Prehensions, Propositions, and the Cosmological Commons

Dialogue with Tevin Naidu about the mind-body problem and its dissolution

Tevin Naidu recently hosted me on his Mind-Body Solutions podcast. Below is the video and an edited and somewhat condensed transcript.

Tevin: I have shaped today’s episode around your paper, “Physics Within the Bounds of Feeling Alone.” It is a wonderful piece—a beautiful read. One thing I often ask my guests to do is give a brief philosophical history of the mind-body problem. I know that is a tall order, but if you had to summarize the story, what would you say?

Matt Segall: We could begin with the ancient Greeks, but even earlier—across every continent—many primal cultures held animistic worldviews. They never separated mind and body; what we call “mind” permeated all things. In that early phase of consciousness, life was not mysterious—death was. Human societies built elaborate rituals around death because the disappearance of living presence was baffling. Other species may register death, but humans ritualize it.

Fast-forward to early-modern Europe. With the rise of mechanistic science, the polarity flips: death becomes the rule and life the anomaly that needs explaining. Something clearly shifted in humanity’s self-understanding.

Among the pre-Socratics, the physiologoi sought a single elemental principle—fire, water, air. Yet their elements were alive; interior experience resonated with the exterior world. In Plato’s Timaeus you begin to see what we would now call dualism, though Plato dramatizes multiple positions. The demiurge—a divine intellect—shapes a formless material receptacle according to eternal forms, introducing a split between active mind and passive matter. Aristotle systematizes this as hylomorphism—form–matter composites. Even so, radical dualism has not yet appeared.

Leap to the 1600s. René Descartes codifies mind–body dualism: res cogitans (thinking substance) and res extensa (extended substance) are fundamentally different. All subsequent modern philosophy wrestles with that divide—some thinkers tilt toward mind (idealism), others toward matter (materialism), but nearly all still operate in Descartes’ wake.

Contemporary cognitive science debates—“the hard problem” of consciousness—are variations on those early-modern dilemmas. For tens of thousands of years animism was humanity’s baseline; the last few centuries are the anomaly.

Naidu: Your paper critiques contemporary physicalism, which, you argue, still works inside a “Cartesian–Kantian” frame. How does that limit our grasp of reality?

Segall: The limitation is largely implicit. Scientists try to understand nature as if the knower were not part of nature. Physicalists will say, “Of course the human mind evolved.” Yet their method assumes a “view from nowhere.” They almost never ask: What must nature be like for conscious agents and scientific knowledge to exist?

Following Friedrich Schelling, I ask: If mind emerges from nature, what kind of nature can generate mind? Schelling—and I—find it implausible that nature was ever entirely mindless. Instead, nature must have been seeded with proto-mentality from the outset; evolution is that seed flowering into conscious agency. Under that reading, science becomes the universe’s way of knowing itself. That realization forces us to revise our picture of nature before scientific investigation even begins.

Naidu: In the article you spar with physicist Sean Carroll. Why him?

Segall: Among physicists, Sean engages philosophy seriously, and he is unusually willing to debate mind–body questions. I disagree with him but respect his clarity, so he makes a worthy sparring partner. (I heard someone handed him the article my a conference; I have no idea whether he was convinced!).

Naidu: Carroll is a many-worlds theorist. Do many-worlds proponents tend to be more philosophically open?

Segall: Not necessarily. I find many-worlds metaphysically extravagant—an ontological overflow that discards Ockham’s razor. Carroll would say, “We simply take the wave function as real, so that is parsimonious.” But multiplying an infinity of unobservable universes to preserve unitarity strikes me as bad metaphysics. I currently prefer Ruth Kastner’s transactional interpretation: it preserves one world-line, treats the wave function as a realm of potential, and sees reality as a rhythmic alternation—potential opens, one possibility actualizes, the cycle restarts. That view keeps faith with ordinary experience and with the agency science presupposes.

Naidu: Suppose a neuroscientist claims subjective experience is a mere brain-generated illusion. What is your strongest rebuttal?

Segall: Paradoxically, I invoke Descartes. In Meditations he doubts everything—sensory experiences and even math and logic—but he cannot doubt the doubting itself: I think, therefore I am. Subjective awareness is indubitable. If consciousness were an illusion, then so is science; you cannot deploy scientific reasoning to invalidate the very subjectivity that makes reasoning possible. That is a performative self-contradiction.

Naidu: People sometimes label you “anti-science.” How do you respond?

Segall: I love science. My critique is aimed at scientism—the notion that philosophy is obsolete, that only empirical data count. Science floats on philosophical assumptions about observation, measurement, mathematics, and truth. Ignoring that substructure is itself anti-scientific. Criticism is part of rigorous inquiry.

Naidu: How does Alfred North Whitehead’s idea of prehension shift our view of causality?

Segall: Prehension unifies causality, perception, and memory into a single notion of “feeling.” Reading Hume closely, Whitehead notes that, yes, we lack sensory access to necessary connection—but our bodies feel causal efficacy directly. When you flick a light switch and your pupils contract, that is causality-in-experience. Whitehead envisions reality as “drops of experience” inheriting feelings from their antecedents. Enduring objects—tables, trees, bodies—are “societies” of such occasions of experience. The most primitive transaction is blind emotion. Thus feeling, aim, and purpose arise within nature, not by external imposition.

Tevin: You say physics should incorporate experience. What would actually change?

Segall: Day-to-day practice—model building—remains. The shift is philosophical. Geometry, for example, is a convenient abstraction; it is not concrete reality. The panexperientialist simply refuses to reify abstractions. Reductionism is a method, not an ontology. An ethical corollary: when we realize every entity feels at some scale, we might rethink certain experiments that cause suffering.

Tevin: Whitehead’s “propositional feelings” fascinate me. Could you unpack them?

Segall: Whitehead co-wrote Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, so he knows logic intimately. After Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, he recognizes that logic alone cannot ground mathematics or experience. He redefines a proposition as a hybrid between actuality and possibility. Organisms “feel” propositions—they sense alternative ways the world could be. Novel propositions enter experience, alter behavior, and thereby reshape reality. Whitehead famously claims that a proposition may be more important for being interesting than for being true, though a true proposition is usually interesting. Novelty flows into the cosmos through propositions.

Naidu: If feeling runs throughout reality, is consciousness a fundamental force?

Segall: Whitehead reserves consciousness for a complex, derivative mode of experience. Most experience—even much of ours while driving, or while asleep—is non-conscious but still experiential. What goes all the way down is feeling, not consciousness. That avoids crude anthropomorphism.

Naidu: Can panexperientialism allow real free will?

Segall: Yes. Whitehead’s universe is not deterministic; each occasion includes self-creativity. “Laws” are long-standing habits. Nervous systems evolved not merely to react but to respond—to weigh past learning, imagine alternatives, and choose. Consciousness adds a temporal dilation in which possibilities are evaluated before action. Freedom is genuine, though always constrained by inherited conditions.

Naidu: Have these always been your views?

Segall: No. In my late teens I leaned toward a pragmatic, Buddhist stance: metaphysics seemed less important than alleviating suffering. But I caught the speculative bug. I discovered Whitehead around age twenty-two, and despite searching for gaps in his system I find him remarkably persuasive. Still, my orientation has evolved. I once believed enlightenment sounded relatively straightforward; the pathos of life taught me otherwise. Now I see spiritual practice and speculative philosophy as complementary.

Naidu: How can philosophers and scientists collaborate better?

Segall: Over the last 150 years science became a profession. Specialization and peer-review journals sharpened rigor, but the same system encourages competition—especially for funding, often from corporations or the military. Knowledge becomes proprietary. We need to reclaim science as part of the commons, shift funding toward gift-based models, and remember science is rooted in, and continually reshaped by, philosophical reflection.

Naidu: The mainstream materialist picture of a cold, dead universe produces existential dread. How does your view answer?

Segall: Some find heroic meaning in that very bleakness—Richard Dawkins, Jacques Monod, Sean Carroll. It is still a mythic narrative: “The lonely but valiant rationalist.” But that story easily lapses into nihilism. Panexperientialism roots human values in deeper cosmic tendencies—toward beauty, compassion, wisdom. Those values are not mere human projections; they helped shape beings like us. The universe, as Whitehead says, is driven by the appetite for vivid experience.

Naidu: Where is the universe headed?

Segall: I admire the optimism of Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point vision—evolution inevitably converging on a divine culmination—but I lean more toward Whitehead’s open-endedness. The cosmos trends toward deeper, more intense forms of beauty—the harmonious contrast of diversity. Greater sensitivity amplifies both joy and suffering, yet existence seems to deem the risk worthwhile.

Naidu: What is the biggest misconception about your work?

Segall: Some materialists think I’m anti-scientific; some traditional theists think I mischaracterize and demote God. Others assume I’m inventing a comforting worldview. Actually, a sentient cosmos is unsettling: the world gazes back at us. Panexperientialism is not escapist; it is ethically and existentially demanding.

Naidu: Besides Plato, Kant, Schelling, and Whitehead, who else is essential?

Segall:

Ralph Waldo Emerson—eloquent, accessible Platonism infused with Vedānta.

Friedrich Nietzsche—one must face nihilism head-on; no bypassing it.

Hölderlin, Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman. Poetry keeps language supple, preventing conceptual ossification. Philosophers risk getting stuck in jargon; poetry refreshes thought.

Naidu: Ever consider renaming your YouTube channel “Footnotes to Whitehead”?

Segall: The current title, Footnotes2Plato, is itself a nod to Whitehead’s quip that European philosophy is “a series of footnotes to Plato.” Whitehead understood himself as continuing Plato’s open-ended inquiry—so the homage is already baked in.

Naidu: Are you a theist?

Segall: I lean panentheist or pan-gen-theist—emphasizing process and evolution in the God-world relation. On some level I treat the divine as conscious, but even divine consciousness evolves. That overlaps with cosmopsychism: one vast mind diversifies into many centers of experience. I am not wholly comfortable with any single label, but those come close.

Naidu: Tell us about Mind at Large.

Segall: With several colleagues and supported by the Center for Process Studies and the Pari Center, we’re organizing a multi-year project. We are planning three conferences—likely California, New York, and a third in the Southern Hemisphere or Europe. We want to examine how materialism came to dominate in the modern period, and showcase live alternatives—idealism, panpsychism, animism, vitalism—and foster genuine dialogue, including with any committed physicalists. A documentary may emerge. We have seed funding but welcome more support. We would love your participation, Tevin!

Naidu: Count me in. The closer to Cape Town the better, but I will travel! Any closing reflections you think are important to remember?

Segall: Trust your experience. Much alienation stems from letting abstractions outrank direct encounter. Begin with experience; then construct models more carefully—not simply to predict and control, but to enter deeper relationship with the world.

Naidu: Matt, thank you. This has been a pleasure.

Segall: Likewise, Tevin. I look forward to meeting in person—perhaps at one of our Mind at Large conferences.