An Anthropocosmic Approach to the Nature of Consciousness

A Transcript of My Presentation at the UTOK Conference on Consciousness

“What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his ‘soul.’ Man wants his physical fulfillment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here-and-now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.

I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself; it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters.”

-D. H. Lawrence (Apocalypse)

Stained glass by John Piper, St. Peter's Church in Firle, Sussex

Gregg Henriques invited me to speak at his UTOK Conference on Consciousness (UTOK = “Universal Theory of Knowledge”) in a session Michael Levin and

Bonnitta Roy

. I spoke after Mike and before Bonnie. I believe the videos will be made available later. For a primer, you can read my note posted yesterday about what I intended to share.

Below is a recording of my remarks, as well as a transcript, followed by John Vervaeke’s comment and my reply:

What I want to offer today is, first, a deep appreciation for the work Gregg Henriques and John Vervaeke have done. I find the UTOK framework really helpful for making fine-grained distinctions as we move up the evolutionary process. At the same time, I agree with Mike Levin that we are dealing with a continuum and must be very careful about the categories and joint-points we impose. Clear definitions can help dissolve false problems—such as the alleged “hard problem” of consciousness, which I regard as a faulty framework—but we also have to avoid what Whitehead calls “the fallacy of the perfect dictionary.” There is no perfect language for this.

There is no perfect language for this. Whenever I enter dialogue about consciousness, it can be exhausting to find points of contact where we agree on what we mean by consciousness, mind, the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness, or terms such as sentience, awareness, perception, and sensation. I do not see any way around that struggle; genuine dialogue requires us to triangulate meanings for words that carry such subtle connotations.

I am a process philosopher drawing heavily on Alfred North Whitehead, and I will lay out a perspective that grows from my study of his work. I also consider myself a transdisciplinary researcher—perhaps just a more academically respectable way of self-diagnosing ADHD. Yet I genuinely feel philosophy’s role, at this stage of our development as a species, is to stitch back together the scientific disciplines. Over the last few centuries these fields have become so specialized that even biologists in different sub-disciplines can scarcely communicate, let alone converse with physicists, psychologists, or sociologists. As a philosopher, I enjoy befriending scientists and learning about their research. Later I will mention collaborations with astrobiologist

Dr. Bruce Damer

on the origin of life and with mycologist Merlin Sheldrake on fungal cognition.

Before that, let me sketch what is involved in any attempt to develop a comprehensive understanding of reality. On one hand, of course, we want to be scientific and pursue truth. On the other hand, as human beings concerned with our own existence, we must also approach the ultimate nature of reality in artistic (aesthetic, poetic) and religious ways. The three great Platonic transcendentals—the True, the Beautiful, and the Good—must be integrated. While we need precise, well-defined scientific categories to pursue truth, we must also balance them with aesthetic beauty and ethical goodness. As Whitehead notes at the very beginning of Process and Reality, the scientific pursuit of truth is itself a variant form of religious interest: science values truth, and valuing is inherently religious. Physics likewise demonstrates that beauty matters when we seek the most coherent theoretical explanations of empirical data. These domains overlap and mutually inform one another.

I offer what I call an anthropocosmic orientation: we must begin with the human situation. Our condition includes multiple ways of knowing that have evolved over time. Drawing on Merlin Donald, we can see three stages—mimetic, mythic, and theoretic—or, echoing Jean Gebser, we can speak of magical, mythical, and mental structures of consciousness. If we seek reality’s ultimate nature, we cannot start with the theoretic or the mental alone and then explain everything else in those terms; we must deepen into more embodied ways of knowing, into story and myth, and even ritual mimesis. The late sociologist Robert Bellah, borrowing Eric Voegelin’s term mythospeculation, reminds us that whenever we engage in theoretical reason, we inevitably engage in storytelling and rely on metaphor. The Enlightenment gap arose because we thought we could practice theory without story, rationality without a mythic substructure—even though the very motivation of science draws on such myths.

For me, within this anthropocosmic context, rationality involves building proportional analogies between what we know well and what we know less well. That entails a certain anthropocentrism in our explanations, yet an anthropocosmic perspective pushes us beyond common-sense human categories into the weirdness of how the rest of nature does its own thing. We should see ourselves as exemplifications of cosmogenesis rather than improbable exceptions to it. It turns out that we can learn more about what it means to be human by getting out of our heads.

In pursuing truth scientifically, I find Whitehead’s 1920 book The Concept of Nature crucial. In that text, Whitehead addresses what he calls “the bifurcation of nature.” This bifurcation is related to—though somewhat distinct from—the Cartesian dissociation between mind, the thinking substance, and matter, the extended substance. For Whitehead, the bifurcation refers to a split between physics—with its conjectured model of reality that lies beyond perception—and our own subjective experience of value and the qualitative characteristics we assign to the natural world. He calls the former “the conjecture,” typically expressed by physicists in mathematical equations predicting the behavior of energy, particles, or fields. He calls the latter “the dream,” associating it with the nature poets. If the bifurcation were true—if reality were divided into conjecture and dream—then the nature poets should congratulate themselves on the beauty of the sunset and the scent of the rose, because the mind would be concocting all that qualitative richness, while nature itself would be nothing but equations.

To heal this bifurcation, Whitehead redefines nature as whatever we are aware of in perception. If nature is what we perceive, then it includes both the red hue of the sunset and the electromagnetic radiation by which physicists explain that color. An unbifurcated picture of nature puts sensory experience back into the world and invites us to search for patterns in which qualities and quantities hang together systematically.

In The Concept of Nature he distinguishes two modes of thought. One is homogeneous thought about nature, which considers nature without reference to thought or sense awareness. The other is heterogeneous thought about nature, which considers nature together with thought or sense awareness, or both. As he writes on page 5: “We are thinking homogeneously about nature when we are thinking about it without thinking about thought or about sense‐awareness, and we are thinking heterogeneously about nature when we are thinking about it in conjunction with thinking either about thought or about sense‐awareness, or about both.” He takes homogeneous thought to exclude any reference to moral or aesthetic values, whose apprehension is vivid in proportion to self-conscious activity. “The values of nature,” he adds, “are perhaps the key to the metaphysical synthesis of existence, but such a synthesis is exactly what I am not attempting in this book.” Instead, he is “concerned exclusively with the generalizations of widest scope that can be effected respecting that which is known to us as the direct deliverance of sense awareness.”

Thus, before turning to the fuller metaphysics and cosmology of Science and the Modern World (1925) and Process and Reality (1929), Whitehead is here doing philosophy of science. He redefines nature to avoid bifurcation but deliberately leaves mind—the knower—outside the picture, calling the relation of mind and nature a metaphysical problem that philosophy of science need not tackle. In science, we may simply define nature as what we perceive and assume a knowing mind; without such a mind, there would be no science. When practicing science—engaging in homogeneous thought—we need not consider the mind. However, if we wish to do metaphysics and overcome the Enlightenment gap, we must discuss value. For Whitehead, value does not begin with animal minds; it is intrinsic to existence itself. Human values are derived from cosmic values, and this point may well be contentious.

Let’s shift now to consider two examples from empirical science of how mind and nature are inseparable at every level:

First, consider a recent Nature cover article by Merlin Sheldrake and colleagues, “A Traveling Wave Strategy for Plant-Fungal Trade.” The authors rely on both economic and cognitive metaphors to describe how mycorrhizal networks navigate soil, make seemingly goal-directed decisions, and regulate carbon and other nutrient flows. Their findings suggest a form of cognition: hyphal tips at the network’s edge balance cheap, long-range exploration with the need for reliable nutrient return, adding loops only when those loops shorten routes to potential future partners.

In other words, these networks can evaluate possible futures, explore a possibility space, and choose the most efficient pathways for nutrient distribution. We see network optimization, cost accounting, and context-sensitive resource allocation. One might dismiss these descriptions as mere metaphors, yet in Entangled Life Sheldrake goes further, discussing memory, problem-solving, and learning at the level of mycelial networks. If rationality is, at heart, the construction of proportional analogies—and if Mike Levin’s work shows a continuum of agency and awareness throughout nature—then these descriptions should not be dismissed as mere metaphors.

Second, Bruce Damer and I have co-authored a long chapter on his empirical origin-of-life work. Through wet-dry cycling in shallow volcanic ponds—a scenario he investigates with biochemist David Deamer—Damer shows a continuum between non-living chemistry and living organisms, with no sharp boundary. Chemical selection can occur in these cycles, suggesting that the progenitor of life may have been more complex than the first truly self-producing, reproducing cell. Evolution, then, is not always a march toward greater complexity; rather, it seeks ways to perform difficult tasks ever more simply.

To close, let me highlight points of convergence between my Whiteheadian, process-relational approach and UTOK. Whenever we think about the universe’s nature, we must start from the fact that conscious agents exist and can inquire into nature. Any theory that ignores conscious agency risks performative self-contradiction, and John and Greg emphasize the need to examine those presuppositions. Science must account for scientists emerging within cosmic evolution. From my anthropocosmic perspective, mind is no add-on to nature; nature is already impregnated with mind. Please forgive my broader use of mind—I hope to avoid the fallacy of the perfect dictionary.

Another convergence lies in a nonlinear, contextual understanding of causality. If nature is seeded with mind, neither the seed alone nor the soil alone explains anything; causation is always contextual. As an aside, physicist Ruth Kastner’s possibilist transactional interpretation of quantum physics illustrates this at the quantum level: physics has focused on emission (the yang) and has neglected absorption (the yin). Her work exemplifies nonlinear causality in quantum transactions.

This shift from linear to contextual causation is, for me, the most attractive feature of Extended Naturalism. We seek a relational, multilevel account of causal unfolding and can even rehabilitate Aristotle’s four causes—provided we throw Aristotle into evolutionary motion. Evolution is the process whereby, whether we call it nature or spirit (and I freely use the latter term), reality potentiates itself and becomes more complexly incarnate in living forms. We might speak, suggestively, of four emergent levels: Light, Life, Looking, and Language. Light concerns quantum transactions; Life, cellular autopoiesis; Looking, perceptual agency; and Language, symbolic reflexivity. At each level, distinctions become relevant as minded nature moves deeper into relationship with itself, differentiating into ever richer unities. Yet there are no ontological breaks—no moment when mind magically “emerges” from new arrangements of matter. Mythically speaking, matter is fallen light, and light was, is, and will always be on its way toward Logos.

John Vervaeke’s response:

The Neo-Platonists proposed a fifth kind of causation. They did so because they were wrestling with the status of abstract entities. Most physicalists argue that abstracta, being outside time and space, have no causal power. They do not even seem bound to particular patterns; rather, they generate many patterns—exactly what Mike’s work suggests.

The Platonists replied with the idea of participation—a relation in the same family as continuity. We use metaphors like “accessing” or “downloading” that realm, yet obviously neither term is literal. This paradigmatic or verticalcausation does not fit neatly into Aristotle’s efficient, formal, material, or final causes.

These issues interweave with another problem: how to hold identity and difference simultaneously in our explanations. As we probe this vertical causation—what Wolfgang Smith calls it—and Whitehead’s notion of ingression, we also confront the continuum/participation question. A continuum cannot be captured by simple reduction, sheer relativism, or tidy dialectic. So what conceptual tools do we use?

A third provocation sits behind all of this. We are, in effect, talking about God, though we hesitate to say so. Lower levels “participate” in paradigms, but what is being participated? We once thought of Platonic forms as a static set, yet Mike’s work shows the space of possible participation is remarkably open-ended and richly interconnected. That was a classic Neo-Platonic problem: something must hold and select among these forms—something akin to relevance realization.

I am uneasy calling that “God,” given the baggage, but we are indeed talking about real abstract entities with their own causal reality—hyper-rich, hyper-dimensional “hyper-objects” linked together, yet giving rise to very specific participations in concrete situations.

In short, we are confronting ancient questions that Neo-Platonism wrestled with deeply:

1. What is vertical, paradigmatic causation?

2. How do we speak about continuum without collapsing into Theseus’ Ship paradox, sorites traps, mere reduction, mere relativism, or a dialectic that ultimately re-privileges identity?

How open are we to exploring that? Matt, I think you should be; Neo-Platonism moves smoothly among religion, art, and science—one of its great gifts. Yet modernity and post-modernity largely reject Plato and Neo-Platonism. What we are doing here is radical: we are invoking new kinds of causation and a logic beyond reduction, relativism, and standard dialectic, while gesturing toward what people once called “God,” all the way down into the guts of science.

That is noteworthy. To account for life, intelligence, and consciousness we find ourselves radicalizing metaphysics far beyond the Enlightenment hope for a simplified, all-explaining scheme. That is my commentary.

My Follow-up to John Vervaeke

Let me try to be as brief as possible and highlight how important it is to keep a clear metaphysical distinction between actuality and possibility, especially when we talk about the morphospace Mike describes. John just dropped the “G-word,” and, yes, “God” has a long and problematic history. Whitehead recognizes that in Process and Reality, yet he still finds it necessary to speak of what he calls the primordial nature of God.

Why? Because someone—or something—has to order the realm of possibility. Whitehead’s eternal objects, the Platonic forms, are not scattered randomly in some soupy cloud of potential. They stand in definite logical and even aesthetic relations to one another. When an organism faces a concrete situation and needs to ingress novelty, Whitehead asks: How does it draw in the right novelty—the relevant possibilities rather than sheer randomness? In his metaphysics, God supplies a continuum of both extensive and intensive relevance from which the organism selects.

But we must not picture this “divine” order as a pre-established, already-actual grid. It is an order among possibilities—a logico-aesthetic web of relations among eternal objects. It does not determine what happens; it simply offers each actual occasion a field of relevant options to choose from. Agency, for Whitehead, belongs entirely to the organism doing the ingressing, not to the forms themselves.

Mike and I have gone back and forth on where agency resides—an intriguing metaphysical puzzle—but the key point is this: the actual world is a community of organisms bathed in an ocean of possibility.

There’s a short passage in Process and Reality (Part II) I always recommend to Bayesian brain theorists and free-energy-principle folks. Whitehead distinguishes between statistical judgments of probability—very much like a Bayesian approach—and a non-statistical form rooted in what he calls “the feeling of intensive relevance.” That feeling arises from our prehension of the primordial nature of God. It is not a statistical computation; it is an aesthetic lure that links us to the divine—not as a Creator who imposes outcomes, but as what I like to call the Relator: the one who relates actuality to possibility and possibilities to one another.

That’s a lot of metaphysics in a couple of minutes, but I wanted to bring it into the mix.

Here’s a video of me reading the relevant passages from Whitehead’s Process and Reality (p. 197-207):