Matt Segall
Hi Jessica,
You are right in the trenches with your fifth graders! I am not sure it makes sense to try to teach them Whitehead, but I do think we do our children a major disservice by rushing into the teaching of scientific theories before they’ve had a chance to experiment with the phenomena themselves. I mean, for instance, working with prisms to see how light and color behave; working with gravity and acceleration in an embodied way by feeling the difference between spinning with our arms down v. up; planting seeds and watching plants grow through their various stages of metamorphosis, etc. So much of contemporary science education gives kids the products without at all exposing them to the process. The problems with this are manifold, including the fact that it leads kids to believe that our current textbook knowledge is a done deal when in fact many fundamental questions remain matters of great controversy. We should aim to inspire more kids to get into science to explore the mysteries, not feeding them a ready-made list of “we now knows.”
Welcome, Kathleen. I believe our study of Whitehead these next few weeks will allow for an “expansion of the dictionary”–which is one of the consequences of engaging in speculative philosophy.
Glad to have you here, Doug!
Here’s how Whitehead puts it in Modes of Thought (p. 150): “The doctrine that I am maintaining is that neither physical nature nor life can be understood unless we fuse them together as essential factors in the composition of ‘really real’ things whose interconnections and individual characters constitute the universe.”
I take him to be offering new concepts of the physical and the experiential that make it impossible to imagine (within the scope of his scheme) anything like self-existent objective matter. In his scheme, “objective” always means “objective data for a subject.” Similarly, in his scheme, “subjective” always means “arising from an objective world” and “perishing back into superjective satisfaction (or objective immortality).” In other words, the two terms depend upon one another for their coherence. What has traditionally been called the physical world Whitehead understands as being composed of low grade occasions of experience–that is, occasions with very little in the way of conceptual innovation that are almost entirely driven by the reproduction of what is felt by their physical poles.
He does at times introduce a relative distinction between “living” occasions and non-living occasions. This is a matter of degrees and not an ontological division. It has to do with how much conceptual innovation an occasion introduces in its mental pole.
Similarly with consciousness, it is not a hard and fast line. As soon as you have occasions with some degree of contrast between what their physical pole feels in the past and what the mental pole entertains as adjacent possibilities, you have at least the germ of consciousness. Fully flowered consciousness awaits occasions with nexūs complex enough to support the entertainment of what Whitehead calls propositions (which I won’t get into here but I can point you to my paper “Physics Within the Bounds of Feeling Alone,” which contains a section introduces Whitehead’s theory of propositions and propositional prehensions).
Thanks for these critical comments, Mark. It is helpful to have your expertise so we can dig into the claims I am making. I think there are some issues with the way Whitehead’s metaphysical language interfaces with Rosen’s. When I refer to “organism” as a universal speculative principle I am speaking about the general concept of self-organization (which is how Kant and Schelling, as well as Whitehead, approached it), not about the individual lifeforms studied within the special discipline of biology. I can understand why this might be confusing, as if I were suggesting that biological organisms make up atoms or stars, etc.
What I take Rosen to be suggesting about the non-generic status of the laws of physics is that mechanism is in fact a special case of organism (in the broader sense of self-organization explained above). This may be me reading too much Schelling and Whitehead into Rosen’s ideas, but that is how I understood him.
I am not finding this sentence in my book: “Rosen argues that the mechanistic laws of physics, which are purely efficient in terms of Aristotle’s four causes”… Can you clarify?
I think the distinction is not relevant within his scheme itself, but it is relevant if we want to contrast his approach to others in philosophy of mind, eg, those that argue that a certain number of neurons or neural connections suddenly turns matter into mind.
Whitehead uses the term in a unique way, referring to his cosmology as an account of “emergent evolution.” He defines this phrase in PR, p. 229: “the doctrine of real unities being more than a mere collective disjunction of component elements.”
I would not want to say Whitehead views life and consciousness as “fundamental properties.” His process-relational ontology is an attempt to think beyond the substance-property ontology typical in Western philosophy. He is not arguing, like some contemporary analytic panpsychists, that consciousness is the intrinsic property of matter (which physics knows the relational properties of). First of all, Whitehead rejects the idea that “consciousness” as such goes all the way down. Whitehead is clear that consciousness is an inessential and derivative form of experience only present in the late phases of very rare actual occasions. He has his own technical definition of consciousness as an affirmation-negation contrast that we can unpack if you want, but the distinction between experience and consciousness is key in the philosophy of organism. Further, when we say “experience goes all the way down,” the point is not that fundamental particles “have” experience like a stone has a gray color or even some more essential property. It would be more accurate to say that experience is what actual entities are made of, not that they “have” it as a property (which implies there is some underlying substance that is qualified by it).
Hello, Eric! Thanks for your kind words. Glad you found your way into this course, but sorry to hear the timing conflicts with your schedule! Let’s find a time to meet on Zoom over the next few weeks. Please email me: msegall@ciis.edu
By “strongly emergent,” I mean actual occasions are ontologically irreducible to the given environment from which they arise. There is something new introduced into the universe, a new value, a new perspective, each time an actual occasions reaches satisfaction and perishes.
There are infinite eternal objects. That is not a large number, it is beyond number. So from the perspective of any given actual occasion, there will always be an infinitude of possible novel ingressions.
Well, Mark, I am sorry to say but I fear I have created a monster! That GPT can be helpful, but it should not be trusted. That quote is completely made up! Whitehead does talk about eternal objects on page 44 of Process and Reality, but not like that. That was of phrasing it makes EOs sound like they are “waiting” in some Platonic heaven somewhere. That is not how Whitehead imagines them.
On the other hand, it is true that “there are no novel eternal objects” (PR 22). This is because eternal objects constitute an infinite continuum of possibilities. Actual occasions are themselves strongly emergent from their past (ie, greater than the sum of their prehensive parts), and this precisely because of their ingression of novel eternal objects (novel relative to the actual past, not novel in the sense of having been created ex nihilo).
It is not that Whitehead rejects emergence. Concrescence is nothing if not a theory of radical creative emergence! What he rejects is, eg, the “emergence” of mind from matter, or of life from matter.
Hi Mark,
If I were to imagine Whitehead’s response, it would be to point out that the concept of “pattern” [or “contrast” in his terms (PR 22)] already presupposes the distinction between eternality and actuality.
I am not sure Whitehead is arguing that eternal objects are established prior to communities. In a logical (not temporal) sense, Creativity precedes and groundlessly grounds both God and eternal objects. Before God’s conceptual envisagement, there are no definite eternal objects or determinate actual occasions; there “is” mere multiplicity.
This is my interpretation, at least (I unpack it more in my chapter linked above). I don’t see this as a foundationalist argument, but as radically empiricist. Patterned contrasts and communities/societies are indeed the places to look for the real meaning of the abstract categories of “actual occasions” and “eternal objects.” But if we are going to think about the conceptual principles at play in our perception of contrasts, it seems to me we end up having some version of a polarity between positive and negative poles. Process-relational reality is dipolar. There is no such thing as a “separate” realm of eternal objects. They exist only in relationship to actuality. Whitehead’s argument is that we cannot make sense of our experience of actuality without making reference to potentialities, to abstract “objects” that can participate in more than one particular at a time.
Whitehead goes to some but clearly not enough lengths to clarify the nature of EOs, but it is clear enough to me that he is not asking us to imagine a celestial catalog of fixed forms. Nor is he asking us to imagine God as anything other than immanent. Already in beginning God has committed to complete fusion with the world. It’s just that Whitehead’s panentheism goes a step further than divine immanence by affirming the self-creative transcendence achieved by each and every actual occasion of experience. God is in and beyond the world precisely because God evolves with the myriad of self-transcending occasions.
Process philosophers must admit right up front that rationality has limits. “The general principle of empiricism depends upon the doctrine that there is a principle of concretion which is not discoverable by abstract reason” (Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. 178).
Thanks for these great questions, Mark. I admit to not being an expert in Rosen’s thought, having only read Life Itself and borrowed from Thompson’s treatment of his work in his own book Mind in Life. I plan to respond more in depth to your questions, but can you clarify the page numbers you are citing? Are those PDF page numbers, or the actual pages from the book? I am not seeing any correspondence between the pages and the quotes you are drawing in my paperback copy… And unfortunately, the publisher SacraSage uses Amazon’s print on demand services, so it is not available elsewhere. My other book Crossing the Threshold is available direct from the publisher, but that’s not what we’re reading for this course : )
And just to say, there are other ways of understanding UAP phenomena as a kind of interdimensional travel that would not require the specific metaphysics implied by MWI.
Hi John,
I may indeed be wrong! But at this point I am not sure how MWI could be proven wrong? I don’t reject it so much for scientific reasons, but for philosophical reasons. But again, I may be attached to faulty philosophical premises. I would just say that I do not see any possibility of squaring MWI with Whitehead’s cosmological scheme, since the former makes no distinction between actual and potential, which is a core feature of Whitehead’s scheme. In MWI, everything is actualized. In Whitehead, most everything is held in potentia.
Hi Mark, I thought I’d share a few more lines from p. 6 of Science and the Modern World:
“There have been great civilisations in which the peculiar balance of mind required for science has only fitfully appeared and has produced the feeblest result. For example, the more we know of Chinese art, of Chinese literature, and of the Chinese philosophy of life, the more we admire the heights to which that civilisation attained. For thousands of years, there have been in China acute and learned men patiently devoting their lives to study. Having regard to the span of time, and to the population concerned, China forms the largest volume of civilisation which the world has seen. There is no reason to doubt the intrinsic capacity of individual Chinamen for the pursuit of science. And yet Chinese science is practically negligible.”
I’ve written a review of Eastman’s recent book Untying the Gordian Knot, wherein he argues for what he calls “potentiae” as a reformed version of Whitehead’s eternal objects. He thinks some such concept is necessary for making sense of quantum physics. https://footnotes2plato.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/segall-review-of-eastmans-untying-the-gordian-knot.pdf