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Hi Mark,

The GPT is good, but not perfect : )

I’ve written a long chapter due out hopefully later this year that addresses these sorts of questions. Sounds like you would feel more at home with the various forms of “new materialism” on offer these days, which incorporate a processual view and often some kind of panpsychism, but without making reference to potentiae of any kind and so remaining forms of what physicist Tim Eastman calls “actualism.”

Here’s my eternal objects chapter if you’re curious for arguments in favor of a certain reading of Whitehead’s category. Long story short: there is no sense to be made of his actual occasions if you get rid of eternal objects. You can change the word to “patterns,” but either these patterns are performing the same function or else the logic of the whole system has collapsed upon itself. Arguing for actual occasions without eternal objects would be like arguing for a magnet with no south pole. You can break the magnet in half as many times as you want, the poles will keep reappearing. “Standing Firm in the Flux: On Whitehead’s Eternal Objects”: https://footnotes2plato.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/segall-standing-firm-in-the-flux-on-whiteheads-eternal-objects_jrp.pdf

Glad to hear all of this, Thomas! I’ve taken the liberty of forwarding your message to Brian, since he won’t be joining us in this forum.

Thanks for sharing this excerpt, Rolla. Whitehead here shows his complete ignorance. We have better anthropology today and know that the forests and plains of the Americas were by no means “wild” when the colonizers arrived. It is strange that Whitehead would emphasize such a contrast between European and Indigenous populations given how clearly he affirms (in other books like The Function of Reason) how all lifeforms are engaged not simply in an adaptation to the environment but in an adaptation of the environment to themselves. They construct their own niches, as biologists would now say.

Hi Bill,

Thanks for this rich contribution. In his book Religion in the Making, Whitehead explains what he means by “rational” religion. As you suggest, he does not mean a form of rationality that is devoid of feeling. But he does mean emotion purified by reason. Whitehead (RM, p. 31-33):

“Rational religion is religion whose beliefs and rituals [which have their origin in and seek to promote numinous emotions] have been reorganized with the aim of making it the central element in a coherent ordering of life—an ordering which shall be coherent both in respect to the elucidation of thought, and in respect to the direction of conduct towards a unified purpose commanding ethical approval. … Rational religion appeals to the direct intuition of special occasions, and to the elucidatory power of its concepts for all occasions. It arises from that which is special, but it extends to what is general. The doctrines of rational religion aim at being that metaphysics which can be derived from the super-normal experience of mankind in its moments of finest insight. Theoretically, rational religion could have arisen in complete independence of the antecedent social religions of ritual and mythical belief. Before the historical sense had established itself, that was the way in which the apologetic theologians tended to exhibit the origins of their respective religions. But the general history of religion, and in particular that portion of its history contained in the Bible, decisively negatives that view.”

What you say about Buddhist modernism applies equally well to modern Christianity. The social and cultural dimensions of religions–including their beliefs in gods and goddesses, angels and demons, gnomes and fairies, etc.–cannot just be neatly set aside from their theoretical and moral content. But to count as rationalized, a religion must transform its originating emotions and intuitions in such a way that they lift those emotions beyond what is relevant just to oneself or ones family but into the sphere of the general. Whitehead calls this “world-consciousness.” It is what typifies a “world religion” (incidentally, Whitehead finds it noteworthy that both Christianity and Buddhism flourished among people other than those who invented them). Whitehead (RM, p. 41):

“The new, and almost profane, concept of the goodness of God replaces the older emphasis on the will of God. In a communal religion you study the will of God in order that He may preserve you; in a purified religion, rationalized under the influence of the world-concept, you study his goodness in order to be like him. It is the difference between the enemy you conciliate and the companion whom you imitate.”

Anyway, hopefully that is not TMI on Whitehead’s views of religion and its evolution!

On the issue of racism, I didn’t mean to imply he is free of the charge! I just don’t think his suggestion about why mechanistic science arose in Europe and not China (despite its being more advanced than Europe in other ways) is rooted in racism. His comments in Adventures of Ideas about inferior races (he doesn’t name names but he takes the general concept seriously) and empty continents, on the other hand, are certainly rooted in racial prejudice. Such prejudices were pervasive in his time and remain so (if ever so slightly beginning to transform) in ours.

An example of a non-relational (better, non-conformal) subjective eternal object would be my own perception (as someone with red/green colorblindness) of a “green” flower that is, for non-colorblind people, perceived as red.

You could also think of the variety of emotional responses (subjective forms, in Whitehead’s lingo) to the same event. To say that an eternal object is subjective or non-conformal is to say that it is one of many possible responses to the given situation. Objective eternal objects, on the other hand, are what allow us to even be in the “same situation,” which presupposes certain mathematical relations known to physicists as space and time, etc.

[Matt Segall]

Mark,

I don’t see this as a “more or less” rational thing, but rather about what kind of rationality. Whitehead is pointing to a qualitative difference due to the unique perspective granted by Scholastic theology. This unique perspective may be “better” in some ways, but Whitehead is also very clear that it is “worse” in others (eg, definitely worse in terms of acknowledging interconnectivity and the life in all things).

• This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by Matt Segall.

Thanks for clarifying my overly general use of the term “train.” Yes, you are right about the retrieval process.

I was less than impressed by the GPT4 model, but the GPT4o version of the Whitehead GPT is actually rather good. It still makes the sort of mistakes you would expect from a machine that has no idea what it is actually talking about! But I have found it to be a useful teaching tool and even a neat way to find quotes in his various books when I cannot recall a page number.

The endowment is not something abstract like an equation, but rather the primordial fact at the base of all things that is directly felt by each concrescing occasion and that sparks its own process of self-creation.

Hi John,

As interesting as the many world interpretation is as a thought experiment, in my opinion it is completely incompatible with Whitehead’s cosmology. Had he lived to see it, Whitehead would likely hold it up as a rather striking example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness whereby an abstract model is surreptitiously substituted for concrete reality. Whitehead would say that the wave-function is a powerful way of calculating potentialities for actualization. It is not the territory, but a useful map.

Glad you found your way here, Mark. And sorry to hear about the post that evaporated!

If you’re interested in LLMs, perhaps you’ll enjoy playing with this Whitehead GPT I created. It is trained on all of Whitehead’s major books: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-uXLrsabXQ-whitehead-s-philosophy-of-organism

I don’t think Whitehead’s remarks were motivated by racism at all. He undeniably makes Victorian colonial and Eurocentric assumptions that are evident in his other writings (eg, in the sociological section of Adventures of Ideas). His joke about the “fundamental decency” of things is as much a knock on the manners of Cambridge mathematicians as it is a historical point about why technologically advanced ancient China never developed natural science in the way modern Europe did. While Whitehead makes the historical point to offer some explanation for why natural science arose out of European theology, don’t forget how critical he is of that theology! He fleshes out the historical point in more detail in Science and the Modern World (written not long after this lecture). Joseph Needham followed up with his multivolume work Science and Civilization in China that re-enforces Whitehead’s argument. The point is not at all that China was not an advanced civilization. The point is to ask why, despite their refinement, the modern scientific method did not arise in that cultural context.

In another book, Religion in the Making, Whitehead argues that Buddhism and Christianity are the two “rational religions.” Perhaps this raises new issues as he is quite dismissive of Islam, perhaps mostly due to his own ignorance of it (he’d learned about Buddhism from his colleagues at Harvard). In Process and Reality, he admits his own philosophy resembles Buddhist and Vedic modes of thought far more than his own European tradition.

Epperson makes the important point that natural philosophy should not imagine that the wave-function explains how “something comes from nothing,” as if some kind of pure potentiality temporally precedes actuality. This is what the application of quantum physics to cosmology ends up suggesting (eg, physicist L. Krauss refers to the quantum vacuum before space-time and matter as literally “nothing”). Instead, Epperson makes clear that the wave-function is an attempt to describe what goes on between actual measurements. You don’t get actuality from potentiality, but from prior actualities.

All that said, while the wave-function represents measurable properties, these properties remain abstract potentialities until they are actually measured. Otherwise we end up in the position of having to say that Schrodinger’s cat is really somehow simultaneously dead and alive.

Hi Chris,

Our physical sense organs do not allow us to perceive the concrescence of actual entities. The everyday entities we perceive around us–like tables and chairs, plants and animals, and other human bodies–are all examples of “societies,” in Whitehead’s terms. Societies are “historical routes” of actual occasions that genetically inherit from one another some definite characteristic (eg, the shape of the table, the personality of a human being, etc.).

So whereas Whitehead’s “societies” are empirically observable, the concrescence of actual occasions is something transcendental, ie, a process that underlies and makes possible those societies as well as our perception of them. In each moment of our experience, we are in fact aware of far more than just our outward sensory perceptions. We also experience what Whitehead called “bodily reception,” which is the feeling of the past, a kind of memory, as well as anticipatory feelings of the future. The idea of concrescence is Whitehead’s generalization of the total Gestalt of human awareness, a kind of distillation of the essential dynamics of our direct experience. So while we are not directly aware of concrescence as a thing in the world we might point to, we are ourselves always in the midst of a concrescence.

…

The extensive continuum provides the many concrescing occasions making up the cosmic society with the uniformity of relations necessary for something like laws of physics and spatiotemporal measurement to be possible. It is not to be imagined as an already actualized space-time fabric or container. Whitehead makes clear that he views the 3+1 dimensional space-time of our cosmic epoch as an abstract field of potentiality emergent from the experience of actual occasions. This doesn’t mean space-time isn’t real, it just means it is a function of the relations among occasions, as much “in them” as they are “in it” (if not in a relation of containment, than at least one of determination, as actual occasions must obey the rules of extensive connection laid down by the continuum, else all nature would fall to pieces).

Welcome, Dan. Perhaps you noticed during our Zoom session this morning that behind me on the top of my bookshelf is the collected works of Jung. He was really my first love, prior to finding Whitehead’s cosmology. I very much look forward to hearing about the resonances you have found in their work. I shared a few (and some differences!) here: https://open.substack.com/pub/footnotes2plato/p/archetypal-panpsychism-whitehead?r=2at642&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Thanks, Rolla. I couldn’t agree more about Brian : )