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I am answering your questions with a “Yes”. I feel I have to criticize ANW but I do so to strengthen my confidence in accepting his vision.

Hi Evan, I had some similar thoughts to yours, which you expressed eloquently. I am not sure if I am adding anything. I wrote this before I read your post.

“There is a problem in understanding how development, growth, or concrescence of experience is possible without temporal succession, especially since God’s concrescence is understood as extending over all of time. But this problem is analogous to the problem of understanding how the development of a temporal actual entity occurs without temporal succession in its phases of concrescence.” (Hosinski Ch 8 p42.) ANW makes his first step off the tarmac and into the bush of speculative philosophy and it is easy to go along with him “Yes, you think, that is reasonable, that is possible”. Then he takes a few more steps and because you are motivated you follow along. After a while you completely loose sight of the tarmac. Then he justifies step 124 by referencing step 85, the passage quoted above. Well … suddenly my “BS” alarm goes off! “God’s experience develops but does not change” and black is now white? I’m not saying this couldn’t be OK with God but is it meaningful for us to say it? In a sense ANW’s God talk sometimes ignores the “Private Property No Trespassing” sign that protects the land of mystery. I am reminded of Wittgenstein’ last sentence in the Tractatus, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” ANW is usually careful about this, his aeroplane metaphor, but with God perhaps he stays aloft too long.
But his is the last word and it recognizes and surpasses everything I have just written:
“Of course we are unable to conceive the experience of the Supreme Unity of Existence. But these are the human terms in which we can glimpse the origin of that drive toward limited ideals of perfection which haunts the Universe. This immortality of the World of Action, derived from its transformation in God’s nature is beyond our imagination to conceive. The various attempts at description are often shocking and profane. What does haunt our imagination is that the immediate facts of present action pas into permanent significance for the Universe. The insistent notion of Right and Wrong, Achievement and Failure, depends upon this background. Otherwise every activity is merely a passing whiff of insignificance. (IS 265)”
I am certain ANW’s BS alarm would, rightly, go off if he read a singe word I just wrote. I should wash my ears…

Hi Dennis, I sympathize. It seems as if the rabbit is “God, truth, beauty” and a complex hat is being constructed to house him. The magician loves his rabbit! As I understand it ANW claims that the hat (common, simple everyday experience) comes first, yet a sneaking suspicion lingers that this is motivationally not the case. I look forward to hearing what Sherburne is putting on the table.

Douglas, I love your extrapolation of finite – infinite from maths to words. But I am not sure I understand why you say it approaches it not from “a finite set but from the infinite”? When you say, “we have a finite set of rules for word combinations” and “can say anything” isn’t this going from finite to infinite? (Which is much easier to grasp than my set theory example!) I would argue that we speak sense not nonsense because the meanings we intend are constrained by the words we have already uttered and not by God limiting all possible words that might come next to a pool we can choose from. In other words (ouch) “every combination that means something” does not require God to “make it so”.

Error, when I copied the post from Word it dropped the exponent tag. 23 = 8 should read 2^3 = 8. likewise 2n should read 2^n etc.

Its a great graph! love it. It puts a lot of the key ideas together in a visually pleasing and dynamic way. Thanks!

“In Whitehead’s philosophy we must distinguish between the “human person” which is the strand “presiding” or directing occasions, and the complex living society which is the physical body.” (Hosinki 138).
I wondered if this had anything to do with subject and superject. I found this in P&R:

“This is the doctrine of the emergent unity of the superject. An actual entity is to be conceived both as a subject presiding over its own immediacy of becoming, and a superject which is the atomic creature exercising its function of objective immortality. It has become a ‘being’; and it belongs to the nature of every ‘being’ that it is a potential for every ‘becoming.’”

(Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (p. 45). Free Press. Kindle Edition.)

You write about “ a distinction between body and personhood, directed and transmitted over time”. Perhaps personhood is the superject which becomes the objective data for the next flash of subjectivity and this process is the “transmitted over time” part of your statement. In other words, personhood is our memory of our past flashes of subjective becoming. On the other hand our physical bodies are societies which sum, scale up, to provide the prehensive material for the flash. For me the words “physical body” are a kind of slang for the physical pole that is necessary in early concrescence but is an analytic abstraction for the non dual synthesis of physical and mental in an actual occasion, a “drop of experience”. I agree with you when you suggest “ … these [are] simply two different conceptual ways of viewing the complexity of a human life operating at multiple levels”. Doing a lot of hand waving here! Thanks for the prod.

Kathleen you ask, “What kinds of “first grade” actual occasions take place in this “empty space”? It made me think “When is an eternal object of the objective species no longer eternal but actual?” and this in turn led me to virtual particles.

From Wik: “A virtual particle is a theoretical transient particle that exhibits some of the characteristics of an ordinary particle, while having its existence limited by the uncertainty principle, which allows the virtual particles to spontaneously emerge from vacuum at short time and space ranges.”

Before the particle “spontaneously emerges” it is a true eternal object and exists only as potential then after it pops into being it is an actual occasion carrying out a communication job between two real particles. The fact that the ontological status of virtual particles seems murky to physicists as they are necessary for the theory but have no mass is maybe no different to the EM field. This kind of makes the EM field oscillate between pure eternal object and real entity too as disturbances use it to “make particles” or to communicate through it as waves. It is there as a pure eternal object until needed.

Quantum foam also comes to mind:

Quantum foam or spacetime foam is a theoretical quantum fluctuation of spacetime on very small scales due to quantum mechanics. The theory predicts that at these small scales, particles of matter and antimatter are constantly created and destroyed. These subatomic objects are called virtual particles.[1] The idea was devised by John Wheeler in 1955. (Wik)

This is really helpful in getting my head around the “consciousness all the way down” problem. From your post Dr. Levin is only looking at the biological, the physical, story that correlates with experience and not integrating the consciousness itself into his explanatory categories. I will check him out, thanks.

I too am fascinated by consciousness. In the 1970’s the physiology lab I worked in stuck electrodes into the hippocampus of rats’ brains and discovered that a single cell firing correlated with a rat knowing where it was in a maze. Five Decades of Hippocampal Place Cells and EEG Rhythms in Behaving Rats | Journal of Neuroscience (jneurosci.org). So a physical cell firing was the same as the mental knowledge “I am here”. I got hooked and still am! It seemed clear to me that that macroscopic physiology (and physics) was too large scale to weigh in on the identity problem, but quantum physics … I got a very superficial and inadequate understanding of QM and then discovered Pen-rose and OR. This formed the context my mind sloshed around in for the thirty five years I had to earn a living and raise a family. But retirement is great and I got back into it!
I approached the mind brain problem like this “How can the mind spring from the brain?” . Why did I do this? I had materialism drilled into my bones. I even taught classical physics for thirty years, with conviction. I was a sincere sales-man. The fact that I was teaching was in a separate Cartesian box to the explanatory completeness of what I taught. The consciousness of the rat knowing where it was in the maze, is off limits to all possible explanations physics or physiology could offer. I see OR now as an attempt to push physical explanation into mental space. But it is an attempt from the physical side of the fence that separates mental from physical. For me ANW’s solution to the problem of consciousness is his recognition that the mind brain separation has roots in the 17C split between the two and the enduring success of the separation. By re-combining them in the physical and mental poles of an actual occasion which in itself has no poles and then building everything that becomes and briefly is on this basis the problem of consciousness is solved. It is not a solution that comes out of either camps.

To be ingredient to be “provided by (and presupposed) by creative passage” requires a functional interface between an actual occasion and the detritus of others passages along with the independence of eternal forms for the potential part of a concresence. An interface occurs between two or more existents which must be different to permit contribution. If they are different they can not be reducible to the same thing. What is the ontological status of such independence? If actual occasion detritus is real enough to be a necessary ingredient in the formation of an actual occasion but detritus is not an actual occasion then … ? So the question changes to how does the fleeting objective past, detritus, come about? I guess we must accept it as an experiential fact and go from there. This would give the ex-actual-occasion ingredient status which does not need explanation. It is part of where the airplane lands. The same could be said of the eternal objects on the subjective side. Then it isn’t hand waving to say that a cake is made from ingredients but only the cake exists and the ingredients are fictitious parts of its becoming.
Dr Davis, thanks for making me grapple with this. I really appreciate your thought-provoking comments.

My mistake, the quotes above are from Hosinski’s book not Davis’s.

Hi everyone, I was thinking of option 1, people taking the course. We could meet an hour and a half before the scheduled class and talk for an hour. I am thinking people might find this a convenient time. If one of the sponsoring programs could provide the zoom meeting that would be great. Let me know what you think.

We would meet on Zoom. Perhaps this could be done through the Institute as I only have the 40 minute free version. We could settle on a day and time through this discussion page. The topic could come from the course lectures, the readings or the session discussions and be agreed on through this page or in real time. I feel that if we just got started the details would emerge through consensus.

That would be great.