”An ecologist who learned to think by getting muddy and a philosopher who learned to feel by reading Whitehead walk into the same question from opposite ends: What happens when we stop pretending we're separate from the world we're trying to understand? … What follows is a wide-ranging conversation about ecological intelligence…, and why the meaning crisis won't be solved by new technology — but might be addressed by new institutions that give people permission to feel what they already know.”
https://youtu.be/_S8Um8Aajss
#matthewsegall #richblundell

“Reality does not show up as a set of fixed things so much as a creative advance, a becoming, an unfolding. Even the now is a flow. It’s not an instant. To say it’s a flow is to bring time back into our thinking, though not necessarily clock-time. Something more like duration, or creative flux. Reality as I experience it is a process of revelation. Not revelation as a one-time religious event, but revelation as the ongoing way experience discloses itself, moment by moment.”
—Matthew Segall, The Question of Now
https://footnotes2plato.substack.com/p/the-question-of-now
#matthewsegall #reality #flow #experiencing

“In 2026 I want to risk a new kind of directness with fewer guided tours through other people’s ideas, more open air construction in the wild fields where metaphysics meets practice, where cosmology becomes ethics, where ideas are tested not only by argument but by the quality of attention and relationship they make possible.”
—Matthew Segall, Flights and Perchings
https://footnotes2plato.substack.com/p/flights-and-perchings
#matthewsegall #metaphysics #cosmology #attention #relationship

“After century of making basically no progress on the foundations of physics after quantum theory blew up the old mechanistic, materialist picture, plus the ecological crisis forcing us to reimagine how human beings relate to the rest of the natural world—these factors have led people to realize that a reductionistic understanding of life and ecosystems, and a profound ignorance of the intrinsic value of the living world, contributed to us destroying that world. There is more recognition of the importance of aligning our deep values as human beings with what we think we know about the nonhuman world…”
—Matthew Segall
https://footnotes2plato.substack.com/p/why-the-world-is-unfinished
#matthewsegall

"There was a moment when a different kind of science, maybe a more organic kind of science, was possible. But then in the 19th century…materialism went out because I think it had more immediate industrial application, and so economic payoff. But there’s a whole approach, … and even a methodology … that had been worked out in great detail and with tremendous rigor by people like Goethe … and Shelling. … It’s a view of evolution as purposeful, and of the human being … as a natural expression of what the universe has been doing from the beginning. … I think 200 years of mechanistic science have not just led us to some theoretical dead ends. … This view of the universe has had rather destructive practical consequences both for human meaning and for life on the planet more broadly. We’ve treated the living systems of the planet like machines, and the result is mass extinction, and climate chaos, and all the rest of it."
—Matthew Segall
https://youtu.be/FHZ_RlDnO-c?t=4542
#matthewsegall #science

“Physicists are looking for a theory of everything or a grand unifying theory which, from their point of view, would explain everything that needs to be explained about the nature of our universe. … The problem with that, from my point of view, would be that it doesn't explain how there could be organisms capable of seeking and finding such an explanation. In other words, it's not recursive enough. It doesn't include its own conditions of possibility. And so if we're going to have an explanation for the universe as a whole, including the conscious beings, the conscious biological organisms, that are capable of explaining it, then it's going to require a reference being made to more than just the laws of physics.”
—Matthew Segall
https://youtu.be/V7YLrbGpNNk?feature=shared&t=929
#matthewsegall #physics #theoryofeverything #recursion

This book records my attempt to cross the threshold of the Kantian transcendental imagination by descending into the depths of the sensible. I descend with the help of Schelling and Whitehead’s process-oriented categories, ultimately arguing that their descendental philosophy is rooted in the cultivation of a new organ of cognitive perception (or intellectual intuition) called etheric imagination. I claim that this new organ can bring philosophy into epistemic resonance with an aesthetic ontology of organism (something Kant explicitly denied).
—Matthew Segall, Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead
#matthewsegall #book #philosophy

”To the extent that nature is imagined as a mere machine, and mind is imagined as this external observer upon that machine, … we're going to have a merely external view of something that also has an inside. And if we can't include the contributions at the causal level of that interiority, then we're only going to be understanding nature in terms of finished form, and we're going to lack an understanding of nature as a process of formation. And we can understand the mineral world, the inorganic physical world, decently well just as a bunch of finished forms. It's why math works so well in physics, but to try to understand the living world—whether single cells or plants or animals or human beings—just as a collection of finished forms, obeying fixed laws, doesn't work. So until we can cultivate this other way of knowing, and see how we can participate in the the formative process, I think we're going to be locked into a very limited form of science, that's not only limited in the sense of not letting us fully understand how nature works, but it's limited in the sense that through its technological applications we're actually destroying the world.”
—Matthew Segall
https://youtu.be/UoHTxPPWcCY?feature=shared&t=4329
#matthewsegall #science #mathematics #physics #nature #life