Feeling Our Way Forward: Rethinking Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Reflections after a podcast recording with Tevin Naidu

I just recorded a podcast with Dr. Tevin Naidu that will end up on his Mind-Body Solutions YouTube channel. He asked some great questions, which I continued to think about after our discussion. There’s nothing especially new here, but I felt like sharing the stream of thoughts that were stirred up by Tevin’s queries.

We’re living in a strange time. Never before have we known so much about the external universe—from the rhythms of its atomic nuclei and stellar supernovae to the rhymes of its skull-encased neural network—and yet for many people, the more we know, the less meaning it all has. As Stephen Weinberg once put it, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” But is that the only story we can tell?

If we zoom way out, it’s clear that the modern mechanistic worldview is a very recent arrival. For tens of thousands of years, humans lived in a world that was itself overflowing with life—where the weather had moods, mountains were revered as ancestors, and even bones left a silent trace of spirit. These weren’t just quaint beliefs. They formed the basis of an animist worldview shared by human communities across continents for hundreds of thousands of years.

For the primal cosmovision, life isn’t the mystery—death is. Everything is ensouled. The real puzzle from this perspective is why living beings so obviously full of spirit could die and decay into dust. Ritual performances arose around this mystery, cultural means of participating psychosomatically in what they could not comprehend cognitively. Even today, in our supposedly disenchanted world, death still stops us in our tracks. Something in us knows that its meaning goes even deeper than the mysteries of biology. Life cannot be opposed to death; death must be another phase of life.

In ancient Greece, the earliest philosophers—the physiologoi—still spoke of elemental powers: everything is water, or air, or fire. But these elements weren’t mindless. They were principles of being, archetypal expressions of a cosmos still vibrating with vitality. There was a deep resonance between the body and the world, between the inner life of humors and the outer elemental powers. The same fire that illumines the sky burns in the hearth and in the blood.

It wasn’t until Plato and Aristotle that we start to see the beginnings of a split between mind and body, between intellect and substance. In his Timaeus, Plato conjures a Demiurge—a cosmic artisan—to shape unruly matter according to eternal Forms. The mind informs; matter receives and obeys. Here we see the beginning of dualism (though, to be sure, Plato problematizes his own dualistic tendencies with reference to a “third thing”). Aristotle turns this into a more systematic vision: form and matter always go together, but there’s still a hierarchy—form leads, matter follows.

The crack becomes a chasm with Descartes. Suddenly, the universe is divided cleanly into two kinds of stuff: thinking stuff (res cogitans) and extended stuff (res extensa). Mind versus machine. Consciousness versus particles. Much of modern and postmodern philosophy, and science too, is still trying to figure out what to do with this divide.

On one side, the materialists, claiming that everything—even consciousness—can be explained in terms of matter. On the other side, the idealists who argue that everything is ultimately mental. But both of these are reacting to Descartes. They’ve accepted his framing of the problem. Even now, in debates about the “hard problem of consciousness” or whether free will exists, we’re playing on Cartesian turf.

Though we still live in the shadow of Descartes, unlike in his original work today’s materialist science confidently dismisses any need to think carefully about the thinker. Most claim we can study the world “objectively,” without considering our own role in knowing it. It’s a textbook bootstrapping maneuver. And it fails every time.

Some physicists, like Sean Carroll, are more philosophically engaged than others, and I respect that. But there’s often a more or less implicit assumption that nature is fundamentally mindless, and that consciousness just “emerges” from complex arrangements of matter. As Carroll confidently claims, we are all just blobs of organized mud. Many physicalists just take this as the only possible rational story we might tell. But is it really rational? We have to ask: what must nature be like such that mud could give rise to mind? The materialist mythos shaping contemporary common sense encourages us not to think too hard about what that magical term “emergence” really means. If we do think about it, though, it seems to me it does not finally make sense to try to squeeze mind out of dead matter. The physicalist story is irrational.

This is where philosophers like Friedrich Schelling—and later, Alfred North Whitehead—turn the whole question around. If mind arises from nature, then maybe mind was there all along, in some potential form. Maybe nature isn’t mindless matter but rather a creative, feeling process, gradually complexifying into the kinds of minds that can wonder about it.

Whitehead takes this possibility very seriously, developing a rigorously logical, empirically grounded metaphysical scheme meant to spell out the implications. For him, science isn’t something that stands apart from nature. Scientific and philosophical knowledge is nature becoming conscious of itself, is nature conscious (or in Schelling’s terms, autophusis philosophia). As Carl Sagan once said, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” That’s not just pretty poetry. It’s the basis of a coherent metaphysics.

Whitehead gives us a powerful new way to think about causality—something that science and philosophy have struggled with for centuries. David Hume said we never actually observe causation, only the constant conjunction of events. One billiard ball hits another, and we assume a connection, but we can’t prove it’s necessary. It’s just us projecting our habits of psychological association onto otherwise meaningless sense data.

But Whitehead reads Hume carefully and points out where he admits that we see with our eyes and hear with our ears. That’s a direct feeling of causal transmission right there. Hume realizes we smell with our noses, and yet misses what is hiding right under his own. Whitehead calls this the “withness of the body.” When a light flicks on in a dark room and our eyelids blink and pupils contract, that’s not a theory—it’s immediate experience. That is what causality is all about: the transmission of feeling.

He calls these vector-feelings prehensions—a kind of feeling into, and feeling of, another. Every event, every “occasion of experience,” inherits feelings from what came before. Rocks, rivers, stars—they may not be conscious, but they participate in this deeper rhythm of inheritance. Feeling, not just mechanical pushing and pulling, lies at the heart of causal transaction in nature.

From this perspective, the universe isn’t made of dead stuff. It’s made of experiences, pulses of feeling repeating and evolving. Enduring bodies—like rocks and organisms—are really stable patterns of these pulses. What persists over time is a pattern of repetition, a society of moments agreeing to feel similarly. Whitehead thus views emotion as the most primitive form of experience, a “blind” or non-self-reflective feeling permeating all levels of nature. While animals and humans have evolved more sophisticated layerings of experience, the basic principle of prehension is pervasive. Organisms are not externally directed by a designer, nor externally related like dead particles. Rather, they participate in an evolving cosmic process through internal drives and aims seeking creative satisfaction.

Another pivotal contribution by Whitehead is his rethinking of propositions. In standard logic, a proposition is a linguistic statement judged true or false. Whitehead enlarges this notion, treating propositions as “hybrid entities” that link actuality and possibility. An organism that feels a proposition is not merely applying abstract logic; it is considering a real possibility in light of actual experience. Where most philosophical accounts obsess over truth values, Whitehead emphasizes novelty. For him, an “interesting” proposition can be more influential than a true one, because new possibilities guide evolution and generate new truths if they become actualized.

Simultaneously, Whitehead warns against the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” which arises when we treat a scientific model—be it Einstein’s four-dimensional spacetime or Newton’s corpuscular theory of color—as absolute reality, forgetting it is a conceptual abstraction. Whitehead does not advise scientists to abandon precise modeling; rather, he insists we remember that models are partial abstractions from a far richer reality.

One of Whitehead’s more challenging claims is that consciousness is somewhat peripheral, a specialized form of awareness arising amidst a far deeper field of feeling. This assertion often provokes resistance: how could there be experience that is not conscious? Yet examples abound. Driving a car while talking with a passenger indicates how much of our everyday functioning remains non-conscious yet still experiential. We can recall dreams, making clear after the fact that we were immersed in experience without full wakeful consciousness.

In Whitehead’s framework, consciousness proper emerges when an organism can contrast the actual with the merely potential—what might be but is not. This capacity for feeling absence or negation twists experience into self-reflection. It is a refined evolutionary achievement, not an all-or-nothing property of some disembodied mind.

Central to Whitehead’s project is the notion that the universe is creative rather than deterministic. Biology, chemistry, and physics exhibit lawful regularities, but these are not fixed from the outset. They are acquired habits. Indeed, as life evolves, more complex forms of sensitivity and intelligence appear. The existence of organisms endowed with will and deliberation indicates that past conditions do not mechanically predetermine every outcome. If everything were mechanistically driven, science itself would be impossible—no real agency would exist to undertake careful observation and formulate theory.

Whitehead’s panexperiential standpoint also implies broader ethical implications. If even inorganic matter is in some sense experiential, realizing value for its own sake, then every experiment carries a degree of ethical gravity. Of course, Whitehead’s main aim is not moral prescription but to offer a framework in which creative freedom and value are woven into the cosmos at multiple levels. Taken seriously, this vision challenges reductive accounts of meaning. As many are now noting, a purely materialist story that relegates meaning to subjective preference is not only alienating but is ultimately culturally unsustainable. This becomes more evident every day in light of our current social and political breakdowns. Without a shared sense of meaning that goes beyond egoic wish-fulfillment or preference, the basis of all civilizational value including scientific truth begins wither away.

This isn’t just metaphysics for the sake of metaphysics. It has real implications for how we do science and how we live. Over the past century and a half, science has become increasingly professionalized—highly specialized, highly competitive, often tied to military or market interests. It’s lost something of its soul. Knowledge used to be a commons, shared and cultivated in the spirit of wonder and open inquiry. Today, it’s often hoarded, monetized, or weaponized.

To restore a more collaborative, integrative spirit in science, we need to rethink what knowledge is and where it comes from. Whitehead’s process philosophy invites us to do just that—not by rejecting science, but by grounding it in a richer understanding of experience and cosmic value.

We need not just science and philosophy but poetry in this endeavor. Not just literal poems (though those help), but a poetic approach to thinking itself. Philosophy, at its best, is poetic. It doesn’t repeat the same formulation over and over—it finds new language for the same conceptual insights. Concepts aren’t identical with the words we use to express them, but the ways we express them help us penetrate further into new conceptual connections. Our attempts to language ideas must remain fluid and alive, shifting depending on context, on mood, on the question at hand.

Whitehead’s cosmos is alive, growing with us. We, in all our curiosity and confusion, are its way of learning, feeling its way forward to ever richer forms of beauty.

So where is all this going? Honestly, no one knows. Teilhard de Chardin imagined evolution culminating in a kind of divine union—a planetary mind waking up to itself. That’s a beautiful vision, but too deterministic. Whitehead is more open-ended. He sees a general direction, a “lure” toward beauty, but not a guaranteed outcome. The future is still being created.

And maybe that’s the point. Meaning isn’t something we impose on a dead world. It’s something we discover in relationship—with each other, with the Earth, with the stars.