Replies

Hi Roni, thanks for this post. Yes, I think you have made a great point very succinctly. It is overemphasized and rigid dogma that gets us in to trouble not only in science, but also many other areas like politics, religion, economics, you name it. Certainly REALLY listening to perception and lived experience helps. Practicing living both can help tremendously when the status quo does not “feel right.” That feeling is partially when evidence against the dogma piles up and cannot be ignored I think and requires openness and hospitality to ideas etc. that may not initially be palatable because of dogma.

Hi George, yes I would definitely agree. Abstraction and model making is indeed extremely useful and we would not survive without that conscious skill. It allows us to be conscious of patterns and predict the future in certain ways which help us navigate the world. I think you’ve got the point of the fallacy and the fact that we also HAVE to make models, it is part of our nature. I think, as you allude to, the point is so that those abstractions do not become dogma in the face of a needed paradigm shift.

Hi Bill, thank you for the thoughtful reflection and good questions. I enjoyed that poem you posted too. I like your emphasizing the physical component of prehension and the “felt sense.” You are right in that it is an essential component of the dipolar physical and conceptual pole of all that happens in reality. You are highlighting the fact that this philosophy asks us to do away with duality at all levels of actualized reality. That is a very interesting question about the oaths of secrecy. That is something I must admit I only have superficial knowledge of and I’d like to delve in to that more!

Hi Alexandra, God, for Whitehead would definitely provide a lure of feeling in terms of good and justice etc. That would be part of what Whitehead would call the primordial nature of God (helping to order eternal objects or potential/possibilities for actualization). The reason those might be “sub” possibilities “under” beauty is simply because Whitehead would likely feel that beauty encompasses all those things too. God wouldn’t necessarily have God’s own teleology toward those things for Whitehead. That’s a difficult question, but if we stick to Whitehead’s philosophy, God in God’s consequent nature “remembers” all of the eternal objects and their relationships which have ever been ingressed to any actual occasion for all eternity. That means we also play a role in defining what justice and the good are for example. Prior to humans or other beings that could ascertain such complex eternal objects the good could be more simple, i.e. that which is conducive to the flourishing of more diverse and complex organisms. In the consequent nature of God, for Whitehead, God would simply “remember” those relationships and give lures of feeling to organisms coming to actualization in the future depending on whether they seem to follow those patterns. Evil or disharmony would go against creativity and would not be conducive to the flourishing of new actual occasions over the long run so God would provide lure’s of feeling over eons of time that would be conducive in all likelihood to what we now call the good and justice etc. Hope that helps, let me know if you have more questions or if I didn’t cover something in my response!

Hello all, what a great thread of posts! Chris I’m glad you brought in David Ray Griffin and his book Unsnarling the World Knot which is what I think you are referencing in coining panexperientialism? At the heart of these issues is the idea of emergence, supervenience, and complexity. I posted a bit of a lengthy response to a similar thread from George Strawn earlier today. I’m glad you brought in this great example of qualia and smell Keren. That is a great reflection on the fact that AI could never be conscious in the same way that we are. There is no clear distinction between conscious and unconscious which is why I like the term panexperientialism as opposed to panpsychism. However, we do want to abstract a difference between the type of mentality that we have and say compared to a carbon atom. It all depends on the level of intensity of experience for Whitehead metaphysically. The societies of occasions which have the function of consciousness is much more complex and intense than the experience of the societies of carbon atoms that make the crystalline structure of a diamond. There in lies the hard problem of consciousness. Without a solution that Whitehead’s process metaphysics gives us, there is no way for more intense or complex consciousness to arise from something that is wholly unconscious. There but be the basic building blocks at work at all levels of the Universe. Otherwise, we ask for a miracle everytime we have a conscious thought, or an experience of smelling something etc. Chris, I like how you explain this as well, especially that last paragraph with the quote from PR 🙂 Also, Zhenbao I like your reflection on the Taoist side, I like how Whitehead’s philosophy helps to unite the eastern and western ways of thinking and experiencing.

Hi Enrique, great questions! Chris I really appreciate your answer and I think you are spot on, thank you for taking the time to lay all that out! I always try and remember that even though each actual occasion has its own agency and subjective aim (values attached to possibilities of the future to put it simply), subjective aims can also be shared by societies of occasions too. Much in the same way all our internal organs like our liver, heart, pancreas etc. perform their own functions, but all are united in the subjective aim of a living human trying to flourish in the world. Also, for a little discussion on the deep questions of emergence which your question also gets at, see my response to George’s post in this session “how different is Whitehead’s emergence from systems theory emergence?”

Thanks for this rich post Bill, well said indeed. I also appreciate your reflections too Alexandre. On a personal note for myself, coming to know Whitehead’s philosophy/metaphysics was not only a real eye opener for me to a new world view which solved many problems for me, it was also a confirmation of the reality of non-physical, spiritual energy we experience if we try and sometimes it comes even if we don’t! It is both unifying with a oneness in the Universe of shared values, but also confirms that we all have agency and can choose a path which comes with great responsibility!

Also, a great book on how Whitehead’s philosophy helps to solve the problems of emergence etc. is David Ray Giffin’s book Unsnarling the World Knot.

This is an excellent thread and gets to the heart of a number of matters that I think Whitehead’s philosophy solves for us. We discussed things like the “hard problem” of consciousness and other types of issues in this session. This is really a reframing of age old logical and metaphysical problems that Whitehead’s philosophy provides a solution for. Namely I am talking about supervenience and emergence. Supervenience is the idea that any higher-level properties must be composed of or tied directly to lower level properties. For example, water would have to have its properties completely explainable by the lower-level properties of hydrogen and oxygen and so on. One of the problems of supervenience is that it would be impossible for truly novel properties to come into existence. Nothing could ever truly be created. Of course this brings up all sorts of issues like, how could laws of Nature be created in the first place, or how could consciousness emerge from unconscious material. Supervenience is essentially compatible with reductionism. One prominent advocate of supervenience is Jaegwon Kim in his book Supervenience and Mind, but ultimately admits at the end of the book that he does not feel this fully solves the basic problems. Emergence on the other hand proposes to try and account for novel creation. Emergence often opposes reductionism in that emergent properties are supposed to be fundamentally new and novel and may not be reduced to the “sum of the parts” as in supervenience. Emergence, even when taking in to account certain types of complexity and systems theories eventually falls prey to the same issue as the hard problem and combination problem of consciousness. Namely, that how are we supposed to be able to get truly novel properties that are not somehow related to or composed of underlying base properties. It again would require something miraculous so to speak. One of the best arguments I know of for emergence is that of Terrance Deacon in his book Incomplete Nature. Here he advocates a “teleodynamics” in which he argues that higher order constraints emerge from the self organizing dynamics of matter (like the development of a whirlpool or a hurricane). Deacon tries to avoid dualism of emergence and supervenience, but in my opinion still ultimately cannot account for the seeming reality of true novel creation that also seems to have a telos. This is something called intrinsic normativity. For Deacon things like consciousness would ultimately have to be epiphenomenal as well as again miraculously emergent from non-conscious matter. We can see with complexity theory how systems can be self organizing, but would this ever be able to reach the level of the type of consciousness we enjoy? Intrinsic normativity implies that systems can be inherently value or goal oriented and are not the product of simple randomness. There are many things like the cosmological constant and other phenomenon being elucidated by quantum physics and other endeavors of knowledge production we are capable of that demonstrate the non-random nature of the cosmos. Teleology, meaning, purpose, “oughtness,” are very real and are at work within the inherent creativity of the Universe. Teleodynamics, emergence, and supervenience all cannot account for true novel creation, nor the purposiveness of the structure of life and mind. Whitehead’s philosophy helps us overcome these problems in the following ways. This all has to do with Whitehead’s idea of prehension, mental and physical poles of actual occasions, eternal objects, concrescence, and satisfaction. These words are metaphysical place holders for the necessary functions of actual occasions to not only incorporate actual data and objectivity of the past, but also incorporate unactualized possibility and agency in to the creation of the future. Each actual occasion of reality incorporates objective data and patterns of the past with a subjective aim for the possibilities it might value for the future. This happens through prehension, the feeling and internally integrating of objective data with possibility. This solves supervenience because integrating possibility into creation is not simply copying and pasting properties already present in the past. Otherwise, nothing would ever actually get created, things would just get rearranged, but no new novel properties would emerge. Emergence is solved in a similar way. Novelty is a defining trait of each occasion of becoming, not an anomaly at higher levels of complexity. Teleology is built in to the creation of every actual occasion at all levels of simplicity and complexity of reality. Causation is an experiential continuity, not a mechanical transmission and novelty does not require a miraculous emergence. This process for Whitehead is eternal and can account for the emergence of the laws of nature themselves. All of it is based on the relationships of actual occasions synchronizing their shared values and subjective aims. I don’t think Deacon’s teleodynamics can account for the emergence of teleodynamics as a pattern of nature in the first place. Whitehead naturalizes all of creation including things we might call miraculous.

Hope this helps in some way… excellent questions and post threads!

More great reflections here! One nice thing about Whitehead I think is that he would never feel that his system was an end all be all type of philosophy. It does offer itself a lot of room for “tinkering,” yet is not relativism either. I was not aware of the “auto-Matt” GPT, I’ll have to check that out. As far as the validity of Whitehead’s metaphysics so to speak, I think that there are many aspects that are just now being “validated” by science and theology etc. I have yet to find anything that is not at least internally valid about his philosophy which is probably more than we can say of others such as Kant or Hegel etc. He definitely wasn’t the best writer for sure, and he was a man both of his time and ahead of it in many ways. I think one of the biggest difficulties is the new language he uses and coins for metaphysical concepts we didn’t have words for. This takes a great deal of study similar to other philosophers like Kant who were doing similar things. I think the lifelong pursuit of wisdom through the study of this philosophy and others is definitely the right track no matter what conclusions one might come to. I do agree that you have to “go all in” to really get it, because it is such a different world view than the past couple hundred years has given us. These are just my reflections currently.

Hello Johannes, great reflections and points here! You demonstrate a great pragmatic outlook and integration of process philosophy in to actual applications. I’m sure you are familiar with William James. He gave us one of the best foundations of pragmatic philosophy and obviously greatly influenced Whitehead. Your statement: “But what if none of these perspectives of the nervous system on the systems it inhabits carries ontological weight? What if the concepts of mind are just as flawed as the concepts of matter? Attempting to frame mind through human mental experience is akin to trying to frame subatomic particles through the lens of human sense perception. What if philosophizing is a distraction away from the actual transformation that matters?” is a great obvservation/reflection that exemplifies the fact that consciousness is not a “thing,” or material we can point to, but rather is a function of the societies of actual occasions forming the nexus of occasions of our brain. If you haven’t read it already, I would recommend William James’ essay “Does Consciousness Exist” written in 1904 I believe and it seems “neuroscience” is just now catching up to this with the help of Whitehead’s metaphysics etc.

The last part of your post here where you discuss some aspects of systems theory is interesting and using process philosophy to help with some of the flaws of systems theory and emergence and supervenience etc. would be very interesting as a final paper perhaps? I wouldn’t want to influence what you would like to write about too much, but you have interesting ideas for the application of process philosophy. I especially like the idea of relating this to enhancing spiritual practice as well. The integration of science, philosophy, and spirituality is essential I think. This can help overcome some of the great difficulties of classical theism. Are you familiar with the work of researchers such as David Yaden and Andrew Newberg? You might get some helpful perspectives of the current state of neuroscience research and spirituality from them.

Hi Nelson, this is a great post and you are asking great questions. I’ve been studying this for years and some days I feel I understand, and some days I don’t haha! So, as for the first part of the question, it seems you are asking what is the difference between actualized, and real, and how this relates to our normal conception of reality. For Whitehead, there are multiple categories of existence. He lays them out in the beginning of Process and Reality. For Whitehead, actual occasions are actualized reality, i.e. facts that have actually happened and materialized in to the data of the past. This would be like what I had for lunch earlier today, or a decision I made which affected my actual behavior, or what I am currently typing in this response. There are other aspects of the Universe which are no less real, but are not actualized as data or facts. One of these categories are Whitehead’s Eternal Objects. These are possibilities that are real and can be incorporated, or ingressed to use Whitehead’s term in to actualized reality. A great book by Timothy Eastman called Untying the Gordian Knot does a good job of demonstrating the reality of possibility. Although, for reasons I don’t agree with he tries to avoid Whitehead’s use of Eternal Objects and coins his own term potentiae. So, actual occasions are concrete factual reality, “things” that have actually happened. However, there is a reality of the possible and other categories Whitehead mentions which exist, but are not concrete reality so to speak. One could think of this in terms of quantum physics as well. The “possibilities” of different outcomes of a photon in superposition in an experiment before measurement are all very real possibilities and we can calculate their probabilities of actualization. The possibility does not become actualized as the reality of the past until the subatomic particle comes out of superposition and is measured by a device for example. Actual occasions must incorporate both data of the actualized past as well as prehend possibilities of an unactualized future in order to complete the cycle of creation. The possibilities must also be real as well and this is part of why Whitehead has the category of existence of Eternal Objects.

As for the extensive continuum, this is one of the most difficult parts of Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme. The extensive continuum does not exactly replace the concept of Newtonian or Einsteinian “spacetime,” but grounds spacetime in a continuous building of relational possibilities, or potential of relatedness brought about by the actualization of actual occasions. This builds the extension of space and time as relationships between actualized occasions and the limits of possibilities derived by the patterns of relationships that develop as societies of actual occasions interact. So, things we observe, or call Laws of Nature are patterns of possibilities that get repeated and built in to the nature of vast interactions of actual occasions across the entire Universe as it extends in complexity and time relationships relative to eachother. The reason “spacetime” becomes an abstraction is because it is a description we put on a deeper relatedness that is the fabric of our cosmological epoch that is a non-metric web of relationships of actual occasions and their influence on each-other’s unactualized futures as well.

I hope this helps? Let me know if I missed the point of your questions.

Hi Dennis, thank you for these heart felt reflections and thoughts. One thing that came to mind for me when you mentioned buying Matt’s book but not knowing why at first is the type of “lure of feeling” the Universe can give us if we listen. Perhaps it might also be a synchronicity in the Jungian sense. A “lure of feeling” as Whitehead may call it, is possibly something that happened to you in buying that book which you listened to and then your life became improved, more beautiful, or more complex perhaps in a good way. I like your reflection here because it demonstrates that this nature of the Universe beyond the physical is so important and is where this philosophy comes alive. Yes, I would definitely reccomend reading the Timaeus for sure! It’s one of those great Platonic dialogues just like the Republic, probably better in my opinion.

I’m glad you both brought in William James in to the discussion too. As we know he was a very big influence on Whitehead and it is interesting to discover many of the progenitors of Whitehead’s philosophy in James. For example, we can see progenitors of prehension in James’ “felt experience,” and James’ concept of truth, the function of consciousness (i.e. not being a “thing” we can point to in the brain), and many other important concepts that Whitehead built upon.

Hi Eric, thanks for this great post. I think that you are definitely “getting” Whitehead’s philosophy and are on the right track for sure. It is important because it actually does matter as you point out. Science cannot give us a full picture of reality because the experiential component must be brought in. Just as one can know all the physiology of alcohol’s effects at various receptors, or how the physiology of pain sensation and gating works, but unless that experience is gained of being drunk or experiencing pain, one would never actually be affected by that action of experience. As Matt noted, there would simply be a zombie like state where there was simply action and reaction, no novelty, no creation. It seems the Universe simply does not work this way. I agree, the full integration of science and philosophy is essential and will provide the checks and balances so to speak.