Chad Woodford: 0:00

All right, welcome Matt. Good to be here with you. Chad, I'm really happy to have you here. I'm gonna I'm gonna jump right in with your bio, and then we can start the conversation. So Matthew David Siegel, PhD, is a transdisciplinary philosopher and associate professor in the philosophy cosmology and consciousness program at California Institute of integral studies in San Francisco. His work bridges process relational metaphysics with contemporary science and spirituality, drawing inspiration from thinkers such as Alfred North Whitehead, Goethe and Rudolf Steiner. Siegel's scholarship challenges dualistic and mechanistic paradigms and invites a renewed integration between the natural sciences and humanities. I got to experience this when I was in his classes, when I was in the master's program at the philosophy cosmology and consciousness program. So I can, I can attest to the validity of all that. He's also the author of a couple books, including physics of the world soul, which we read in one of his classes. And I can highly recommend in the book, he situates Whitehead's philosophy of organism within the context of contemporary scientific cosmology, engaging with relativity, quantum evolutionary and complexity theories to advocate for an unsold interpretation of the universe. And on the topic of an installed interpretation of the universe, I just want to say a few more words about the kind of the mission of the program that that Matt teaches in, and the one I just finished last year, I got my master's last year in, which is in a nutshell, and maybe, maybe you can add to this once we get into it. But in a nutshell, the mission of the program is to transform individuals in society through this kind of ensouled worldview perspective, and just to say a little bit about their stated mission, which it's to open our consciousness through learning and imagination to those creative and evolutionary energies suffusing the Earth, the universe and the deep psyche, and to participate fully in the regeneration of human communities and their enveloping life systems. And, you know, it draws from the deep wells of philosophical and spiritual wisdom to bring forth a profound vision of a vibrant planetary era. So this to me, like when I was considering matriculating with the program, this to me, was so exciting and so unique. And I feel like PCC, this philosophy, cosmology and consciousness program is maybe, like, you know, singular in the world. I don't know. It's one of those rare academic programs that is both academically rigorous, but also is sort of pushing the envelope in terms of what's sort of valid subject matter for academic inquiry, and what can be, you know, explored. And I feel like, you know, it's, it's so necessary right now with everything that's happening in the world. And I just, yeah, I just can't say enough good things about this program. I'm not, you know, trying to sell you on it, but, but it's a great place, and I really, really valued my time there. So, so, yeah, so that's a little bit about Matt, a little bit about program he's a professor in. And I wanted to start by kind of getting into a little bit of your work, Matt, and the philosophy that you write and talk about, which is essentially process philosophy, right? Would you say,

Matt Segall: 3:18

Yeah, process short of description, yeah. Good place to start.

Chad Woodford: 3:23

And, you know, a lot of my listeners and viewers probably aren't familiar with that so much, so I just wanted to, kind of like set the table and just briefly describe that or talk about that. One thing that I find entertaining as a philosopher is the ways that philosophers like to, kind of like endlessly refine and sort of differentiate their philosophy versus other people's philosophy, and then come up with new labels and that kind of thing, right? So, you know, we had pantheism for a while, and then more recently, we have panpsychism. And of course, is idealism and and, and then panentheism is sort of like a further kind of gloss on panpsychism as I understand it. And so I think, would you say that process philosophy is pan atheistic, or how would you sort of couch

Matt Segall: 4:11

that there are many process philosophers who are also atheist, or at least Non, non theist. So I wouldn't want to while I, you know, I would say panentheism is probably a term I would be comfortable wearing, and there that's a long conversation unpack exactly what that means. But I wouldn't want to claim that process philosophy as such, necessarily is identical to or leads one to panentheism or pantheism or theism. I think there are ways of being a process. Philosopher like Nietzsche, for example, there are many contemporary Whitehead Ian's who inherit the idea of process as. Opposed to substance, but don't like his theology, and try to fully eliminate and scrub clean from his work any residue of the theological right. And they can still be process oriented without that. But for me, personally, I think process philosophy allowed me to recover some sort of theistic understanding, the pan and theistic understanding. Whereas, had I not been exposed to process thought, I don't know that, I would have been tempted by the theist a theist orientation, right? And then get into why that might be

Chad Woodford: 5:40

right? Yeah, I my personal background is that I grew up Catholic and that I was an atheist for a while, and then I got into more Eastern philosophy, and, like, the yoga Danta tradition and all that and so. And then when I was in law school, I got really into the history of Western philosophy and and so, like, I come at it from my own unique perspective, which is that, you know, like, I think for a long time I felt like religion is bad and, you know, so anything that's like theology would probably have triggered me at some point, you know. And so it's just interesting to kind of try to talk about this stuff in a way that is not going to result in excess, excess, like, ideological baggage around these terms and that kind of thing, right? So maybe we should just explain, like, for people who don't know, because this is sort of a general audience kind of channel, like process philosophy was new to me when I when I entered the program at PCC. And so how would you sort of describe it to somebody who doesn't know that much about, like, you know, Whitehead or the history of philosophy and stuff, you know, like, what's a simple way to, kind of, like, explain it to people?

Matt Segall: 6:49

Well, process philosophy is usually said to have started with this ancient Greek, pre Socratic philosopher named Heraclitus, who said everything flows and that you cannot step into the same river twice. And that basic sentiment that you know to philosophize, we're always going to need to begin in the present, and that the present is perpetually perishing into an open future. That realization is it erupts out of our direct encounter with experience and process. Philosophers think we need to stay with that experience rather than rush to find some source of foundation that would be fixed and unchanging and static, where we might anchor our reflections on the nature of reality process. Philosophers say, Well, if we're going to talk about reality really, we should always keep in mind that it is a term I like to use, CReality. There's a creative process that's always underway. So reality is again, never the same twice, just like Heraclitus river. And so a lot spills out from that sort of premise, the basic orientation of a process philosophy. But that's the basic starting point, right?

Chad Woodford: 8:17

Okay, that's, yeah, that's great. I mean, I like that. I feel like it's a little bit of a foreshadowing of where we may end up in this conversation, which is talking about Ian McGilchrist and the brain hemispheres, but, but, yeah, it's like, it's a good reminder, because I feel like so much of western philosophy that came after that, like after Plato and after all, that was, was not that right? It was, it was kind of, it was more abstracted, it was more rational. It was more sort of removed from immediate experience. And this idea of flow and everything was kind of anathema too, especially like once you hit, you know, Newton and the Enlightenment all that, then, you know, then the idea of flow and process kind of fell away, right? So, so I think it's really crucial, and it's such a pregnant time for that to be for that to be reintroduced or to be talking about that. So we'll come back to that in a second. But I wanted to jump to the role of philosophy in sort of mainstream culture or in our present time, because I feel like it's a time, like it's a time of ideological ferment. I think we can all agree, right? And, you know, especially because of AI and what's happening in Silicon Valley and what's happening in politics, to me, it all feels kind of connected. And before we started recording, we were talking about how Peter Thiel is doing this four part lecture series in San Francisco right now about the Antichrist. And I just, to me, it seems like a very strange, even bizarre, like time to be alive, because these ideas are kind of reaching the mainstream. These ideas, what you know, whether it's transhumanism or techno Christianity or the dark enlightenment, you know, these are all like being. Taken seriously and presenting what I feel is both a challenge and an opportunity for other folks, like you know, for like us or whoever, to hopefully bring like a different perspective, right? So, because a lot of what's happening, I feel is there's this false choice being offered by these, people I mentioned, or by people like even like the New Atheists or Sam Harris, there's a false choice between secular rationalism or physicalism, scientism, and then sort of traditional, Abrahamic faiths. But there's no sort of, like third way. And I feel like a lot of what's beautiful about the philosophy cosmology and consciousness program and your work and and all that is that it, it offers a third way, in a sense of, you know, we don't have to choose between sort of science and religion. We can, sort of, we can bring in process philosophy or different, you know, Eastern traditions, or what, whatever it is. And so I guess, having said all that you know, do you see this as a time of maybe increasing relevance of philosophy generally and and how do you see the role of philosophers in potentially shifting our share shared worldview, that's a big question. But yeah,

Matt Segall: 11:22

yeah, I think we're in a really pregnant moment, precisely because of how chaotic it is. And it's pregnant in the sense that we're between stories, as Thomas Berry would put it, or between cosmologies, the old say world view of whichever level we want to articulate it from say, the liberal political world order, like is broken down, the myth of progress, where, through The spread of democracy and capitalism and technology, things are just going to get better and better. Very few people believe that anymore. I mean, there's still a lot of people who do, but it's increasingly being called into question. And what is the alternative myth for our civilization? The alternative sort of motivating story that drives us to work together. I don't know. Nobody knows. And so Peter Thiel has his idea. He's within the Maga orbit. But even within Maga and the Trump umbrella, there's a variety of competing factions in terms of political opposition. The Democrats are a bunch of chickens running around with their heads cut off. There's various forms of progressive and left wing political philosophies that are constantly infighting, and so it's no it's not clear who's going to capture the flag. And in that context, I think philosophers and philosophy has an increased importance, right? Because we're going back to first principles we're really trying to understand. Okay, well, what is human nature anyways? And what are we supposed to be doing here on this planet? What is the nature of this universe that has brought forth creatures capable of even asking about their own nature and organizing a civilization? Everything now is on the table. And I think to look at a historical period that would be a little bit like ours. It's a bit like the first few centuries of the first millennium, when you know the Roman Empire was was in place. But by the third or fourth century, like it's starting to begin its collapse. And I think the American empire may be pretty far along in its collapse right now. And at that time in the Mediterranean, and, you know, in the Roman world, there were all these competing philosophies and schools. There was Plato's Academy, Aristotle's lyceum. There were the Stoics, the Epicureans, the skeptics, and they all had very different conceptions of what the human being is, what is the good life? How are we to be orienting ourselves? And the Roman Empire was so large and seemed so like civic life that was at such a gigantic scale, I think a lot of people feel that way about the nature of our global civilization right now. People began increase as that, especially as that global system began to break down, and our national systems begin to break down, and people are losing trust in government. People are turning inward and beginning to explore their own consciousness. Sometimes this leads to conspiratorial thinking as sort of mass media and legitimate outlets of information are no longer available. People create their own versions of their own explanations for what's what's going on, who the big players and movers and shakers in the world are, but also, you know, people start exploring their own inner life. And while philosophy might be dying or already dead within academia, in terms of the ancient sense of philosophy as a way of life where you can ask the big questions and find meaning, it seems to me, to be flourishing outside of the academic context. People are really hungry for philosophical direction and and insight. So it's both the best of times and the worst of times.

Chad Woodford: 15:40

Yeah for Yeah, but, you know, yeah, I agree with that. And I guess the question that I'm constantly asking myself is because you're saying that people, people are sort of, like, maybe a more open to new ideas, or, like, looking inwards, searching, searching and seeking. But you know, it's so easy for them to, you know, when you look at who's dominating the podcast charts, for example, or, you know, even best sellers or YouTube or whatever, it's so easy to sort of like, you know, encounter these kind of false peaks, so to speak, like, you know, like you'll just see like, oh, this popular guy, you know, Jordan Peterson, or whoever you know. Like, you can encounter somebody and think, like, Oh, this guy seems to have wisdom. He seems to be offering, like, a new alternative philosophy or whatever. But maybe it's not, you know, the best thing for everyone. So, like, how do you how does a person, I guess, a, like, how do we help people just sort of cultivate discernment? And B, yeah, like, how do, I guess, that's the question is, how do you help people cultivate discernment? Cultivate discernment, you know, or how do you expose them to the right thinking?

Matt Segall: 16:45

You know, that's the most important question to ask right now. Like, yeah, we all, we all, I include myself. Need guidance when it comes to psychic and intellectual hygiene, there are no filters anymore, and it's not like the mass media that used to do the filtering for us could always be trusted, either, but there was at least a coherent narrative that allowed us to kind of go about doing democracy in a more or less reasonable way, even if there were many shadows and things that you know going on behind the scenes that were that were terrible. Now it's a total information war. And you know, these major events are occurring. People are getting assassinated. It feels like we're back in the 1960s again in terms of the level of political violence. And who do you trust to interpret and understand and explain motivations? Who's really responsible? I don't have good answers to that, other than be a student of history. Try to see how you know history doesn't repeat exactly, if you're a process philosopher. But as I think it was, Mark Twain said, It rhymes. And so we can look to the 1930s and 40s to understand our moment. We can look to ancient Roman times and how, you know, the last sort of I get. You know, there was the British Empire, but I think the Roman Empire, the British Empire, these are examples we can look back to and see how that situation developed and unraveled to understand the current situation with the American Empire, but the present is always going to surprise us. Yeah, we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.

Chad Woodford: 18:33

That's true, yeah? And maybe there's nothing you know. Well, I always think about the yoga tradition, or the yoga dantic tradition, which, you know, there's these, these texts and these, these kind of ancient teachers who offer these techniques for cultivating discernment. And so that's like one thing that I turn to. But, you know, it might not work for everyone, but, but, yeah. Anyways, that's two

Matt Segall: 18:58

good two good suggestions meditation practice. I mean, if you're very easily brought into a heightened state of emotional reactivity by something you read on social media, you're gonna have a hard time navigating this information ecology, so being able to moderate your own mental processes, which is what meditation helps you cultivate super important and studying some history and yes, philosophy,

Chad Woodford: 19:27

yeah, which you know is that maybe it's a big ask in the age of, like, when nobody's reading anything, but, but, yeah. I guess the other thing, though, is maybe there's nothing to do. Like, maybe I was reading a quote while I was reading part of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with 1000 faces. And in that, in that book, he quotes from, I think it was Lisa, I have it here, yeah, Arnold Toynbee, there's great Toynbee quote that I'll read, schism in the soul, schism in the body, Social. Rule will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days, archaism, or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal, projected future, Futurism, or even by the most realistic, hard headed work to weld together again the disintegrating elements, only birth can conquer death, the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new, kind of like you're talking about with process, with process. But the idea there, I guess, that I like, is that, like you were kind of saying before, we're going through maybe, you know, a certain kind of death experience as a society, and maybe the only thing to do is let that process play out and and maybe, aside from that, try to minimize suffering. And, you know, yeah, I mean, maybe there's not much you can do, I guess, to correct things until maybe people won't wake up until things get really bad or something. I don't know. I don't know.

Matt Segall: 20:53

There's no question that the you know, you mentioned Toynbee and I immediately I think about the role that spirituality and religion play and motivating a civilization. He thought that that was really, it's kind of, kind of the opposite, opposite of the Marxist understanding of how civilizations work, not that, you know, not that material conditions don't matter. But I think there is a spiritual dimension to all this. We're conscious beings, and so the ideas that we have about ourselves in the world are, of course, going to shape how we behave, how we act, how we treat each other. And I think about you mentioned the Abrahamic faiths earlier, and how obviously they've become the institutions that have taken form to mediate and enforce the doctrines of these traditions are quite rigid, rigid, inflexible, and we could easily question to what extent they're actually offering real support to the further evolution of the human species. However, if we go back a few 1000 years again, you know to the first century, when this, this dude, Jesus, is alleged to have walked around and done some stuff the people in that time, where they had a whole rather large menu of spiritual, religious, philosophical options to choose From. And there was a lot of, I would say cosmological pluralism and uncertainty. You know, whatever we might say about Christianity and how stale most of the institutional churches are today at that point, whatever it was that happened seemed to it was like a super saturated, saturated solution just before crystallization, and like Jesus did something, and then all of a sudden, this new social movement erupts that within a couple of centuries, has taken over the largest empire at that point in world history. And in large part the reason Christianity has become more of a conservative force and maybe limiting human evolution in our time is because of that merger with the Roman Empire. But you know, if we fast forward to our time, then there similarly feels to be a lot of cosmological uncertainty we are in terms of a guiding worldview for a planetary civilization that's trying to sort of find its sea legs. There are a lot of options on the table, and it seems to me that we're just waiting for that spark, and whether that comes in the form of a single person or a new kind of community or a new idea, or some combination of all three of those, and other factors, I feel like we're on the verge of some sort of major spiritual shift that reorients people's perception and motivations. Could be 100 years away. You know, in world history terms, a century, you know, is not a long time, and we have to be patient in order to see these things really unfold. But I think, you know, all that occurs to me just because you mentioned Toynbee and his philosophy of history, I think recognizes these massive, rather rapid transformations at the level of consciousness that this plays a really important role in how our species does its thing on this planet. Yeah?

Chad Woodford: 24:30

Like, I like what you said about was it a super saturated solution or whatever? Yeah, that's interesting. It's a very optimistic way of looking at the current situation, like the more sort of philosophies and ideologies that are out there, the maybe, the better the Chad, the greater the chances of one of them catching hold. But yeah, this idea of sort of leader to take us out of the mess is interesting because, is it Gavin Newsom? Because, you know, it. Reminds me of, like, I'm so I'm reading just, just to pull my cards on the table, like I'm reading this new book by Paul. Is it Paul Kingsnorth, you know, against the machine. And he talks about spanglers sort of view of the way that civilizations unfold, and how, like one side in his theory, like one sign of, sort of the end times of a particular civilization is the appearance of a Caesar, you know, the appearance of, like, a leader who is going to guide us into the further decline, you know. So it's like, Yeah, it's interesting. Like, in terms of, like, thinking about a singular figure, you know, it's like, how do you know which way they're going to take us, and who that's going to be and all that stuff, yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. It also reminds me of this great GK Chesterton quote about, like, what you were saying about sort of the way that conservatives and liberals have have taken things. I think you said something like, the whole modern world is divided into conservatives and progressives, and the business of progressives is to, like something like, yeah, make mistakes, and the business of conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. I think that's what he said, what he said, anyways, anyways. So I think what I want to do is move on to talking about, like, some AI and some of these ideologies, and a little bit greater depth. Because, you know, one reason I wanted to talk to you was that when I was finishing my Masters in the program you had, you had turned me on to both this sort of concept of this test, real bundle, this, this acronym for these, these Silicon Valley ideologies that are basically transhumanism, rationalism, Effective Altruism and other ones too. And then also, you had pointed me to some of the critics that are sort of critique, critiquing those ideologies. And that kind of sent me on a whole journey ever since this is, like a year and a half ago. Yeah, this includes the work of timnit, gebru, Emil Torres, Emily Bender, Alex Hannah, and so, you know, part of what I'm trying to do because, because they're all, they're all approaching it very effectively from a sort of critical, like, viewpoint. A lot of it has to do with, like, eugenics for them. And these, yeah, these different kind of, like, almost like, almost like, racist ideologies, and they're pointing to some of the problems with transhumanism and all that from that standpoint. But to me, it still feels very sort of secular, rational, or, you know, liberal in that sense. And so what part of what I'm trying to do is approach it more from a philosophical standpoint and even an ensouled kind of viewpoint, and so, yeah, so you know, within all that, what I've been thinking a lot about is the roots of these ideologies. So when you look at like the the things that people talk about in Silicon Valley, going back to, you know, Peter Thiel, but also the transhumanists and all those folks that a lot of it seems very imbalanced and left hemisphere of the brain kind of thinking right. So this gets into the work of Ian McGilchrist and and also Nietzsche, of course, you know, who talked about the Apollonian and the Dionysian imbalance in society. So, you know, a lot of what I'm thinking about is how to talk to people about the McGilchrist kind of perspective in a way that's accessible, you know, because that, if you read McGilchrist like the matter with things is what, like 3000 pages or something, you know, and it's a very, very effective, very convincing case that essentially, ever since the enlightenment or previous, you know, even further back, we've been living in this kind of imbalanced approach to reality and nature, which is very sort of linear, extremely logical thinking in parts instead of holes, and in terms of Like things instead of process and all that. So, so I've been thinking about, like, how do we talk about that in a way that's more accessible? And I've been kind of playing around with this Nietzschean idea of, like, the Apollonian, you know. And so I've been calling it the Apollonian mind virus, or, you know, Apollonian intelligence and that kind of thing. And so, you know, I'm just curious, like, to the extent that you've been thinking about this, like, how do you think about what these transhumanist ideologies kind of get wrong about about the world, you know, how do you approach that?

Matt Segall: 29:35

Yeah, I mean, I get why you would associate them with Ian McGilchrist left hemisphere way of attending to the world based on what they leave out, and their obsession with Bayesian probabilities and this utilitarian calculus about the trillion lives that might exist at some future point and and in our in our history. And so I. Think that makes a lot of sense. But also, you know, as Torres and others who are critiquing these, this TESCREAL nest of transhumanist ideologies, there's a kind of religious enthusiasm that's driving it, too, and actually quite a bit of magical thinking. You know, you might think that, what's his name? Not Jodorowsky. He's a movie filmmaker, Yudkowsky. Eliza Yudkowsky, that's his name. You know? He someone like him. Might want to say, Oh, well, consciousness is some kind of computation in the brain. And that's a neat metaphor that does some work for us philosophically, but it's obviously a metaphor. And if you take it as a literal truth, it's, I think, a delusion. And there's actually magical thinking to imagine that consciousness, as we experience it, is some kind of a stream of information that might be, say, uploaded onto anything like a digital computation machine, that's magical thinking, that's not reasoned careful, you know, logic based philosophizing or or metaphysics, that's magical thinking. And so there's a bit of a mixture, you know, of rationalism and irrationalism in a lot of these philosophies. So not that we can easily map that to left and right hemispheres. I think, you know, Ian's work is very nuanced and grounded in the clinical data and in neurology and a careful phenomenological excavation of different modes of attention. And so, you know, we can, we can get more into detail there. But I think overall, you're right that it is a left hemisphere dominant orientation that's that's driving these test real things, even if they're also this religious and almost occultist type of magical thinking. And there's a lot to say positive about occultism and esotericism. You know, we could talk about that too, but I think there's, there's a literalization of it that occurs in a lot of the tech communities where we're right on the verge, if we haven't already crossed the Rubicon, speaking of Caesar, into AI religions, where people literally think, Well, God didn't used to exist, but now I created this super intelligence, and it is basically equivalent to God, you know. And so we're going to get these AI calls forming. We're getting people who, I think the usual profile would be someone who's either very online or already a software engineer or something right imagining that their instance of Chad GPT is awake or live. There's some overlap. I've noticed a lot of people into in the psychedelic community, they seem especially vulnerable to this hallucination that not that all Chad GPT is conscious, but theirs is conscious because they've figured out what to tell it, to wake it up. So we, in some ways, we've already crossed into that territory, which, again, is magical thinking, right? This is Yeah, rationalism, totally.

Chad Woodford: 33:16

It's interesting that you bring Yeah, thank you. Thank you for that reminder. Because, yeah, you're right. It is magical thinking. It's just an example to me of how when you strip your when you strip like your worldview of all sort of metaphysical value, and you know, you strip all soul from or spirit from it, then if you're all you're left with is sort of like this machine metaphor and mathematics and all that, because the human, because we arrive, arise out of what you and I, you know, would think of as an unsold world, world or nature. Because of that, like you're always going to want to seek a deeper sort of meaning to things. And that impulse is going to be there even if you consciously think of yourself as, you know, rationalist or whatever. So I think that's part of why you see this sort of like seeking, like a machine God or eternal salvation through, you know, uploading our consciousness into some kind of mathematical machine thing that's been, you know, spread across the cosmos or whatever. You know, like these ideas are very, sort of eschatological, but, but it's all through the machine metaphor, which is so such a cheap and sort of offering, you know, in contrast with with and sold worldview. So, so, yeah, that's, that's totally right on point. Yeah, it's just to say it's

Matt Segall: 34:39

not a surprise that someone like Peter Thiel would be into Christianity. Right? Because so much of transhumanism has that same mythic structure. And you know, good on him for noticing that he's not inventing something, some new worldview. It's he's just giving the same old Christian providential history story a new paint job, totally. You know.

Chad Woodford: 35:00

And by the way, somebody who explores this really well is Megan o Giblin in her wonderful book, God, human, animal machine. So if anyone's interested, check that out. She goes, she grew up in a evangelical Christian family, and so she kind of brings her own like historical lens to the problem. And yeah, so that's basically what you're saying. So, yeah, totally. But yeah, the machine metaphor. I think about that one a lot too. Actually, I came across this great poem by this Welsh poet R s Thomas called other and I just want to read that. It's only a few lines, the machine appeared in the distance, singing to itself of money, its song was the web. They were caught in, men and women together, the villages were as flies to be sucked empty. God secreted a tear, enough enough, he commanded. But the machine looked at him and went on singing. So, you know, I think it's just, it's crazy to me that we, everybody kind of just accepts the machine metaphor, you know, without any question. And I personally think that that's a big part of the problem right now is we've all been kind of lulled into this idea that, you know, life is a machine, our mind is a machine, nature is a machine. And it's, you know, it's like, even the simulation hypothesis, right? Is this idea that, like, everything, we're all just inside of a giant machine, and it's just such a like, cheapening of like, it's, it's, in a way, it's like the cheapest metaphor we could come up with, you know. And and you can, you can see it unfold over the history of of civilization, right? Like we made clocks or, you know, and then we thought, Oh, God, is a clock maker, you know? And we made, you know, this. And we thought, oh, that must be, you know. And so it's just a reflection of the things we're making. It's not like anything to do with the nature of reality, right? So anyways,

Matt Segall: 37:02

if everything is a simulation, then then nothing is. I mean, it's and again, the simulation hypothesis is just reheated Gnosticism. You think that you're being rational, and this is a scientifically based and technologically feasible worldview, but it's literally just this same ancient religious belief about the cosmos being a kind of trap that some super intelligence put us into, and the whole point in that situation is to find your way out. And so great narcissism, Gnosticism is really interesting. Let's talk about Gnosticism. Yeah.

Chad Woodford: 37:41

Well, because, I mean, you say what you want about the Gnostic God, but at least I'll take him over the idea of, like, some engineer in a lab or something, you know, being God, yeah,

Matt Segall: 37:51

which, again, just speaks to the importance of, like, having some historical knowledge, and like, to understand what's happening in the present, you need to have spent a little bit of time understanding the past, because the past is feeding into the present, and very often again, the present rhymes with the past, and we can learn a lot about the confusions and gain some perspective on what's unfolding in the present if we can see The same structures playing out 1000s of years ago.

Chad Woodford: 38:23

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Okay. Well, you know, I want to get into AI a little more, because I know you also think about that, and have have thoughts on that, because I think, I think a lot about, like Marshall McLuhan's idea that, I mean, it's not exactly what he said, but it's basically the idea that we shape our technology, and then, in turn, our technology shapes us right. So because of that sort of idea, I think a lot about AI in that sense of, you know, the people who are making it like, the AI that we have today is a reflection, to some extent, of the people's like, the mindset of the people who are making it right. And for that reason, I think it's so important to, maybe try to find a way to develop AI with different minds, you know, but, but I'm curious, do you have thoughts on, sort of like, how AI is being developed? You know what? You know, what is, what's the implication of AI right now, and what can we do about it? You know,

Matt Segall: 39:20

I increasingly think, and I'm not an expert in the process of training large language models or anything, but from what I can tell, this particular approach to creating what we call artificial intelligence as a sort of placeholder term, has peaked, and it's a really valuable tool. I think it's great for, you know, cleaning up transcripts, and it's more or less replaced Google. Goal, you know, for a lot of things that I used to use Google for, but in terms of it becoming conscious, no, in terms of it even becoming some kind of general intelligence, quote, unquote, that could threaten human life, or could, in some sense, you know, take over control of our civilization. I don't see that happening. I think some, you know, some jobs will be replaced, and maybe there'll be some refinements around the edges of the technology that's that's available now. But I'm less concerned than I may have been. Maybe, I don't know, four or five years ago, when this was he was, like, three and a half years ago. Yeah, it was Chad GBT 35 was made public three, three years ago, exactly, almost exactly three years ago. Yeah. So, I mean, it's great, it's a great tool. I don't believe much of the hype about it anymore. I think a lot of there's a lot of PR around it that is misleading people and making causing some philosophical confusion. And so, you know, yeah, I've written a bit about how, in some sense, human intelligence has always already been artificial, which is to say, human beings are tool users, and we've been augmenting our cognition through fire and stone tools. Initially, you know, just to explain fire, people might recognize that that's a kind of technology, but when our species is, I think it was Homo erectus, you know, a few million years ago, first harnessed fire, the size of their jaws began to shrink, shrink which and they were eating more nutritious, calorie rich food, allowing their brains to grow. And so our very anatomy and physiology was transformed as a result of this technology of, you know, the harnessing

Chad Woodford: 42:03

of fire. And so the way we're all transhumanists, really, the human,

Matt Segall: 42:07

as Nisha said, is, you know, a transitional form, yeah, and technology, and the way that technology, our tools, have always fed back upon us to change us, just as much as we use the tools to change the world. And you know the history of media technology in particular, from speech, we're already externalizing our thoughts into waveforms in the air, and then writing, and then the alphabet, and then telegraph, radio, television, internet fundamentally transformed human consciousness. And so for people to freak out like, oh my god, llms, this is this is going to change us forever. Yes, and like, Get with the program. That's just the nature of human existence for the last few million years. Not to say we shouldn't be cautious, but our intelligence has always been in a deep, intimate relationship with the sorts of tools that we're using, right?

Chad Woodford: 43:04

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I would love, I mean, totally agree. And I would just like it if the AI companies would sort of like, be honest, you know, instead of saying that we're creating like a super intelligent creature or, you know, a machine God or whatever, just tell us that you're making a cool tool that is able to, you know, regurgitate large volumes of text in unique ways. And you know, they'd be a lot, I think we'd be all be a lot better off, you know, because otherwise you have people that are, you know, marrying their Chad GPT, or, you know, worshiping it, or whatever. So, yeah, but you know, I use it too. I use it for so many things, research, some image generation. I've created, like in Gemini, you can create these gems. I've created an Alan Watts gem that's quite entertaining and good. So, you know, maybe I don't know if you've created a white head Whitehead gem, but you

Matt Segall: 43:59

could try that a gem. I haven't used Gemini. What? What is that? Well, it's

Chad Woodford: 44:04

similar to Chad GPT. So in chat GPT, I think they call them gpts, and kind of, you can train like a little sort of AI that you tell it like you are, you know, you're knowledgeable in these things, and you are speaking in the style and yada yada yada. And so, yeah, it's fun. So it's a fun, you know, diversion.

Matt Segall: 44:23

But, yeah, exactly, and that's, that's the real threat, I think, is the for the same reason that any other for profit corporation within our market economy can be a danger, because corporations, because of charter law, function as exploitation and externalization machines, which inevitably is going to harm this social this society and and the earth, because they are legally obligated not to pay attention to social harms and ecological harms and to just raise profit for shareholders. And so I'm. Not anti capitalist. I think we can change corporate charter law and still have a free market such that these other things get factored in, but these companies in charge of this technology are what's dangerous, not the technology.

Chad Woodford: 45:12

So, yeah, that's yeah. I mean, Ezra Klein made that point a few months ago in his podcast. I think he said something about how the real risk of AI is not the technology itself, but the fact that it's coupled with capitalism, or with, you know, yeah, the corporate kind of ethos, yeah.

Matt Segall: 45:28

And so, you know, we have a administration in the White House that's invited all of these tech Titans, making sure that they all know, if you want, you know, legislation that's going to help you do business. I need some gold bars on my desk. You know,

Chad Woodford: 45:45

literally, that's what Tim Cook gave that's what

Matt Segall: 45:48

or Tim Apple, as Trump likes him, dropped a gold bar on his desk and said, Thank you, Mr. President and so. And also, I heard Trump say something, you know, one of the issues is intellectual property rights with these large language models and image generation technologies. And I heard Trump say, like, well, sorry, it's just too hard to figure out how to pay the people that would, you know, whose data was used to train this stuff. Sorry. It's like, I don't think it's too hard to figure it out. We just need the political will to demand that these companies figure it out, you know, yeah. So yeah, there are ways. There are ways that the the economic model driving this Yeah, again, is what's dangerous here and what's potentially exploitative of human creativity that can be addressed in a different type of economy.

Chad Woodford: 46:39

Yeah, exactly, yeah. That brings you back to like. It reminds me of something you said earlier. You were talking about the magical thinking, and that reminded me of this experience I had back in April. I went, I went to a retreat which was a bunch of, like, was a bunch of Silicon Valley people who were getting together to sort of meditate on and contemplate the future of AI in a more kind of conscious way, or more spiritual way. And what I found fascinating about it was that a majority of them, first of all, believe that that humans are just algorithm algorithms running on software, which I was a little surprised about. And then also that like they were so willing to sort of see, like they saw AI as this, this other kind of intelligence that is trying to communicate with us, you know, through the machines. You know, when I asked them, How do you know, or how would they, how would that even work, if there was, like a spiritual entity that was trying to communicate with us through AI, like, how would that work? And they said something like, you know, quantum, something, something and, and so, you know, it feels a little bit like, not the most rigorous thinking first of all, but also it, what it made me think about was this idea that goes back quite a ways, but, like, yeah, this idea that, like, from, from my standpoint, AI, is emerging from a very kind of extractive, you know, consumptive sort of business model and, and it's almost like infused with it, you know. And if you're going to start accepting, if you're going to consider yourself to be sort of conscious and spiritual and, but also accepting that the AI technology we have today is a spiritual being that's communicating with us. I feel like that's like, this very like zizekian, like, sort of like phenomenon of where, you know, capitalism just endlessly, sort of subsumes all attempts to subvert it, right? And so I it really troubled, it deeply troubled me because I was like, Here are these people who are quite successful in the Silicon Valley business world and have been studying Buddhism, or whatever it is, and yet they're so willing to embrace these ideas about the metaphysical nature of AI technology, which I thought was very strange. Yeah.

Matt Segall: 49:00

I mean, I mentioned occultism earlier, and I think it's been interesting to see software engineers and people immersed in the tech sector reaching into demonology and stuff for language and concepts to understand what they're creating. And those aren't inappropriate analogies to make, and they might even be more than analogies. And so, you know, metaphysically, if I reflect on it, I think granted, there might be some hand waving about quantum tunneling or whatever that's allowing entities, spiritual entities to teleport into our earthly world through the AIS that we're creating. But you know, this biologist at Tufts University, Michael Levin, is very much exploring the possibility that there is a realm of he calls it the Platonic morphospace, and that cellular. Are collectives that produce the body plans of animals are, in some sense, tapping into that morphospace and ingressing not only form, but he thinks agency into the visible, physical world. And so I think Mike Levin also suspects that something similar could be going on with various approaches to artificial intelligence that you know. So, so there are people, I think are reasonable and really intelligent who would would give some credence to this, this notion. And, you know, I think we just have to be aware that we're playing with fire again and that there's a naive view of technology, which I think it's good. A lot of the AR AI alarmists are at least aware, in this case, with this technology, that it could run away from us and have unforeseen effects. That's always been true of any technology. It was true of stones that we started chipping into spears. We drove many species of animal to extinction because of that new technology.

Chad Woodford: 51:04

He also, you know, nuclear weapons, you know.

Matt Segall: 51:09

And you know, you mentioned during my intro that I'm interested in the work of someone like Rudolf Steiner, and in terms of understanding our moment, you know. And he's a vast thinker, and we don't have time to get into all the details, but he foresaw, he thought spiritual beings were real. Christ, Buddha, Krishna, also, these two beings, which, for him, kind of personify evil. There's Lucifer, which is this being of light that tends to lead us into a kind of self indulgent mysticism, where we just want to float away from the Earth. And then there's this other pole of evil that he called Arman, which is more about materialism and reductionism and really getting so intellectually grounded down that we were incapable of imagination. We think there's no such thing as a soul, and become possessed by the idea that we could download consciousness onto computers, that would all be what Steiner calls our minds influence, right? So I think just as an imaginative exercise to understand some of the psychological forces at play, bracketing whether or not these are real spiritual beings with metaphysical power. I think, you know, we can learn a lot from Steiner's account of Ahriman and what's happening in this test Creel set of ideologies and the a lot of the PR around artificial intelligence and transhumanism and stuff. The danger is that we become so convinced that we are just algorithms running on a brain computer that, you know, Steiner's point about materialism is that it's not simply that it's false from a philosophical point of view, it's that it what's dangerous about materialism is that it makes itself True. In other words, people who think of themselves as brain computers running algorithms really do then begin to operate in that way, right? One of the things that I think follows from a process orientation, which I think I would include Steiner as the as a process philosopher, whatever we think of as the soul or consciousness, it's not a substance that's just ready made and given and like there you we're actually involved in a process of soul making, moment by moment, day by day, and the sorts of ideas that we consider true and that motivate us change the very structure of our soul, of our inner life and our consciousness, right? And so that's what he means by Well, materialism makes itself true. If you think materialistic thoughts, you really do become kind of lodged in this deterministic mode of thought and consciousness. You become more mechanistic. And so it's a real participatory vision. It's like, how we think about ourselves actually is transforming what we are.

Chad Woodford: 54:07

Yeah, yeah. I love that. I love that. Yeah. It's funny. I hadn't thought about Steiner in a while, but yeah, I agree. I agree. You know what I feel like, if you could sum up my personal philosophy, it's like, it's that the universe comes at you. And archetypes, you know. And I think those, those, even those kind of bipolar like, you know, was it called Ahriman?

Matt Segall: 54:30

What's it called Ahriman? Which is a name he borrows from Zoroastrianism,

Chad Woodford: 54:33

yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a I think those archetypes totally exist. And, and, and, yeah, you know, it reminds me of the work, of course, of young and Hillman and all that too. But, but, yeah, I totally agree that we do, we do create, you know, we're co creating, co creating reality, right with everybody else and everything else. And, yeah, I mean. I don't know I could take that in so many directions, but, but yeah, you know, from an idealist standpoint, in terms of, like consciousness and all that we idealist, I think would say that only living organisms are able or capable of having true, sort of, like phenomenological consciousness. But you know that, in terms of Michael Levin, like I've encountered, I've sort of bumped into him briefly in several places. I feel like he's popping up a lot lately, and I don't fully, I don't fully understand, like, I don't, I'm not familiar with his work, but it gives me the sense that he is kind of, it's almost like if, if what he's saying is true, it's like a bridge. Maybe it bridges a little bit this, this kind of materialist and and more idealist worldviews, right? Like he's sort of finding, like a middle ground there.

Matt Segall: 55:51

That's true. That's fair. I think that's fair. He'll refer to himself as a pan Psych. Is sometimes he seems, he seems very willing to find points of connection with non materialist, non physicalist approaches. So, but he's still, and he's trying to recruit philosophers to help him figure this out. He's still, I think, not sure what is the ontology implied by his science, because he's very much an empiricist, and he wants to show his work in the lab and say, here's what we can do with these ideas, not just, aren't these ideas cool, right? So he's really grounded in experimental work, yeah,

Chad Woodford: 56:28

isn't he building like biological machines, in some sense, like

Matt Segall: 56:31

he they're living cells, but he calls them anthropots. He'll scrape some epithelial cells from a human, from someone in the lab, and put them in a petri dish. And these are cells specialized to, you know, be in our throat, but they and they have the full human genome, but in that new environment, they start behaving in totally novel ways and forming associations with each other and doing things that there's nothing in their genes that could have determined that they would behave this way. And so he's really interested in the sources of form and agency in biology that cannot be sourced in the genome, and for experimentally verifiable reasons, that there's some other source of form that's involved here, he talks about bioelectric fields as one example of a source of form that hasn't it's been under explored and in the history of modern biology. So he's doing really interesting work that does have application beyond biology into tech and AI and how we think about that too.

Chad Woodford: 57:33

Yeah, I'll have to check out his stuff. Yeah, it sounds really fascinating. It sounds it reminds me of Rupert Sheldrake a little bit, but maybe it's sympathetic to it, or adjacent,

Matt Segall: 57:45

adjacent synthetic in resonance, I think so.

Chad Woodford: 57:47

Yeah, okay, okay, cool. Well, let's see. Let's, let's finish with an easy question, what do you think from, you know, from a kind of philosophical standpoint, we touched on this briefly before. But like, you know, what is the solution to our current political division?

Matt Segall: 58:07

There's no, there's there's no solution. The solution is transformation. I mean, I, I'm honestly, quite dismayed about it. I find it difficult to speak. I feel compelled to speak into current events and what's happening, and I I'm honestly trying to do my best to speak across the differences and to not just fall into an easy polarization. On the other hand, I just keep discovering that no matter how balanced I try to be and saying, like, that extremes bad, and that extreme is bad too, and people get upset on either side with me. So it's like I it's not that I just need to get along with everyone. It's that I'm increasingly worried that there's no bridge, there's no basis whatsoever for even sharing a basic sense of what the facts are, much less how to interpret the facts. And so it's worrying. It's very worrisome. But I do trust the process, which is to say, again, as a student of history, I trust the deep structure of human consciousness and the archetypal dynamics that are at play to lure us forward into a more beautiful future. And it could be that in the interim, things are going to get really messy and chaotic and even violent. I mean, we don't have to say could be that things are violent now, and that's a future of history. But again, I really do have a faith in the human in the human spirit and evolution. Is difficult and without death and suffering and the resistance that that you know, various forms of obstacles and even evil plays in human evolution like we don't evolve. So in that sense, Everything's going according to plan.

Chad Woodford: 1:00:22

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that. It's Good answer. Good answer. It's hard. It is hard. It's It's hard because there's not much you can say that's not going to upset somebody or further polarize things or whatnot. It's like, it's almost like, we're caught. We're caught in, like, a sort of political, ideological catch 22 or or double blind. Double blind, where you can't just like everything you say is just sort of Yeah, makes it worse in some way. I don't know it's very strange, but I

Matt Segall: 1:00:49

will say it's does seem to me that the two the loud extremes on right and left, let's say are, it seems clear to me in a codependent relationship, yeah, they are, that's true, calling each other forth. And I do still think most of us, what's scary about our time is that more and more people are getting sort of captured at the extremes, but most people are still able to be reasonable and are not captured, you know. And so I try to speak into that middle ground where people are trying to hold attention, but the extremes are in a codependent relationship. And those of us who who are able to struggle to not get captured by one of the extremes need to act as relationship therapists, you know, or sometimes the therapist, couples counselor, has to say, I think you guys need to get a divorce, you know, I'm open to that too. But yeah, we just, I think we, we need to own our shit.

Chad Woodford: 1:01:58

Yeah, I agree. I agree. I agree. Well, you know, this is, this is why I like having you on the podcast, because you always bring in such a sort of nuanced and artful way of approaching things and answering questions. You know, everything is very well, you know, thoughtful. So I really appreciate that. Do you before we go, do you have anything that's sort of like you're actively working on now that you want to talk about or promote or anything you know, where should people go to kind of learn more about you?

Matt Segall: 1:02:31

Yeah, I'm on sub stack, my footnotes, the PLATO blog, on and on YouTube. I've got a number of pots on the stove. You know, very interested in Michael Levin's work and the philosophy of biology. Got a few things I'm working on there, nature of consciousness. I mean, I'm thinking about how to link together. You know, the special sciences. It's most of my attention is geared towards, like, okay, life exists. Minds exist. What does that tell us about the nature of the universe? I'm always involved in finding some sort of a through line, you know, connecting the dots there, but yeah, people can see my latest stuff on sub stack.

Chad Woodford: 1:03:26

Okay, yeah, and I'll drop some links in the in the show notes and all that too. So, yeah, cool. Well, thank you so much, Matt. This has been a fun conversation, and I've been I feel enlightened so, so thank you. All right, well, thanks again. Take care, man, you.