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Eric–insightful comments and questions, In the preface to PR, Whitehead writes: “Also, it must be one of the motives of a complete cosmology to construct a system of ideas which brings the aesthetic, moral, and religious interests into relation with those concepts of the world which have their origin in natural science.” You’re not arguing that it may not bring these admittedly anthro-centric concerns into relation, surely. It is a question of the relation and characterization. There is more than one system of process thought and how they approach differing aesthetic, moral, and religious interests is worth considering. The Cobb Institute is named after a Process Theologian, and I enjoy reading his work; it also evolves from the Claremont School of Theology. To me Whitehead’s scheme is designed to be general enough to house a tremendous amount of diversity and like you I have been surprised by some of the specificity, but I don’t find anything here that is ruled out by Whitehead’s scheme. I feel you may have a Nietzschean Process focus on cruelty in nature, remorselessness of nature, a god who may lure an individual to disastrously awful decisions (for that individual at least), stars smashing violently into each other seeding violent and random creative flows with no human notion of harmony, compassion, concern for the vulnerable, etc. I’m interested in how the proponents of these found their way here. I hope you stick it out through the cert system (I am also enrolled) because you are providing something confronting the passengers once Whitehead’s speculative plane lands: cold, hard, irreducible and stubborn facts on the ground. I also think cruel, remorseless, violent, and random are just as much human notions as harmony, compassion, concern for the vulnerable, etc.

I was simply looking at hierarchical as the central of the central nervous system is the brain for us, not extending it past that to anything outside human body. Based on this organization we ought to be good stewards of the earth for the entities with differing organization, but we’ve abused that role more than honored it–is that your hesitancy on the frame?
BTW we both hit enter at the same time on the discussion today so it looked like my pharaoh example was in some way counter to your example but I hadn’t seen yours when I hit enter. Yours was good.

I liked your phrasings here. It may seem that my response is avoiding much of the content, but for me the emphasis that Dr. Cobb puts on the persuasive power of god/God instead of the coercive power of god/God concept that we’ve inherited from nearly every mythology and organized religion goes a long way. Reading Adventures in Ideas, Process and Reality, and Science and the Modern World concurrently, I am convinced that Whitehead’s view is teleological in that the purpose is aesthetic fulfillment, increased complexity leading to increased intensity of experience, and even a god/God as a byproduct of creativity is not at all a disinterested party to outcomes. For Cobb this god/God rejoices and suffers with us, with all, as it/IT experiences all. Whitehead recognizes that this being lures nature forward towards its desired ends, but this being is incompatible with coercive power (hence the lure). Providential luring does not equal determination, so divine providence as usually presented seems to me fixed dice, the traditional trope of the good god playing against the evil god in a game the good god cannot lose (the bad god is just a dupe furthering the grand plan of the good and only real one) doesn’t work here. We can in fact lose most the other species on the planet and ourselves in doing it–there is no coercive divine intervention in this model. I was always a fan of the divine intervention model in the past, so this is an adjustment for me.

Leslie–

I’m avoiding trying to evaluate rocks and birds and such, and reworked the last paragraph on page 39 so it works for me: “…the brain (my word) is not only the body, but…a hierarchical dualism rather than a metaphysical one.” As a single actor, the body has a mental pole and a physical pole. The brain, while also body, has the mental pole here. It is the “monarch” in Whitehead’s quote of page 38.

Mike