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Joy, imagination, aesthetic sensibility, moral intuition, and empathy. All essential ingredients for the good life!

Dennis, My personal tutor (chatGPT) says that sheldrake’s hypothesis about morphogenis is been confirmed but with mechanisms quite different from “fields.” -George

Dennis, I haven’t looked closely at morphogenis but he says it’s a scientific theory with experiments that could support or refute. Since it’s an old theory now, I wonder what the status of those experiments is? I don’t recall getting an answer in Matt’s interview of him. Fudamentalist scientists who refuse to consider it are the same as fundamental religonists like the church leaders who refused to look in galileo’s telescope. -George

Eric, I, too, have read wolfram with interest. However, his definition of computational irreducibility doesn’t give the history of that concept, where it is called recursive enumerability. The creation of computability theory in the ‘30s (I believe), distinguished between a recursive subset of integers and a recursively enumerable one. For a recursive set, there is an algorithm to answer the question is a given integer in that subset. If the subset is only recursively enumerable, there is an algorithm to generate the elements one after another. So if a given integer is in the set it will be eventually generated and so positively answer the is it in the subset. However, if it’s not in the subset the generating algorithm keeps generating (an infinite loop) and you’ll never know if it’s not there or still looking.

Wolfram’s special cellular automata that are computationally irreducible means that you can’t say in advance if a specific row of zeros and ones occurs in the computation without going through the computation.

I’ve made the mistake of not looking back at previous discussion fora, only the current one. ANW’s definitions are indeed a stumbling block. Don’t know if anyone is still looking at this thread, but here’s my latest attempt to understand his definitions.

Whitehead’s definition of *organism* is anything that has a subjective dimension, which goes all the way down to actual entities. Another one of his non-standard definitions is that of a *living society*. The simplest living societies are those like single cells or even pre-cellular chemical aggregates that maintain a dynamic pattern through novelty. They are “alive” because they embody creative adaptation — a balance between order and innovation. Even an actual entity that has creative adaption (some degree of novelty) is said to be alive.

Living Actual Entities and Living Societies and Living Organisms

Whitehead gives *life* a cosmological rather than biological meaning. Thus, life is not confined to biology—-it’s a quality of process wherever novelty, not just repetition, is achieved. So, wherever there is self-creative aim, synthesis, and enjoyment, there is a degree of life, even in some actual entities. And at larger than human scales, civilizations and the earth itself are, cosmologically speaking, living societies.

However, a *living organism* is a structured society of actual entities whose pattern maintains itself over time and expresses a *regnant (a coordinating) aim*. Individual actual entities and sub-societies within that living organism participate in life and are coordinated by the regnant sub-society.

Gents, I agree that tech is never neutral. More than that, it defines who we are. We live in a post-human or trans-human world in which we are a part of an encompassing system which is part us, part tech. That is, the symbiotic relation we have with tech makes a bigger system that contains us both. -George

Dennis, You asked, “does the observed fact truly point us to the theory behind it?” I share your skepticism. Observed facts often have various theories to explain them (eg, earth and sun—who moves and who doesn’t). Goethe has the poet’s sensibility but I’m not convinced about his science. -George

Dennis, I share your interest in these topics. In fact, I’ve begun working on my capstone paper towards the certificate, which will use whitehead’s definitions of life and consciousness to offer criteria for when software is alive and conscious. I start with comparing the execution of a computer program with an actual entity and proceed to computing analogs to regnant societies, etc. -George

Dennis, You say, “I think Matt is correct that the hard problem of consciousness disappears or is perhaps explained by the adoption of a panpsychist view.” I’m not convinced that saying consciousness/experience is there at smallest levels (actual entities) explains it any better than saying it arises in complex organisms. Especially if you’re a pan-experientialist, how does consciousness arise from experience? That’s only slightly different from consciousness arising from complex matter. Having said that, I’ll also say that pan-experientialism might be right and science’s attempt to prove consciousness arises from complex matter may be unsuccessful. But if science turns out to be right, process philosophy will still (imho) be a preferred metaphysical foundation. -George

Eric, You say, “My point is to really “get” Whitehead, you need to question whether science defines reality.” Even scientist Whitehead himself said science committed the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Matter-in-motion has been a very powerful abstraction but a very weak definition of reality. Drops of experience seems to be a better abstraction by incorporating subjective experience along with the objective. A better move toward the reality, but still only a (more) likely story. -George

captGPT’s answer to the question if whitehead ever explicitly said life does not have to be biological.

Whitehead does not give a single, simple sentence like “life need not be biological,” but he does explicitly and repeatedly broaden the category of “life” beyond biology in Process and Reality and related works. A few key places:

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1. Life as Persistence of Order and Novelty
• Whitehead writes:
“Life is a bid for freedom… It occurs whenever a society of actual entities maintains itself by the attainment of a measure of novelty.” (PR, Part V, Ch. II)

Here, “life” is defined in terms of the ongoing self-maintenance and creative adaptation of any society of occasions—not limited to cells or organisms.

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2. Biology as One Expression, Not the Definition
• He states explicitly:
“Biology is the study of the larger organisms which are in fact societies of occasions.” (PR, Part II, Ch. III)

But then he adds that the principle of life is already at work in smaller, non-biological societies: atoms, electrons, and even enduring inorganic structures.
Thus, “life” is a more general metaphysical category of process and creativity, not something confined to DNA-based systems.

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3. Life as “the Origination of Novelty”
• In Modes of Thought he generalizes further:
“Life is an offensive directed against the repetitious mechanism of the universe.”

The key is that any process that introduces novelty into repetitive order exhibits “life,” whether or not it is what we normally call “living matter.”

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4. Comparison to Non-Biological Systems
• Whitehead notes that enduring physical systems (atoms, crystals, stars) also embody “societies with personal order” and can thus exhibit rudimentary life-like characteristics, though at a very different level of intensity and freedom.
In this sense, the cosmos is pervaded with degrees of life.

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✅ Conclusion:
Whitehead does explicitly define “life” in terms of metaphysical categories (self-maintenance + novelty) rather than restricting it to biology. Biological organisms are a high-level instance, but not the exclusive domain. For him, life in the broad sense is processive creativity—and this can be found in non-biological systems (atoms, stars, ecosystems, perhaps even machines).

Examples of non-biological life (by whitehead’s definition)

Example: A Civilization
• A human civilization, in Whitehead’s terms, can be called a living society even though it is not a biological organism.
• Why? Because it inherits the past (institutions, traditions, technologies), but also originates novelty (new laws, philosophies, scientific revolutions).
• Civilizations rise and fall depending on whether they sustain a balance of order and creative advance. A stagnant civilization is, in his sense, dying—even if the biological people within it are alive.

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Example: A Star System
• A star and its planetary system can also be seen as exhibiting a kind of life in Whitehead’s broad sense.
• Stars are not “alive” biologically, but they undergo creative transformations (fusion processes, formation of heavier elements, evolving structures).
• These processes introduce novelty into the cosmos—the conditions for new chemical orders and eventually biological life.

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Example: An Artwork (as a society of occasions)
• A symphony or a novel can be described as “living.”
• Each performance of a symphony inherits a tradition (the written score, prior interpretations), yet each instance can introduce freshness of expression.
• The work achieves intensity of feeling across time, not just repetition.

Dennis, I agree. With my current understanding, I’d say all actual entities and all nexūs are organisms. But all such things are not live organisms. Eg, neither individual actual entities nor the nexus of all things are live organisms.

Dennis, I too bought Matt’s book when it first came out. And now I reread it with increased understanding. Regarding your question about archetypical values, I take him to mean that all societies have had values. (An archetypal thing represents an original type after which other, similar things are patterned.) -George

I really resonated with whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness with respect of metaphors. I viewed him as calling out the fallacy of mistaking a metaphors for concrete reality or literal truth. I now understand there is also another interpretation. As a scientist he understood that science concepts are abstractions from reality and that a scientist commits the fallacy if s/he thinks of those abstraction as reality. So the scientific concept of abstraction and the literary concept of metaphor are two sides of the same coin.