Matt Segall
I should add that Whitehead was well aware of Bergson’s criticisms of the “cinematographic method” in science, whereby motion is said to be something like a cartoon flip book illusion. Whitehead is not proposing this. His actual entities or occasions are not point-instants, not freeze frames that add up to the movement of the societies they compose. They are durations or happenings, where the past bleeds into the present and the present bleeds into the future, and only considered unified entities because of the aesthetic satisfaction that is achieved with each concrescent pulse. Whitehead wanted to preserve some notion of determinate actuality, something that might correspond to our attempts to indicate: “that”; such indication, and thus all of intellectual and scientific research, would be impossible if reality were just an unbroken flow. Perhaps science and reason are mere delusions and all is really just a continuous stream, with all distinctions a function of our own ignorance. In that case, I am still left wondering how we human beings got so messed up given that we, too, are expressions of this flow.
I am sorry this seems so slippery, Eric. When trying to understand what Whitehead means by his category of the “actual entity,” one thing we want to avoid is reifying them into infinitesimal quantum-like events. This would be to mistake something metaphysical for a particular physical entity or activity. Whitehead is not doing physics, not positing some new type of particle that might be tested for at the Large Hadron Collider. He is seeking a general description of the process of reality at whatever scale we may want to look.
After he considers all the evidence from the special sciences (from quantum physics on up to psychology), as well as the various logical paradoxes he hopes to avoid (eg, Zeno’s paradox), he arrives at a basic metaphysical menu: actual entities, eternal objects, and nexus. While eternal objects or definite possibilities are continuous, actual entities are said to be discontinuous; that is, they are “epochal,” or “atomic” in Whitehead’s terms. He does not mean a Newtonian atom or corpuscle. He means a happening or event with a determinate status that distinguishes it from all other such occasions as unique and once-occurrent.
A nexus of such occasions becomes a society when they partake in some definite characteristic or exemplify some definite eternal object or objects. In the case of the society of occasions composing a living animal body, we would refer to the actual occasions involved in that society if we intended to analyze it at any one moment of its life history. Whitehead will refer to the “dominant occasion” of a living animal body as that occasion of experience likely arising somewhere in the “interstices of the brain” that is uniquely positioned so as to inherit the organized transmission of feelings from the rest of the bodily society in a particularly intense and cumulative way. A living body is composed of many subsocieties and any attempt to describe this in detail can get quite complicated, as you would expect. I’m currently in the midst of writing an article with a neuroscientist that attempts to offer a Whiteheadian description of the various routes of transmission involved in the simple act of holding a stone in one’s hand. Wish us luck!
Wonderful lines from the Da Xue! Thank you for sharing then, Zhenbao. They speak to the interconnection of all beings, that in some sense, we all share the same cosmic origin.
Thanks, Zhenbao. I’m glad you feel the resonances between anthroposophy and process thought, as well. We’ll be exploring the connections between Goethe (an important influence on Rudolf Steiner) and Whitehead later today.
Hi Mark,
It is true that Newton’s account of gravitation relied upon occult “action at a distance,” and so is not mechanical. He famously claimed to “feign no hypotheses” in that arena and simply offered a predictive description of motion. But in his other work on, eg, optics, he insisted on contorting the phenomena to fit a preconceived hypothesis about corpuscles of light moving through prisms at different rates. So there is plenty of mechanism still at work in Newton’s physics, even if not in his theory of gravity.
The field theories of the 19th century still relied upon the idea of a material ether through which waves could mechanically propagate. Einstein replaced this old ether with what he called a “new ether,” namely, the gravitational field. In effect, Einstein swaps out the material ether for a geometric ether. Whitehead was unhappy with this because it relied on the idea of “curved” space, which for epistemological reasons he found highly suspect (basically, it doesn’t allow us to make accurate measurements, as this depends on defining straight rulers, and if space is warped by intervening masses, we’d first need to know where all the mass is before we could determine whether our ruler was straight, but to know where the mass was we’d already need a ruler… you see the problem). Whitehead articulates what he calls an “ether of events,” which is not material or geometrical but topological (pre-metrical). Space and time become adjuncts of events, in this approach, rather than a pre-existing fabric that might be warped by mass. He developed his own alternative tensor equations for gravity more along the lines of Maxwell’s EM theory that were (and some argue still are) empirically equivalent to Einstein’s equations.
You’ve misunderstood Whitehead’s actual occasions, which are not to be imagined as little quantum events that add up to larger things. The “actual entity” is a scale free metaphysical category meant to describe any process of actualization, whether quantum or atomic or biotic or psychic. This description is certainly not algorithmic but is rather creative. What goes on within concrescence is an aesthetic process of selection, not computational number crunching.
Thanks, Rolla.
There is, of course, the Whitehead Word Book by John Cobb, Jr. If anyone wants to Google is, you can find a PDF online easily enough (I don’t think John would mind extra readers of his book!).
I also don’t like to encourage elitist sentiments, particularly when our political world is being turned upside down by a populist revolt driven by very understandable rage against “elites.” That said, I think all of us (no matter how many degrees or titles) remain vulnerable to group-think. Indeed, I take no joy in admitting that academics display this sort of non-thought all the time. Anyone who has studied the Challenger space shuttle disaster knows how this dynamic can take root even among literal rocket scientists. So let us all be wary of allowing our freedom of thought to be hijacked by the desire not to disturb the settled habits of our social group. At the same time, let us be respectful of social habits wisely built up over centuries, lest we saw off a branch we ourselves may be perched upon!
As for Darwin the Romantic, I know of no better source than Robert Richards, author of The Romantic Conception of Life. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Romantic_Conception_of_Life/X7N4_i7vrTUC?hl=en The final chapter of the book unpacks his thesis that Darwin was in fact a Romantic biologist in lineage with the likes of Goethe and Humboldt.
Powerful thoughts, Bill. Thank you.
I hear what you’re saying about the “Die and Become!” line. It seems to me that Goethe’s admonishment can really only work for someone who is already well aware of the first noble truth. It is less about “killing the ego” than it is about becoming aware of an experiential reality: that a new “you” is arising and perishing in every moment. Suffering results from a misperception of the nature of this inescapable fact. The good news is that “The best metempsychosis is for us to appear again in others,” as Goethe puts it in Maxim 585.
Great questions, Kevin.
I make a point of asking theoretical physicists a question like that whenever I have their ear. I ask some version of “where do you think the laws of physics come from?” Usually I get some version of this answer: “that’s an interesting philosophical question, but I’m not a philosopher.”
What I find interesting about the current state of physics is that after several hundred years of reductionistic analysis, physics itself has demolished the idea of mechanistic materialism. It turns out that, from the perspective of contemporary physics, nature is not made of bits of matter but of formal patterns. In other words, matter has turned out to be all a matter of form.
As for Whitehead’s eternal objects, yes they do function as lures, but not in and of themselves. Whitehead is not unlike Aristotle in affirming that the Divine is the ultimate end toward which all nature moves. The major difference with Whitehead’s process theology is that he also affirmed God’s relationship with the world-process. God is thus not an unmoved mover but the most moved mover, ie, “a fellow-sufferer who understands” and who lures all creatures toward ever-more inclusive truth, beauty, and goodness.
On the question of “intelligence,” I thought I’d share a few paragraphs from Whitehead’s book Adventures of Ideas (p. 46-48):
“Our consciousness does not initiate our modes of functioning. We awake to find ourselves engaged in process, immersed in satisfactions and dissatisfactions, and actively modifying, either by intensification, or by attenuation, or by the introduction of novel purposes. This primary procedure which is presupposed in consciousness, I will term Instinct. It is the mode of experience directly arising out of the urge of inheritance, individual and environmental. Also, after instinct and intellectual ferment have done their work, there is a decision which determines the mode of coalescence of instinct with intelligence. I will term this factor Wisdom. It is the function of wisdom to act as a modifying agency on the intellectual ferment so as to produce a self-determined issue from the given conditions. Thus for the purpose of understanding social institutions, this crude three-fold division of human nature is required: Instinct, Intelligence, Wisdom.
But this division must not be made too sharply. After all, intellectual activity is itself an inherited factor. We do not initiate thought by an effort of self-consciousness. We find ourselves thinking, just as we find ourselves breathing and enjoying the sunset. There is a habit of daydreaming, and a habit of thoughtful elucidation. Thus the autonomy of thought is strictly limited, often negligible, generally beyond the threshold of consciousness. The ways of thought of a nation are as much instinctive — that is to say, are subject to routine — as are its ways of emotional reaction. But most of us believe that there is a spontaneity of thought which lies beyond routine. Otherwise, the moral claim for freedom of thought is without meaning. This spontaneity of thought is, in its turn, subject to control as to its maintenance and efficiency. Such control is the judgment of the whole, attenuating or strengthening the partial flashes of self-determination. The whole determines what it wills to be, and thereby adjusts the relative importance of its own inherent flashes of spontaneity. This final determination is its Wisdom or, in other words, its subjective aim as to its own nature, with its limits set by inherited factors.
Wisdom is proportional to the width of the evidence made effective in the final self-determination. The intellectual operations consist in the coordination of notions derived from the primary facts of instinctive experience into a logically coherent system. Those facts, whose qualitative aspects are thus coordinated, gain importance in the final self-determination. This intellectual coordination is more readily achieved when the primary facts are selected so as to dismiss the baffling aspects of things into intellectual subordination. For this reason intellectual activity is apt to flourish at the expense of Wisdom. To some extent, to understand is always to exclude a background of intellectual incoherence. But Wisdom is persistent pursuit of the deeper understanding, ever confronting intellectual system with the importance of its omissions. These three elements, Instinct, Intelligence, Wisdom, cannot be torn apart. They integrate, react, and merge into hybrid factors. It is the case of the whole emerging from its parts, and the parts emerging within the whole. In judging social institutions, their rise, their culmination, and their decay, we have to estimate the types of instinct, of intelligence, and of wisdom which have cooperated with natural forces to develop the story. The folly of intelligent people, clear-headed and narrow-visioned, has precipitated many catastrophes.”It seems to me that the interesting question is not whether current or future forms of “artificial intelligence” are really intelligent. In some sense, in that it modifies our natural instincts, human intelligence is already artificial. Indeed, what we normally think of as intelligence is largely dependent upon the externalization of thought into various technical languages and instruments. It has been the case long before microchips were invented. Our technologies augment our cognition and consciousness. What is interesting, then, and perhaps even urgently so, is how we might find a way to wisely integrate our natural instincts with our modifying intelligence.
Wow, Thomas! What a project. I think it is fantastic, and quite bold!
I think the philosophy of organism is perfectly consistent with this sort of view, but Whitehead would probably say a lot of it awaits empirical/experiential confirmation. Steiner claims we can directly experience these past “cosmic epochs” (to use a Whiteheadism) through a sort of deep memory recall. I am not yet myself able to verify the detailed accounts Steiner offers of cosmic and earth history, but I suspect that unbifurcating nature and bringing mind and matter back together will end up bringing us to some rather strange realizations compared to the common sense of scientific materialism.
Hi Mark and Doug,
I am not an expert in machine learning by any stretch, but my understanding is that LLMs are indeed creating numerical representations of the statistical probability of certain words (or really, the tokens it creates out of words) following one another in various contexts. Human consciousness is not generated by numerical calculations, though of course we could devise all sorts of interesting models that simulate aspects of human consciousness by way of such calculations.
The transformers or neural network architecture used in todays’ LLMs are nothing like biological neurons. In fact, they don’t even have a physical form. They are mathematical operations. It may be that there is some modicum of experience realized in the electrons coursing through the microprocessors running these calculations, but there is nothing in the way of the organized cellular form that would allow for the amplification and intensification of experience that would be required to make it conscious.
If we’re talking about a cloud of gas in deep space, probably not much experience can accumulate. But if we’re talking about molecules within the social context of a living animal body, molecular experience accumulates through the organized routes of inheritance and amplification of novel feelings that pour into a centralized occasion of experience Whitehead suggests hovers somewhere in the interstices of the brain.
A really wonderful post to read. Thank you, Bill.
Really great questions here, te’a.
Whitehead is skeptical of Russell’s theory of perceptual objects as nothing but our classification of sensory perceptions (ie, what W. calls “display”). W. feels R.’s theory is based on a faulty understanding of perception that leaves us cut off from relationship with the concrete movement of real baseballs, as if we have to reconstruct their reality out of bits and pieces of sense data, snapshots of the instantaneous present that we then mentally link together, and even then only relate to a sort of mental representation of a ball rather than actual leather-bound rubber.
When he discusses the physical field or electromagnetic field, and “retarded potentials,” he is referring to the way that Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism only makes sense if the field measured in the present is intrinsically connected to its past and its future as it propagates through spacetime. It has no reality “at an instant.”
I appreciate this insight, Kevin! I think you are right about the importance of dynamic patterns, which make the molecules out of which we are made into a whole that is irreducible to its parts. But I would suggest that there’s also something else, namely the nexus of possibilities haloing what gets actualized by the physical patterns. Complexity theorists try to get at this with the notion of “constraints.” Terry Deacon refers to “absential properties” of systems. Whitehead introduces his “eternal objects” and the mental pole of actual occasions which evaluates and selects among them with each pulse of concrescence.
So, in Whitehead’s process ontology, a conscious animal body is more than molecules and more than arrangements of molecules. It is also a cumulation and synthesis of the mental poles of the occasions of experience associated with all that molecular dynamism.