Below I am outlining the remarks I will share tomorrow morning for day 2 of Gregg Henriques’ UTOK—“Universal Theory of Knowledge”—Conference on Consciousness. I’m speaking on a panel with Michael Levin (the biologist) and Bonnitta Roy (the philosopher-practitioner of process-relational arts).

The Universal Theory-of-Knowledge (UTOK) project calls for a framework capable of integrating physics, biology, psychology, and the humanities. Most theories of mind either begin below the human—reducing consciousness to neural or computational processes—or above the human—postulating trans-human metaphysical agents. Both approaches risk a performative contradiction: they explain consciousness while forgetting the explanatory act itself—the questioning mind. I plan to propose what so far as I can tell is a mostly complementary point of view: I will offer an anthropocosmic perspective on consciousness.

We must begin with the human situation. Heidegger attempted something like this in his existential analysis of Dasein. Whitehead, however, approaches the issue in a more cosmocentric way. If Heidegger centralized the human mode of being as uniquely revelatory of the world—leaving other beings, animals, plants, and rocks progressively “poorer in world”—Whitehead insists that value, aim, subjectivity, experience, emotion, and aesthetic realization as such go all the way down. There would be no world without such feelings/prehensions. In Whitehead’s cosmos, Dasein—the clearing into which consciousness unfurls—belongs to all existents, not only to human beings, but also to animals, plants, and single cells. The proto-form, the experiential minimum of consciousness, pervades every energetic transaction and every instance of information processing from top to bottom across the universe.

I’ve arrived at this anthropocosmic stance by way of a process-relational onto-epistemology. Epistemological problems are really disguised ontological problems: we cannot claim to know how we know until we know what there is to know, because we, as knowers, are ourselves an example of what there is to know. Onto-epistemology therefore unites the known and the knower within the same recursive dialectic of cosmogenesis—of order-creation.

Order-creation is always ongoing, because order can never finally overcome chaos. We can distinguish order from chaos only relatively, from particular environmental standpoints, and we cannot define chaos apart from some regime of order. Yet its relational, perspectival status does not render order arbitrary; it remains coherent and creative. Creativity, coupled with an ideal aim at beauty, is for Whitehead both divine and creaturely. God, in his cosmology, is also a creature. Creativity plus this ideal aim tends toward an intensification of complexity—not toward any single predetermined form, but toward ever richer forms. The observable universe strongly suggests such a tendency, for we witness it and participate in its realization.

When thinking about the nature of the universe, we must start from the fact that we, as conscious agents, exist and can inquire into that nature. Any theory that begins without presupposing conscious agents falls into performative self-contradiction. Both John Vervaeke and Gregg Henriques emphasize this extended-consistency requirement: science must account for its own presuppositions. From the anthropocosmic perspective I am offering, mind is not merely an add-on to nature; nature is intimate with mind, imbued with and pregnant with it—always already seeded by it. Neither the seed alone nor the soil alone explains what happens; causation is contextual.

This shift from linear to contextual causation is, to me, the most attractive aspect of Extended Naturalism. A relational, multi-level understanding of causal unfolding allows us to rehabilitate Aristotle’s four causes by throwing them into evolutionary motion, thus extending naturalism beyond materialism toward an integral vision of how mind and nature hang together from beginning to end, and from small to large.

Evolution, on this view, is the process whereby spirit potentiates itself and becomes ever more complexly incarnate in living forms—through light, life, the capacity to look, and the capacity to speak and think. Light, life, looking, and language mark successive levels of emergent emanation.

• Light (quantum transactions)

• Life (cellular autopoiesis)

• Looking (perceptual agency)

• Language (symbolic reflexivity)

At each level, new distinctions become relevant as minded nature moves deeper into relationship with itself, differentiating into ever-richer and more intense unities. But never is there any ontological break, never a moment when mind might emerge from new arrangements of matter. Matter is fallen light, and light was, is, and will always be on its way to logos.