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You use the language well, another example would be a zen koan translated to English.

Is there a modern language you would suggest as an alternative? I do see your point, but I don’t see a practical path forward.

Understanding of nature and process requires non-linguistic awareness. Perhaps such awareness could slowly evolve language along the lines you so artfully advance.

My Colorado interlibrary loan has the Katarani. A question, was Pythagoras an Ionian?

I am reading a well regarded minor classic the briefly references. It’s the physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s ‘what is life’, also short. This edition includes ‘mind and matter’, where the Ionian reference was. This Cambridge University Press 1992 edition also includes an introduction by Roger Penrose. There are many others.

For what it’s worth I suspect that history will show Schrödinger to be the quantum man relative to the more ‘mainstream’ Bohr and Eisenberg. Both of these longer essays are awesome.

As I continue my Process journey I amazed at just how frequently process friendly thought is published, but still stays out of the mainstream, even if a bestseller.

Coming back to Heraclitus, the human that dips its foot in the river is also never the same twice.

That said, the river does carve its enduring river bed.

And so does language carve the social riverbed of consciousness?

The individual, through whiteheadian ‘creativity’ has choice.

Curiously though that choice may create a statistical bell curve in a larger population. At least most of the time.

Thanks.

As I recall generally these effects are mild. Association among participants does also boost the effect.

I tried to nail down Kelly on just how effective the best study participants are, but I didn’t word the question strongly enough. To be valid, it would take a lot of trials with those selected to be most effective preliminarily.

That’s definitely the Feynman quote.

For what it’s worth I don’t think quantum mechanics is all that hard to get a partial meaningful grasp on if you frame the question on a non-materialistic basis.

The sad fact is that in spite of the evidence materialist bias is pervasive.

And curiously those theories that argue for the consciousness of the observer having a role in the collapse of the wave function are implicitly making a psi argument. I presume those proponents would vehemently object to this.

Cobb associate Timothy Eastman, a retired NASA plasma physicist, has a worthy book, Untying the Gordian Knot. In great detail Eastman updates Whitehead’s mental poll with the concept of ‘potentia’. The book is well supported and the Cobb Institute did a chapter by chapter reading with source participation for each chapter – I believe available online.

I was fortunate to attend those sessions, early in my process journey. Rereading the book, and some of the sources, is on my list.

That looks like an excellent introduction to a wide swath of consciousness research. Thankfully I now have a refurbished iPad mini for longer form reading.

Thanks.

Well said.

I too have a recovery story. My attention now is drawn away elsewhere. Perhaps you could do a Cobb event?

I loosely adopt a critical perspective in life after death. Evan Thompson in his book Waking Dreaming Being has plausible explanations while more generally being an inspiring introduction to meditation associated neuroscience.

I do think we live on through our works, if I recall my whitehead language right, the objective immortality of an actual occasion.

To me, this compares to what happens to matter as it goes through a black hole. It would be awesome if in some fashion the experience f that matter somehow persisted.

Yes, Whitehead is difficult. But I think that difficulty is more meaningful, and productive, than the Latin of the medieval Christian church.

I have a conceptual proposal in that regard for the Processism community.

Much of the best of modern science has processist aspects, I think that perhaps our most productive ‘proselytizing’ will result from both constructive criticism and interdisciplinary weaving. These dialogues will also help to refine Whitehead in line with modern findings in quantum mechanics, relativity, evolution as well as religion, the humanities, and social science.

More generally, I believe the easiest foundation for Whitehead is nature herself. Our brains evolved in this process context, David Abram talks about these benefits in detail. In the end though just engaging with nature is educational, and healthy.

Politics is a difficult subject. The fact is that the process god is in some regard a commie, though most certainly not a Marxist.

Economically I find the best answer in Henry George’s 1879 Progress and Poverty, very much in tune with 19th century traditions so very foundational to Whitehead. I can go on about this, though it is not my current focus.

I would love to hear more about Ionian philosophy. I imagine it is a bit more pagan, nature based. I hope you follow up on that topic.

And I hope nature focus is something the entire process thought community can agree on.

For what it is worth much of science is in fact bullshit, it the culture of scientific method that sorts out the wheat from the chaff.

There is a literature on the human mind being a ‘prediction engine’, like AI. I am neither deeply informed on it nor aware of current comparative perspectives on AI.