Gordon White: Well, it certainly opens with kind of “Goldilocks-ing” our way through different models of reality, the main ones being materialism, which doesn’t work and then we start to move onto ones that I like less, but are slightly better than materialism. We have
panpsychism, which is essentially a fudge to kind of keep materialism in the game, and then we have
idealism, sort of the idea that everything is kind of one mind; that’s in there and I like that well enough. I think it describes reality certainly better than panpsychism or materialism, but it’s in that Goldilocks sense, not quite right. It bends rather than breaks a model when you come to deal with high strange phenomena, magic, UFOs and so on. And so it then explores this idea of return of
animismto what I call the philosophical big table where it… animism has been a very popular idea for the last 20 years within ecological circles or post-colonial indigenous politic circles and that’s all well and good. I don’t see a lot of…
Alex Tsakiris: What does it mean in those circles? Because I think it has a little bit of a different meaning in those circles than it does in the magic occult circles world and you do a nice job of defining those differences and similarities.
Gordon White: Well, it sort of means the same thing. A broad description of animism would be… well, I call a spirit haunted universe, but in the kind of political speak, it is that humans aren’t the only persons.
Alex Tsakiris: Right.
Gordon White: There are nonhuman persons. They can be sacred mountains. They can be plants. They can be ancestors. And it’s sort of decentralizing or democratizing personhood and you can make a very good case that it’s our kind of aboriginal view of personhood that we’ve got in a post-Christian, post-Descartes world, but has sort of imbalanced people, both mentally and quite messed with the environment. So it’s good in that political sense and there’s a lot of value that comes out of people discussing it in that sort of sphere. They do still tend to stop short of the things, and we’ve had this discussion before, the things that change everything,