Upscaling Reality: Thoughts on the ‘Scaling Problem’ & a Possible Solution

We have referred to the “scaling problem” in our group as the question of whether or how Whitehead’s seemingly micro-cosmic metaphysics can be scaled up to the macroscopic level of human beings, other organisms and even, say, societies (in the traditional rather than the technical Whiteheadian sense).

Bluntly stated: “does a human being ‘prehend’ their actual world?” But more alluringly stated: “can the metaphysics of process and becoming support my analysis of my lived world?”.

DANCING AROUND THE PROBLEM: metaphor reverts to metaphysics

This question is a variant, though stronger, of the “combination problem” which I have written about elsewhere. (“Searching for Process”). The functional question: “how do the microscopic monads possessing quality X combine and scale up to a conjunctive macroscopic unity also manifesting X?”, becomes the more ontological one of simply wondering “in this scheme, do they actually scale up – notwithstanding the seeming evidence of X at the macroscopic level?”

In a metaphysics such as that of Whitehead, which works downward from human experience as being all that we can know (I think this is what philosophers call “empiricism”), this is all the more a risk. In the down-scaling which Whitehead utilizes he is inevitably called-upon to use anthro-centric language to describe his processes and entities; even with a wealth of neologisms his work is read as a micro-cosmic metaphysics of “feeling”, “togetherness”, “process” and “organism.”

“Well,” one then can be lured into saying, “the natural (social, political, psychological) world is itself so obviously processual and interconnected (or desperately needs more of this viewpoint) that Whitehead’s concepts of ‘feeling’ or ‘prehension’ must be imbedded at all levels and can be sources for my thoughtful (social, political, psychological) analysis.” Thus we go up-scale. Additionally, we often unconsciously import the rich, deep coherence and precision of Whitehead’s microcosmology into our own willy-nilly human world-building. Metaphor undergoes “reversion” to metaphysics.

I have argued that at minimum we should be suspicious of the lure toward this approach simply because it is a “lure.” The waters of far too many deceptively alluring philosophies have tumbled over the dam not to leave one cautious about clothing a pretty metaphor in metaphysics. Furthermore, to the degree that we must accept our being stained by the original metaphysical sin of being born into and growing up in a culture rooted in substance, we must at least notice that we do find this necessity of such “scaling-up” in our foundational, if flawed, metaphysics. Atoms may exhibit “spin” and “charge” but humans do not.

Physical science, instead, explains each new leveling-up by conjuring physical “laws” which themselves are level-linked. The “weak nuclear force” is operative at the level of the atomic nucleus, but negligible at the level of a molecule. The gravitational force, diminishing as the square of the distance between masses, becomes thus an argument against the possibility of archetypal Pluto in your natal chart influencing your earthly horoscope. And at the extremes the two warring brothers of 20th century science, quantum physics and relativity explain, respectively, the microscopic and the macroscopic but combine only in… a century of frustrating nonsense. This latter disjunction has become emblematic of the deep incoherence of the modern approach.

Whitehead does not help things because he, himself, was often more of a sociologist than a metaphysician. For much of his life he was interested in the problems of the human and natural world and he wrote and spoke widely on the challenges of education and human suffering and the nature of macroscopic things. Even his most metaphysically-dense work, “Process and Reality” is littered with asides into the nature of consciousness and of (primarily human) aesthetics and morality. Having abandoned the decade-long task of explaining all of mathematics at the microscopic level in the “Principia”, largely due to a subtle but essentially macroscopic glitch in the matrix of symbolic logic (exposed by Frege or Goedel), Whitehead seemed intent afterwards on keeping his deep dives into microcosmic metaphysics tethered to the breathing tube going to the surface of human affairs.

THE PROBLEM… APPROACHED: subjective and objective actuality

Nevertheless. Notwithstanding the neologisms and the asides we have to go to the “building code” of Whitehead’s work, (see my “Code-Compliant Whitehead”), to “Process and Reality” to see if the up-scaling project is coherent. Does the nitty-gritty of his scheme support a view of the macroscopic world which is metaphysically robust.

Though the one final actuality in all of the universe, of any universe in fact, is Whitehead’s actual entity, it is notable that this entity manifests both “becoming” and “being”. These are two seeming categories of such actual-ness. The former is the non-temporal process by which any actual occasion takes in or “prehends” the entirety of the elements of its “actual world”, and driven by a pushpull of subjective aim and appetition, and guided by the suggestions of a god which maintains a garden of eternal truths, makes a subjective choice of how to become and thus what to be. The latter is the universe of these beings: objectively-immortal settled occasions, providing or superjecting themselves as available for prehension by their next iteration of becoming or those becomings of any of the infinitude of other actual entities not yet present.

PARTLY SOLVED: objectivity is clearly depicted as being up-scaleable

I would argue, only briefly, that on the balance scales holding these two elements of actualness, subjective and objective, Whitehead has robustly described a variety of scale-able and scaled-up elements for one: the objective. On this side we can up-scale continuously to the level of a human or perhaps a stellar beings and on to societies of humans or plants or planets. He describes in depth how collections of the primal, microcosmic entity, the actual occasion, can form associative groupings such as nexus/es, societies, enduring objects and multi-stranded corpuscular societies. These allow scaling over time (via the ‘enduring’ elements) and in larger unities spanning associative if not necessarily physical space. Whitehead also takes a somewhat complicated stab at defining “living societies” via “living occasions”, and seemingly crowns this hierarchy with a less physical (or even biophysical) notion of a “regnant occasion.”

This last, importantly, reminds us that an actual occasion need not be some sort of distorted analog to an atom or a quark or any physical ‘thing’. As a process it should shed its thing-ness for us; and certainly we do not seek a homunculus peering down from the top of this hierarchy. Instead there would appear to be an immensely complex process of integration of vast strands of societies of living and inorganic elements enduring and changing and associating as organs and metabolic systems but also as memories, sensations and psychological complexes. There could well be a person in there.

Except the coronation does not actually take place. When I searched my handy e-version of P&R I found that no occurrence of the term “regnant occasion” could be found. The only reigning element I found was a “regnant nexus” (PR 103). And this is a problem.

THE PROBLEM: the not-so-regnant nexus

Actual occasions can exist on both sides of the balance of subject and object – and do so exist in Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme. An actual occasion can be a concrescing subject that is becoming and making subjective choices along the way. Nexus/es, on the other hand, do not concresce! Although nexus/es are one of Whitehead’s formal categories of existence I do not believe they exist except as associative collections of already-settled actual occasions – as objects, not subjects. (Recall that a collection of actual occasions which are “in process”, e.g. undertaking concrescence, are labeled “contemporaries” and thus inaccessible to each other and hence unable to associate into a nexus.) A nexus is only ever the object of a concrescence – when through the process of “transmutation” a prehending actual entity chooses to grasp the associative whole via a shared eternal object. The crowning of the new king is the event which signals the arrival of the new monarch. The crown merely sitting on a satin pillow is a static being, however pregnant with potential to participate in important events. A “regnant nexus” can not become. No nexus can.

So. There was my additional “problem” of scaling. On the objective side of the scales we find a rich hierarchy seemingly framing many opportunities for Whitehead’s elements to scale up to the non-microscopic world we live in. But on the subjective side there lie only actual entities. There can seemingly be no scaling of subjectivity to societies or nexus/es or corpuscular strands or any of the rest. This experience and this process can only reside in an actual entity. And Whitehead reminds us that:

“apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness.” (PR 167)

A SOLUTION: do not apply the sparse models of atomic physics to actual entities

If we concede to Whitehead this insistence on the experiences of subjects and of the strict limitation of subjectivity to actual entities we must seek our solution in broader conception of the latter; or abandon the pleasures of up-scaling to the realm of “romantic metaphor” as Elizabeth Kraus has expressed it. Perhaps actual entities are not always or necessarily mere specks of becoming as the microcosmic view can suggest. In this quest we might take a cue from Whitehead and his foregrounding of “novelty” and seek novel forms of actual entities. The most striking, of course, is Whitehead’s god. This non-temporal actual entity (thus not an ‘actual occasion’) distinctively “contains multitudes” within Whitehead’s metaphysics. This simple fact of at least one actual entity’s vastness can serve as a catalyst to raise us above a simplistic particle-physics approach to up-scaling problem.

God is thus a pointer to a crucial notion: in Whitehead’s scheme actual entities can, evidently, be vastly complex. Furthermore our recent betrayal by the evocatively named, but illusory, “regnant occasion” can force further digging to find a fair handful of actual references in P&R to “dominant occasions” and “presiding occasions”. Conceptualizing these forces the rich imagining of vast entities; actual but as immensely inclusive as a they need to be.

Certainly if we can imagine the vast sweep of subatomic and chemical processes that are purported to combine into the functioning of a mere eschericia coli, much less in a nerve cell in a brain in a pod of whales in an ecosystem… if we can imagine a lifetime of memories and feelings and interactions and successes and failures constituting an explicable and reflectively-analyzable human psyche… we ought to allow ourselves to approach the notion of a vastly complex actual entity crowning those seeming entities in their becoming.

So. The “regnant nexus” was just a red herring – or maybe just a crown sitting on a pillow reminding us of the potential for a crowning. Perhaps a typo, or a misunderstanding on my part – but this imagined or un-true proposition has, in a prototypically Whiteheadian way, fostered interesting results.

The solution to the scaling problem on the subjective side is not to create a field guide to a hierarchy or web of entities at higher levels but merely to expand the conception of a “dominant” or “presiding occasion” to its true capacity.

If one subjective form of that presiding occasion is my sense of “I-ness” then “I” can indeed say that I take it all in: the stomach rumbling, the “floaters” in my vision, the regret over the comment made, the glimpse of a leaf falling, and roll it all up into a richly contrasted unified droplet of experience, achieving a brief instant of objective immortality, laying down another fraction of a second of extensive time together with a brief occupation and delineation of a locus of physical spacetime, I thus subjectively perish; only, in a few tenths of a second (cf Galen Strawson “Selves”), to instigate the launching of another go at it; the leaf now forgotten while an intriguing proposition moves onstage… “how does that instigation arise?” I wonder.

AFTER-WORDS: turtles (and problems) all the way up and down-scaling

It just occurred to me – perhaps it is evident to the reader – that this rather extended argument I have been having with myself has only settled the question of whether Whitehead’s subjectivity can scale up metaphysically from the microcosmic to the level of the human… perhaps a bit further to a sentient Helios… possibly to an integral psychology or a collective individual. But the further scaling which many process thinkers would like to apply to consider, say, human societies, modes of education or ecological civilizations, really cannot, in my opinion, lend itself to similar argument or conclusions. I think it is wiser to call, for instance, such “organic” or “process-relational” worldviews “Whitehead-inspired” rather than attempt an analysis justifying naming them “Whiteheadian.” An argument for a better way to do earthing need not be analytically rooted in this intensely focussed “categoreal scheme” to be judged true. As the creative advance spawns new ways to be – to be human or whale or tribe or pod or galaxy – we, inhabiting the first form for a while more, will also employ our new ways of experiencing to scale down to reform a metaphysics which must be as dynamic as the universe.