Charles Bledsoe
There are different interpretations of Whitehead’s extensive continuum. The more orthodox interpretation emphasizes its being derivative, and not receptacular. Cobb writes: “The existence of the extensive continuum depends on the existence of the actual occasions”; and that it’s composed of extensive connections that “are potentialities realized by the actual occasions”. Cobb also explains that the extensive continuum is essentially Whitehead’s term for space-time, and that Whitehead rejects the idea that space-time/the extensive continuum can “be understood as having an existence independent of occasions in which, then, occasions come into being”.
But there’s an alternative interpretation, that of Jorge Nobo, according to which the extensive continuum is both the extensive continuum of the conventional interpretation, and also an aseitous rather than derivative, and receptacular structure of mutual immanence and solidarity.
Michel Weber I think similarly also explains that “Extension is both derivative and required: the a priori dimension of the extensive continuum comes from the existence of basic regions while the aposteriori dimension comes from the proper regions”. Weber further says: “The extensive continuum is a totality weaved with three threads that unfortunately PR does not highlight with enough clarity: basic regions, objective proper regions and subjective proper regions. Basic regions are presupposed, a priori … Objective proper regions are derived, potential (actualized), a posteriori … Subjective proper regions are actual, i.e., in fieri”.
This is all to say that the extensive continuum can be understood to have multiple facets, and that it both is and isn’t “built of” the experience of actual entities.
In any case it’s a “relational complex” that centrally figures into Whitehead’s explanation of the relational nature of experience, universal relativity, and the sharing of experience of actual entities.
My personal focus is process theology, and process thought as an aid in the area of religious studies. Science is my weak area, so I won’t touch on the question of how the theory of the extensive continuum “squares” with science (I would recommend the books of Timothy Eastman, Michael Epperson, and John Jungerman). As for common sense, well, a good bit of quantum and modern physics is counterintuitive and difficult to square with a common sense that’s conditioned by our experience of reality at the scale of perceptible objects, so if it’s difficult to grasp some of process metaphysics from the perspective of common sense process is in scientific good company.
Yep, the incorrigible propensity of business elites to continue doing business in the ecologically catastrophic but profitable fashion they’re accustomed to, despite the climate change crisis it’s manifestly causing, may very well turn out to be humankind’s “filter”, the factor that ends us. We’ll see.
I’m also uncertain about the legitimacy of identifying micro actual occasions with the strings of string theory.
It’s in fact possible to hold the process perspective without subscribing to Whitehead’s concept of eternal objects. No less a process thinker than Charles Hartshorne rejected the concept of eternal objects. I’m not advocating making that move, but you should know that it’s an option.
I agree, an orientation to substantialist thinking has been encoded deeply into our mental DNA by our civilization for millennia and so a paradigm shift to a process ontology will be one of the most radical and difficult paradigm shifts imaginable. Also, there’s the fact that it would enjoin and entail a deep revision of our socioeconomic system and form of life, and a revolutionary transformation of the status quo, which isn’t in the interest of the powers that be, and so their considerable influence over our culture is another monumental obstacle. The shift to a process paradigm will certainly be a process that will take some time, and that we’ll survive as a civilization and a species long enough to bring it off is truly questionable.
If there’s truth to the great filter theory, the theory that the myriad of other civilizations that must have existed elsewhere in the cosmos haven’t been detected thus far because when they reach approximately our level of development they tend to self-destruct like humanity appears to be on the verge of doing, well, then it may indeed be likely that making the process philosophy-inspired course correction necessary to steer our civilization and species away from the abyss is not going to happen in time. We may very well be about to become another galactic statistic, another victim of the great filter. I’m not prepared to abandon hope yet, but we’re going to have to really get going in a big way with transforming our ontological, values, social, and economic orientation to justify holding out hope much longer for humankind beating the possible galactic odds against our survival.
Yes. And I would just add that we can also think in terms of its indivisibility by thinking in emergentist terms of its “satisfaction” and identity being more than the sum of, and not resolvable into its individual constituent bits of data.
A “big drop” composed of smaller related drops, or an ongoing “drip” would, I think, be Whitehead’s enduring objects and societies. Btw, if you’re especially interested in “big drops”, or societies, I would suggest reading Joseph Bracken. He’s given quite a lot of thought to the “big drops”, or “structured fields of activity”, as he calls them. (Also, remember that living and moving and having our being in the meso world, the world of visible-to-the-naked-eye objects such as trees and planets, we encounter actual entities not as isolated entities but rather collectively as societies, which is what meso objects like trees and planets are; our meso-level, empirical reality consists of these societies, and so I think we would do well to follow Bracken’s example and take as much interest in societies as we do in actual entities. Bracken has charged Whiteheadians with not taking sufficient interest in societies, and I think he’s right.)
My understanding of an actual entity is that it isn’t really a simplex, something composed of a single part and irreducible for that reason. Rather, I think that it would be better to describe actual occasions as indivisible, atomic (in the the word’s original sense of “indivisible”). They’re indivisibly integrated and unified units of complexity. There’s complexity in an actual occasion, but it’s concresced into a unity that can’t be taken apart and with a character of its own. Actual entities are both individual and social; they’re social and synthetic processes of prehending and integrating prehensions of the world’s diversity of data into a unique individual who is emergent from but more than the sum of its constituent parts, and who therefore can’t be reduced to the sum of its parts. A drop of your experience in this moment indeed “has parts: sensory perceptions, thoughts, feelings, qualia”, but it’s a unity of all of these elements that’s more than merely these elements as a group, and that can’t be reduced to them. Thinking about actual entities in terms of irreducibility orients us in a wrong reductionist direction. I think that thinking in terms of indivisibility and creative emergence is more helpful for understanding them. (Btw, the term “emergence” is often associated with theories of consciousness and mind that are materialist and substantialist, so I guess even that term has the potential to send someone off in the wrong direction.)
I’m glad that you bring up anthropocentrism. I can see how at first blush it might appear that Whitehead fell into anthropocentrism and anthropopathism, but the premise of his method of generalization wasn’t actually that the mode of experience of human beings is shared by the rest of reality. In fact his premise was quite the opposite, that our mode of experience at the level of consciousness obscures the rudimentary experience that consciousness is a complexification of; and that that rudimentary experience can be taken as instantiative of the rest of reality.
Contra some of his critics, Whitehead is definitely not guilty of abjectly making human interiority into a paradigm that’s imposed on the elementary actual entities that populate the universe; rather, it comes in for a close examination by him simply because it’s our most intimate data about reality, not because he presupposes it to be paradigmatic. And the data of our subjectivity certainly isn’t projected in a simplistic way that attributes full-fledged consciousness and all of its qualia to actual entities. Rather, Whitehead takes human consciousness and psyches to be an emergent high-grade configuration and example of experience which he finds ultimately consists of his actual occasions, which are sentient rather than conscious, and not anthropomorphic at all.
Whitehead makes his way down to a level of experientiality and ontology where we find building-block occasions of energy-process that have a mental pole, not homunculi or micro human egos. He never lamely humanizes actual entities. No, whitehead’s work does not amount to an elaborate rationalization of anthropocentrism and the attribution of human traits and feelings to the rest of nature. He always scrupulously treats an occasion of our internal experience, a feeling as a specimen of reality that we can scrutinize to derive a description of reality from; not as a model that’s foisted on nonhuman reality with an anthropocentric presumption of applicability.
PS Because Whiteheadianism probes down to the building-block occasions of experience that consciousness emerges from it also often comes in for criticism for the opposite of anthropomorphism, for a dehumanization of experience that reduces it to something that we can no longer relate to. Among those who only have a superficial knowledge of it, Whiteheadianism finds itself being placed between the Scylla of anthropocentrism, and the Charybdis of reductionism! But once again the critics get it wrong, Whitehead’s elementary units of reality aren’t devoid of relatable liveliness, they merely aren’t portrayed as psychic homunculi, quanta-level bits of full-blown consciousness. They’re still left with plenty of relatable and enchanting axianoetic interiority (“axianoetic” is a great neologism recently coined by Andrew Davis, btw; he uses the term to describe ultimate reality as oriented to value-realization, and minded).
(Well, this is what I’ve taken away from my reading of Process and Reality regarding the question of anthropocentrism, but as Dr. McDaniel has said, it’s a difficult book, so I certainly might have gotten some of this wrong and would very much welcome correction if anyone takes issue with anything I’ve said here.)
Yes, you’re quite correct, as I understand it one way that we prehend and receive influence from other, either spatially or temporally distant actual entities is by prehending God, who has prehended and includes the experience of the rest of the universe’s actual entities. Additionally, the interrelational, integrative ontological MO of actual entities accounts for a thoroughly, universally networked universe and so actual entities are able to prehend and include in themselves the rest of the universe’s actual entities, including noncontiguous entities who are vastly in the majority, mediately; i.e. by virtue of the networked structure of the cosmos. We actually prehend only a small percentage of the world’s actual entities directly, the rest, all of those far away in space and time, we’re able to connect with thanks to the nature of existence being a nexus. As for the extent to which other actual entities affect us, while everything in the universe affects us to some degree, I think that it would be safe to say that the closer other entities are to us in space and time the greater is their relevance to us; and, as I believe Whitehead says somewhere, extremely distant actual entities can have a pretty trivial degree of relevance to our lives.
I would also say that the kind of prayer that I have in mind is essentially a feeling. Kataphatic prayer is the generation of a feeling-verbal thought, and its direction toward God. Petitionary prayer is the generation of a supplicatory feeling-thought, and its direction toward God. I think that divine initial aims can be interpreted as reverse prayers, so to speak; as God’s prayers for us because they’re a targeted and supplicatory feeling generated in God for actual entities.
I’m not familiar with the work of Reginald Cahill, or his theory of a stochastic neural network. I do however subscribe to Whitehead’s ontology in which all of the actual entities that populate the universe are occasions of interrelationality, which makes for a thoroughly networked universe in which all entities are connected either contiguously and immediately, or, in most cases noncontiguously and mediately through the other actual entities that they’ve immediately prehended. I think that this is a way that our thoughts can be transmitted through “thin air”, which is actually composed of networked micro actual entities. In my view this ontology is how our thoughts can indeed cause “spooky action at a distance”, and accounts for telepathy and other paranormal phenomena. Also, God would be an important player in the networking of entities. That is, God prehends entity A directly, and then entity B prehends entity A indirectly when it prehends God and receives some data from God regarding entity A.
Oh, and as for what I mean by God, well, essentially I mean what Whitehead means by God. My personal conception of God is very Whiteheadian. I hold the multiultimistic perspective that there are multiple ultimate realities, and that the “universal of universals”, to quote Whitehead, or as I would say, the ultimate of ultimates, is a process of experiential-relational creativity, of which God is the “primordial” and supreme subjective individualization. Such an understanding of the Divine may not work for a great many other theists, for more conventional theists, but it works for me.
Whitehead does comment on the similarity of aspects of his conceptuality to “certain strains of Asiatic thought”. He even goes so far as to say that he’s “greatly indebted” to them. But I’m not sure how directly he was influenced; how much, if any Buddhist or Confucian philosophy he actually read before writing Process and Reality. That would certainly be very interesting to know. Whitehead’s processism also bears some similarities to Hegelianism (and other German idealists), but if I recall correctly Whitehead claimed that he never read Hegel. Any influence Hegel might have had on him would have been indirect. Perhaps the same was the case with Buddhism and Chinese thought. I’m hoping that Dr. McDaniel knows something about what Whitehead’s indebtedness to Asian thought actually involved and will share that knowledge with us.
I agree, “bad” initial aims would, among other things, aim at merely mitigating the damage that will be done when mitigation rather than cessation or prevention of damage is the best, the only possible course of action available. Such “bad” initial aims are bad in the sense that they only mitigate or palliate badness, they don’t eliminate it. Some measure of badness is still the case when such initial aims are actualized, but it’s reduced or redeemed as much as possible—hence “bad” initial aims are actually both bad and good.
As for mitigating the damage that we human beings perpetrate upon the planet, we certainly can reduce and minimize our destructive impact. I think that most people who’ve given thought to this question will agree that to do so we’ll of course need to begin to practice moderation, as individuals and as a civilization; and we’ll need to begin to practice prioritizing ecological well-being, i.e. doing the work of figuring out the ecologically sound modes of producing what we need and want, and making the choice to restrict ourselves to those modes.
This is of course a tall order, much easier envisioned and recommended than executed since it will take nothing less than an ecological transvaluation of values, and the emergence of a new form of economic system geared to moderation and responsible relationship with the earth rather than growth and profit maximization. Our current economic paradigm is one-dimensionally driven by the competitive drive for accumulation of profit and capital; and it consequently acculturates the corporate players in the economy to be one-dimensional specimens of Homo capitalisticus, who are all about producing monetary values and frankly have no capacity for practicing moderation and concern for the ecosphere. This isn’t really their fault, and we don’t need to vilify them, they’re hapless products of the pathological paradigm that they came up in, and that their consciousness was conditioned by. It’s that ecologically pernicious paradigm that we need to focus critique and condemnation on, and need to replace with an ecologically healthy system ASAP. I think that we need to realize that we can’t achieve an ecological civilization merely by tweaking our existing economic model, it’s too inherently and incorrigibly opposed to putting people and planet before profits. We really do need a new model.
I would just add that although John Cobb is very humble, and has a great appreciation of Whitehead and would therefore never claim to have transcended the master, so to speak, he isn’t just a student of Whitehead’s thought, he’s an original and innovative thinker in his own right, and has added much to the process tradition, including an enrichment of Whitehead’s concept of initial aims. Today process, and especially process theology, features some bits that are Cobbian, and also Hartshornian, and whatnot, rather than purely Whiteheadian. We should take account of that and not get locked into thinking that everything in process has to square with Whitehead’s every word. That would be a kind of scholasticism, and for a philosophy scholasticism is a ticket to being static and moribund.
Thank you.