Topic: Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds

Presenters: Merlin Sheldrake & Matt Segall

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, and winner of the Royal Society Book Prize and the Wainwright Prize. Matt Segall, the Cobb Institute’s Science Advisor, says of Sheldrake’s work: “He encourages us to wonder how our scientific image of nature would be transformed by the adoption of mycelial rather than mechanical metaphors.” Segall will continue the dialogue about Whitehead/process thought’s relevance to mycology and biology more generally. See this blog post for a sense of what Matt and Merlin have already explored: https://footnotes2plato.com/2021/09/27/towards-a-mycological-metaphysics/. Merlin’s presentation on this topic at the 50th Anniversary Conference of the Center for Process Studies has been posted to YouTube.

Merlin received a Ph.D. in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research institute. Merlin is a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam, and works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks and the Fungi Foundation. Learn more at his website. Matt is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA (CIIS.edu). He has published articles on a wide-array of topics, including metaphysics, Gaia theory, religious studies, psychedelics, and architecture. He also blogs regularly at footnotes2plato.com.  

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