“Time, it had transpired, was of the essence.”

Topic

“Time, the very attar of the Rose, Was running out.”
– James Merrill in “The Changing Light at Sandover”

Thusly – after a brief, very Whiteheadian, admission of his own limitations and those of his art – does my favorite poet commence his vast metaphysical epic poem describing his decades long conversations with nonhuman spirits. Blake, I am told, did something similar. Maybe many creators do.

Time remains, for me, one of the deepest mysteries of the universe and also one of the sore-rubbed points of concern for me in understanding Whitehead and P&R.

Two very specific questions to share for now:

A. How can we explain human experiences of precognition, and the implied retro-causality, and scientific studies which seem to demonstrate the phenomena, in the context of Whitehead’s fundamental grounding of the “creative advance” on a uni-directional arrow of time?

B. How can we justify “scaling up” Whitehead’s framework from the micro- to the macro-cosmic when in the former the core processes (of concrescence) are non- or pre-temporal while in the later they seem ever so time-laden?

Question A is the harder one but often the most easily brushed off.

Whiteheadian scholar David Ray Griffin, in his book “Parapsychology, Psychology and Spirituality” opens the door wide to accepting nearly the full gamut of paranormal experience into a Whiteheadian cosmos. After all the core processes of concrescence take place outside of spacetime and (apparently) are considered to spawn the arising of “extension”, e.g. space and time, as secondary, though important effects of “satisfaction.” Action (and interaction) at a distance such as ESP and telekinesis are hardly challenges to the metaphysics. And, of course, Whitehead demands that human experience of all sorts be accounted for and inform our metaphysics: sober or drunk, awake or dreaming.

Nevertheless, Griffin specifically does not accept pre-cognition as explicable within a Whiteheadian framework. He bluntly dismisses it as fundamentally contradictory to the metaphysics and somehow explainable via a short list of possible mis-apprehensions that those who describe (and study) precognitive experiences must necessarily be suffering under.

Of course this list of the “usual suspects” comprises the same suite of casual brush-offs that so-called skeptics have employed to dismiss the range other “para-normal” experiences regularly reported by humans, often seen in animals, and rigorously studied by careful scientists in laboratory settings over many decades.

Precognition (including precognitive dreaming) appears to me to be an established fact of scientific inquiry in recent decades and, unarguably a fact of human experience for millennia. By Whitehead’s directive we cannot ignore it as an element of human experience.

[I refer the curious to the range of work by scientists Dean Radin and Daryl Bem and will try to provide links below or in comments. Be aware, though, that the mainstream gatekeepers of “that which is fact” are ideologically very active in preserving the status quo and are unhesitant about policing “that which you can know” within the media where we casually seek knowledge. This, even while the paradigms shift and melt beneath our feet! The example of Rupert Shedrake’s “wikipedia page” is a fascinating story of the censorship of ideas and science. So do your research… be skeptical of the skeptics]

I will try to be briefer in explaining Question B.

At the micro-cosmic scale of a singe actual entity the processes of concrescence take place outside of time. Time and extension themselves only arise as elements of the final satisfaction. But at the macro-cosmic scale, when we speak, say, of the human or human societies or ecosystems, these processes seem to degenerate into mere “romantic metaphor” to borrow Elizabeth Kraus’s phrasing from my earlier post. This is the problem we in our class have been referring to as “scaling Whitehead.”

I feel that in particular the macro-cosmic framings suffer the critique of being mere metaphor because the element of time-less-ness during the “concrescence” appears to be lacking. Human experiences and those of ecosystems and societies clearly take place in time.

It feels like we are playing by two sets of conflicting rules if we use the structures of Whitehead’s categoreal scheme and the details of P&R to launch understandings of human consciousness, human societies and whole ecosystems while sidestepping the central element of timelessness in the core of the process of the basic scheme.

Of course Whitehead in his other work actively engaged with the macro-cosmic processes of nature and of humanity. I would appreciate any guidance in understanding his view of this question. But even in Process and Reality I believe he refers to a “regnant occasion” of a human or living “society.” I would very much like any sort of explication of what this particular sort of vastly complex actual occasion is. How does it concresce, per Whitehead and P&R?

I believe a path into this tangle may arise from the distinction between “clock time” and “psychological” or “experienced time”… or at least with some multiplicity of sorts of time. Perhaps the concrescence of the regnant occasion of a bat flitting across the night sky is indeed timeless and the bat’s experience of time – maybe as it eats a mayfly which lives only a day in any case – is a construct of the satisfaction. Somehow…

attar of the rose, indeed…

Replies

Good to see that Matt Segall raised the question of pre-cognition during the hour-long concluding discussion of the recent conference centered around the publication of the second volume of Whitehead’s “Harvard Lectures”.

You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yugxiGG_KDo with Segall’s questions at 13:30 and 16:00.

Ronny Desmet is a very astute thinker but his “deer in the headlights” reaction to Segall’s question suggests that there are cracks in our understanding of Whitehead’s ideas which ought to be further explored.

In Adventures of Ideas Whitehead cautions us:

“In order to discover some of the major categories under which we can classify the infinitely various components of experience, we must appeal to evidence relating to every variety of occasion. Nothing can be omitted, experience drunk and experience sober, experience sleeping and experience waking, experience drowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experience self-forgetful, experience intellectual and experience physical, experience religious and experience sceptical, experience anxious and experience care-free, experience anticipatory and experience retrospective, experience happy and experience grieving, experience dominated by emotion and experience under self- restraint, experience in the light and experience in the dark, experience normal and experience abnormal.”