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Hi Brian, really enjoyed reading your post. It motivated me to check out my own understanding of eternal objects.
Accepting your point that “eternal objects and timeless ideas are pretty much the same”, ANW seems eager to separate their platonic like abstractness (their conceptuality) from the concretely real, the actual becoming tree I see in my yard. He writes: “The definite ingression into a particular actual entity is not to be conceived as the sheer evocation of that eternal object from ‘not-being’ into ‘being’; it is the evocation of determination out of indetermination. Potentiality becomes reality; and yet retains its message of alternatives which the actual entity has avoided. In the constitution of an actual entity:—whatever component is red, might have been green; and whatever component is loved, might have been coldly esteemed.” P&R p149. It is as if eternal objects/ideas be they platonic or whatever are necessary to explain the “what next” of creativity, and this is the ball he wants us to keep our eye on.

After posting a comment (above), I went on an XC ski in the woods. I spent most of the time thinking about my experience of the trees around me … and crashed! But I did join the dots (my dots anyway) and came up with this:

1) The tree is over there, so how can I experience over here? The fallacy of simple location addresses this. Segall:
“Whitehead’s events and actual occasions thus do not come to be inside of a pre-existing spacetime fabric. Spacetime is rather an emergent product of the relations among actual occasions. Actualities are not to be pictured as if they were bits of matter located in a four-dimensional spatiotemporal block.”
Segall, Matthew. Physics of the World-Soul: Alfred North Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology (p. 115). Sacra Sage Press. Kindle Edition.
This deals with the “over there – over here” problem.

2) What is it that I am experiencing that is also part of the trees experience? Without this I could just be fooling myself because I like the idea. ANW:
“In the first place, the initial aim so understood determines what locus or standpoint will be occupied by each occasion.(PR 195-434.) This, in turn, determines just what occasions will constitute the past of the new occasion.(PR 435-436.)
… and John Cobb:

“It is important to emphasize that the determination of the exact locus and extent of each occasion affects not only its internal development but also its relations with other occasions. Specifically, it determines exactly which of these occasions will be contiguous to it and, of these, which will be contemporary and which past. Thus, by determining the standpoint of each occasion, God determines also just what other occasions it will prehend.”

If I understand this correctly (which is doubtful!) both I and the trees can share the same standpoint or locus, and thus access a common past for the construction of our respective presents. If both I and the tree included an eternal object, say beauty or tranquility, in our initial aim it will be part of both of us as we move through concresence. This commonality will be my sense of the woods and the woods sense of me. You might say we become experientially one.

In her post Kathleen raises the question of “becoming part of the web of consciousness of all things in the woods”, something we experience. Cobb writes:

“It is the nature of each actual occasion to have a subjective aim at a determinate satisfaction. It prehends both the eternal objects and the temporal entities in its past in terms of this aim, and in successive phases of its own becoming it fashions a new creative Synthesis which is itself.”

How can we “become part of the web of consciousness of all things in the woods” if our prehensions are restricted to “eternal objects and the temporal entities in [our] past”? I understand (maybe wrongly) the process of an actual occasion (and nexus) to be internal to itself, that is not shared with other actual occasions. In other words, the subjective pole is private. The subjectivity of the trees, let alone the woods, would not be part of our past as we only prehend them as part of the initial datum which is concrete (the trees as we sense). Nor are trees eternal objects. So what is going on when as Kathleen rightly observes, we experience the woods?

I think there is a distinction between “centralized intelligence” as animals and notably humans experience it and the intelligence that goes “all the way down”. In Eddelman, G.M & Tononi, G. (2000). A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination, Giulio Tononi puts forward his Integrated Information Theory (IIT), a mathematical model of consciousness, which sees the level of consciousness in any-thing as a function of the level of connectedness of its parts. This is a kind of modern panpsychism with an objective measure of the degree of “intelligence”. This would both “peg” the level of consciousness of the tree and also the higher level of consciousness of the richly connected forest Kathleen and Dennis refer to. Tononi is silent on the matter of how we might “become part of the web of consciousness of all things in the woods”. I think he would reject the idea since we are not physically a part of the woods connectivity network. ANW’s prehensions seem to avoid this restriction as prehensions (I think) happen upstream of space/time. I’m not too sure about this!

I agree with Kevin that Mesle conflates experience with consciousness. When Kevin says “Even quarks experience the color force attracting them to two or three other quarks or antiquarks!” experience gets linked to causality the ‘attraction’. Donne (I think) pointed out that all we see in the world is a sequence of snap shots. We assume causality as a link between these still images but we have absolutely no support for the idea. As a feature of our consciousness we know the ball flies through the air because (be-cause) we threw it. The causation is part of internal reality not external reality. Thus, the quark is ‘attracted’ be-cause of its internal reality. ANW attributes such internal reality “all the way down”. The question of whether the quark is conscious or experiences is irrelevant. The argument simply says that an “internal” reality is necessary for causation.

Thom, I appreciated your clarifying remarks on creativity. They prompted me to check out Hosinki’s book. In the preface he says:

… most of Whitehead’s metaphysical theories were derived from his reflections on modern science and on ordinary experience and [that] he included his novel concept of God only because he found it necessary, on strictly rational grounds, to do so.

What I like about this is putting “science and ordinary experience” first, foremost. The ordinary is where the process story starts. As his scheme develops on “strictly rational grounds” it gradually transitions the ordinary into extraordinary for both our understanding and our experience. In this way first creativity and then God become necessary. For me, process theology and process religion grow from this base. The roots of Jay’s tree.

Hi Brian, I like your distinction between wisdom (noun) and wising (verb) and the way you connect this to “Fresh Wisdom” in the active asking (verbs) and knowledge, the static answers (nouns). I get the feeling that the fallacy of subject and predicate is getting into your point. Jay quotes ANW on page 39 of his book: “How an entity becomes constitutes what that entity is.” To use your words, I am reading this as “How an entity wises (verb) constitutes its wisdom, what it is (noun)”.

My take on this (so far) is that Creativity is fundamental not God. In practice each religion is reducible only to creativity and is thus a unique entity. Different communities create different religions to celebrate Creativity. God seems necessary to the process scheme because something is needed to allow us to “connect” with Creativity in order to move (become) from instant to instant.

Regarding Kathleen’s comments about the “limits of language” and Evan’s remark about non linguistic forms of communication e.g. dancing our prayers, Wittgenstein’s statement in the Tractatus (1921) that “The world is all that is the case. The world is the totality of facts not things. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” comes to mind. I take this to mean that we can talk about what is in the human purview of being human, but must recognize this as being limited, an inescapable part of what it is to be (becoming) human. We can only point at (dance with) the mystery beyond. My take on P&R is that ANW is fully exploring “the totality of facts” as the only game we can speak of. I see his God statements as statements about the world we experience “all that is the case”. I don’t think he is a mystic.

Hi Joel and Kathleen, Charlie and Evan, regarding Joel’s opening query: “Would the solitariness of religion only be limited to the individual – or would that experience of religion impact a multitude of other “others”?”, I followed up on Jay’s quote from P&R “The many become one and are increase by one” and found the following:

‘Together’ is a generic term covering the various special ways in which various sorts of entities are ‘together’ in any one actual occasion. Thus ‘together’ presupposes the notions ‘creativity,’ ‘many,’ ‘one,’ ‘identity’ and ‘diversity.’ The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are increased by one. In their natures, entities are disjunctively ‘many’ in process of passage into conjunctive unity. This Category of the Ultimate replaces Aristotle’s category of ‘primary substance.’

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (p. 21). Free Press. Kindle Edition.

Perhaps our experience as a “novel entity, disjunctively among the many” makes us inescapably alone, novel, and yet we are also “at once the togetherness of the ‘many’” and thus have “impact on the multitude of others”. I am taking “increased by one” to refer both to God and each of us.

I wonder if this also address what you had in mind, Kathleen, when you wrote “In response to Joel’s question about whether the experience of the divine is held only in oneself, I would like to believe that it is not; that if our experience of God is taken up to God and God is changed by it, then in our experience of the divine we are, directly or indirectly, the recipients of our other’s experiences?” ?

I wonder if we can experience this directly since it feels more like an explanation that a direct experience. Perhaps in direct experience we can not escape “being alone”?

Evan’s post, in this context, would imply that evil actions/thoughts also increase by one the “conjunctive unity” of God and thus become part of the “multitude of others” . Charlie, does this relate at all with what you were thinking about when you referred to a clash with existentialist philosophy?

Yes, Heraclitus got the western process ball rolling “This world order is an ever-living fire.” [ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Process Philosophy entry] I was thinking more of the comprehensive systematic structure of speculative thought presented in P&R. At the start of chapter 1 ANW writes:

Thus the philosophical scheme should be coherent, logical, and, in respect to its interpretation, applicable and adequate. Here ‘applicable’ means that some items of experience are thus interpretable, and ‘adequate’ means that there are no items incapable of such interpretation.

I see “no items incapable…”, thus all items, as being the branches of the tree.