Emergentism

... uh, in this opportunity, yeah, I'd like to, I'd like to dive into a couple of things in that context because, um, one of the things I think, uh, that I'd love to hear you talk about is this element of sort of, uh, pan experientialism, prehension, and this notion of kind of a an experientialist aspect that k- kind of goes all the way down.

And I'm really interested in this because I think that there's a really important, mm, fault line fracture or cleav- cleavage would be too hard, uh, or, or, or strong a term, but there's certainly a, a, a major, I think, um, potential difference amongst different metatheoretical, uh, communities in terms of approaching this, uh, question around interiority and how far down it goes, um, right? There's sort of broadly speaking, you know, emergentists, and there are panpsychists, and this is kind of a classic divide.

Um, and so I think any synthesis work that we're gonna do is really gonna have to grapple with that very head-on and really, um, dig into that question a lot more.

So, uh, first question is, can you say more about that aspect of process thought and maybe unpack a little bit about, about prehension and how this idea relates to, um, this experientialist aspect of the cosmos metaphysically that isn't maybe necessarily to be conflated with like consciousness or some of these things that emerge later on in the evolutionary story? So big, big proposal there.

You know, but, but why interiority in the first place, right? Why, why this concept of feeling? And it's a, it's a good one.

And in part, this has to do at least with Whitehead's, uh, sense that the sciences had overcome in his time, right, a, a kind of reductive materialism, if that is interpreted to mean that what's fundamental is dead, inert atomic bits that have no interiority whatsoever, right? And that, you know, move about in space, but again, there's no internal development in terms of their constitution.

So he found this utterly, um, contradictory to human experience for the, on the one hand, 'cause it, again, if it's the hard problem of consciousness, hard problem even of experience, right? And this is where emergentists, strong and weak and, you know, process people will bicker back and forth.

But [clears throat] he believed that, you know, provided there is no interiority, um, at a primal level, you're not gonna get it, however complex the amalgamations of, you know, atomic bits are.

And actually, and I should have said this maybe at the outset, but this was sort of the drive or the goal or the catalyzing mission for this project from the beginning.

I mean, I'd written a book called Emergentism where I kind of offered an accessible, popular take on how I saw the whole big picture.

But even when I was writing that, I'm like, I know that I need to write something that's 10 times as long and gets into all the details with all the footnotes and all the up-to-date science and all that.

And that's what this project is.