“There is nothing “outside” the natural order. In this sense, I am opposed to the transcendentalist’s move to remove Reason or the reflective understanding from physical reality. There is indeed a supernaturalist residue in much transcendental and phenomenological philosophy. This is why my project has always been to theorize “the natural order” as itself always already creative, aesthetic, interpretational, experiential (mine is a naturalized transcendental (Schelling’s “Nature is a priori”)). There is no “other” world from which the causal efficacy of our world derives. With our universe, the cause is internal to the effect, which is another way of saying our universe is primarily organic (with mechanism as a secondary appearance). This is why I follow Whitehead in the endeavor to construct an ontology of organism, wherein: 1) Physics is the study of the evolutionary development of particles, stars, galaxies, and other micro- and macro- organisms-in-ecologies; 2) Biology is the study of the evolutionary development of single cells, plants, and animals in their meso-cosmic ecologies; 3) Philosophy, anthropology, and theology are different aspects of the study of the evolutionary development of languages, myths, and ideas in their noetic ecologies. The organism-environment field becomes the metaphysical metaphor guiding our theorizing, rather than the machine.”

The above passage is from Matthew David Segall’s response to R. Scott Bakker on the subject of transcendental phenomenology and The Blind Brain Theory of the Appearance of Consciousness (BBT). I particularly like Matthew’s Whiteheadian, evolution/organism-centric understandings of human knowledge.

As far as treating consciousness as some kind of secondary illusory appearance that must be explained away, I honestly do not understand this impulse. To insist that humans (or any other animal) are merely purposeless, mechanistic, ‘vacuous actualities’ is a really difficult concept for me to entertain, and I have zero time for it. Sorry.

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Generative sculpture above by Elijah Porter

Tags:blind brain theorybodyconscioussnessMatt SegallMindprocess philosophytransendentalismwhitehead