely possible occasions pre-exist their concrescences, as if awaiting admission into existence. When a transaction actualizes, nothing that was already determinate is promoted; rather, a genuine novelty becomes.

^[2] Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, 30.

^[3] Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 51.

^[4] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 189.

^[5] See Miller, Life in Four Dimensions: A Defence of the Block Universe Theory (2026), for a recent systematic defense, directed especially against arguments for temporal dynamism from human experience, concepts, attitudes, and beliefs.

^[6] See Kastner (2025a) and section 7 below on the transactional actualization of spacetime events, and section 4 on the reflexive argument from scientific hypothesizing.

^[7] See Bradley, “La Cosmologie Transcendantale de Whitehead: La Transformations Spéculative du Concept de Construction Logique” in Archives de Philosophie 56 (1993), 3-28.

^[8] The subtitle of Whitehead’s Process and Reality is “An Essay in Cosmology” where “cosmology” refers to a comprehensive philosophical framework that incorporates human experience and metaphysics along with physical cosmology.

^[9] Whitehead, “First Lecture, 1924” in Whitehead at Harvard, 46-47.

^[10] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 88.

^[11] Whitehead, The Concept of Nature, 3, 67.

^[12] Albert Einstein to the family of Michele Besso, March 1955, quoted in Alice Calaprice, ed., The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 75: “For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” The remark is often invoked in support of a “block universe” reading of relativity, though its interpretation remains contested. In the context of our argument, “mind,” in that it implies the reality of possibility alongside physical actuality, also implies real becoming. See also Eastman’s discussion of the 1922 Einstein-Bergson debate (Untying the Gordian Knot, 52-53), where he argues that Einstein stayed within his presumed block-world, Boolean-only description, whereas Bergson (without contesting Einstein’s more limited physics descriptions) argued philosophically for a framework that could allow for potentiae and human knowing. See also Kastner (2023) for a physics-based dissent from the “illusion” claim.

^[13] See Kastner, The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (2022), 226.

^[14] Eastman, Untying the Gordian Knot (2020), 4, 237.

^[15] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 283.

^[16] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 61, 285.

^[17] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 235.

^[18] Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 154.

^[19] Eastman, Untying the Gordian Knot, 82-84, 95.

^[20] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 184-186, 259-280. On the treatment of scientific hypothesis as Whiteheadian propositions, see also Segall, “Physics Within the Bounds of Feeling Alone” (2024).

^[21] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 161, 267.

^[22] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 54.

^[23] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 66.

^[24] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 62.

^[25] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 92.

^[26] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 303.

^[27] See Whitehead, The Principle of Relativity (1922) and Gary Herstein, Whitehead and the Measurement Problem of Cosmology (2006).

^[28] While the current account examines primarily philosophical aspects, Kastner and Eastman have argued that the failure to allow for ontic possibilities has led to unnecessarily vexing problems in varied areas of physics, such as the measurement problem of the conventional quantum theory as well as puzzles in statistical mechanics such as “Maxwell’s Demon,” which is readily solved once it is recognized that quantum indeterminacies and uncertainties involve ontic possibilities (e.g., Kastner, 2025b, 2026).

^[29] For a defense of Whitehead’s eternal objects against a Bergsonian virtualist critique, see Segall, “Standing Firm in the Flux: On Whitehead’s Eternal Objects” in Whitehead at Harvard, 1925-1927, ed. by Joseph Petek and

Brian Henning (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), Chapter 12.

^[30] Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (1958); Kastner, Kauffman & Epperson, “Taking Heisenberg’s Potentia Seriously” (2018); Eastman, Untying the Gordian Knot (2020). Note that potentiae are not a third order of quasi-entities hovering between being and non-being. They are fully real, “intermediate” in Heisenberg’s sense only in that they lack actualized determinateness.

^[31] Kauffman, Humanity in a Creative Universe, 128.

^[32] The prolonged coherences in photosynthetic complexes were first reported by Engel et al. (2007), cited by Kauffman, Humanity in a Creative Universe, 138-139. The phrase “simultaneously tries many reactions” is Kauffman’s gloss. We invoke chlorophyll here as an emblem rather than a settled mechanism. The functional role of quantum coherence in photosynthesis remains contested. Nothing in the metaphysical point turns on the empirical dispute.

^[33] Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 91–196.

^[34] This section draws on Eastman, “Cosmic Plasmas” (forthcoming), together with Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context(2020), “Orders of Possibility and Actuality” (2025), and “Duality without Dualism” (2004).

^[35] Whitehead, The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1925–1927: General Metaphysical Problems of Science, ed. Brian G. Henning, Joseph Petek, and George R. Lucas Jr. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), 375.

^[36] For a transactional alternative on which the phenomena attributed to dark energy arise from the spacetime emergence process itself, without invoking a new fundamental field, see Kastner and Kauffman (2018).

^[37] Eastman, “Cosmic Agnosticism, Revisited,” Journal of Cosmology 4 (2010).

^[38] Herstein, Whitehead and the Measurement Problem of Cosmology (2006).

^[39] Nor is the demand that cosmology take becoming seriously confined to process philosophy. Unger and Smolin (2015) argue on independent grounds that the reality of time is a precondition of a genuinely historical cosmology, and Ellis (2014) presses the causal openness of the future against block universe readings of general relativity from within relativistic cosmology itself.

^[40] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 237.

^[41] A “theory of everything” in physics means not a total explanation of all phenomena whatsoever, but a physical theory unifying quantum theory, general relativity, and the known fundamental interactions within a single coherent framework. See Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist’s Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature (Pantheon, 1992).

^[42] The affinity between Whitehead’s scheme and quantum theory has a substantial lineage: see Shimony, “Quantum Physics and the Philosophy of Whitehead” (1965); Stapp, Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics (1993); Malin, Nature Loves to Hide (2001); Epperson, Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Whitehead (2004); the essays collected in Eastman and Keeton, eds., Physics and Whitehead: Quantum, Process, and Experience (2004); and Epperson and Zafiris, Foundations of Relational Realism (2013); and essays collected in Eastman, Epperson and Griffin, eds., Physics and Speculative Philosophy (2016). What RTI distinctively contributes to this lineage is a fully relativistic, direct-action realization of the potential–actual distinction.

^[43] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 61ff.

^[44] In his essay “Orders of Possibility and Actuality,” Eastman (2025) focuses on this distinction of fundamental ontological orders and its implications. In The Quantum of Explanation, Auxier and Herstein (2017) provide details on Whitehead’s concept of the extensive continuum; e.g., “Since extension and prehension are prior to space and time, they are also prior to the metrical relations of space and time” (88).

^[45] The extensive continuum “is not a fact prior to the world; it is the first determination of order—that is, of real potentiality—arising out of the general character of the world” (Whitehead, Process and Reality, 66); it is “not productive of the ordered world, but derivative from it” (72). As an order of historically conditioned potentiality, the quantum substratum shares this non-container-like status.

^[46] Considered “in its full generality, apart from the additional conditions proper only to the cosmic epoch of electrons, protons, molecules, and star-systems,” the continuum’s properties “are very few and do not include the relationships of metrical geometry”; shapes, dimensions, and measurability “are additional determinations of real potentiality arising from our cosmic epoch” (Whitehead, Process and Reality, 66). Whitehead’s account of metrical relationships as epochal rather than generic converges with RTI’s account of an emergent metric.

^[47] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 80: the extensive continuum is “the fundamental aspect of the limitation laid upon abstract potentiality by the actual world,” while “a more complete rendering of this limited, ‘real’ potentiality is the ‘physical field.’”

^[48] See Schlatter and Kastner (2023), who attribute to fermionic systems and bound states in the quantum substratum an internal clock defining their proper time, the Schrödinger evolution of such systems defining inertial frames for the emergent spacetime.

^[49] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 35.

^[50] Whitehead’s mature statement occurs in Process and Reality: the atom “is only explicable as a society with activities involving rhythms with their definite periods,” and the quanta of energy are “in their own nature, somehow vibratory” (78–79); a molecule is “a historic route of actual occasions” (80).

^[51] Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 35-36. The discrete atomicity in question is not Newton’s, the smallness of a corpuscle, but the singularity of a decision: the non-unitary event in which a determinate outcome is selected from among real alternatives.

^[52] Schlatter and Kastner 2023. An actualized transaction generates an emission event, an absorption event, and the invariant null interval constituted by the transferred photon. These events and links, not the massive systems themselves, are the elements of emergent spacetime.

^[53] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 73. This convergence of vocabulary makes the comparison clear: RTI’s emission and absorption events are “events” in Whitehead’s technical sense, each terminus an occasion, their transaction the minimal nexus.

^[54] Kastner, “Decoherence and the Transactional Interpretation,” International Journal of Quantum Foundations 6(2) (2020): 24–39.

^[55] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 283.

^[56] For the quantitative development of this claim, on which real non-unitary actualization supplies the ontological indeterminacy required to ground the Second Law of Thermodynamics, see Kastner (2017); on the incompatibility of a real arrow of time with the received actualist view, see Kastner (2025a).

^[57] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 67.

^[58] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 283.

^[59] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 210.

^[60] Kastner, The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (2022), 56.

^[61] Whitehead, The Harvard Lectures of Alfred North Whitehead, 1924–1925, 75.

^[62] Wheeler and Feynman (1945, 1949). The quantum relativistic form of the direct-action theory on which RTI builds draws on Davies (1971, 1972).

^[63] Kastner, The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (2022), 66-67, 203.

^[64] Kastner The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (2022), 51.

^[65] In the terms of contemporary analytic modal metaphysics (see note 1), real potentiae may be understood as dispositional powers grounded in and conditioned by actuality, preserving the proposal’s consistency with Whitehead’s ontological principle. The quantum substratum is not a realm in which fully determinate but unactualized things subsist, as in certain reifications of Platonic forms or merely possible individuals. It names instead the objectively real potential or dispositional order of actuality prior to its resolution into any particular actualized transaction.

^[66] Kastner, The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (2022), 67. It is worth quoting Kastner at length here to clarify the point: “A macroscopic object termed an ‘emitter’ is just a type of object with a high probability of generating fields that can couple to other fields (i.e., microscopic emitters and absorbers). An example is a laser. The atoms that emit the photons are ‘just’ conglomerations of field excitations and exist in the quantum substratum, not in spacetime. If the previous sentence seems surprising, remember that Ernst Mach railed against the idea that atoms were real because they were not directly observable. We have become so accustomed to the concept of atoms that we have forgotten that they are not directly observable: we never really ‘see’ an atom. We can image small numbers of atoms through interactions with devices such as a scanning tunneling electron microscope, but those images are created from transactions between the apparatus and the imaged sample. The transactions result in a measurable current, and there are variations in this current (fewer or more transactions) depending on how many or few atoms comprise a given portion of the sample. The changes in current are rastered onto a two-dimensional surface to yield a kind of ‘image’ of the scanned surface, with regions corresponding to larger currents being identified with atoms. Thus we are not really ‘seeing atoms’; we are seeing a representation of changes in the transacted current due to interactions between an electron offer wave current and atomic absorbers” (68).

^[67] Kastner, The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (2022), 74, 91.

^[68] Kastner, The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (2022), 65-66.

^[69] The same relocation directly addresses an influential argument for the block: the inference from the relativity of simultaneity to the equal reality of past, present, and future events (Rietdijk, 1966; Putnam, 1967; see also Stein, 1968, for a relativistic rejoinder). That inference is commonly taken to show that any objective becoming conceived as a globally advancing present within the spacetime manifold would require a preferred foliation forbidden by special relativity. On the present account, however, becoming is not a process occurring within spacetime at all. Rather, determinate spacetime events arise through transactions in the pre-spatiotemporal quantum substratum. Frame-dependent simultaneity assignments pertain only to the emergent manifold of already actualized events, while its invariant structure consists in the partial causal order constituted by actualized transactions. Because this growth requires no preferred foliation, it is compatible with Lorentz invariance. Kastner (2016) develops the affinity with Sorkin’s causal-set program, whose classical sequential-growth dynamics has likewise been proposed as a model of objective becoming compatible with relativistic covariance (Sorkin, 2007); see also Kastner (2025a).

^[70] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 248.

^[71] Kastner, The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (2022), 66, 73-76.

^[72] Kastner, The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (2022), 147, 203: the fermionic matter fields and bound states “are not transferred by way of offers and confirmations in transactions.” The spacetime structure grows by photon emission and absorption events, so that the manifold “is really constituted solely of null intervals,” while systems with rest mass remain in the extra-spatiotemporal quantum substratum.

^[73] Kastner, The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (2022), 206–207.

^[74] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 61. For Whitehead, this point “lies on the surface of the fundamental Einsteinian formula for the physical continuum.”

^[75] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 170.

^[76] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 66.

^[77] Kastner, The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, 72-73, 200.

^[78] Schlatter and Kastner 2023.

^[79] Eastman, Untying the Gordian Knot and “Implications of Triads as Primal,” Holistic Science Journal: 3 in 1, Vol. 5, 4/2026.

^[80] Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985); Process and Reality, 168–183.

^[81] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 7.

^[82] Whitehead The Concept of Nature, 29.

^[83] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 283-285.

^[84] Kauffman, Humanity in a Creative Universe, 133.

^[85] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 267.

We then turned to Plotinus’ account of Nature as contemplation from top to bottom. Nature “makes without hands”: its efficacy is indwelling, not externally imposed. This marks a crucial contrast with LLMs, which are in an extended sense made by hand, shaped from the outside, etched into silicon transistors that direct electrons. From a panexperientialist perspective, those electrons may have simple physical feelings, and so are contemplating themselves as electrons, but the question is whether any higher integration arises in the circuit itself. Plotinus’ physis makes itself, but our current machines do not. Plotinus can seem contemptuous of artifacts since they are merely diminished products of lower contemplation, yet elsewhere he praises sculptors like Phidias, whose depiction of Zeus gives access to intelligible beauty more powerfully than any empirical model.

A major thread concerned the ancient/modern shift from a divinely inspired world descending from intellect, soul, and life to a godless one in which mind is supposed to accidentally emerge from matter. Max located a decisive turn in the early modern discovery of the conservation of energy. Once body-body interaction no longer required an incorporeal input to keep motion going, matter could appear self-sustaining, and mind became a problem. Pedro added entropy, with Prigogine’s far-from-equilibrium systems complicating the story by showing how entropy can also become generative of local order. Jack brought in Bergson’s reading of Plotinus: consciousness is not, for Plotinus, the modern heroic principle of negentropic moral creativity. It is closer to matter, a subtraction or dissociation from fuller noetic life (Nous is not ordinary consciousness but hyperconsciousness).

The question of matter recurred. Matter in Plotinus is not creative fullness but the limit of procession, pure indefiniteness, the boundary that stops vertical causality from trailing off forever. Soul, as intelligible matter, creates sensible matter as a kind of image of itself. Nous gives formal causes, Soul gives material causes. Matter is the underlying condition that allows form and activity to take place. Yet matter strangely mirrors the One: both are empty of distinction and cannot be grasped intellectually. But the difference remains absolute for Plotinus: matter is indefinite because it is too poor for form, while the One is infinite because it is too rich for form. I tried to bend the hierarchy into a lemniscate, where the overflow reaches matter and immediately returns to source, a Whiteheadian transmutation in which material multiplicity and Oneness are two faces of the same self-differentiating Creativity (there are no non-paradoxical ways of speaking about such Ultimates). Max resisted making Plotinian matter too interesting. Pure matter is just a limit point; bodies, with their hylomorphic dynamism, are where the action is.

Embryology then gave us an opportunity to think the vertical descent of form. Evolution appears as the historical accumulation of form, while embryogenesis is at least suggestive of emanation: each organism is made there and then, not by preformation, nor merely by a genetic trace, but through formative entelechies that are not reducible to efficient causes from the past. Max brought in James Wilberding’s work on Neoplatonic embryology, logoi spermatikoi, and the Neoplatonic insistence that the mother is also a formally contributing cause (contra the Aristoteleans). The embryo is a nexus of cosmic contributions, nature’s seminal principles, and both parents’ active participation.

We also explored emptiness and mystical experience. Plotinus is closer to a metaphysics of fullness than to Buddhist emptiness or anatman. The flight of the alone to the Alone is not the realization that one is nothing, but that the principle of everything is within. Still, soul as intelligible matter has a kind of indeterminacy in that it receives formal determination from noetic activity.

The discussion of freedom centered on Plotinus’ treatise on fate. Freedom is not the Epicurean swerve, not counter-causality, but self-actualized activity. The freest reality is the One because nothing external conditions it. For human beings, freedom means becoming more one, less dependent on external causes, and on learning to play one’s role well. Like an actor in the cosmic drama, one does not choose the role but can bring it to life well or badly. Jack, drawing on Bergson, described Plotinus as raising the problem of freedom without finally reconciling its two sides: the mythical view of expressive play, fall, love, magic, and return, and the rational view in which the monad already contains its predicates and unrolls its program. Pedro brought in Iris Murdoch to shift freedom away from the idea of free will and toward freedom from illusion, such that love is objectivity in human relations, an epistemological attunement to reality through the diminution of ego.

Love, finally, appeared as the metaxic power that tied the conversation together. Plotinus’ highest love is non-reproductive, a pure intellectual or reflective love. The gods do not have children, and to live like a god is to rise beyond ordinary generation. But this provoked the Christian and embodied counterpoint that we do have bodies, we are organisms, and somebody has to have babies or there will be no more philosophers. Eros is a mediating power, able to raise the soul through beauty, but I feel the soul and spirit must also be reconciled with earthly incarnation.

Mike’s language of the “positive pressure” of patterns that “haunt” matter struck me as strongly convergent with Whitehead’s affirmation of the “eternal urge of desire,” the Eros of the universe, which functions not as a mechanical push from behind but as a lure toward more intense contrasts among unrealized possibilities. Mike asks in his essay whether this pressure could be quantified. I framed Whitehead’s distinction here between extensive order, which can be measured and treated statistically, and intensive order, which is felt, an aesthetic order, and not straightforwardly countable. We may be able to measure observed patterns of ingression statistically, but the underlying relevance that drives novel ingression from within the concrescence of each occasion of experience is not itself reducible to statistical quantification. I unpack this idea at greater length (also in dialogue with Stu Kauffman’s ideas) here:

Mike’s claim that matter “midwifes” life and mind, rather than manufacturing them, also seems deeply consonant with Whitehead’s view that physiology “shelters” and amplifies experience rather than producing it. Bodily organization provides a protected environment in which higher-grade occasions of experience can arise. In this context, I emphasized Whitehead’s direct inversion of Descartes: “the thought is the constituent operation in the creation of the occasional thinker.” The thinker is not a pre-existing substance that has thoughts as accidental properties; rather, the thinker is the final end of the thoughts. For Whitehead, the prehended pattern is not the agent using the prehender or the experient as a “scratchpad.” Rather, the pattern, the thought, is itself a constituent in the self-creation of the experient, the thinker.

One of my questions for Mike concerned whether he thought the agency is located in the pattern or in the one feeling the pattern. What’s the locus of agency? Is agency located in the pattern, in the experiencing occasion, or in the interface between pattern and organism? Mike resisted the search for a single locus. For him, organisms are ecosystems of patterns distributed across a full spectrum, from fleeting thoughts to personality fragments to whole human-scale selves, perhaps nested in still larger agencies. He does place agency on the side of the pattern, but only with the crucial qualification that “we are the patterns.” Patterns are not ghostly visitors entering a merely physical body from outside. Bodies are not just physical blobs, nor are they just one intelligence. They are ecological hierarchies of many nested intelligences: molecular networks, cells, tissues, organs, and organism-scale systems, each driven by patterns with degrees of agency. Mike described luring as bidirectional: patterns attract attention, but organisms also seek patterns. He connected this to his work with Chris Fields on the symmetry between problem-solvers and the solutions they seek. I framed this as a double distribution of agency: horizontally, across cellular collectives on the biological scale; vertically, in the prehensive relation between prehenders and the possibilities that lure them.

We then turned to question of the permanence or evolvability of forms. Levin expressed skepticism about the idea of truly unchanging eternal forms. His preference is for a more dynamical picture, where even mathematical structures may shift on very long timescales. He offered a thought experiment: many people are willing to imagine that the speed of light might change over cosmic history, but would find it incoherent to say that the digits of e were once different. This suggests that people tacitly regard mathematical structures as more stable than physical constants, and not merely as human constructions. I noted that Whitehead, like C. S. Peirce and more recently Lee Smolin, treats physical laws as historically emergent. But Whitehead would still distinguish the mere definiteness of forms from the determinateness of actualization. Eternal objects are definite possibilities, but only actual occasions decide among them, allowing some to ingress into concrete fact. Only with such actualization does determinate truth become possible. In the realm of eternal objects as such, nothing is yet true or false, because pure potentials are not yet propositions about an actual world. The law of noncontradiction applies to determinate fact and to propositions entertained in relation to fact, not to the indefinite togetherness of unrealized possibilities prior to their selection by an occasion of experience.

I asked Mike about the origin of form in the living world. This would lead into a fascinating discussion of his notion of “free lunches”: cases where engineering effort, evolutionary selection, and learning all appear insufficient to explain the order observed in a system. Typically we say there’s heredity and there’s the environment providing boundary conditions. This is natural selection, the standard Darwinian story that form is just the leftovers of environmental filtering of random variations. Ingression implies a free lunch. It’s not just leftovers, but the delivery of a fresh meal preheated in a latent space. He distinguished this from StuKauffman’s “order for free,” while recognizing Kauffman as the “granddaddy” of this line of thought. Stu showed that random networks can exhibit interesting mathematical properties like autocatalytic closure, but Mike thinks current findings are only the tip of the iceberg. Free lunches seem to span many orders of organization, from static patterns, to time-extended developmental sequences (including xenobot stages), to behavioral policies, and even in very high-grade conscious minds. Mike’s hypothesis is that free lunches may be the main driver of evolution, with conventional Darwinian and emergence-based explanations accounting for less than we assume. Molecular networks may already be primed, asymmetrically biased toward agency and intelligence. The arrow toward greater intelligence may predate biology, and perhaps even physics as we usually understand it, arising from the mathematical structure of latent space itself. Mike also raised the open question of whether computation can be performed in latent space without thermodynamic cost in physical space; preliminary work, he suggested, indicates that this may be possible.

We also discussed centralization and multicellularity. Following Whitehead, I suggested that animals may have a more “monarchical” organization, in which experience is gathered into a centralized cerebral organ, whereas plants might be more democratic. Mike was skeptical of this distinction, or at least wary of treating it as absolute. Centralization, he argued, is highly scale-dependent and observer-dependent. What appears centralized at one scale may be a distributed network at another. He also stressed the problem of which interface we query when we study cognition. Even conclusions about unconscious learning are often calibrated by asking the language-using left hemisphere to report on what “the organism” knows. This risks mistaking one communicative interface for the whole cognitive ecology of the body. Levin mentioned active work on tools for communicating with non-linguistic components of the body, precisely to get beyond the tyranny of the verbal-reporting interface.

I then summarized Whitehead’s philosophical project as an attempt at civilizational coherence. Whitehead wanted to integrate relativity and quantum theory, overcome the subject/object split and the bifurcation of nature, and give mind a home within the universe rather than leaving it outside as an inexplicable spectator. But his aim was not only scientific. He sought to integrate scientific knowledge with art, literature, religion, and spiritual life—to recover kosmology in the ancient sense. I described his speculative method as “descriptive generalization”: metaphysics takes what the special sciences have discovered and generalizes it to create categories that are mutually illuminating. Metaphysics is not in the business of producing testable hypotheses in the ordinary scientific sense, but of rendering the discoveries of the sciences coherent in the widest possible context.

The dialogue culminated in a discussion of the paradigm shift Mike’s work may imply, beyond both neo-Darwinism and intelligent design. We agreed that the neo-Darwinian and intelligent-design camps often share a hidden assumption: that order is rare and expensive, and therefore requires some special explanation. In my view, the neo-Darwinian framework gives ammunition to intelligent design theorists precisely by leaving explanatory gaps it cannot fill. Mike’s empirical program offers a third way. It shows that the standard story was always too thin, but without invoking an external designer. I mentioned my recent conversation with Stephen Meyer as an example of how genetic reductionism and intelligent design remain trapped in the same game.

Both presuppose that order must be either painstakingly assembled by blind mechanism or miraculously imposed by an external intelligence. Mike’s ingression framework suggests an alternative, that the space of possible forms is already structured, already fecund, already luring evolution toward more and more intense forms of agential experience. I framed his research program as an empirical realization of what Whitehead described more poetically as the Eros of the universe.

Mike closed by pointing toward several forthcoming lines of work. A preprint on pre-replicator dynamics—what happens to pattern and agency before replicators exist—is expected imminently, and he invited me to attempt a Whiteheadian interpretation. He also mentioned forthcoming empirical work on time in the interaction between the non-physical and the physical; continued work with Chris Fields on the symmetry between problem-solvers and solutions; experiments giving physical embodiment to static mathematical structures; and papers on quantifying free lunches and specifying what kinds of order are obtainable. He also has an upcoming conversation with Stu Kauffman on order-for-free and the adjacent possible. We agreed that further translation is needed between his empirical framework and Whitehead’s philosophical categories, and that the International Whitehead Conference may provide a useful setting for testing and refining that translation.

At stake throughout the dialogue was not simply whether Whitehead can be retrofitted onto contemporary biology, nor whether Mike’s work can be recruited to support a pre-existing metaphysical scheme. The deeper issue is whether biology is beginning to discover experimentally what the philosophy of organism had already intuited: that life is not an improbable accident emergent from a dead, dumb substrate, that form is not an abstraction projected by human minds, and that agency is not suddenly inserted into nature at the level of animal or human consciousness. Rather, the universe is organized by potent patterns that become increasingly explicit as energy organizes itself into living, feeling, thinking societies.

I’m a pragmatist at the end of the day, and so I engage in this effort of imagination not just for the sake of enjoyable flights of fancy, but to transform the world in a positive way. I want to bring more harmony into our shared reality, and that’s my guiding light in this work.

I’ll be speaking with Mike Levin tomorrow. Mike is a developmental biologist at Tufts University, and the context for our conversation is the International Whitehead Conference, which is in Zhuhai, China this year. I’ll be traveling there in a few weeks, but Mike will be back in the US—and given the time zones, rather than have him wake up at 4 a.m. to join us on Zoom in China, I’ve invited him to record something with me in advance.

Mike and I have had a number of dialogues over the years, and I’ve been delighted by the transformation—the Kuhnian paradigm shift—that he’s helping to inaugurate in biology. He points to the collective intelligence of cells, which are able to leverage the formative power of bioelectric fields to intelligently organize themselves in response to novel problems and environments that they’ve never experienced, that their ancestors haven’t experienced, responding creatively in a way that seems to go beyond their inherited genetic repertoire. Mike is beginning to point to another source of order in evolution. He calls it the Platonic morphospace, and he wants to argue that forms have a kind of causal agency—that what we think of as minds are a gradient of patterns. At the bottom of that gradient are mathematical facts that we don’t think could have been otherwise. But as you ascend the gradient of these formal patterns in Platonic space, they become more and more agential; the minds become more and more intelligent.

I never would have imagined that I’d live to see this kind of shift at the heart of biology, where all of a sudden formal and final causality, purpose, and this field-like formative patterning that Levin points to become serious scientific hypotheses and research programs again. But here we are. As a process philosopher, I obviously want to encourage this kind of paradigm-changing science. But I also think the metaphysics is messy, and we need to think through what we mean by agency, what we mean by form, and the role of history and time—the role of chance alongside necessity, and then, in addition to chance and necessity, something like learning, something like agency: decision-making ability, intelligence.

We want to tell a naturalistic story in the modern age. But of course, anyone familiar with my work knows I’m not shy about bringing in theological concepts, because I think modern science is itself built out of components that are theological. If you’re going to talk about physical laws, if you’re going to talk about causal explanation, then at the end of the causal chains and the logical arguments there will be certain moments where you have to bite the bullet and say: nature is intelligible because there’s an intelligence at work.

Now, I am not an intelligent-design theorist or a creationist, and the reason is that they tend to be just as mechanistic as the materialists. I think organically. I know Mike has been trying to break down the machine/organism dichotomy, and I think this is really a terminological issue. I don’t necessarily disagree with what he’s saying there—but, playing a different language game than the one he’s playing, I’d still want to make distinctions between what’s usually called a machine and what’s usually called an organism.

So rather than use Whitehead’s terminology, let me make a distinction—three distinctions, really, that he makes, but in ordinary terms. I think making these distinctions helps us sort out this issue of agency, because I’ve been concerned that in the Platonic proposal Mike is making, organisms become puppets of the patterns. I’ve wanted to locate the agency differently. But maybe, again, it’s terminological. So one of the issues I want to work out with Mike tomorrow concerns what follows from this distinction.

Events occur—actual occasions, in Whitehead’s terms. Forms recur—eternal objects, in Whitehead’s terms. And organisms endure—societies, or historical routes, in Whitehead’s terms.

Whitehead makes these distinctions so that we can undertake a more concrete analysis of the process of reality, and I think they help us locate agency more rigorously. By making this metaphysical distinction between occurrences, recurrences, and endurances—the events that occur, the forms that recur, and the organisms that endure—I think we can illuminate the data Mike’s lab at Tufts is collecting. So this isn’t a rival metaphysics, necessarily. It’s an attempt to interpret the data, and to affirm the need for a structured space, a latent space of possibilities that is not separate from the physical world as a dualistic substance set apart from it, but that is nonetheless irreducible to how we normally understand that physical world. I agree with Mike about that. But making the distinction between occurrence, recurrence, and endurance helps us navigate the semantic thicket around this term agency.

Endurance is not a third thing alongside the other two. It’s not a third reality, domain, or level standing beside actual occasions and eternal objects. Recurrence is carried by occurrence. Whatever endures is a function of the recurrence of a pattern, and that recurrence is always carried by actual occasions—by occurrences, by events. Forms, patterns, eternal objects recur. Events, occurrences, never recur. So forms recur, they don’t occur; events occur, but they never recur. They are once-occurrent, unique. An organism endures because a route of occurrences keeps occurring that reenacts a recurrent form. That’s what a society is in Whitehead’s sense: a historical route with a definite characteristic that recurs. The persistence of a morphological pattern is nothing but the iterated occurring of a cellular collective’s own acts of feeling, moment by moment, being influenced by an inherited form.

An event is just what it is. You can’t describe it in terms of anything else; it’s singular, and it can’t recur. But an eternal object is what can be again. Eternal objects don’t occur; they only recur. They can be again. So what endure are societies, never occasions—and occasions themselves don’t endure. They arise, and they perish.

I think there’s an asymmetry here, because recurrence is ontologically parasitic on occurrence. This is Whitehead’s ontological principle: outside of actual occasions of experience, there is nothing. Eternal objects must in a sense be housed within actual occasions; they don’t float free in another dimension. Recurrences are ontologically parasitic on occurrences. There can be nothing that recurs except as the recurring of occasions that entertain that form, that pattern. This is a more Aristotelian view, in the way we typically characterize the Platonic–Aristotelian difference—and of course that characterization is a caricature of those two thinkers, but we understand the distinction being made. A pattern endures only because it’s borrowing that endurance from the events, the actual occasions, that ingress it.

So the forms, the patterns, are not the puppeteers; the organisms are not just passive clients subject to the dictates of the design of these abstractions. Patterns don’t act—that’s what makes them patterns, potentials, possibilities. The forms themselves are not the prime agents, because they don’t even persist on their own. They depend on actual occasions to ingress them, and to ingress them in a way that’s persuasive to their inheritors—to future occasions—so that those occasions decide to ingress them again, such that there’s a recurrence, and an endurance as a result. Endurance is always on loan from occurrences. It depends on the decisions of actual occasions whether or not an eternal object will endure.

Another metaphor I’ve used in thinking with—and in response to—Mike Levin’s work is this: the patterns are the notes being played on the piano. They’re not the player. You could say the morphology of the organism is the music, the song. The player is something subtler than the visible, measurable matter the organism is composed of, the molecular parts. There is something about the wholeness, the entelechy, the form and aim of an organism that’s not simply located in its parts. But is that just the pattern—at least a pattern in Whitehead’s sense, the recurrences, the eternal objects? I think we need to shift and concretize our awareness so that we recognize the role of occurrences, of actual occasions, and don’t give all the agency to the forms. Forms are more like the notes being played on the piano.

Let me build another image: a candle flame. It’s a dissipative structure. The shape of the flame is a recurrent form. A flame is a society of occasions of experience, in Whitehead’s terms—there’s a recurrent form that lets us identify it as fire, a definite characteristic by which we see, “Oh yes, that’s fire, there it is again.” It changes moment by moment; it’s a chaotic system. And yet it’s also the same, moment by moment—we see, “Yes, that’s fire, there it is again.” What we call combustion is a stream of perishing occurrences. Different molecules flow through the dissipative structure of the candle flame moment by moment, and that’s a stream of occasions in Whitehead’s terms. What endures—the enduring flame—is a form sustained through that relay of combustion events.

If we describe a flame that way, I don’t think anyone would say that the flame-shape itself, the pattern that gives it its form, is the agent responsible for the combustion, the agent actually burning the wax. The shape of the flame recurs—and this isn’t a static shape; fire is obviously dynamic—but all the shapes the fire takes have a family resemblance, one we recognize as recurring. So the shape recurs; the combustion, the burning of the wax, occurs; and the flame as an activity is what endures—what makes us say, “Yes, that’s the same fire, that’s the same candle burning.”

Now, when we’re in Michael Levin’s lab looking at multicellular animals—planaria, flatworms—seeking a target morphology, that target is the flame-shape. Each act of the cells, the metabolic activity and the gap-junction activity, is the combustion; those are the occurrences, moment by moment. And the organism itself is what endures—it’s the enduring flame, what persists through time. So a set point that can be rewritten—when Levin and his colleagues change the bioelectric field, using certain drugs to shift the charges of cells and redraw the pattern, so that you suddenly get a two-headed planarian—is a shift in which form the occurrings are recurring, a shift in what will recur across the occurrences that lead to the enduring organism in its developmental sequence. But the set point isn’t what burns the candle. The pattern of the flame, the pattern of the organism—that’s not what does the work. The burning does.

This is a subtle distinction. But I think it’s important, and I think it actually affirms everything Mike Levin is doing. It’s just a different metaphysical interpretation of the science.

That’s the thought I wanted to express. I’m speaking with Mike tomorrow afternoon, so I’d be curious what you all think of my framing. It’s always helpful to have feedback as I develop these ideas. Thanks for your attention.

I tried to situate this convergence within the older dialectic between Plato and Aristotle, and the more recent tensions between Darwin and Whitehead. Aristotle already brings form down into things; Darwin then deflates form into an accidental accumulation of functions filtered by survival. But Darwinism, especially in its neo-Darwinian form, became blind to the intelligence at play in development and to the creativity evident in macroevolution. I mentioned Whitehead’s critique of survival as an adequate explanation: “the art of survival is to be dead.” If survivability were the motive force of evolution, we would have no explanation for why organisms that are more fragile, sensitive, and complex, but comparatively deficient in survival power ever emerged. What we need is not a rejection of Darwinian historical contingency, but an account of form that integrates history and ingression, emergence and emanation.

Rupert clarified that morphic resonance is not primarily a theory of creativity, but of repetition: once a new morphic field has come into being, does repetition strengthen the habit of nature? The origin of genuinely new wholes can be interpreted in different ways—Bergsonian creativity, Platonic or theological ingression, materialist chance—but morphic resonance remains empirically testable regardless. We discussed the difficult question of similarity: whether resonance follows lineage, behavior, species, family, culture, or some more general field-like affinity. Rupert’s answer was pragmatic and empirical rather than definitional. Like Faraday’s field concept before Maxwell, morphic resonance need not yet specify the full mechanism in order to generate testable predictions. Similarity, in practice, may operate through overlapping fields—family fields, species fields, cultural fields—which interpenetrate and fuse in ways material objects cannot.

We also discussed crystals, protein folding, dog breeds, family constellations, and Darwin’s Lamarckian sympathies for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Rupert emphasized that Darwin himself was more holistic, physiological, and almost vitalist than later neo-Darwinians. He spoke of “the coordinating power of the organism,” a phrase that already points beyond the reduction of life to genes and selection. The case of deer antlers became especially important: if mutilations or injuries to antlers in one year reappear in modified form the next year, that seems far more naturally explained by morphic resonance than by a pre-existing Platonic form containing every possible accidental deformation.

The theological dimension then became unavoidable. If forms have agency, or if they function as lures and attractors, then we are already asking questions of final cause, value, and divine ordering. I brought in Whitehead’s distinction between God’s primordial envisagement of eternal objects and God’s consequent feeling of the world’s actual decisions. Rupert responded by opening a related but distinct path through the world-soul and the Cosmic Christ tradition: not every evolution of form need be placed directly in God the Father if there is an intermediate cosmic organism, a world-soul, within which fields, finite souls, and formative powers evolve. This led us to the deeper claim that changes in science are always also changes in natural philosophy, and finally in natural theology.

The conversation ended with the sense that the old mechanistic consensus is weakening not merely at the margins, but at the cutting edge of developmental biology and field theory. The question is no longer whether form can be reduced to matter, but which post-mechanistic account of form can best explain the evidence. Morphic resonance, evolutionary Platonism, Whiteheadian prehension, Bohm’s implicate order, the world-soul, and the field concept in physics may be different vocabularies circling the same breakthrough: nature is not made of inert matter externally arranged, but of living patterns, memories, and lures.

Love is a mystery drama. Its apex is so sublime it hurts. I am convinced that poetry—becoming the poet of one’s life—is the key to its meaning, though fashioning it be an endless task at least until death do us part and maybe then some. That is why a love letter is my favorite kind of poem.

Love letters try to cross the distance between lover and beloved. Love achieved would mean there is no need to write. Love letters are born of separation and misunderstanding, if not desperation. Love letters are suspension bridges held aloft by lines of longing, and like every bridge, finally grounded by each end of the gap they want to cross. The gap remains even if the bridge succeeds.

Love is always already heartbreak. I do not mean that love fails, but that it reveals the awesome impossibility of possession, whether of ourselves or of others. The desire to be one with my beloved will never make one of two, nor make me whole. No kiss, no embrace, no vow, no night spent bodies beside and inside one another can abolish the mystery of the utter otherness of the lover. The beloved remains beyond me as I remain beyond myself. We must, for otherwise we would not be free to love one another.

Desire begins in the dark, as lack. Like a seed buried in soil it reaches outward because it feels itself incomplete in comparison to the cool moisture below and the warm light above. The seed seeks by radiating longing in every direction. And what glory it creates with its elemental companions, what fragrant rainbows of flowers and sweet fruits erupt from the marriage of sun light, moon tides, and mud! Our senses overflow at the elemental edges of earthly life beneath the stars. We find ourselves influenced by the All, above and below, and yet we lose ourselves, vulnerable to one another’s enchanting romance novels. It turns out our bodies are not barriers but metabolic and sexual barometers beholden to the emotional atmospheres we inhabit; our souls are not substances but processes uncertain of who is safe to trust, or of whether we ourselves are.

Love is the most familiar stranger in all the worlds. We cannot have from someone else what we already are. Whatever in me can love her is already made of love. Whatever in her calls to me answers something love has already planted in our souls.

None of this leads me away from her. It leads me deeper in.

That is the paradox I try to live out in my love poems. Love is all there is or could be in the universe, and still I love her particularly. Not as an example of love, not as a symbol of woman, not as a temporary face of the eternal feminine, but as herself. Just her smile. The universal is granted no supreme reality by being made to float free of particulars. That merely makes it entirely irrelevant to actual life. The transpersonal comes through the personal or not at all. The divine will not return at the end of the world to save us from our mutual hatreds or indifference. Salvation is by love alone.

…

I performed two love poems at an open mic here in Chiang Mai last night: one for a woman I love on the other side of the planet, and one for Mary Magdalene, a face of the divine feminine. At first they felt like different poems. One was romantic, erotic, earthy. The other devotional, archetypal, heavenly. But as I read them, and especially as I have reflected on the responses I received afterward, I realized they both orbit the same sacred wound.

The woman across continents and Magdalene in the Garden of Eden are not one and the same. To mistake the actual woman for an archetype would be a profound betrayal to her singular soul. To make Magdalene into a mere projection of romantic longing would be to desecrate her. And yet the two poems speak to one another as love expressed through distance. In neither can the beloved be possessed. In both, the body is not an obstacle to revelation but its organ of perception.

Last summer, helped me see something important about the revisions I’d made to my prayer poem to Mary:

I feel danger in the deed: a man writing in praise of the divine feminine… The temptation is to turn my reverence into architecture that freezes her music so it is not forgotten, that builds a fortress to protect her. The masculine imagination rushes to erect temples around what first needs to be sat with in the dark and listened to. It wants to consecrate by classifying and commanding. Mystery is handled, carefully but clumsily, with a lamp in one hand and a sword in the other.

But Mary Magdalene does not deliver us a doctrine. She weeps for love lost, and for love redeemed. She is the devotion before the institution, the inner recognition of the Risen One before theology’s prohibitions, constrictions, and repressions. She turns around in metanoia when Love speaks her name. Her name in particular. Every love poem must remember this.

In addition to the unrevised prayer-poem to Mary Magdalene, I read this love letter:

…

Love poems can be a form of worship, but also a form of capture. They can illumine the beloved, or cage her inside the lover’s fantasy. It was reflected to me by several people in the audience last night that the poems conveyed a seeing and feeling that isn’t consuming, a desire that doesn’t claim ownership, letting eros become attuned attention rather than appetite alone. I was glad to hear it, since that was my intent; but I do not pretend to complete innocence. No one is innocent in love and war. Desire always has its hunger. The question is whether that hunger can learn to taste more tenderly, which is to say, to learn to listen.

…

Here is one of my favorite love songs by Henry Jamison, “Real Peach.” (It’s the second song that begins at 3:30; the first one, “Through a Glass,” is a great love song, too). Lyrics below.

Well, nighttime passes
But the dark remains
And I was feelin’ like a little child
But I am loathe to place blame
On that lioness-esque woman
Who will go here unnamed
She was looking in me for a lion
When she found it so tame

On that erstwhile May morning
I took the six downtown to Spring
And I was writing something elegiac
That I never learned to sing
But I think that it was this song
Just four years premature
And I remember crossing out the line
“All is fair in love and war”

Well, if all is fair in love and war
Then I don’t know what we are fighting for

‘Cause my baby she’s a real peach
Even when the night come crashin’ down
Real peach
And the nighttime rolls away, alright
And we’re comin’ back to the demon-killing work of love
My God

Well, nighttime passes
And the dark retreats
I hand it over to my upper angel
Who visits me in sleep
We’re in the field beyond the right and wrong
And the fallacy of form
Well you can call it what you wanna call it
I just say, “All is fair in love and war”

Well, if all is fair in love and war
Then I don’t know what we are fighting for
So if we don’t care
To fight no more
Let’s go upstairs and let’s shut the door

‘Cause my baby she’s a real peach
Even when the night come crashin’ down
Real peach
And the nighttime rolls away, alright
‘Cause my baby she’s a real peach
Even when the night come crashin’ down
Real peach
And the nighttime rolls away, alright
And we’re comin’ back to the demon-killing work of love
My God
Illuminate

…

Someone in the audience asked: “Who do you love more: she who shall remain nameless, or Mary Magdalene?” I said Mary lives in everyone, so I kind of want to have it both ways on that.

Another listener heard in the poems what I had not fully heard myself: both depend upon separation from the beloved, not simply as a source of pain, but as the condition that keeps the soul oriented toward the world. True love is not lack but lure. It draws us out of ourselves, not by allowing us to consume what we seek, but by making the world vivid, charged with meaning, unbearably articulate. Distance teaches deeper love by delaying and even by denying union.

Every lover knows this. Someone inevitably leaves the bed, boards the plane, grows old, dies. All forms of earthly love—romance, friendship, parenthood, marriage, collaboration, the fleeting communion between poet and listener—carry their end in their beginning. That love in these forms always ends is not an accusation. It is the pressure that makes love precious, that makes the poetry of life.

To love a mortal being is to consent to the gift of grief. Not later, when the loss arrives, but now, from the instant of recognition and devotion. Love is not other than a direct perception of perpetual perishing. The Moon wears many faces on her cycle through time. Hair grays, skin sags, even if eyes keep their twinkle. The world keeps turning. The love letters keep coming.

And what else would we live for?

The universal cannot rescue us from particularity. Love does not become more divine by becoming less personal. It becomes divine by risking flesh, time, error, distance, misunderstanding, longing, and death. Love incarnates.

Love is not the cure for heartbreak. Love is heartbreak transfigured. Love does not make two into one. It lets lack become relation. It lets love of the whole world’s soul and love for a soul co-relate.

The poems I shared last night came back to me through the ears and mouths of others changed. Less mine. I felt changed, too. Like I belong less to myself.

Love letters don’t close the distance. But they radiate in the darkness. Never as a final word, but as a prayer that we might learn to listen well enough to be answered.

Mary turns to face the Gardner. She smiles on the far side of the world. We cannot have from someone else what we already are ourselves. And yet realizing love is all there is or could be need not lead us out of love with one another. It only leads me even more deeply into love with her particularly, universally.

The comments and questions that took up the bulk of the meeting left me with much to chew on.

Here is how I introduced my talk (for the full explication of what I shared, see the “Spiral Genesis” post linked above or watch the video of the presentation below):

I’m a process philosopher, and I’m going to offer some fairly speculative ideas tonight. I think along the lines of Alfred North Whitehead, whom hopefully some of you are at least a little familiar with—I know Rupert is, and I know Wayne is. You might also detect some of the ideas of Charles Sanders Peirce in the background of what I’ll share.

As a way in: I’m going to be talking not only about biology—and in particular Stu Kauffman’s idea of the adjacent possible—but also about theology. And Peirce and Whitehead each have a distinctive way of getting into that subject matter.

When we talk about agency, we can frame it simply in terms of scientific inquiry, where we’re trying to observe and model biological systems. But if we take up Whitehead’s or Peirce’s very similar methodologies, there are basically three domains we need to consider and weave together in the larger speculative project I want to touch on today. The first is our common sense, everyday experience of being agents. We’ve built a whole society on the assumption that we possess some degree of freedom to decide how we behave and what we believe. That commonsense domain is one we more or less take for granted—including the scientists who do research on organisms and on the physical world.

Whitehead has a great line: “scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.” So from a Whiteheadian point of view—and from Peirce’s as well—science shouldn’t imagine that it’s in the business of explaining away our common sense presuppositions. The role of speculative philosophy, then, is to adjudicate between the common sense understanding of agency, on the one hand, and what inquiry—observation, experiment, and modeling—tells us about the nature of nature, on the other. There’s no question that science will sometimes upset and disturb common sense. But at the end of the day, science itself depends on common sense as well. The speculative ideas I’m going to offer today are an attempt to mediate between the two.

Charlie Munford: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Matt. That was wonderful—really deep. So much to respond to, I’m sure; all of us have lots of thoughts. So we’re going to go into the discussion part. Just as a reminder, at the bottom of your screen there’s a button that says “react,” and if you press it you’ll see a way to raise your hand. That’s how you ask a question in this format—it puts you in a queue, and I’ll try to go through people expeditiously. If you have follow-ups, try to keep them short so we can keep moving.

Before we do, I just wanted to quickly summarize what I heard, Matt, to refocus everyone. This meeting is about what process gives rise to biological intentions. The question I heard you asking is adjacent to that—the one you started with: are biological intentions predictable, in a sense pre-statable? You’re responding to Stu Kauffman’s idea of the adjacent possible, which basically says no. And you’re bringing Whitehead’s process philosophy to bear on it. In Whitehead, intentions arise through these lures of propositions, which are a combination of pure possibility—this infinite set of forms—and fact. So form and flow, as you said, are wave and trough; they arise together. And that gives us this metaphysics of God, or everything, as a developing whole—something not outside the universe controlling it, but embedded in and part of it. You called it historicizing physics, so that physics itself is developing—a concept we’ve definitely heard before. In fact, Rupert, as I recall, has even empirically investigated whether the constants of physics have migrated over time, which is fascinating.

So that brings us back to the question, slightly reframed. The way I’m hearing it, I’m trying to map it onto: where does the craving for function come from? Because we’re talking about exaptations, and embedded in that idea is already the idea of a novel function. So where the craving for function comes from—out of that combination of fact and possibility—is where I am right now. With that, I’ll turn it over, because I’ve said enough. I think the first is Richard.

Richard Watson: Thanks so much. It’s so easy to agree with all of that—it really resonates with me strongly. Also, Charlie, how do you do what you just did, summarizing so many interesting things and holding them all in one place at once? I totally can’t do that.

My question is much squidgier than that. Matt, I had a couple of small bits I missed that I wanted you to repeat briefly. You said there were three things in this view: creativity, something, and world. Can you tell me the something?

Matt Segall: God—God is the relationship between creativity and the axiological structure of possibility. Whitehead distinguishes these, while most theisms identify creativity with God, so that God is the creator. But Whitehead’s God is not a creator. They’re distinct: his ultimate category is creativity, which means even God is subject to it. God is the relator, instead of the creator.

Richard Watson: Cool, that helps. The other thing was this notion of historicizing physics. It makes sense that we’d want to talk about the history of electrons that makes them not all the same, because they all have different histories—and the history of the cosmos that makes it not unique, because there are other histories it could have had. But when they’re very far away from our sense of scale, they don’t look very agential. Far from our physical and temporal scale, they all look the same, like electrons, or they look like just one thing, like the cosmos—it only happened once. And that gives us a way to historicize, which is not different from agency-ifying everything. But they have an agency that’s relevant to a scale that isn’t so relevant to ours.

So it’s like: well, these are the processes and these are the eternal truths. But to the next layer up, those things look interchangeable. And then there’s a process that transfers one to another—and yet the process that transfers one to the other is also lawlike. And it’s like, ah, now I have to move up another level. So we have this kind of recursiveness to it. Is there any notion of that?

Matt Segall: What you’re recounting of historicization, I totally agree with, and I think Whitehead has something like what you’re describing. He’d describe the history of the universe as laying down a series of nested regimes of order. He calls them societies. Initially there’s what he calls the geometric society, which establishes rules of congruency. Within that, the electromagnetic society. And gradually these environmental societies shelter more and more complex forms of organization within them. So from our perspective it looks like electromagnetism’s laws are set. And yet if you rewind cosmic history, there was a point where contingent “decisions” were made by electrons to behave in a certain way; they could have made other decisions. Once that decision was made, it got locked into place. Looking back, it seems like a law—but thirteen billion years ago it was still contingent. It could have gone a different way. But I might be missing an aspect of your question about recursion—is there more you could fill in?

Richard Watson: No, I think that helps a lot. It’s like—we could list some societies and say there’s a chain of them, where, as you said, they shelter more and more complex forms of relating. So if we’re inside many complex forms of relating, it looks like we’re inside a lawful universe where the laws don’t change. And if we look into finer and finer resolutions of complex relating, things end up looking simpler, but there are more of them. There’s this electron and that electron and—there’s a whole lot of electrons, but they’re all the same. So the family splits, or unifies, as you go in different directions. I think that does speak to the recursion I was after.

Matt Segall: Yeah. Maybe we’ve all seen the movie Antz, which gives them each personalities. But when we look at the anthill, one ant’s as good as another. We could imagine a very large mind looking at human beings, and we might appear just like ants. That’s kind of what it’s like with electrons for us—one ant seems pretty similar to another.

Richard Watson: So they’re all ants, but it matters that there are a lot of them, and they’re all in slightly different relation to one another. And that’s how the colony does something that’s more than just a lot of ants. Cool.

Charlie Munford: Okay, the Kauffmans are next.

Stuart Kauffman: Matt, you’re really quite wonderful—just amazing. Did you ever know—this is not beside the point—Stephen Jay Gould? He and I are sort of the same age.

Matt Segall: No, I never met him, if that’s what you mean. But I certainly read many of his books.

Stuart Kauffman: When I used to listen to Steven, I thought I could play tennis like that—but I can’t. Listening to you is marvelous, and I want to thank you deeply. I think we’re probably going to agree that we’re somehow moving beyond amazing Newton, 340 years later, but it’s so wide open. I’m deeply glad for your representation of what I’m trying to say. Let me end with one more thing. In the past few months—well, maybe a year or so—I’ve tried to marry the idea of catalytic closure and constraint closure. Do you know about this yet?

Matt Segall: Yep. I’ve been spending time with your most recent book, and your earlier ones too.

Stuart Kauffman: Thank you. Okay, so give me a moment, because—whatever you said — form and flow, is related. So for those who may not know this, let me just tell you. Matteo Mossio and Maël Montévil came up with their wonderful idea of constraint closure. In truth, I’d been stuck for fifteen years—I wasn’t smart enough to get what they got. I then took it in a slightly different direction, Matt, that may be really important, though I’d never have gotten there without them. They say constraint closure is a set of constraints that mutually depend upon one another. I’m going to go in a slightly different direction that turns out to be fundamental.

Here’s the way in. What is work? It’s force acting through a distance. Then Atkins says: no, no—work is the constrained release of energy into a few degrees of freedom. So I tried to understand that. Take a cannon, which is a constraint, a boundary condition. The powder at the base, the cannonball, and the boundary-condition constraint constrains the release of energy. You don’t get a spherical wave in the explosion; the explosion propagates down the remaining degree of freedom—the bore of the cannon—and does thermodynamic work on the ball. Okay, I got it. Then I thought: I accept that with no constraints on the release of energy, you get no work. And, being a medical doctor and not a physicist—where did the cannon come from? It took work to make the cannon. Uh-oh. Newton needs boundary conditions, but he never tells us where they come from. I got as far as realizing somebody constructed the cannon—and I got stuck.

So in 2015 or ‘16, I saw constraint closure and said: that’s fundamental. I’m going to change what Matteo and Maël mean. I’ll mean that constraint B depends upon constraint A if and only if A is a boundary-condition constraint that constrains the release of energy into the few degrees of freedom that constructs B. So mine depends upon as a construct—it’s stronger. My favorite example is Gonen Ashkenazi’s nine-peptide autocatalytic set. He feeds in half-peptides from outside, and peptide 1 binds the two half-fragments of peptide 2, orients them in three-space, lowers the energy barrier to ligate them; then thermodynamic work is done, ATP breaks down to ADP, and it constructs a second copy of peptide 2. Peptide 2 does it for 3, and around the cycle, and 9 does it for 1. So this system is both collectively autocatalytic and has constraint closure. That’s what I mean by constraint closure.

I’ve been living with this for about a year and a half: we can define life as the union of catalytic and constraint closure. It’s both form and flow—the flow is the processes. And in a non-ergodic universe, where we’re present way above about 500 daltons, that now constitutes one fundamental sense of agency. I knew all of that. But about two weeks ago I was trying to understand what form is, so I looked up Aristotle’s form. I think this is a modern version of Aristotle’s form from 2,400 years ago—see what you think. For Aristotle, the form of the oak is the essence of this specific oak tree; it’s what makes the oak what it is. There’s a sense of wholeness in form that’s not there in mechanism and parts acting on one another. And I think this marriage of catalytic and constraint closure is the form. We lost the form. Form was central to philosophy for 2,000 years, and we lost it with Newton and entailing laws, which are syntactic. Form is semantic.

I’m beginning to try to understand this as a biologist: cells labor to construct themselves. They’re not constructed from the outside. As Feynman said, what I cannot construct I do not understand—and we cannot yet construct the dividing liver cell. I’m beginning to get the image of an anatomy of construction: inside a dividing liver cell, there’s all kinds of constrained release of energy that builds more constraints, in loops and cycles we cannot see yet. It’s easy to see in Gonen Ashkenazi’s case—some kind of anatomy of autopoiesis, the anatomy of internal construction. And we don’t know this.

Two more points. The RNA world says only template-replicating polynucleotides are a stable molecular form that allows heritability—so the selfish genome. But an autocatalytic set of proteins, which exists, or of RNA or DNA or small molecules, is a completely different stable form of heritability. And that means that over four billion years, the forms of organisms aren’t just carried in the genes; they’re carried in the ever-evolving Aristotelian form. Aristotle’s forms didn’t evolve, but this form has evolved over four billion years. It’s so mysterious. Somehow I’m confident something like this is true. It’s nowhere in medicine—we don’t have an understanding of how cells construct themselves. I trained in medicine and I’m in a biotech company. We don’t have the idea yet, Matt. We can’t see it yet, and I’m just stunned to a stop. Anyway—it’s marvelous listening to you, and I’m deeply grateful.

Matt Segall: Well, thank you, Stu. I can’t remember if it was reading one of your earlier books where I picked up this idea: Newton can describe how the apple falls from the tree, but not how it got up there in the first place. And the thing about Aristotle—he’s just a brilliant observer of the living world and of ontogenesis. He knew nothing of phylogenesis, nothing of evolution. He knew the universe as a static series of concentric spheres out to God, with God as the final cause. But his account of formal cause is very dynamic—it’s this movement from potential to actual. And with Darwin we get variation and selection, but Darwin assumes organization: organisms that want to survive.

Stuart Kauffman: Yes, you’ve got it. Let me throw in—Darwin gives us the filter of heritable variation and natural selection, and it’s brilliant and it’s right. But he never tells us how we get that which is filtered. How did we get life? How do we get variation of form? And thinking about Mike Levin’s morphologies—somehow those morphologies are Aristotelian forms that construct themselves. It’s so mysterious.

Matt Segall: I think the challenge is to bring Aristotle and Darwin together. And this is why I bring in the theological piece—which I’m often a bit embarrassed about, because it can upset scientists. But the imaginative background of mechanistic science is so theological, and we forget that. To really break out of the mechanistic paradigm means rethinking these theological assumptions. Aristotle is not a mechanistic thinker, but he has this view of the divine as final cause—thought thinking itself, beyond the eighth sphere—and that becomes the paradigm that all other forms of organization are trying to imitate. Whitehead does something analogous, but he evolutionizes it. For Aristotle, that divine thought thinking itself is totally unaffected by what happens in the universe; the universe is just copying it, and the divine can’t care what’s happening in the world. Evolution requires us to think differently—that there is no perfectly closed thought thinking itself at the peak of everything. We could still talk about the divine, but it’s got to be as an immanent lure. And that doesn’t just change how we think about science; there are deep existential shifts in our sense of what it is to be a human being and what we can hope for—major emotional consequences. So there are reasons some scientists holding tight to the mechanistic paradigm would resist it, and reasons religious people would resist it too, because it’s disturbing to think of God as not all-powerful, large and in charge. It’s a difficult needle to thread, but I think it’s our task.

Charlie Munford: Great. Sai, did you have a question? I think you might still be muted.

Sai: Thanks for that talk—incredibly interesting, powerful and intense, and it covered a lot of ground, most of which was outside my realm of understanding. I want to follow up on what Stu just said, and what was implicit in it, and also on what Richard asked and your answers—and it relates to the historicity of physics. When we talk about agency in biology, we talk about the ability of all organisms, down to bacteria, to do things. They act with this agency, but also with an ability to be aware of their environment—some sort of cognition. And you could add teleology, because they act for a reason, for a purpose; sometimes that purpose is just to stay alive or reproduce. That characteristic—all living organisms have it. I don’t see that happening in the physical universe, at least at the current time. Your answer to Richard was interesting: you said it happened early on, when decisions were made about how electrons would behave. That could really be true. But don’t you think we perhaps need a different word than the ones we use for life? Because we’re talking about a past historical thing that’s no longer applicable. Today, rocks don’t decide to fall down hills and volcanoes don’t think, “gee, I’d like to blow up.” We don’t see agency in the non-biological world. That may simply be, as you said, a question of perspective—we don’t have that perspective. But if so, I feel it would be useful to find a different word for it compared to what we see in life. How do you feel about that?

Matt Segall: That’s fair. Whitehead says metaphysics, like all sciences, has its instruments that it experiments on. In the case of metaphysics we don’t have telescopes or microscopes—we experiment on the instrument of language itself. So we’re constantly searching for novel phraseology to capture really general ideas. Whitehead reaches for a word like feeling and generalizes it so that it applies to pulses of light just as much as to a bacterium swimming up a glucose gradient because it tastes something yummy. Whether that’s a helpful way of speaking remains to be seen, but we have to make choices about what words we use. And Whitehead does distinguish biological life from what’s going on in the chemical and physical world, in the sense that cellular life seems able to originate novelty in its behaviors and decisions that isn’t found in its lineage. A photon will carry the same vibratory frequency forever, until it’s interfered with; a cell can make real breaks with its causal past and do something new. If you’re around a dog and clap your hands really loud, it depends on the dog, or on the mood of the same dog, how it reacts—it’s not a simple mechanism of cause and effect that behaves the same way every time. So agency intensifies as you go up the scale. But Whitehead would say there’s no sharp line, no ontological gap, between physics, chemistry, and the first cell that needs explaining. There’s some basal form of agency—which he relates to what he calls prehension or feeling—present all the way down. Mike Levin says something similar, that agency is a continuum or spectrum in nature. I’d want to make some distinctions, though—I’m not as ready to give up the machine/organism distinction as he is. Even though agency shades down all the way, machines are assembled in a different way. Maybe if he means “machine” in a way that’s assembled at the nanoscale and more like organisms, then that’s a different question.

Sai: That was great.

Charlie Munford: Mary?

Mary: Hi, everyone. Thanks for this discussion, Matt. I think we share a lot of interaction with the integral world as well. I’ve been following your work for a while, and it’s great to talk to you. I have a question about the nature of holons—the turtles all the way down—and what you describe as the societies. Have you had any thoughts about what the invariance might be of these societies, and whether you think they’re continuous, recursive, or rhyming—maybe from the ingression from the platonic space all the way down to, say, bio-civilizations and endosymbiosis? It seems like there may be some habits that are repeated in a rhyming or fractal fashion. I’ll mute for your answer.

Matt Segall: It’s hard not to see the self-similarity at different scales in cosmic evolution—how, in Whitehead’s term, societies take form. A galaxy is a society of stars; a star is a society of atoms; and they each have their lifespans. Galaxies can die, in the sense that the spiral form that allows new stars to emerge breaks down for different reasons. And stars have their life cycle. The astronomer Eric Chaisson describes multiple generations of stars in terms of a metric he calls energy rate density, and suggests we can understand stars as evolving and becoming more complex as heavier elements are produced. So there is a self-similarity at different scales in nature and evolution. But at the biological level there are major evolutionary transitions that make the amount of novelty that can be produced increase rapidly—so it’s not all the same across scales. There are major transitions, but I think there’s a deeper self-similarity at work, and it’s not a coincidence; it’s a deep organizing principle.

Mary: Thank you. Hold on—starting at the highest level, these societies: are we talking about the pre-physical, the substrate prior to what we’d understand, or outside of it?

Matt Segall: I like Arthur Koestler’s term, the holon—something that’s both whole and part. A cell is a whole, but it’s also a part of a multicellular organism, and so on. That nesting relationship is what I was trying to describe with societies enveloping one another, providing backgrounds of order within which more complex order can be sustained. There are all these things the universe needs to keep doing for us as biological organisms to stay alive, far beyond the chemistry inside our skin. If the deeply canalized habits of electromagnetism were to change, we’d immediately break down; other fundamental constants are constant enough that we stay alive. All of that has to be assumed as pretty stable in order for the dynamic stuff in our metabolism to keep doing its thing. So holon is a fine word. There are all sorts of distinctions we could make about different kinds of societies. Some societies in Whitehead’s sense are living, and he’d talk about a dominant monad, percipient event, or presiding occasion of experience—in a vertebrate organism, the environment gets filtered through our senses and nervous system, and that information gets channeled into a presiding occasion. Plants are a little more democratic in their organization, to use a political metaphor, than animals, which are more monarchical. This is Whitehead’s metaphor. So they’re different kinds of societies, not all the same—but again, at different scales, patterns repeat.

Mary: I’m curious what you think the recurring patterns might be. I’ve outlined what I think are the invariances of a holon—perhaps I could send it to you, and you could tell me how far you think it might go in either direction, or if I just missed something obvious. Thank you.

Matt Segall: Sure—please do share.

Charlie Munford: Thank you, Mary. Rupert?

Rupert Sheldrake: Thanks very much, Matt—really stimulating, lots I loved about it. I was interested when you got to the idea of eternal objects being able to be modified or changed through what actually happens. This is the emphasis on creativity. I’m more influenced by Bergson than Whitehead—or at least I read Bergson first—and Bergson has an enormously strong emphasis on creativity, as in his book Creative Evolution. So I like that. I’ve been thinking recently about Michael Levin’s idea of platonic forms; he now has this idea that they can evolve, be modified depending on what happens. This is very similar to what I’ve called for years morphic resonance—the idea that there are formal causes throughout nature, through what I call morphic fields, and that these are influenced by what’s happened in the past. My model is that there’s a direct influence from the past to the present, giving a kind of collective memory in each kind of thing. His model is that the form comes from outside space and time, comes into space and time, then what happens affects the form outside space and time, and when it comes in again it’s different. It gives rise to essentially the same predictions. I think of mine as a kind of evolutionary Aristotelianism—and I loved what you said about Darwin and Aristotle—and his as a kind of evolutionary Platonism. Very obvious when it comes to actual empirical tests.

And in terms of empirical tests, when you talk about evolutionary physics or historicizing physics—I’ve actually been trying to test this, and I wonder what you think of the possibility of tests. Although electrons have been doing the same thing for an awfully long time and are in deep grooves of habit, there are things in the physical world that are new, truly creative. The realm I’ve concentrated on is synthetic chemistry. Chemists make thousands of new organic compounds every year, and they crystallize them—so there are thousands of new crystal forms coming into being every year that haven’t existed before. According to evolutionary Platonism or morphic resonance, you’d expect them to form more easily the more often they’ve happened, as the habits grow up. And it’s well known that new compounds become easier to crystallize as time goes on. One of the tests I’ve done recently is changes in melting points. If compounds become more stable, more habitual, it should be harder to disrupt them—and you disrupt a chemical by heating it up until it reaches a melting point. So I predicted that melting points of new compounds should go up. And in a survey of hundreds of organic chemicals, it turns out practically all of them do go up—by between two or three degrees or more. We’re not talking fractions of a degree. So I think this historicizing of physics is testable. There’s already evidence suggesting a kind of memory in the physical world, or at least the chemical world. One could also do experiments on Bose–Einstein condensates: you can make a new one at 0.1 or 0.01 of a degree above absolute zero, which would probably never have existed in the whole history of the universe—the ground temperature of the universe is 2.7 degrees Kelvin. If you make a new condensate in the lab and keep doing the same experiment, you might observe either evolutionary Platonism or morphic resonance, by seeing the rate speed up. And the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin also suggested the evolution of laws of nature; he thinks it would only happen at the quantum level. If Smolin’s right, it should happen in Bose–Einstein condensates, even if it doesn’t happen in chemical crystals. So I wondered how much you see this as an empirical question too.

Matt Segall: I’m familiar of course with your proposals to test some of these things, but this melting-point data is very interesting. As a speculative philosopher, I’m always very happy when an experimentalist says an idea I’m proposing can be tested—I think that’s great. But I think the issue with this idea of fixed laws and constants is less an empirical matter than a theoretical one. It’s pretty well established that when we go out to measure these things—the speed of light, which you’ve written about—the speed of light being a constant is a postulate. When we try to measure it, it’s never exactly the right speed. So it’s not an empirical issue so much as a theoretical one: we create models where the laws have to be fixed, then filter the observations through the laws and the models. The effective theorization of physics is a very powerful method—but again, it’s mistaking the model for the reality, when the empirical reality is, as you’re suggesting, that these things do change, and change in interesting ways that suggest an interplay between the actual and the potential, where there’s a non-local learning process occurring. Physical distance in metrical spacetime doesn’t put a limit on formal causality. It puts a limit on efficient causality, but not formal. That’s huge. We’re missing a lot if we don’t take that into consideration.

Rupert Sheldrake: That’s a really interesting point—that there’s no limit on formal causality through space. That’s terribly important, I think. I’ll think about that.

Charlie Munford: Thanks, Rupert. Henry?

Henry: I really enjoyed your talk. When you discuss form and flow, the relationship is biologically quite interesting—just as Dr. Kauffman said, there’s an interdependence, but also a co-evolving relationship. For evolution, we think three key components are always involved: information itself; a carrier, for example different species; and the ecosystem. The three are simultaneously evolving, so none can be independent—and the relationship transforms into one another, which is fascinating. The information may be most fundamental: they use energy, they change the form, and the form provides the carrier for information, so information can pass on and become new information. At the same time, the ecosystem defines the boundary of selection. Previously people separated each of these; now we realize they’re not separate. For example, when the environment is in crisis, the conditions change, the information feeds back to the genome, and the genome goes through genome chaos—randomly creating new information and finding the right carrier, a new species, and then the information is preserved.

Interestingly, Darwin never discussed evolution as directional. So what is the direction? Information complexity increasing—that’s the direction. Every time, under stress, the form-and-flow relationship comes into conflict, and the information changes itself. The organization becomes more and more complex because information complexity increases. With this, we can even address what Mary asked about recurrent patterns. Looking back at the history of evolution, there’s always a two-faced evolution: macroevolution reaches first, to create the new system; microevolution follows, to duplicate it. So from beginning to end, to the society, it’s the same thing every time—you change the information, find the new suitable carrier and a different societal form. And evolution is all about conservation; 99% of it is conservation. Now we realize the biological system is different from the physical system: only the biological system can self-create information. All the genetics, everything, is a constraint. So Darwin missed the point—he missed the constraint, and constraint is the most important thing in evolution. Creativity only happens when the ecosystem has a problem, when the form-and-flow relationship is in conflict—that’s innovation, because otherwise they don’t get the chance. So I hope you can share some of your philosophical thinking on this as another way of thinking about evolution. Because gradually the cognition can become so complicated—humans can choose the environment, even choose places larger than Earth to live in; we’ve completely become the opposite of deterministic. But initially, biological systems have very little cognition, and this process is reflected in information complexity. How do you like this framework?

Matt Segall: It all sounds very much congruent with what I’m suggesting. We need to understand evolution as an integrated process—what’s evolving? It’s the whole organism–environment nexus. And this question of information as what makes life distinct is, I think, what you were getting at: life creates novel information.

Henry: Yes. Give you one example: when we try to kill a cancer cell, instantly all the chromosomes shuffle. Each configuration is a new set of system information. So there’s some strange power guiding them. The biological system knows, but it only knows a little—it only knows to increase the probability in general; it doesn’t know the specificity. And natural selection favors the specificity. That’s the story of how the information becomes more complex each time. They only know that they need a mechanism to get a more varied set of variables. That’s about all I’ve got to say.

Matt Segall: In Whitehead’s book The Function of Reason, he talks about the Darwinian account in terms of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest—Spencer’s term—and says that if survival were really the only factor, we’d have no explanation (and this is to your point about directionality) for why organisms comparatively deficient in survival power—more complex, more fragile organisms—would ever evolve. So Whitehead thinks there must be something more, which is why the question of agency is so important: organisms are able to respond creatively to environmental changes in ways that don’t seem accounted for just by inheritance from their lineage. This is another thing Mike Levin is discovering—that there’s creativity in living cells that seems truly intelligent, not just spontaneous in the sense of random. It’s goal-seeking.

Henry: Right. If you look at the history, all the different species have been replaced. What’s left is that the information becomes more complex. That’s the only fact left—everything else, the carrier, is replaced. So that’s a fact we have to think about.

Matt Segall: There are so many questions about information—that would be a whole other two hours, to get into what’s meant by it. The idea of information being stored in a genome always struck me as a new form of preformationism. Information is always, as Bateson would say, a difference that makes a difference—and I’d add, a difference that makes a difference to somebody, to some organism. If there’s any information in biological processes—and clearly it’s meaningful to talk that way—it’s not stored in a particular molecule. It’s as much stored in the whole intracellular matrix as in the environment and the whole series of historical environments a lineage has lived through.

Henry: Right now they do have a mechanism to preserve the information—we need to identify which one, the karyotype coding. But we can discuss that later on. Thank you.

Matt Segall: I’d like to understand that point better.

Charlie Munford: Thank you, Henry. Alicia?

Alicia Juarrero: Thank you, Matt. I’m really appreciative of your exegesis of Whitehead, because I’m trained in philosophy and I never understood Whitehead—the neologisms just killed me. I was particularly struck by your emphasis on how he allows for a historicization of physics. Historicizing, localizing physics is straight down my avenue; I like that a lot. It’s the going-up side that concerns me, because at this point language matters. I’m upset by the idea of neoplatonism—from Levin, from Chalmers, from a lot of these folks—which is partly why, if I had to choose, I’d go more with your Aristotelian approach. But I have a problem with that too. For Plato, forms were eternal, unchanging, fixed, rigid—so the question was how they get into matter. But Aristotle faced the same problem. There are two books I really rely on: Depew and Weber’s Darwinism Evolving, and Lennox and Gill on Aristotle, saying the relationship between formal, efficient, and final cause in Aristotle was never made particularly clear. That’s one reason I think language is important.

I’m not crazy about the idea of Aristotelian evolution, because Aristotle believed in forms just as much as Plato—he just didn’t believe there was a separate realm where they could exist independently. For Aristotle the form always exists embodied, embedded in a particular thing. So for Aristotle there’s no evolution; there’s only what we’d call development or specification—which you suggest is the role of the propositions, that they specify the eternal objects. But that suggests to me that it’s just a question of specification, a technicality—the fifth decimal point of the existing form. I was struck that at the beginning you said it’s a price too high to pay. It seems to me almost a lower price to say: look, the cosmos is creative. It throws off emergent properties that are unpredictable—and I’d say something different from Stuart here; I wouldn’t say it’s a different organization, I’d say the topology changes altogether. So it is creative. And then just dispense with the whole notion of eternal objects—dispense with all of it—and say there’s a mechanism, and I’m perfectly happy calling it enabling constraints, constitutive constraints, regulatory constraints; it’s constraints all the way down and all the way up. In each case you get emergent properties qualitatively different from the ones before. A tornado is a dissipative structure, yes, but it doesn’t have the properties living things do; and human beings have properties that lower animal and plant forms do not. So why do you really think it’s a price too high to pay to forget the whole notion of the eternal? It almost sounds like trying to keep the Ptolemaic theory going by keeping the notion of God, the notion of eternal life. If you chuck all of that and just say there’s a tendency in the universe toward increasing coherence—autocatalytic closure, then constraint closure on top of it, giving you something else, and so on—why isn’t that an option?

Matt Segall: That’s a very good question, Alicia. I’m tempted to say there are cat people and dog people, and there are Platonists and Aristotelians.

Alicia Juarrero: Sure—but my point is they’re the same insofar as both believe eternal forms are eternal, unchanging, and fixed.

Matt Segall: Let me give different examples of the same thing happening at different scales. A mathematician engaged in the creative effort to trace out a new pattern never conceived before. Or an organism that’s experienced a mutation in development, where a new function is discovered as a result. In these cases of creative advance into novelty, the space of possibilities being explored or dipped into—the possibilities aren’t just arbitrarily related. There’s a structure to possibility.

Alicia Juarrero: Oh, correct, correct.

Matt Segall: We could say that structure is established just by adjacency to actuality, and that it isn’t there already, definite, before an actual organism—a living mathematician or a cell—dips into it.

Alicia Juarrero: But why does it have to be an outside entity, like a scientist? Why can’t the constraint dynamics—the recursive aspect, the constraint-closure aspect—be the creative thing? And what it’s created is real new potential, real new possibility. It doesn’t need an efficient cause that’s outside, something outside producing the boundary conditions—which is what Polanyi tried to do. Polanyi was perfectly happy with self-organization until you got to boundary conditions; then he wanted to make sure something outside, some entity or deity, set them. Why not say that’s the key thing about Stuart’s autocatalysis—they create their own boundary conditions, which is in fact what they’re doing?

Matt Segall: I accept that part. I’m trying to walk a line between that and where I hear Mike Levin going—where he gives basically efficient-causal power to the forms; the agency comes from the forms, in Mike’s view.

Alicia Juarrero: No, it should be formal—not efficient causality. It’s a form, but formal, not something that pre-existed in any way, shape, or form. It’s true novelty. Why not? It seems simpler—it’s Occam’s razor. It beats postulating eternal objects and all the rest of it.

Matt Segall: Right. There’s both an axiological side and a logical side to it: this realm of possibility seems ordered, and we, as organisms, in some way ingress that order.

Alicia Juarrero: I think that second part is questionable. New order is qualitative novelty, and it is new. And—you’re absolutely right—it brings axiology in with it, because the function can be better, more efficient, more parsimonious. So you do have valence, qualitative value coming in with every new product. But it’s endogenous. That’s where I thought you were going with the panentheism.

Matt Segall: Well—if you get a chance to read the longer essay I prepared, I’m trying to lay out Whitehead’s distinction between definiteness and determinateness. I know you don’t like his neologisms or the seeming scholastic machinations of his metaphysics, but in questions like this, I’m trying to have it both ways. I really don’t want to hypostatize a separate realm of already-determined forms that we’re just trying to copy.

Alicia Juarrero: Correct. I like that. Correct, correct.

Matt Segall: But there’s a subtler point that keeps me thinking with Whitehead—his account of an intensive ordering of what he calls eternal objects, and the grading of their relevance for each occasion of experience in the life history of an organism—that for some reason I’m not able to let go of. Because then I feel like I lose the ability to understand the structuring of possibilities.

Alicia Juarrero: You’re pushing on exactly the right place—the constraint dynamics, I’d think. Any new creation, because it’s creating new possibilities, is almost by definition multiply realizable. And that opens up the actual realization further down. But whatever is brand spanking new has got to be a multiply realizable reality. I don’t want to use the word form, because then we’re buying into the fixity, the rigidness, the unchangingness, the universality. And if you really believe physics is going to go historical, then that’s got to be all the way up and down.

Matt Segall: It’s such a subtle issue—and I’m with you in what you’re resisting.

Alicia Juarrero: No, I’m very interested, because it is certainly part of the tradition, and I’d like to see what aspect of it can still fit in to this new way of looking at the universe that I’m trying to carve out. Thank you—it was very good. I understood a lot about Whitehead that I didn’t before.

Charlie Munford: Thanks, Alicia. Okay, we’ll move on to Kate Kauffman.

Kate Kauffman: First of all, Matt—that was an absolutely exquisite love letter to Stu. You are a soul son, clearly, and there are many of us who want to keep building on that foundation. So bless you, my son. And Alicia—I think there really is a beautiful space where we can have our cake and eat it too about flexibility and eternal form. Mike Levin says if you ask why long enough, you end up in the math department; I’ve been hanging out there, thinking about the quantum physics, and there’s a lot of good open territory to mine. What Stu and I were talking about—form and function and this idea of eternal form—what if the historicity of everything that’s ever happened builds an ongoing record, which would give us a kind of eternal nature? I think that’s part of what we need to add to the story, in terms of what would support theological ideas like reincarnation and connections between people across lives—like reiterated trajectories in Hilbert space. So you have historicity, context—all up for grabs in terms of history—while honoring the internality and agency that living systems have.

So the way to have the constraints is to add three new closures I’ve been working on. First, clarifying identity closure: how the information works top-down and bottom-up—you’re really an expert in that, Alicia, bless you. Second, enhancing Pattee’s idea of semantic closure, which puts the axiology back in. And, here in the math department, we’re looking at self-referential systems—Gödelian openness in mathematics. So there’s a beautiful space where we can talk about iterative self-reference, distinctions being made constantly through this iterative process, which is part of the transition and translation between the possible and the impossible. And that’s something the agent does fresh in every moment, through its own historicity, contextuality, and perspective—but anchored to axiology through the structure of identity, and the fact that any geometric structure is a resonance cavity. You can anchor the balancing in gauge symmetry—the “yes, this form is right for me” or “that form is wrong for me”—in the mathematical structure and gauge theory. So I’m really excited to go forward with all of this.

Matt, I’m thrilled—a fine young mind with such a unique mastery of language. I’ve never seen anyone as close to Stu as you are in terms of verbal fluidity. And Alicia, I think there’s a lot of hope, by adding identity closure and enhancing semantic closure to clarify what we mean by information closure—then we get to have our cake and eat it too, and a whole new way of thinking about the internal domain and our subjective access into it, particularly the role of emotion. By the way, evolution is a great story, but we need to go back to Darwin, who wrote about emotion in man and animals. He had that from the beginning, but it was laundered out over time with the big push to stay away from anything religious. We’re not there anymore—we’ve come full circle back to what we mean by soul, by spirit. Spirit is really this process, this flux, this flow in any kind of form, that may be eternal, that’s constantly within our own ability to reconfigure. So these are good times; there’s room for optimism. My question for you, Matt: how deep are you going into the math and physics of this? Because everything you’re saying, I think there’s territory to mine there.

Matt Segall: I appreciate the compliments about my verbal facility, but my math is not there—I can’t claim to be making any advances on the mathematical side. I’m always looking for colleagues to collaborate with who are. It’s funny that I’d get into a philosopher like Whitehead, whose method is so mathematical—all his concepts are informed by his work on Principia with Russell, and how and why that project failed. Trying to ground arithmetic in the logic of sets ended up not working; they ran into all these paradoxes, and Gödel came decades later to prove why. But Whitehead was liberated by that to do speculative philosophy—both guided by the example of mathematics and recognizing how mathematics can mislead philosophers. Spinoza, brilliant as he is, thought you could geometrically prove a speculative philosophical view, for example. Whitehead would say philosophy is not about proof; it’s the search for premises.

Kate Kauffman: Indeed. And Peirce has his abductive form of reasoning, which is very relevant here too.

Matt Segall: Yeah—but I’m not making any advances on this mathematically, unfortunately.

Kate Kauffman: Let me finish with this: I’m very fortunate to be privy to the mind of Lou Kauffman, one of the leading theorists on topology and knot theory. He’s helping me fill in the gaps that a bad education left. So I’m happy to pass along—there’s a lot of beautiful stuff about self-reference and the Laws of Form with Spencer-Brown, a whole way of thinking. We’ll talk later. Let me do as much of the heavy lifting as I can, and then pass it along to you.

Matt Segall: That sounds great. Division of labor.

Kate Kauffman: Exactly.

Charlie Munford: Thank you all so much—this was a great meeting. Before I close, I want to read a comment from Wayne Lewis, who had a question burning him up but then had to leave. It’s not actually a question, it’s a comment, so I’ll read it: “Alicia, have you by any chance read Tim Eastman, Untying the Gordian Knot? It unpacks a great deal. The big leap is allowing yourself to admit that pure potentia with internal relations—which is what Whitehead meant by forms—are an aspect of reality just as actuality is. Many problems evaporate. What Whitehead meant by ‘eternal’ was different from how people interpret Plato. Eternal, for Whitehead, means that potentia arise and increase because of historical, unchangeable fact, as time evolves.” So that was just a comment, but he wanted to be sure we heard it.

Alicia Juarrero: Thank you—I’ll look into Eastman.

Charlie Munford: In any case, we’re at time, so I’ll bring this to a close. Thanks so much, Matt. I really want to extend an invitation for you to come back and join future meetings as a member and participant, because we appreciate your work—it’s given us a ton of resonance with many of the thinkers in this group.

Matt Segall: Thanks so much, Charlie. It was a joy to be here. I enjoyed all the questions and challenges—definitely more to think through. Very generative for me.

Charlie Munford: Fantastic. We’ll be coming back to some of this material later in the summer—Stu Kauffman has a session in August, and before that another session with Vadim Backman at Northwestern about the computational properties of the genome. Exciting stuff to come. Join us again, and thank you all so much. Bye, everyone.

I have since been invited to present at the next meeting of the Agential Biology Institute. This article serves in part as my preparation for that talk. Perhaps it will also be of interest to some of you!

What follows is an attempt to once again gather my thoughts on the topic of evolution. I want to argue that the agential turn in biology, of which Stuart Kauffman has been among the most prophetic instigators, cannot be quarantined within biology alone. It demands a speculative renovation of our basic categories in two directions at once: downward, into physics, so that we come to see that the supposedly universal, context-independent laws and constants of mechanics are special abstractions from a wider historical flux of cosmogenesis; and upward, into theology, so that “God”—or the origin of intelligibility that anyone who cares about truth, goodness, or beauty must presuppose in some sense or another—ceases to be conceived as an impassive eternal engineer who stamps the gears on a finished clock-work world, and becomes instead something more like an eternally evolving embryo.

In my maybe mad mind, these two movements are inseparable. “The way up and the way down are the same way,” as Heraclitus put it. To historicize physics is to deny that there exists any pre-determined state space from which the future of the universe could be deduced. And to deny a final blueprint is also to transform what we might mean by the word “God.” To deny a pre-determined state space and so a deducible future is not only to deny our knowledge of the future, but also God’s.

The Reality of the Possible and the Closure of Constraints

Kauffman affirms that reality is made of more than what is actual. Or you might say less than what is actual, if the possible is precisely what is not. As Plato put it in the Sophist: “Not-being is a sort of being.” But the cannot and the not yet refer to different universes of possibility: to the eternally impossible or inconsistent and the futurity of the probable, respectively. Possibility is both already formed and forever fluxing. It throws being into becoming just as it gathers becoming into beings. Whitehead quotes Plato’s seemingly contradictory line several time in his corpus:

“…the notions of negation and of inference can be derived from that of inconsistency. Thus the whole movement of logic is pro­vided for. We may notice that this basis for logic suggests that the notion of frustration is more akin to finite men­tality; while the notion of harmonious conjunction is derived from the concept of a monistic universe. It is for philosophy to coördinate the two aspects which the world presents.

…this basis for logic enlightens our understanding of process, which is a fundamental fact in our experience. We are in the present; the present is always shifting; it is derived from the past; it is shaping the future; it is passing into the future. This is process, and in the universe it is an inexorable fact.

But if all things can be together, why should there be process? One answer to this question embodies a denial of process. According to this answer process is mere appearance, devoid of significance for ultimate reality. This solution seems to me to be very inadequate. How can the unchanging unity of fact generate the delusion of change? Surely, the satisfactory answer must embody an understanding of the interweaving of change and perma­nence, each required by the other. This interweaving is a primary fact of experience. It is at the base of our concepts of personal identity, of social identity, and of all socio­logical functionings.

Meanwhile, another aspect of the relationship between inconsistency and process must now occupy us. Incon­sistency is the fact that the two states of things which constitute the respective meanings of a pair of propositions cannot exist together. It denies a possible conjunction be­tween these meanings. But these meanings have been brought together in the very judgment of inconsistency. This is the sort of perplexity that Plato alluded to, when he makes one of his characters say, ‘Not-being is a sort of being.’” (Modes of Thought, 52-53).

Language fails at the limits of its own negation. Possibilities, too, are real, and without being actual. Mechanistic physicalism is uninitiated into the coherent contradictions of possibility. It remains inadequate to the creative fact of evolution, wrongly imagining that possibilities exist only as a pre-specified state space, as if all of natural history was merely a complicated trajectory through a list of optional moves already laid out in advance. This assumption is explicit in Newtonian mechanics and persists in epistemological form in statistical-mechanical accounts of probability. Classical physicalism knows only deducible futures or calculable frequencies. Kauffman has argued cogently that, in its old mechanistic mode, natural science cannot account for the open-ended evolution of the biosphere.1

His point about Darwinian exaptations remains decisive as a refutation of mechanistic biology. Evolving organisms are not browsing a prix fixe menu of morphologies. Kauffman argues life creates its own adjacent possibilities and then wanders into some subset of them, which enable the next in turn. The possible functions of an organ or protein cannot be determined in advance of organismic becoming, whether agential, accidental, or both. To borrow an image from Whitehead, Kauffman’s affirmation of “Kantian wholes” throws a match into the powder keg, blowing up the whole mechanistic neo-Darwinian workshop. An organism is a Kantian whole, a being whose parts produce one another for the sake of the whole. As Kauffman frequently reminds us, our beating hearts have countless causal consequences, but only a subset of them contributes to keeping us alive. A function is not an isolable property of a part (like a “selfish gene”), since it can only be defined in relation to the organism for whom it matters, and in relation to the environments it inhabits.

The philosophical idea of a Kantian whole has been given a rigorous natural scientific articulation by Montévil, Mossio, and others (see especially 2015, 2016). Their distinction between “generic” and “specific” objects captures something important. The theoretical objects of physics are said to be generic in the sense that they obey the same equations under the relevant idealizations. Every electron or hydrogen atom is treated as identical, with their historical individuation bracketed.2 Organisms, by contrast, are specific objects, meaning they are historically individuated beings whose phase spaces are unprestatable, who each to varying degrees qualitatively differ from others and even from themselves across development. Organisms constantly undergo functional transformations of constraints that alter the terms by which their prior organization might have been defined. Biological organization, on M&M’s account, becomes legible to scientific theorization as a special exception that within carefully defined limits can still be lawfully modeled in terms of a “closure of constraints.”

M&M distinguish open energetic process from the relative stability of forms of constraint that channel those processes at relevant time scales. In physics, constraints (eg, an inclined plane) are often externally given and independent of the processes they constrain.3 In organisms, constraints are always inseparable from the processes they constrain. Closure is their term for the mutual dependence or community of causality whereby constraints maintain processes that maintain constraints. Organizational closure is never complete, else organisms would be immortal and incapable of evolution. Thermodynamic openness and organizational closure are intended to be complementary concepts. The organism persists not by remaining the same object shaped by the same symmetries but by metamorphosizing from one regime of closure to another. An organism is an improvised melody that survives by resonating with (modifying and being modified by) its environment, not a rock that persists by resisting alteration.

Historicizing Physics

In their earlier work, Montévil and Mossio offer an epistemology of biology. They mark the living being as a distinctive kind of scientific object, protecting biology from reduction to physics by showing that biological symmetries are local and historically contingent. But they do not take the further speculative step into evolutionary cosmology by asking whether the supposedly ahistorical generic objects of physics are themselves abstractions from a deeper history, emergent products of our specific cosmic epoch rather than eternal givens. They historicize biology to distinguish it from physics. The Whiteheadian move I am proposing is that we learn from biology how to historicize physics.4

This does not mean physics should abandon mathematical idealization. Physics has earned its tremendous theoretical and technological power by modeling many phenomena as if they were ahistorical. Recognizing that physics, too, is historical—in both senses, ie, as natural history itself and as the history of physics as a science—just means never forgetting that we are working with idealizations. The success of the method has seduced many physicalists into mistaking a successful method for a finished ontology. Nature is not a bloodless dance of numbers. From the standpoint of a speculative biology enlarged into an organic cosmology, the law-like regularities that physics discovers are better understood as widespread habits, stable routes of inheritance, enduring societies, or patterns of process that have achieved such depth of repetition that they appear ageless to us. Each electron seems interchangeable with every other electron not because it stands outside history but because what Whitehead calls “the electromagnetic society” is among the most generic social habits shaping our cosmic epoch, enormously stable relative to our biological lifespans, but still an achievement of evolutionary becoming and not an eternal design imposed from beyond it.

Eternal Objects, Novel Possibilities, and a Propositional Proposal

When Kauffman insists on the indefiniteness of possibility prior to ingression, he does not just mean that possibilities are undefined prior to measurement. He means that they do not yet exist. Adjacent possibility is not a region of extended space we have failed to chart. It is, if you want, a result of spaciation, ie, possibility being created by the very creature that prehends it.

If this is right, then the dream of modern science (whether in its Baconian empirical or Cartesian rational self-conceptions) to achieve total domination of nature is not merely difficult but impossible in principle. If nature is evolutionary through and through, it cannot be exhaustively predicted and controlled. The appropriate, truly scientific posture is therefore not instrumental or representational mastery but participation, that is, relational collaboration with a democracy of fellow creatures we can commune with but cannot command. Agential biology is, in this sense, an example of what it looks like when natural science takes its own creaturely participation seriously as a condition of its knowing and its being.

In Process and Reality, Whitehead distinguishes eternal objects, “pure potentials,” or “forms of definiteness” from propositions, which he calls “impure potentials,” or “matters of fact in potential determination” (PR 22). His organic concept of propositions is far more expansive than the usual idea of a logical proposition. For instance, in Whitehead’s universe, even oysters entertain propositions (as Isabelle Stengers once told Richard Rorty). Whitehead proposes that in the becoming of the world, while novel propositions are created continually, “there are no novel eternal objects.” That is, there are no new pure potentials, but there are genuinely new propositions. So in Whitehead’s terms, I would refer to Kauffman’s unprestatable possibilities not as new eternal objects, but as new propositions.

A proposition is a hybrid of actuality and possibility. Organisms prehend propositions, feeling not only what is (conformal propositions) but also relevant alternatives, including what cannot be as well as what might be but is not yet. Propositions function as proposals, as “lures for feeling.” As Whitehead famously says, a proposition may be more important for being interesting than for being true (PR 259). Novelty flows into the cosmos through nonconforming propositions. On this Whiteheadian reading, an exaptation does not require a new eternal object. It is a new proposition: a novel actual situation has emerged in which definite forms take on novel relevance and thus function as fresh lures. Whitehead’s own phrase is as precise a translation of biological exaptation as we could ask for:

“When a non-conformal proposition is admitted into feeling…a novelty has emerged into creation. The novelty may promote or destroy order; it may be good or bad. But it is new, a new type of individual, and not merely a new inten­sity of individual feeling. … [It introduces] a new form into the actual world; or, at least, an old form in a new function.” (PR 187)

This lets us affirm the undeducibility of the adjacent possible without having to conjure the new out of nothing. The relevant function is new even if the possibility as such is not. While Whitehead forbids novel eternal objects, in his Harvard lectures, Whitehead is recorded as saying that the ingression of eternal objects casts the shadow of truth back upon eternity, so that the actualization of a possibility does not merely realize a fixed form but enriches the realm of forms by determining a relevance it did not antecedently possess (HL1 75). Eternity is then not diminished by history but enhanced through it. The trans-spatial gains its concrete relevance only in and through the actual occasions that prehend it. So the adjacent possible is genuinely created at the extensive level, while at the intensive level it comes with graduated eligibility; and that intensive grading is itself enriched, occasion by occasion, by the very actualizations it solicits. Permanence and flux, once again, each requiring the other.

Ruyerian Resonances

I want to hint at a resonance with Raymond Ruyer, the great thinker of the genesis of form whose work was deeply marked by his engagement with Whitehead. Ruyer argued that genuine forms are not assembled from parts in space, partes extra partes, but are unified through a non-localizable “absolute survey” (survol absolu). An embryo is his paradigm case: it is not an assemblage of parts but a division from wholeness. It is not built by external molecular machinery alone but by axiological lures that allow it to hold itself together as a self-enjoying process of unification. Ruyer is often cast as a Platonist who lodges form in an eternal trans-spatial realm that simply preforms the development that organisms perform. But I think this is a caricature of a far more nuanced position. Yes, like Whitehead, he affirms form has a sort of permanence that is irreducible to physical flux. But Ruyer’s trans-spatial domain does not preform organisms like a blueprint preforms a house.

While I am only just beginning to study his work in any depth, I believe Ruyer’s concept of “themes” rhymes with Whitehead’s propositions. For Ruyer, organisms and indeed all true forms are governed not by efficient pushes alone but by themes, which are axiological lures, values felt trans-spatially or vertically that orient an organism’s becoming without mechanically determining it via a horizontal exchange of force. A theme solicits development rather than dictating it. Like a proposition, it functions as a lure rather than a law.

Ruyer also insists that even physical processes of individuation like atoms and molecules must be understood as self-surveying organisms rather than as heaps of externally related parts. Like Whitehead, then, he sought to organicize physics from below, recognizing that apparent mechanism is the limit case of a living agency that in diminishing degrees goes all the way down. He is thus a fellow traveler in both directions: downward, dissolving the mechanistic picture of physics into a graded panpsychism of self-forming organisms; and upward, since for Ruyer the trans-spatial linkage of all themes finally requires a divine embryogenesis in which they might cohere.

I must admit that on further reflection, Ruyer’s themes may sit closer to Whitehead’s eternal objects than to his propositions. Both are trans-actual forms of value that solicit rather than compel. Both find their unity not in extended space but in a divine survey, which Whitehead specifies as the primordial nature’s conceptual prehension and valuation of the whole multiplicity of pure potentials. The decisive difference is dipolarity. Ruyer effectively fuses God with Creativity, so that the divine is at once agent and ideal: a single trans-spatial surveyor in whom the themes are held and from whom they radiate vertically into the forms that participate them. Whitehead refuses the fusion. Creativity is his Ultimate, and God its primordial creature. And he adds a consequent nature, so that the conceptual valuation of eternal objects is only one pole of the divine life, deficiently actual on its own and inert until completed by God’s reception of the achieved world. This means that the lure of a theme or proposal cannot descend as a pure verticality from the ideal; it becomes effective only through ingression into actual occasions and entrance into historical actualization, where it is physically prehended by the consequent nature. Ruyer’s God can solicit form from above; Whitehead’s God can lure only by passing through the suffering of the world it lures, so that every ideal is mediated, and made relevant anew, by the cumulative history it helps to compose.

Theogenesis

If there is no pre-stated state space, no final blueprint, no Theory of Everything, then we must rethink not only physics and biology but theology. Reductive physicalism turns local idealizations of closed systems into an absolute causal reduction base. Intelligent design patches local mechanistic limitations (eg, fine-tuning, origin of life, specified information, etc.) by appeal to a transcendent demiurge. Both mistake the mechanistic abstraction for concrete reality. My imaginative proposal is to speculatively expand what Montévil and Mossio mean by organizational closure. It is important to emphasize immediately that “closure” is always relative, never complete; it is not the conservation of a fixed set of components or constraints but the continual achievement of a community of causality through the alteration, breakdown, and acquisition of new constraints.

What happens if we take this biological insight and cosmologize it? Cosmogenesis is organization writ large, closure cosmologized, but emphatically not as closure finally achieved. Whitehead’s evolutionary panentheism intimately relates while keeping functionally distinct 1) Creativity, 2) God, and 3) the creaturely world.

Creativity is the principle of unrest that assures no form is final, and that prevents even God from knowing the future in its full concreteness.

God is both the Erotic intensity seeking novel varieties of experiential unification amidst creative unrest (the primordial nature), and the Agapic tenderness holding space for the perpetual failure of creaturely closure (the consequent nature). Death is not a flaw but a feature of creative flux. Without death there could be no life, no value, no meaning, and ultimately no love. Not to mention no evolution. At best, the dipolar divine function contributes to the evolutionary realization of tragic beauty rather than meaningless waste. Whitehead:

“Apart from it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience. … The worship of God is not a rule of safety it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.” (Science and the Modern World, 192).

Whitehead is explicit that the primordial nature of God is not a finite state space or set of eternal objects stored in a Platonic freezer. It is blind appetition adding an incline to the multiplicity of infinite possibilities, thereby grading relevant potentials for finite creaturely becomings, providing axiological definiteness without spatiotemporal determination. The consequent nature of God is the recollection of the world’s proliferation, the preservation and integration of finite satisfactions into an ever-diversifying, ever-lastingly immediate harmony of harmonies, a raucous jazz ensemble and not a museum archive. We can only hear God’s whispers in the silence between our words, in the pause after a period. That silence sways the songs of poets and sends scientists in search of deeper truths. It turns lovers into parents and children into men and women. There’s a crack in everything, even the stars; and so the stars are the fountain-veins of the divine (h/t Leonard Cohen and Jakob Böhme). God transforms the absence of the possible into the intelligible fullness of creaturely life.

This panentheist—or better, pangentheist—relation between God and world is not the external relation of a potter to clay or an engineer to an artifact (at least as we abstractly imagine these crafts: the best potters and engineers are the first to admit they are as much made by their materials as the reverse). It is not the relation of a King to His subjects, but of kin with one another. “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’?” (John 10:34). The God-world relation is the internal, mutually constitutive relation of gestation. There is no creatio ex nihilo—no unilateral fabrication or paternal parthenogenesis of the matter and form of the world by a deistic dictator. There is mutual immanence: a soul and its world growing together, an embryogenesis with no pre-given adult form from which it proceeded or toward which it is obliged to develop.

It is worth dwelling on how thoroughly this image confounds classical theology. Our traditions almost always cast God as parent, as Father or (less often under patriarchy) as Mother, and we creatures as dependent children. But process theology offers an embryogenic God, re-imagining the divine life as an ongoing gestation rather than as a judging father standing over its helpless offspring. The classical image must be turned inside out, which it turns out isn’t that far from the central mystery of Christianity: God is a gestating child. And we, along with the whole proliferating democracy of fellow creatures, are the contributing cells out of which the divine embryo takes form. We do not merely receive our being from a finished God but contribute to God’s becoming. The consequent nature grows by what we give, and shrivels by what we withhold.

Classical theists will accuse me of impiety for this inversion. Forgive me for the immodesty, but in addition to being more mature5, I think this is a more faithful reading of the incarnation, of a God who can no longer be imagined as impassive but who suffers with the world, and who redeems it not by rapturing the chosen few to heaven but by dressing everyone’s wounds so we might keep growing together here and now. To paraphrase Meister Eckhart, what good is it to us that Mary gave birth to God two thousand years ago, if we do not also give birth to God in our time and in our culture?

Whitehead:

“The good of the Universe cannot lie in indefinite postponement. The Day of Judgment is an important notion: but that Day is always with us. … [Our task] is to render the Day of Judgment a success, now.” (Adventures of Ideas, 269)

Like all artists, a gestating God genuinely risks something in co-creating. Our valuations and our refusals, our love and our lies, are the nutrients and the toxins in the womb of divine embryogenesis. We contribute to God’s growth or decay. The stakes of creaturely action are raised to an almost unbearable height by this thought. No longer are human beings simply tasked with the salvation of their own souls. Every actual occasion of experience is another cell in the divine fetus, knit together concrescence by concrescence, mitosis by mitosis, out of the cumulative achievements and failures of cosmic and biological and human history. The ecological catastrophe is then not merely a wound to the biosphere but harm being done to the tissue of the divine child. To pangentheize Paul (Romans 8:18-23):

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the divine child to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the false will of human egos too proud to perform their part, so that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of growing together into the divine child. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption into the divine embryo, the redemption of our bodies.

To call God a gestating child is, of course, to speak a “likely story,” not a final theory. It is a mythic image offered in the same spirit as Plato’s Timaeus, where Nous negotiates with Anankē and learns to dance with Khōra. I do not propose it as a doctrine that blocks further inquiry but as a lure to pry it open, to remind us of the value of truth and the beauty of goodness. The divine, like every organism, has a history. God is not recollecting childhood from the standpoint of old age, though. God is perpetually born in and through us, continually improvising, cell by cell, occasion by occasion, up and down the spiral genesis of evolution.

This is my pangentheist proposal: the God-world relation as an open-ended process of embryogenesis. God is not a finished totality but the goad and growing memory of an incompletion in process of production. There is no final concrescence, and no one completed set of actual occasions, because “we can never survey the actual world except from the standpoint of an immediate concrescence that is already falsifying the presupposed completion” (PR 211). The same applies to God. The divine is not a frozen bud on an eternal rosebush, not the closure of the cosmic circle, but a lure amidst creative unrest that keeps the blossoms blooming.

Kauffman and Plato on Eros and Logos

Kauffman new book Origins: Cosmos, Life, Mind (he discussed the ideas in it with Curt Jaimungal earlier this year) seems to me to carry us to the threshold of such a process theological vision. In recent statements of his argument in a Noema interview, Kauffman names what he calls the “Third Transition” in science. Beyond the classical and quantum paradigms, both of which still presuppose a prestated phase space, lies what he calls a domain of no entailing law, the unprestatable becoming of the evolving biosphere. He has begun to draw the theological consequences himself. The first words of Genesis, he observes, can be read in two tenses: God created, past tense, conjures the transcendent deist God of the Enlightenment, the engineer who finishes the world and withdraws; or God creates in a continuous present as an immanent God we can become with. The sacred, he suggests, is not a completed order but the act of becoming itself, an invitation to co-creative participation that resonates, as he himself notes, with process theologies.

Three cheers for all this! Kauffman dismantles the idolatrous machine god and affirms the God who grows and groans alongside us. There is one place where I would seek to nuance his tale, though. Kauffman offers a genealogy of the ancient Greek terms Eros and Logos: Eros is linked to unpredictable creativity, to the domain of no entailing law, while Logos is reduced to deductive logic. He blames Plato, that terrible totalizer, for allegedly absorbing Eros into Logos, pegging him as the ancestor of mechanistic physics. Kauffman wants to rescue Eros from Logos. I want something subtler: to recover Logos alongside an Eros it cannot finally do without. I’ve already addressed what I take to be flattened readings of Timaeus in this post:

Logos is not a cold engineer mind designing from a distance. From Heraclitus and Philo through Plotinus and Maximus the Confessor, Logos is described as fluid, living, relational, ever-new, and indeed, as carnal. There is good reason Chinese Bibles render Logos as Tao. The Logos I want to resuscitate is not the frozen blueprint but the erotic axiology of possibility itself. Logos so understood is not the enemy of the adjacent possible but its condition of possibility: the grading of relevance by which the indefinite becomes, not a set of pre-determined variables, but a relevant field of viable next steps. Eros without Logos is selfish yearning; Logos without Eros is dead deduction; birthing the Living Word has always required their marriage.

It is true that Plato’s dialogue contains an image of demiurgic design, of a craftsman-god who looks to the eternal Forms as a model and fashions the cosmos as a copy. Kauffman is right to see in that image the seed of the engineering paradigm. But the demiurge is not the dialogue’s main character, nor is that Plato’s final theory of cosmic construction. As John Sallis shows in his book Chorology (1999), the account given in the first discourse—the artisan-god producing the visible kosmos as a representation of the intelligible order—is interrupted and must begin again. Plato’s character, the astronomer Timaeus, encounters an aporia and is forced to set the first beginning aside as inadequate. What forces the re-beginning is an encounter with the khōra, the Receptacle, the “third kind” that mediates between being and becoming, that always appears but never as itself, fleeing as Nous approaches it. Khōra is at once the nurturing mother of all becoming and a fugitive from formalization that no calculation can capture.

These false starts are not a matter of Plato’s compositional clumsiness. The structure of the dialogue deliberately performs the impossibility of preformation. The cosmos cannot be deduced from the Forms as by uninterrupted derivation, because the eidetic order, ironically, is only given a place by that which also displaces it: the form of formlessness, the wet-nurse of becoming that provides the blue ink and paper for every design. The demiurgic image is a constant temptation to hubris. The khōric interruption is the humbling cure. As Sallis sees it, in Timaeus the basic distinction between the intelligible and the sensible is at once proposed and disrupted. Plato, in other words, did not deliver us settled doctrines but inscribed into his cosmology the recognition that no account of genesis can close upon itself. We are capable only of eikotes mythoi, telling tales that must remain provisional not only because their subject is a becoming and not a finished being, but because in telling them we participate in their creation. Read this way, the Timaeus cannot be the founding charter of an engineering paradigm that it already pre-empts. Plato becomes less the totalizer Kauffman seeks to transcend than an ancestor of the participatory cosmology we are both trying to recover.

Here’s the dialogue at the Agential Biology Institute after I presented these ideas:

[Update]: as usual, has chimed in with exactly the right questions about the comparison between Whitehead and Kauffman that I’m trying to make. Here’s the exchange:

I was invited by to share a Solstice prayer at a gathering he hosted here in Chiang Mai earlier today. We burnt what we wanted to let go of, and buried in soil with zinnia seeds what we wanted to call in.

Sharing my prayer here for those who observe the turning of the seasons.

As Earth and Sky together turn the seasons round again, we gather here to pause and plant on the Sun’s tallest day.

Perched on Doi Suthep’s shoulder, our giant gentle host, we receive through eyes and skin the long light and warmth that falls also for forest, field, and river.

We honor the Sun, source of all ripening, whose fire awakens leaf from seed to inspire all life.

We honor the Earth, patient bearer of root and stone, who takes dead leaves and makes soil.

We honor the Moon, reflector of dreams, who wears a new dress every night to remind us of the beauty of shadows, and that brightness has its phases.

We turn East, where day is born, always blessing us to begin again.

We turn South, where warmth radiates to temper our hearts for love.

We turn West, toward evening, honoring the descent into darkness.

We turn North, toward the stillness of ancestral memory that guides our future steps.

We honor fire: the heart’s courage, the spark of consciousness.

We honor air: breath between beings, wind among the trees, clouds lifted from the forested slopes.

We honor water: the rain of those clouds returning to raise rice and flow in rivers.

We honor earth: the mountain, the soil, the ground from which we come and to which we return.

The fire flickers in our blood, the air fills our lungs, the water pulses in our veins, the earth holds firm our bones—we are each a little world in whom the great world wakes up.

In spring, the world’s beauty draws us outward into birdsong, fragrant blossoms, and greening grasses.

Now, at summer’s height, we stand still amidst a shower of sensation. Light pours through us and warms our blood.

So much light surrounds us that the small self can exhale its long watch and safely slacken into the world’s lap.

We do not flee the world to find spirit, but enter more deeply into color, heat, breath, and rain, until depths of soul are kindled.

Teach us, four elements, how to belong to one another, to circulate without hoarding.

Teach us, brother Sun, to give without domination.

Teach us, mother Earth, to receive without possession.

Teach us, sister Moon, to transform without fear.

So may we stand in the fullness of the year’s day, without clinging, since the end of spring’s climb is also the beginning of the descent into night.

So may we lose ourselves in light and find in depths of soul our kinship with spirit, who lives and dies, and lives again in us all.

Preface

At the time of writing, a transformation in the very medium of thought and communication is well underway that may come to dwarf the arrival of alphabetic writing in the ancient Mediterranean or the printing press in early modern Europe. Large language models and other technologies of automated computation are not merely new tools for generating and circulating ideas. They are catalysts of an entirely new shape of human consciousness.

Despite the tedious quality of their insufficiently prompted prose, it would be irresponsible to ignore the potential intellectual and logistical utility of LLMs and other machine learning systems. They show great promise as aids to scientific and philosophical research. But I remain polemically dismissive of the fantasy of so-called machine consciousness. This book emerged as an expression of philosophical passion. I strive for logical coherence, experiential adequacy, and scientific clarity, but I admit up front and without embarrassment that my reasoning is motivated by a love of the human spirit.

I feel LLMs tugging at a craft with which I have identified for my entire adult life. Writing is one of the practices that makes and keeps our thinking free. We do not know who we are, nor what we really think, until we have labored to articulate ourselves in writing. Those who cannot write their own sentences will be sentenced by another. I’m not precious about the long-maligned idea of authorship, nor do I imagine the solitary author was ever more than a useful fiction. Every sentence we inscribe is woven from the voices of the dead, inspired by living dialogue partners, including the wider nonhuman semiotic commons that makes human thought possible. But if I were too soon to lose the ability to make letters out of my life more of my soul would leave with it than I need to survive the rest of this incarnation.

So I ask for my reader’s indulgence if I express some alarm while watching minds all around me begin to fall in love with or bow in prayer before fictional characters. The question we concern ourselves with should not be that of whether computers can gain consciousness. They cannot. The only way to create another consciousness is by an act of love. Rather, the important question is how machines are affecting our consciousness. What becomes of thinking when its linguistic medium is increasingly co-produced by systems that do not themselves comprehend, suffer, desire, remember, or care?

This does not mean I think we can or should reject the rise of this new media technology. There is no turning back from the millennia long process of anthropotechnic co-individuation. But humankind must decide whether to continue on the path of entropic decay, or to avert extinction by becoming Bernard Stiegler’s “neganthropos.” What this would require, according to Stiegler, is replaying “all the questions of philosophy since its point of departure—which therefore demands that reason be rethought after Whitehead.”^[1] He continues:

“Knowledge—as savoir faire (that is, knowledge of what to do so that I do not myself collapse and am not led into chaos), as savoir vivre (that is, knowledge that enriches and individuates the social organization in which I live without destroying it), and as conceptual knowledge (that is, knowledge the inheritance of which occurs only by passing through its transformation, and which is transformed only by being revived through a process of what Socrates called anamnesis, a process that, in the West, structurally exceeds its locality)—knowledge, in all these forms, is always a way of collectively defining what is negentropic in this or that field of human existence.

The inhuman refers to a way of denying the negentropic possibilities of the human, that is, of denying its noetic freedom, and, as a result, its agency. …freedom and capability must be conceived from this cosmic perspective, and related to Alfred North Whitehead’s ‘speculative cosmology,’ as constituting a negentropic potentiality—as the potential for openness of a localized system, which, for that being we refer to as ‘human,’ may always once again become closed. Or, in Whitehead’s terms, human beings may always relapse, decay into simpler forms, that is, become inhuman.”^[2]

Human intelligence has always been technically augmented. Speech, writing, alphabets, print, radio, television, the Internet, and now LLMs have all altered not only the content of the messages we communicate but the very form of being we become by so communicating. While every sentence in this book emerged from decades of reading texts traced by my own two eyes and months of typing with my own ten fingers, I did regularly consult Claude and ChatGPT while composing it. I shared sections of the manuscript, asked for objections, prompted the models to defend the perspectives I was criticizing, and engaged their outputs as occasions to sharpen my own claims. I believe this improved the arguments substantially.

This admission raises a methodological problem that this book can only begin to formulate. How are we to find our way, experimentally and ethically, through the machine-mind collaboration that is linguistic knowledge production? The question did not begin with the advent of large language models. Human thought has never taken place in the spaceless space of a Cartesian theater, cut off from all relations to living bodies, their techniques and external implements. It has always depended upon technical media, social institutions, inherited vocabularies, libraries, conversations, editorial pressures, and pedagogical forms. LLMs make this dependency newly explicit and newly perilous. They intensify a condition that was already evident, namely, that knowledge is produced through collaborations that exceed the individual thinker. What is different under current conditions is the speed, opacity, scale, and economic enclosure of the mediating system. Consider Peter Lemmens and Yuk Hui’s definition of Stiegler’s concept of “proletarianization”:

“as meaning, among other things, the loss of knowledge, both practical and theoretical knowledge, which finally leads to the loss of the knowledge of living [savoir vivre]. This is because once the know-how [savoir faire] is short-circuited by artificial organs, such as what happened when artisans were forced to give up their skills and enter the factory, it led directly to the loss of individual and social life competences. The technical organs are taking over more and more functions and responsibilities of the human subjects and social institutions that together form a global technical milieu—a condition of planetary proletarization par excellence. This milieu serves ever more exclusively the prolongation and intensification of the consumerism, as well the productivism, that are necessary for continuing the process of capitalist valorization, which has imposed itself as the ultimate and almost sacred finality of the human adventure, albeit a nihilistic and self-destructive finality.”^[3]

I have also shared drafts of this book with human readers, and their feedback has contributed immeasurably to the form my thought has taken. Human writers, like their readers, do not use statistics to decipher the meaning of text. They respond from life histories, while hungry, beset by wounds, torn by conflicting commitments, attentional demands, and enthusiasms, formed by diverse literary sources. Their constructions and criticisms carry the limitations and the liberty of situated judgment. My polemos arises in this spirit, not because I believe I have settled everything in advance, but because I seek to stir the pot so that the spices rise to the top.

^[1] Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, ed. and trans. Daniel Ross (London: Open Humanities Press, 2018), 85. https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/the-neganthropocene/ Stiegler cites Whitehead’s Function of Reason, 17-18.

^[2] Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, 54.

^[3] Pieter Lemmens and Yuk Hui, “Reframing the Technosphere: Peter Sloterdijk and Bernard Stiegler’s Anthropotechnological Diagnoses of the Anthropocene,” in Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy 37, no. 2 (2017): 26–41, https://scispace.com/pdf/reframing-the-technosphere-peter-sloterdijk-and-bernard-4g4p740yt6.pdf. Lemmens and Hoi cite Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy (Cambridge-Malden: Polity, 2010), 40ff, 5.

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