Matthew D. Segall
Associate Professor, CIIS
About
Matthew D. Segall is an associate professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness department at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). His work bridges process-relational metaphysics with contemporary science, drawing on Whitehead, Schelling, and Goethe. His research explores the intersections of philosophy of mind, philosophy of nature, and cosmology.
Key Contributions
- Develops process-relational philosophy for contemporary questions in mind, nature, cosmology, and science
- Interprets Whitehead and Schelling as resources for moving beyond mechanistic materialism
- Wrote Physics of the World-Soul, connecting process philosophy with modern physics and cosmology
- Teaches at CIIS, bringing metaphysics, ecology, and consciousness studies into public-facing philosophy
- His work opens alternatives to reductionism, though sympathetic metaphysics can be hard to separate from speculative overreach
Questions they sharpened View the streams
Does reality descend or emerge?
2021Emergence and emanation need not be enemies. Read through Whitehead, the world's upward creativity and its lure toward an ideal pole are two beats of one movement — novelty rises, but it rises toward possibilities held out to meet it.
Where does agency come from?
2024Levin's agential material is Whitehead in the lab — final and formal causes returned to biology, purpose without a designer.
Videos & Interviews
David Abram and Matt Segall on Animism, Panpsychism, and the More than Human World
Abram and process philosopher Matt Segall compare two ways of describing a living world: animism, rooted in the felt experience of a landscape that gazes back, and panpsychism, the metaphysical claim that experience goes all the way down. Along the way they circle the questions this site keeps returning to — whether mind requires a body, what language does to perception, and how a culture of screens might recover its senses.
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Alfred North Whitehead: His Life and Work
Matthew D. Segall traces Whitehead's life from mathematician to process philosopher, surveying the arc of his thought
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Hidden Consciousness & The Living Patterns That Shape Reality | Michael Levin & Matt Segall
A long-form dialogue (THIRD EYE DROPS, Mind Meld 424) between developmental biologist Michael Levin and process philosopher Matt Segall on hidden minds, the patterns that organize living form, and where cognition comes from.
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Emergence-emanation, Whitehead, Kastrup: a dialectic ontology w/ Matt Segall - Voices with Vervaeke
Segall and Vervaeke work the axis between emanation and emergence: does reality descend from the One, as Plotinus taught, or climb from below, as Whitehead's process philosophy suggests — and can a dialectical ontology hold both? A follow-up to their Whitehead dialogue, set between Vervaeke's conversations with Bernardo Kastrup.
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Is The Universe Conscious? | Matt Segall
View DetailsConnections
David Abram
In conversationCultural Ecologist & Philosopher
Abram and process philosopher Matt Segall recorded a long dialogue comparing animism and panpsychism — two ways of describing a living world, one rooted in felt experience of a landscape that gazes back, the other a metaphysical claim that experience goes all the way down. The conversation is on this site.
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John Vervaeke
In conversationCognitive Scientist & Philosopher
A Voices with Vervaeke episode — on this site — walks the ladder between emergence and emanation with Segall, testing Whitehead's process thought against Neoplatonism's descent. It is the rare conversation where cognitive science and speculative metaphysics negotiate openly, each conceding what its own frame cannot generate.
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Michael Levin
In conversationBiologist & Morphogenesis Researcher
Their Third Eye Drops conversation — on this site — is Levin's biology read through Segall's Whitehead. Segall offers the frame: 'a kind of Whiteheadian approach here — mind is this capacity to search adjacent possibilities in this morphospace,' and asks not only what organisms have done but what draws them forward. Levin, who usually keeps metaphysics at arm's length, concedes the fit: 'I know for you, Matt, you like Whitehead's interpretation, and it sounds to me like the two of you are probably on the same page.' A process philosopher and an experimentalist agreeing that form is something living things reach for, not something they are handed.
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