Chris Hughes
Thanks Matt, I think I understand this. I was thinking of the space an actual occasion inhabits. A space that is not a chunk of block time or block space but nonetheless has implications measurable in time and space. Durations seem like a bridge taking in objective facts, inhaling possibilities then breathing out again into space-time as new facts for others to take in.
“The “actual entity” is a scale free metaphysical category meant to describe any process of actualization, whether quantum or atomic or biotic or psychic. This description is certainly not algorithmic but is rather creative.” Matt
When I read this a new possibility opened for me: the realization that understanding in all its details and whatever its details is a passing creative act which denies all and any categories of explanation as it moves on to the next act of understanding. There is no chance of rest, the hand is always exploring, never grasping. The actual entity is a rejection of categories, of anything fixed as it is equally at home in the “the quantum, atomic, biotic and psychic”. In a way the actual occasion is a symbol for ANW’s Adventure of Ideas.
Hi tae, I only just found this post, apologies. We meet Sundays at 4:00 pm PT and usually talk for 90 mins. The conversation is loosely structured around what has been posted in the discussion forum but we go wherever the wind blows us. It would be great to see you there. ID 834 8112 8493 PC: 885 857
I felt your poem breathing Whitehead into the air. So well done. Thanks for sharing.
My perspective is that a flower evolved and the societies of occasions that evolved with it contribute to the flowers experiential pole. When you pile bricks on top of each other no such evolution occurs. A computer is put together in the same way a house is. People living in the house do not give it any experience. The execution of code does not transcend the electrical activity of the CPUs. That LLMs are not understood does not provoke the query “are they sentient” it means we can not follow the “steps” they are taking when they “learn”. As to using AI to advocate a relational world view, great idea!
There is a machine, there is code, there is a program. All extrinsic components of a LLM, all a LLM amounts to. There is not the slightest flicker of anything intrinsic. We interpret the output of the LLM, we wonder about it. It can’t do this because all it does is select the next word, one word. Such a system doesn’t so much pass the Turing Test as fool it. That is it makes a fool out of someone who thinks passing the Turing Test signifies someone is “at home” the other side of the door.
Yes, both poles but it is the subjective pole that physicalists deny.
Hi Mark, you raise a lot of interesting points in your response. You start by saying “I’ll try to think of the object as an actual occasion i.e. a process.” Actual occasions have one foot in the 4D space-time continuum, their physical pole, and the other in their intrinsic quest for satisfaction, their subjective pole. The subjective pole evaluates the God restricted set of possibilities available to it and settles on (concresces) into something new. With this starting point my posted argument is unnecessary, the object as a process makes a choice. The ontology of the world accommodates life at every level. My argument was an attempt to make a die hard physicalist pause for a moment, abandon the Copenhagen orthodoxy, adopt a realist position and consider the possibility that superposition offers a small foothold to start the climb out of materialistic reductionism.
Hi Jessica, I resonate when you write, “I don’t see how I can continue to work with the current curriculum knowing that it is perpetuating theories that are at odds with Whitehead’s philosophy”. I am a retired teacher and I enthusiastically taught Maths and Physics for many years without any awareness that what I was doing was selling a world view that does not help the planet solve its deepest problems.
First off, Whitehead was a believer in science and maths, his objection was that they have overstepped their mark. Arthur Eddington has a nice way of putting this: imagine your school and the full richness of life going on in it. Then consider the accounts in the office, a record of where every dollar is spent and of every dollar that comes in. Science is like these accounts, its not wrong but its far from the truth. In the same way I think you can open kids minds to the idea that reality is about events not about objects. For instance, you can talk about your students’ relationships with each other and point out how a friendship is an exchange that makes each person who they are to the other. Then when you start a science class you can say that what we are going to look at today is the same, one thing affecting another. In this way I think you can shift the feeling of a science class away from “a ready-made list of ‘we now knows’” in the direction of process thinking. And a big YES to awe and wonder! If you can open your student eyes wide, then you have given them a momentum that will take them places. Isn’t that the deep joy of teaching?
For my springboard project I have developed a set of lessons on process thinking for high school students. I think the same could be done for the age group you teach. If you are interested, I can give you a link to them.
Hi Christie, I am fascinated by the idea of “wonder focused assignments” and moving classroom experience to the edge of wonder rather than the drab task of memorizing what is already known. I would love to hear more about your work. Maybe you could join us on one of our Sunday Zoom meetings. 4:00 pm PT, 834 8112 8493 PC:885 857
“But the initial stage of its [an actual entity’s] aim is an endowment which the subject inherits from the inevitable ordering of things, conceptually realized in the nature of God. The immediacy of the concrescent subject is constituted by its living aim at its own self-constitution. Thus the initial stage of the aim is rooted in the nature of God, and its completion depends on the self-causation of the subject-superject.” (P&R p244)
Could you see the “endowment” as the Schrodinger equation and the “completion” and “self-causation” as the collapse of the wave function?
Thanks Matt and Doug. Matt, I’m not sure I follow you when you say, “the wave-function only represents the pattern of eternal objects, i.e, measurement probabilities and not actually measured states”. Epperson writes “Ultimately, then, concrescence/state evolution is a unitary evolution, from actualities to unique actuality.” I take him to mean that the State Vector represents measurable properties of the system (the specification of |Ψ〉 for a particular observed system) and is a unique actuality. The measurement probabilities are projections onto umpteen other vectors in the space (the squared amplitudes in Schrodinger’s version). So, this would make the evolving |Ψ〉 a representation of actuality and a measurement the concrescence of a possibility from the grounding “reality” of |Ψ〉. I feel I may be getting closer to your meaning now.
Thanks for your explanation of “in time” and “out of time”. Really helpful.
Hi John, does the “only occasional” account for the difficulty we have with the probability inherent in Quantum mechanics and Bohr’s retreat to seeing QM as a predictive apparatus and not a description of reality?
Hi Kathleen, your description of the localized farming around Bloomington is heart warming. It makes me think about what Jeremy Lent said in answering a question Eric asked the other week. He (Jeremy) said many, most people, are good, honest and concerned but they are part of a system that lacks these attributes. The system has become too big to challenge, it is the air we breath, the medium we swim in. The encouragement you speak of when you “learn of such things” always seems to sit within this context. It is a dissonance we experience as a pervasive anxiety even when we are encouraged. But the “system” is not only the exploitation of the world in the name of progress and capitalism it is also the system of thinking that we have imbibed since birth, the very grain of our common sense. I suspect that most of the people involved in the Bloomington coop share this dissonance. They have partially opted for a greener, more localized lifestyle but have they thrown off the spirit of our age, our understanding of how the world works? This is where I see Process coming in: the replacement of the common sense understanding of the world as a set of objects we encounter with our senses to the experience of the world as a constant becoming only fleetingly accessible to our senses. In the techno babble of Whitehead, the becoming of an event (an actual occasion) conformal prehension, subjective aim, subjective form, satisfaction don’t occur in clock time at all and only enter into “clock time” when satisfaction occurs and the Becoming concresces into Being, the sensed word we find ourselves in. If we experienced Becoming instead of Being what a different world we would find! How differently we would treat it. To put “encouraging” on a firmer footing process understanding needs to become more accessible. We need an “Idiots Guide to Process and Reality” and we need it to go viral.
What comes first practice or worldview? A practice effort initiated by the collapse of the ecosystem seems a bit like patching up the old barn. A worldview change would replace it. The headline drama of tornados and heat domes motivates dramatic reactions but if they sit on the same “mimetic” foundations the trajectory has not shifted. Unpacking ANW’s “experience”, I agree, is perhaps a place to start. It’s not an easy starting place though as it requires us to reject the “atom” and the “thought” as dualistic building blocks and replace them with “drops of experience”. A “drop of experience” is a hard sell.