Transcript of a Zoom conversation on March 20, 2025

Matt: Hi, everyone—good to see your faces. I’m here in Oakland, wishing I were back with you in Ojai. Today I’ll give a brief review, then Ruth and I will chat, and finally we’ll open it up. Remember: these are propositions, not assertions. In Whitehead’s sense, a proposition is a lure for feeling—it draws us in, elicits further propositions.

Back in January, and really for a few years now, I’ve been exploring how transaction isn’t just something humans do; it pervades nature at every level. When Alex joined earlier, he mentioned Michael Levin’s work on cellular collectives. Each of us is a society of cells. Levin shows how animal cells—hundreds of billions—coordinate through bio-electric fields to heal wounds or, in flatworms, regrow an entire head. He’s decoding that collective intelligence.

I’ve also hinted that transaction goes below biology to the physical world. That’s why we invited Ruth down to Ojai: to talk about her Transactional Interpretation of quantum theory and the role possibility plays at that level. Alex once said learning new ideas can feel like “brain damage.” It’s not because Ruth is unclear; it’s because the usual way we picture cause and effect is—well—wrong.

We’re used to an overly Yang picture where a cause pushes an effect that just sits there passively. Ruth’s “possibilist” view brings in the Yin side—the agency of possibility—so cause and effect have to be understood reciprocally. Ruth, am I on the right track? Where would you complexify the story?

Ruth: Thank you, Matt. Yes, that’s a great nutshell. I love the “brain-damage” line—it explains the fear you sometimes feel in the physics community: If we think this way, something in our brains might break.

What the transactional formulation does is highlight that fields themselves are transactional. In the conventional story you’ve got a quantum state that just goes out and does stuff—pure Yang, unilateral, like pushing over dominoes. TI says that, in fact, you need another dynamic: confirmations. So even if you call the offer wave a lure—an invitation—the absorber’s response is receptivity, the Yin aspect, entertaining that invitation.

If you throw a party and send invitations but no one receives them or decides whether to accept, nothing happens. That receptive dynamic is missing from standard physics; TI puts it right at the base. Quantitatively we can write down how it works. So at the deepest level you don’t wind up a mechanical clock—you have a continuous negotiation of invitations and responses.

Matt: Beautiful. Let me read a line from Mary Parker Follett, who studied with Whitehead. She wrote: “I never react to you, but to you plus me… It is I plus you reacting to you plus me.” That reciprocity feels like what you’re describing between emitters and absorbers.

Ruth: Exactly. In TI every charged particle is already in a network—always contextual, always in dialogue with the whole environment of charges. They’re constantly communicating what capacities there are for something to happen—when it might happen, how it might happen. It’s never one acting on another in isolation; it’s a collective milieu where individuality emerges through transaction.

Matt: When you spoke in January you mentioned extending TI into relativity and spacetime. You called spacetime the “shed skin of a snake.” Could you unpack that?

Ruth: Sure—but brace for more “brain damage.” Historically people thought Einstein’s theory demanded a block universe—past, present, future all equally real. That’s a map mistaken for the territory, Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

Together with Andreas Schlatter I’ve shown you can get the Einstein metric from a process of spacetime becoming. Events—the results of transactions—accrete into a fabric that looks like general relativity. So the future is still frayed and unwoven, the past a tight braid.

And remember: the quantum substratum is possibility. I like to tell people, slightly shockingly, “You don’t live in spacetime; your body is in quantumland.” Spacetime is more like a user interface—empirically valid, crucial for survival, but not the ultimate arena.

Matt: That shift—from living inside spacetime to weaving it—has big implications. One is the collapse of observer independence. Cartesian science imagines a spectator outside nature; quantum measurement, and your resolution of it, show that’s untenable. How does that change our sense of agency and consciousness?

Ruth: It highlights contextuality. The environment you offer a system shapes what it can manifest. That’s true in physics and, I believe, up through the life sciences. And it foregrounds Yin agency—waiting, listening. Quantum systems are always “being there now,” available to one another. Yang is still vital, but you need Yin to host the invitation.

The Tao Te Ching says the fundamental reality is more like emptiness than stuff. Entering a situation by waiting to see what the environment offers—that’s physics, not just Zen.

Matt: So agency includes listening. Not-doing is still an expression of power; it opens possibilities.

Ruth: Exactly—very powerful.

(Audience reflections omitted for brevity, though Anna, Alex, Daphne, Siobhan, and Trisha all share how Yin-Yang reciprocity has shifted their daily practice.)

Matt (closing): To wrap: transaction as invitation-and-response scales from photons to flatworms to job searches. Spacetime is a trail, not a container. And the moral seems Taoist: “The Way does nothing, yet nothing is left undone.” Ruth, thank you for re-patterning our brains yet again.