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and her section on “Strains” (Part IV, Chapter IV)

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oops… that was the long one… here is the 9-page excerpt

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Be well Mike. Thanks for even thinking of us and the course in the midst of such a disruptive life event.
d.

It would !

I think my track through the course and the book might look a lot like the graphic from Kraus’s book which I posted somewhere else here: a generally forward trend characterized by lots and lots of backtracking!
d.

** Consider both books and their relationship with time. The building code struggles mightily with its past, present and future. All those old buildings cannot simply be snapped into code compliance without bankrupting the homeowners. These old elements must be carefully enwrapped in the new forms.

Do you see the parallels with Whitehead when he takes on the creaky peculiar elements of 17th and 18th century philosophy while identifying the worthwhile bits and folding them into his new schema? Unlike the code officers, though, Whitehead is ready and willing to their discard the old edifices and rebuild anew.

I think “pragmatism” is one of the philosophical categories used to refer to Whitehead’s work along with that of James and others. Certainly that is equally descriptive of such a practical tome as the building code book. The willingness to accept, in fact the expectation of, revision and improvement and evolution is evident in both.

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.”

Ach… Part IV… methinks we will need all the help we can get when we get there! It does get very “mathy” I hear!

Thanks for making us aware of Carroll’s new book Elizabeth. I will surely read it – but with a critical eye. I have had a longstanding love-hate relationship with Carroll’s writing! He is a top-notch physicist, a gifted thinker and synthesizer, and an excellent writer in a genre that I appreciated and enjoyed for a long time: popularization of modern physics and cosmology. He is much more readable than Hawking and a tad less quarrelsome than Brian Greene. But he remains a relentless materialist (we’ll see with this new book). I feel that over the years he has modulated his self-description as he struggles with the growingly-evident limitations of substance materialism – he recently described himself as a “poetic materialist” or something like that.

Nevertheless I am delighted that “Natural Philosophy” will gain increased prominence in the academy through his efforts. I notice many formerly “hard-core materialist” folks like Carlo Rovelli, Sam Harris and philosopher Galen Strawson sidling into a comfort zone with questions about consciousness and metaphysical viewpoints such as idealism or panpsychism – and in the process they are producing less “strident” and much more open-ended thinking. [Some, like Dennett and Dawkins seem more permanently stuck.]

Of course what they are all struggling with is the problem that Whitehead pointed out almost a century ago – that the framework of substance materialism can only stand if one ignores the entire suite of actual human experience in the world. Including even the experience of being a thoughtful philosopher or physicist. (I think philosophers call this a “performative contradiction”: the very act of questioning consciousness being itself an act of consciousness).

Ah well… I should be less grouchy and just appreciate the shift, however slow, of such smart people as Carroll toward more non-materialist views of the nature of things. Given the current critical unravellings of the human element of these it is difficult to be patient.

thanks for posting

I will attempt to upload the essay as a smallish PDF.

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AH. Yes. I have had both Sheldrake’s books on my “to-read” stack… having read and appreciated many of his earlier works. I will have to move them up on my queue. Rupert had a fascinating recent essay entitled “Is the Sun Conscious” which was rather mind-blowing. It was published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies in 2021 and is available on his website. His thoughts on the evolution of “laws” of science seems aligned with ANW and, of course, he has widened our notions of the nature of “fields” with his morphogenetic fields hypothesis.

Thanks for reminding me!

For anyone following this question I am pleased to report that the folks at Cobb Institute have updated the links to the audio files for the Cobb-P&R course and they are available for download to those who enroll in the course.
d.

Thanks for suggesting this. I have signed up for the Dr. Cobb series and find it helpful. One practical problem I have is that the links to the audio-only versions are non-funtional. I am generally much less free to sit with my computer for hours than to listen to an audio while working around my place. I have enquired to Cobb Institute about this but received no reply. I tried to join the Facebook group associated with the class but my request is still pending after more than a week. If anyone has thoughts about how I could get access to those audio files I would appreciate it.

I enjoyed the class yesterday (7/10) and appreciate being able to join late.

I am a retired middle-school math teacher who came to philosophy late in life largely as a consequence of a tragic death in my family – now almost a decade ago. I slowly came to realize that I desperately needed to find a generalized framework for understanding life, death and the whole damn thing – in a way that brought “meaning” and value to the fore. Most of my search has been private; threading a path through important books and ideas.

Though I found good, reasonably-scientific evidence for moving beyond the materialist model, somewhere along the line I recognized that unraveling the “knot” of the mind-body problem was central to the search.

I encountered panpsychism as a powerful metaphysics in a number of places, the most comprehensive of them, for me, was Christian DeQuincey’s book “Radical Nature” which also introduced me to panexperientialism and Whitehead. I discovered Matt Segall’s “Physics of the World Soul” and read David Ray Griffin on Whitehead.

The denseness of Whiteheaed’s categoreal schema and his “organic” mode of presentation has kept me from reading P&R itself over the years. So much of the commentary on ANW arises from academic philosophy and goes way over my head.

I have really benefited from Hosinski’s book “Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance” and from Nicholas Rescher’s writing on process philosophy. My most recent foray into P&R was supported by the dual crutches of Sherburn’s “…Key” and Elizabeth Kraus’s “…Companion”. But both are themselves dense and have differing takes on how restructuring P&R might make it more accessible. I stalled-out near the end of Part III some months ago.

My first, nearly-flunked course in philosophy (“Deductive Logic”) back in college 50 years ago left me with a bit of PTSD for for the discipline. But the last decade of self-education has been rewarding. In an odd twist I recently discovered that the room in which that university class was offered was apparently the same room in which Whitehead delivered his early lectures upon arrival in the US in 1924 and 1925.

Now. I am delighted to return to P&R with a group of co-explorers.
Thanks