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So, to get more to your specific question about how EOs relate and unify:
They relate by making sure that all occasions share the same “extensive continuum,” which is Whitehead’s term for the relational nexus shared by every occasion of experience. The space-time of our cosmos is one way that this extensive continuum can take shape, but there are many other possible space-times, say, with 15 dimensions instead of 3+1 as in our universe. Whitehead leaves open the possibility that our universe is evolving toward a more complex dimensional form. But the point is, there are certain mathematical requirements for occasions to be systematically related to one another, and it is these very basic requirements that Whitehead tries to articulate with his account of the extensive continuum. This continuum is a complex eternal object and functions relationally to bind occasions into a shared nexus.
EOs also allow actual occasions some degree of individual self-creativity or unity. This unity is achieved in the course of concrescence as a newly arising occasion inherits the EOs realized in antecedent occasions but from its own unique perspective. A newly concrescing occasion can also ingress (or conceptually prehend) EOs that were not found in prior occasions. Thus something new is introduced into the world-process.

Hi Charlie,

This is a very good question that requires going a layer deeper into Whitehead’s categoreal scheme (as he refers to it in Process and Reality). It turns out there are two species of eternal objects: 1) objective eternal objects, which are what mathematical physicists are concerned with (eg, spacetime coordinates, charge, mass, etc.), and 2) subjective eternal objects, which is what poets are concerned with evoking (eg, the greenness of the grass, the blueness of the sky, the warmth of the sun, etc.).

While the subjective species of eternal objects can function relationally, the objective species always functions that way. This means that an actual occasion cannot but inherit the spatiotemporal position of the entities in its environment; if these prehensions were optional or could be reinterpreted, the very causal structure of the world would break down and science would become impossible. Subjective eternal objects, on the other hand, allow for more leeway and do not always function relationally. Some people are colorblind, for example, and see what look like shades of red to some people as shades of green. This sort of divergence doesn’t tear the fabric of spacetime!

Hi Bill, thanks for all your important work! Glad to have you in class these next several weeks. Gendlin’s work provides an important experiential grounding that process philosophers should pay more attention to!

Welcome, Don. I’m very glad to have someone with your background in the life sciences. We have a number of scientists enrolled in this course, so I know you’ll all keep me–a mere philosopher–on my toes : )

Welcome, Christie! No surprise but I agree that wonder is key to revitalizing science education, and much more!

Hi Doug,

Yes, the first Harvard lecture (which was only discovered and made available by the Whitehead Research Project several years ago) shows Whitehead in the process of transitioning from the problems in philosophy of science that had occupied him from the mid-1910s through the early 1920s. By the time he writes SMW, he is well on his way into metaphysics.

As for Gödel, Whitehead alludes to his incompleteness theorems right at the beginning of Modes of Thought (1938). See section II. Number in this chapter for more on his response to these issues: https://footnotes2plato.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/2023-iwc-paper-whiteheads-philosophy-of-organism-turning-idealism-inside-out-1.pdf

Hi Chris,

We haven’t even stretched yet and you are already jumping into the deep end! Ok, let’s go.

First, I am embarrassed to admit that on p. 41 I should have said qualitative and quantitative aspects. Good catch. Eternal objects include both sense-data and mathematical relations.

If I follow your first question, I would say that the wave-function only represents the pattern of eternal objects, ie, measurement probabilities and not actually measured states. So, yes, measurability is implied, but not actual measurements, which take us beyond the formalism into determinate reality (within the limits of the uncertainty principle).

Whitehead says that an actual occasion is “in time” via its physical pole and “out of time” via its mental pole (see p. 248 of Process and Reality). When in the midst of a given moment of experience we conceptually prehend an eternal object, it has only “partial ingression.” Once that moment of experience has achieved satisfaction and so decided upon some determinate “how” for its experience (ie, some determinate predicative pattern), those eternal objects transition into objective immortality and thus enter into time as characteristics that can be physically prehended by the next moment of experience. Now, this is somewhat complicated by Whitehead’s doctrine of hybrid prehension, whereby a subsequent occasion can prehend the mental pole of an antecedent occasion: so for example, in the stream of your experience from moment to moment, you can feel via hybrid prehension a prior occasion’s hesitation as to which possibility to ingress. But in general, such hybrid feelings are negligible.

I think you could translate your QM account into Whitehead’s phases of concrescence easily enough.

Good to have you in class, Doug! Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Nice to e-meet you, Chris. And thanks for offering to host additional Sunday conversations. I hope some classmates take you up on that invitation.

Welcome, Charlie!

Hi Doug, the version of the book we are using is the one published by SacraSage, which is much extended and revised. There is a PDF available on the course materials page.

Welcome, Kevin. Another physicist! And an appreciator of process theology. A wonderful mix. I am excited to be in dialogue with you these next several weeks.

Thanks, Kevin. I think that’s right! The only entities in Whitehead’s scheme are those whose essence is relational, ie, to be in relationship with one another. He draws on Plato’s insight in the dialogue Sophist that “being is simply power,” where “power” means both the ability to affect another as well as to be affected by another. In other words, to be is to be in relation. This doesn’t mean Whitehead doesn’t also want to provide an account of how an electron or a human being becomes momentarily individuated. Concrescence is the process by which the relational many become one novel individual entity. This novel entity is truly unique in the universe. Whitehead goes so far as to call it “atomic”! But no atom endures even for a second (Whitehead’s organic atoms are not Newton’s billiard balls). As soon as an individual achieves itself, it perishes and is absorbed back into the community, becoming data to be felt by subsequent occasions arising in its stead.

Welcome, John. Glad to have a physicist among us! I would say any healthy inheritance of the recent past is going to include both the best of the Enlightenment and the best of Romanticism. We now know better than to take sides in this old cultural schism. Science and imagination, intellect and feeling, analysis and integration, reductionism and holism: each have their place in the fullness of our humanity. It is insistence on one side to the exclusion of the other that plays the devil.

Wonderful to have you joining us, Rolla! I’m grateful for the work you’ve done to make this all possible : )