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I’ve read “On the Place of Life in the Cosmos” and have a couple more remarks/questions about Rosen, so I’ll add to this thread.

“Rosen thought we need to rethink physics to understand it in terms of self-organization.” It is unclear to me where you are getting that impression from, that is not to say you are wrong. I understand Rosen is pointing out the limits of physics i.e. physics is not generic but I do not think he is claiming that we need a more universal concept of physics. I see him making the case for understanding physics as dealing with a particular subset of systems i.e. physics is less generic than biology. He is taking a more radical stance than we might first imagine – he is making the case that physics is a subset of the systems that biology is concerned with. At the same time he is not engaging in metaphysics and claiming biology as the foundation/universal that everything could “in theory” be reduced to.

“Rosen argues that the mechanistic laws of physics, which are purely efficient in terms of Aristotle’s four causes” Here I think there is a misunderstanding of Rosen. Rosen is fairly clear in explaining the history of ideas and how final causation was discarded as a means of explanation in the assumptions of modern science (including in recent paradigm shifts like quantum “mechanics”). I think there are obvious cultural reasons for this – principally the power struggle with the church pushing radical claims to allow for radical separation. Rosen sees modern science attempting to explain everything in terms of only the three causes – formal, efficient, and material. Relational biology allows for the re-introduction of final causation into science (a fundamental paradigm shift for modern science) but that is achieved in a formal manner i.e. relational biology gives us the theoretical foundation for a science of complexity.

These are extreme claims and it would be reasonable to explore them with extreme skepticism. Rosen provides a powerful (and again, formal) way of thinking about the scientific endeavor in terms of the “modelling relation” (the block diagram of this seems obvious but the implications are profound). A full scientific understanding includes both a theoretical science to formally model a natural system and the applied science to build natural systems. Relational biology has made impressive strides in terms of theory (the mathematical biologist AH Louie has led the charge). Sadly, there have been no equivalent strides in terms of applied science. One reason for this is a lack of awareness and another is a lack of resources. Perhaps the most important reason is the materialist culture that we live in – our benchmark for success is applied science and our interest in understanding is marginal. A young researcher would need to be the contradiction of a young researcher to take the necessary risks. That is partly what has motivated my interest – I am getting old and not part of the academy 🙂

Hi Rolla, that is beautiful and not surprising to me as I see a sensitivity in you that would seek something similar in a partner. I believe that we are participating in processes at multiple scales in space and time. Most of these processes cannot be experienced through our five senses. Our sixth sense, our ability to “think” is intimately related to our language (as are all the senses when we look closely). Therefore I believe that being capable of putting names to these processes is of great importance, as this is the only way we can become sensitive to these processes. For example, we cannot see capitalism, we cannot see historical social injustices, we would not have these sensitivities without the intellectuals who found the terminology. It is normal to assume that the linguistic potential we have is universal but it is a work in progress. We are by definition immoral by tomorrow’s standards and the only hope of reaching tomorrows morality is through wise immoral behavior today. We rely on the tools of philosophy to shed a little light on that path. Best wishes to you both!

Hi Matt, is it fair to say the distinction between weak and strong emergence is irrelevant for Whitehead? If all actual occasions are emergent, then could we say that emergence is not a useful word in Whitehead’s framework because events “not being emergent” only makes sense in a different metaphysics ?

It seems, to me, at this stage, that Whitehead makes the move of “pushing properties down”. He is avoiding strong emergence as an explanation, so life and consciousness become fundamental properties of everything. It is not a reductionist move in the mechanical sense but it could be seen as a reductionist move in terms of the properties that a “mechanical” reduction has not been able to explain/value.

There is a commitment to a coherent universe in the sense of universal properties. I see the motivation for “foundations” coming from Western culture (having lost an anthropocentric god we need something to take that place). It is unclear to me if Whitehead, having maintained a “eurocentric” view, could have gotten out from under these cultural norms, he does not seem to have committed to learning/living an alternative culture.

I see how, on one hand, if we make everything complex and everything alive and everything conscious, then the scientist will elevate the value of those properties because they are seen as universal. On the other hand I worry that if everyone saw the world in this way the sacredness of those properties would be banalized. I look at how people treat matter in our culture and it lacks the sort of awe the physicist might hold. Inversely the treatment of life, that has largely been ignored by modern science, does have a special place in our culture.

It is very difficult for me not to see the central role of philosophy as that of ethics – but I am making an effort 🙂

Hi Rolla, I’m asking myself similar questions. One idea is to share the discovery of insights about processism in what your wife loves doing. Which might mean acting more than intellectualizing – if Whitehead can’t bring more value to what she loves doing then this is a good reason to doubt Whitehead. Our culture is essentialist and most people are going to measure value in those terms. Most people who are comfortable in our culture are not going to want to see what their comfort costs others. I believe that increasing our sensitivity to process can also allow for more success in whichever essentialist project our loved ones may be pursuing. For example, a healthier garden. That sensitivity can do its work and conversations may start – but probably not in philosophical jargon. I think my partner has a sensitivity (not in terms of philosophy) that teaches me more about moving toward a process centric paradigm than I can get from books. She is a teacher so she has a laboratory – like your wife’s garden perhaps.

[Mark Hampton]

Hi Matt, luckily we have you here to sanity check 🙂 I’m not sure what is different between what you wrote and what GPT generated. I did not understand GPT to be describing objects that are waiting because “the realm of pure potentiality” implies that there are no objects in the eternal realm. When you write “actual occasions are strongly emergent”, it is unclear to me if you are making the distinction between weak and strong (I used the term “hard” above when I should have used “strong” – sorry) emergence, it seems relatively clear that Whitehead supports the notion of weak emergence (e.g. communities form a nexus which will result in emergent properties, as in properties which emerge due to the nexus). It is less clear to me that eternality can support a notion of strong emergence – because there is nothing new in the eternal realm just a particular realization in the actual realm ?

• This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by Mark Hampton.

Thanks very much Bill!

Hi Matt, I do not have P&R so this is a quote from your GPT “The realm of eternal objects is the realm of pure potentiality, encompassing all the forms and patterns that can be realized in the actual world. These forms are not themselves actualized until they are incorporated into the process of becoming of actual entities” (Whitehead, “Process and Reality”, p. 44).

If that is correct then I had misunderstood “patterns” as emergent in both the realm of actuality and eternality. It seems emergence would be an appropriate concept in actuality but in eternality all the potentials for all communities exist from the beginning ?

It seems that Whitehead did not buy into a concept of “hard” emergence where actual occassions could create new potentials.

This reminds me of some recent work building a visual language for describing process. It is apparent that for a community to establish a relation it must prehend the other community. How this can happen prior to the communities knowing each other is a challenge. My take on it was to see that actuality creates potentials i.e. the potentials are immanent (one could say interdependent). Relational biology provides theory for how potentials can be part of actuality (the process of anticipation) which gets around needing an eternal realm in that framework. It opens up an interesting line of thought whereby we could develop potentiality (it become a sort of immaterial resource instead of an inaccessible realm).

I agree with you that we are better to accept limits to rationality and I think the desire for foundations (i.e. metaphysics) is part of the “folly” of rationality. It is quite a liberation to have a non-foundational stance and this seems to line up with how process philosophy plays out in some Eastern cultures. At the same time the non in non-foundation sees the utility of metaphysics (the folly is the claim of a coherent metaphysics).

[Mark Hampton]

Hi Matt, I see the above as a strawman to explore my understanding of Whitehead. The issue I see is that eternal objects are established prior to communities. Then when communities emerge there are no associated eternal objects so the actual occassions of the community needs to prehend patterns (not only eternal objects). I guess this choice might have been made to avoid introducing an active god who would create new eternal objects for each new class of community. But then my question is why bother with the initial eternal objects and not just have patterns which are not dependent on god – this still provides the function of eternal objects but it is immanent rather than foundational.

Here is GPT’s take (I gave it your essay) “Patterns can play a similar role to eternal objects in Whitehead’s metaphysics by providing the necessary definiteness, potentiality for novelty, and coherence. By emerging directly from the nexus of actual entities, patterns offer a more immanent and process-oriented approach, avoiding the need for a separate, foundational realm of eternal potentials. This alternative maintains the richness and complexity necessary for Whitehead’s system while aligning with a dynamic, relational metaphysics.”

I agree GPT is not to be trusted.

I was not particularly enamored with new materialism (mainly Karen Barad’s “Meeting the Universe Halfway” although I did get a lot out of reading that). My preferences are more toward non-buddhism and social constructionism. The “non-foundational stance” is a way of exploring different perspectives, I would love to have some intuitions of what it means to “think like a Whiteheadian” by the end of this course – if that is possible.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by Mark Hampton.

Hi Matt, those are page numbers are from the Android Kindle app. It might be easiest to search for the text I quoted. I think you may have read “Essays on Life Itself” which is a posthumous publication (at least I recall that is what is referenced in your book). For Rosen’s work a better general entry point is “Life Itself”, the best formal introduction to relational biology is Louie’s “More Than Life Itself”.

Thanks very much Rolla, it helps to build a more complete picture of Whitehead. “Humanity is nature becoming self-conscious.” is beautiful. We often think of evolution as progress – a growth of diversity and complexity – but I remind myself of the story of a mass extinction caused by trees (so successful in colonizing the planet that they changed the atmosphere too rapidly for many species). Likewise we might see modernity as a period of back-sliding when it comes to our ability to be self-conscious in a relational (we could say rational!) sense. The complementarity of Daoism and Confucianism is quite fantastic (Daoism has such a profound concept of nature). The leap into modernity also seems to have submerged this in China. However that knowledge is much closer for Chinese culture to prehend and we see signs of it happening – the concept of an ecological civilisation was introduced into their constitution in 2017…

Thanks for your profound response Bill. Suffering as a minority seems to hide many blessings – luckily many of us get to be that minority at some point in time. I sometimes worry the West is going to let individualism wipe out those opportunities. What you are describing as rational and Whiteheadian seems closer to Eastern traditions than Western traditions. There is such a rich history of process thought in Eastern traditions and it is so sophisticated that it was a humbling and fortunate experience to come across that. I agree with you that Western takes on Buddhism are often ignoring the bits which will not sell well in the West. Glenn Wallis has done much to wake us up to this e.g. https://www.onphi.org/biblio/89/a-critique-of-western-buddhism

I hope you will share more analogies with Buddhism as the course progresses.

Hi Matt, that makes sense and it makes it difficult to understand why Whitehead did not investigate this different rationality. I guess there was some assumption that prioritized the rationality he was familiar with – we could call that euro-centricism to avoid uglier terms. There is an Einstein quote about the mode of thinking that caused a problem not being the mode of thought that will find a solution – it feels like Whitehead missed an opportunity. It would be reassuring if Whitehead had pointed out how the rationality in China was “better” in some ways before ignoring it. As you wrote, he is in a particular historical context so I am not going to judge him outside of that context but I do have some judgements about that context 🙂

I think I understand the point of the example – the subjective experience is not shared. It seems Whitehead might be assuming that there are conformal subjective eternal objects when that does not appear to be the case e.g. we know that social context can influence the ability to distinguish colors i.e. what Whitehead would assume to be a conformal subjective eternal object is in fact a non-conformal subjective eternal object ? In this case I wonder if there is a conformal subjective eternal object or is this a way of classifying subjective eternal objects into those where differences matter and those where we ignore the differences ?

Hi Matt, that is somewhat reassuring thanks. I do not know much about ancient China but I struggle to see that culture as less rational than European culture. Certainly there are different priorities.

Thanks Matt, I am interested in LLM and I’m trying to work “above” them partly because that space is moving so fast. I’m unsure how much you know about LLM, the “GPTs” feature from OpenAI, the last time I looked, is not training a model on the material you provide but using retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to search the material you provide for relevant “chunks” of text that are included with the prompt the user provides to generate a response. It is a good method for having the LLM use information that was not in the training data (and is a compromise that is surprisingly effective). Did you find it insightful in your own use ?