Replies

Hi Bill,

Thank you for your question. When I first realize I want to re-enact an experience into a piece of art, it is because I want to remember the most intangible qualities of that experience. Like how music can trigger very specific memories of when you used to listen to the song, what can help be an anchor to an experience so it can return to my mind vividly?

I have a collection of photos from my visit to Sintra, Portugal, last year. This was such a beautiful and moving experience. The photos help me to recall what it was like to be there, experiencing the Beauty. I began a painting based on one of the photos in hope of expressing more of my subjectivity within the experience of that location.

Over time, the memory fades, and yes, it does become transformative in a different way to remember the abstraction of an experience. The art is a tangible representation of the objective immortality that was myself in Sintra.

But, that is a very specific example of re-enacting. This passage appealed to me, because I think a lot of artistic expression is attempting to return to some sense, rather than to express something purely unknown, or yet-to-be-known. I found it very insightful across many works, that although they appear original, still may be referring to something else, and thus are re-enactments on some level.

Another thought:

I’m familiar with the term ‘noosphere’, and understand this from my diagram point of view as a great collective of individual thoughts that gains its own independent sentience, in a way. Perhaps this is another way to understand how the process God lives and becomes, inter-related with other living beings.

In the animation I made in Session 4, I made God’s process linear, but the noosphere would be the immersive, spherical cloud that surrounds living beings. I can better grasp this concept as it may apply to our discussions here.

Thank you all for your replies. You’ve each given me more to think about as I continue to explore. I am fascinated by whatever may be the life force, soul, God’s process, etc., as I seek to discover how they’re intertwined in the universe. I may continue to draw out and expand upon this preliminary animation.

Greetings

Thank you for sharing your article about imaginal characters as propositions. It’s interesting to consider these kinds of parasocial relationships through the lens of process-relational thought. Most notable to me, is to also think of past selves and my memories in this way too.

My first assumption was to think of fictional characters as more similar to eternal objects. I mean this in the sense that the script of a play or the sheet music for a song only comes to life when we perform them – otherwise they are pure ideas. Yet, perhaps a proposition is a better term because these human creations are not like the Platonic Forms, they are our imagination come to life.

Can an eternal object also be a proposition?

If something that evokes the True, Good, and Beautiful sparks the lure for feeling, does whatever had attempted to express a sense of its Platonic Form become a proposition in that moment?

I appreciate your description that each new performance of a play is a new concrescence. To me, I wonder about these distinctions between eternal objects and propositions. In the moment of concrescence, the script itself, and the imaginal contents of the script like characters, become actual occasions. But beyond this moment that we perform them are they still propositions, or are they eternal objects?

Can a proposition, like a fictional character, become an eternal object, if it represents something archetypal closer to a Platonic Form, or if it become canon? I.e. Hamlet is iconic, but a character from a B-movie is not.

***

Returning to the idea that this can apply to past selves as well, I had understood myself as having prehensions of the past actual world. In the moment when I recall my past self, perhaps that is a proposition, a lure for feeling what I was like then.

Since my past self was actual, I considered this more like how we prehend other living beings in the present moment. We can only perceive others through our own perceptive filters – our understanding of another is always a bit incomplete to know their complete being. But, other living beings aren’t propositions, they are also actual occasions. They may create propositions, lures for feeling, through our interactions, but they themselves do no become propositions.

***

I have witnessed friends become overwhelmed by their obsession and prioritization of their parasocial relationships, so I know how real imaginal characters can be. Thank you again for this interesting article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction

Hi Richard,

Thanks for your reply. Should the completed project be submitted through e-mail, somewhere in this discussion forum, or in an assignment?

Bill and Danny,

Thank you both for your congratulations. It was an honor to be interviewed by Kat and share my artwork.

As I’ve been encountering process thought, I’ve been reconsidering my perspectives on the soul to be natural – it arises out of our bodies and is connected with our lived experience. But how does this different from regular consciousness? What is ‘regular’ consciousness anyway?

I think that the moments where we become aware of our self in a particular moment, an Actual Occasion, and realize everything that brought us to come into being in that moment, everything we are connected to in that moment, that is an experience of the soul.

As we discussed in Session 3, in Whitehead’s thinking, there aren’t substances, only processes, living and changing beings, not things that are somehow unchanging. This makes the soul change from a thing we have, to something we do, we experience.

When I make my coffee in the morning, I’m not yet fully conscious, not yet fully aware of myself and my place in the universe. Later on, while I play piano or work at my job, I come to realize myself as a conscious entity, as connected to other beings, as having a unique experience in my life. This gets closer to what a soul is, or rather how an experience of soul can be understood. To an extent, the experience of the soul is the 3rd person experience of the self, to not only have a certain perspective but to achieve a meta-awareness of life itself as its lived.

I appreciate our discussion on language, and how Potowatomi has more verbs to express the animate. This speaks to the underlying change of thinking needed, to change simply dividing the world into things and actions, and instead perceive the universe as the flowing, ever-changing experience of many inter-connected beings.

Returning to what is consciousness, I’ve been learning about the current Integrated Information Theory (IIT). This sounds the most in-line with process thought, that I’ve found so far. Here’s a ~9 minute video from Cristoff Koch describing this theory. I’m currently reading his new book Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It.

What caught my attention in IIT, is that they focus on different qualities of consciousness that arise out of our physical composition. I can have many kinds of experience, not only moods, feelings, emotions, problem solving, but that ‘higher’ quality of consciousness where I’m aware of what it’s like to be aware. A visionary or religious experience – something that gives me such a unique insight into what it’s like to be a living being in the living universe that it changes how I understand the rest of my life. That kind of experience arises out of stored memories, the proprioception and interoception of the body, all the input of the senses, and everything that is part of the physical structure of the psyche. That is the process or experience of the soul – it arises from the continuity of the physical body – but is a particular experience, not a thing, because the arising of full conscious awareness of that quality is transient, as are all the other metabolic rhythms of our physical bodies.

The idea of God becoming, and in a different way than an individual, or even a collective, is compelling. I’m curious why this alternative to an immortal and unchanging God sparked the idea that this is a Dark Side of God, if you’re open to sharing.

Thank you for sharing your experience, Alexandre, and thank you for your comment, Daryl. I appreciate hearing both of your thoughts.

Alexandre, I resonate with your experience in Peru, and your further similar experiences of those kinds of moments. Maybe Concrescence is the term for these moments, where we become fully aware of ourselves in our most interconnected extent; where that self-realization is what makes the Actual Occasion become concrete.

To me, these moments fall under the practice and application category of the branches. I don’t think we’ve delved too deeply into this area yet. My strongest focus will be on how we can apply the principles and values of the roots and trunk to lived experience.