Process philosophy question
A quicky (hopefully):
Can an individual 'occasion' of process philosophy be said to actually exist?
Or is an individual occasion like the present moment, of zero duration, therefore not actually existent?
Can an individual 'occasion' of process philosophy be said to actually exist?
Or is an individual occasion like the present moment, of zero duration, therefore not actually existent?
Comments (103)
This is a Whitehead question. @Janus might be able to help.
> You can find argument for your own non-existence, whether temporal or physical, if that's what you want. But it's not very useful; if nothing else you'll be left with the being who wanted to not exist!
The Boy Who Wanted To Not Exist ... I'd read it! ;-)
No I'm not looking for an argument for my non-existence. (I'd have to exist to be doing that.) I'm having a conversation with some Buddhists about process philosophy, and this question came up.
Thanks, fdrake.
Due to my own lack of time, I'll just give a very simple answer to start, which hopefully may suffice to answer your question.
Whitehead distinguishes between "moments", which have no temporal extension, and "durations".
Actual entities, for Whitehead, are not atemporal (in the sense of unchanging), but are rather temporal occasions or processes. So, an atemporal moment would be an idealized instant of no duration, not an actual moment which, in possessing temporal extension, endures "for a time". In Husserlian terms, it means that a lived, as opposed to an idealized, moment is both retentive and protentive. It carries the past that in-forms it, into the future that is expected in it, and which it will, in turn, in-form.
I may not be completely accurately reflecting the subtleties of Whitehead's understanding of this issue here, as it's just 'off the top of my head', but I don't have time to dip into Whitehead's texts right now.
Nice.
Quoting rachMiel
Not speaking for Whitehead, but for process thinking in general, the problem for the process view is how does "atomistic" individuation arise when everything is united by a common flow? So an "occasion" would be like a whorl in a stream - a feature that arises as its own momentary thing while also being part of a greater temporalised flow.
The whorl thus exists both as an expression of its context, and also marked by its momentary departure from the over-riding character of that context. A whorl is a rotation that fleetingly betrays the possibility of other directions of flow and so marks itself out even as it is borne off downstream.
So as @Janus says, an occasion is its own temporal duration - a localised past, present and future. From the point of view of the river, the whorl is a general kind of regularity that is expected to break out in unpredictable fashion. So the general history of the river is a constraint that makes whorls likely to erupt at "any time" in its future. And at any present moment, there will be whorls that have appeared and shortly to depart.
But within the whorl itself, it is characterised by itself being a departure from that prevailing general flow. The whorl opens up the possibility of a brief spin heading upstream. It itself constrains the water flow locally, and any objects bobbing about on the surface, to its quick little rotation. Locally, the past/present/future is set up with its own fleetingly distinctive sense of direction.
Thus, in the physicalist reading of process philosophy, you have a general character to time as @Janus outlines. And it can sound pretty psychological. History locks in a set of expectations as far as the present is concerned. Time itself is thus a process. It has an internal story arc rather than just being a collection of structureless instances.
So time has a general global flow like a river. And that in turn can become particularised by local events that are marked out by being fleeting twists in a different direction. Local moments of temporal structure can arise that go in a different, more personal-seeming and individualistic, direction.
The general flow had mostly suppressed those other directions. But locally, they can erupt as constraint can never completely eliminate freedom. And what cannot be stopped is something bound to be expressed. Like the whorls that spot a stream.
There is no point in examining a question as to whether you exist or not without first defining what you mean by “you” and what you mean by “existence”.
What are you?
What is existence?
Thanks, Janus!
What I get from this (with respect to my original questions) is that no-thing (no unchanging substance) exists in the present moment. Existents (actual entities) are event-sequences that unfold over time.
Sound about right?
I'm happy to share my view/belief/feeling about this ... but you might not like it!
The answer to both: the Mystery.
Or, because it sounds so gorgeous in German: das Mysterium.
Well I personally am unable to identify a thing which I believe is me. So it is indeed mysterious to me. This is why I fail to accept norms of language, terms etc, as representative of actuality.
Ah! It was Alan Watts who said: “The common error of ordinary religious practice is to mistake the symbol for the reality, to look at the finger pointing the way and then to suck it for comfort rather than follow it.”
The same relates, I think, to the symbols that is everyday conversation about things and experiences within which the "I", "me" and "you" are used.
:smile:
Yes, I think it's right to say that, according to process metaphysics, no unchanging substance exists "in the present moment" or indeed at all. The present moment, for process metaphysics, is not a 'duration-less point instant', but a minimal temporal flow during which there would be at least a change in temporal 'position', if nothing else. Anyway, it's certainly an interesting question that many a book could be written about, and thanks for raising it.
:grin:
[i]apokrisis: Not speaking for Whitehead, but for process thinking in general, the problem for the process view is how does "atomistic" individuation arise when everything is united by a common flow? So an "occasion" would be like a whorl in a stream - a feature that arises as its own momentary thing while also being part of a greater temporalised flow.
The whorl thus exists both as an expression of its context, and also marked by its momentary departure from the over-riding character of that context. A whorl is a rotation that fleetingly betrays the possibility of other directions of flow and so marks itself out even as it is borne off downstream.[/i]
Gotcha. Tangent:
The whorl is itself a process, has duration, exists and changes over time, etc. Right?
What is the 'atom' of a process, its smallest existent? (I don't wanna say smallest particle, because this implies substance.) Does this question even make sense in pp'ical terms?
[i]But within the whorl itself, it is characterised by itself being a departure from that prevailing general flow. The whorl opens up the possibility of a brief spin heading upstream. It itself constrains the water flow locally, and any objects bobbing about on the surface, to its quick little rotation. Locally, the past/present/future is set up with its own fleetingly distinctive sense of direction.
Thus, in the physicalist reading of process philosophy, you have a general character to time as @Janus outlines. And it can sound pretty psychological. History locks in a set of expectations as far as the present is concerned. Time itself is thus a process. It has an internal story arc rather than just being a collection of structureless instances.[/i]
The notion of time as story/process really appeals to me. As a composer I've often worked with multilayered soundscapes, with time flowing uniquely for each layer. And psychological time can flow dramatically differently when you are in different moods, situations, states of mind.
1. If time is a process, any slice of it (duration) would have a beginning, middle, and end. Likewise, each of these would have a beginning, middle, and end. And so on, fractal-like, ad infinitum. Yes?
2. If time is a process, does it imply that space is also a process?
It makes sense to me to think of it in terms of smallest form or structure. So you could follow the condensed matter view that a particle is a quasiparticle or soliton. That is, it is like a knot or frustration in the fabric of existence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiparticle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soliton
Quoting rachMiel
Space and time are ways in our modelling to give change a static backdrop against which it can be measured ... as change. So we have to have something that stands still as the way we make it clear that something else is moving or evolving.
Thus in process thinking, we have to realise the nature of the trick we are playing. We invent a notion of a fixed spacetime backdrop so as to dramatise the fact that there are then energetic changes taking place within that steady reference frame.
That non-process approach works really well. But ultimately, it is a physical fiction. As general relativity and quantum physics eventually show. What is fixed and unchanging is simply a point of view.
The next step after that - which gets you into a proper process story - then generalise the (semiotic) notion of a point of view so that change is basic, but a recognisable structure of reality still emerges.
At root, this is just relativity - the light-cone holographic structure of the universe. All action is scaled by c. And so two points in space share the same moment in time only if they are in communication and are integrated or coherent in the sense of being in a cause and effect relation to each other.
If the Sun went supernova now, you wouldn't know about it for another 8.5 minutes. There would be no disturbance in the light or gravity you think it is pumping out until news of that arrived at lightspeed.
So c sets a basic scale of integration when it comes to the physical definition of a temporal duration or moment. Nothing has really changed until two points in space have had enough time to be energetically connected ... in a way that could cause a difference.
Lightspeed is the very fastest rate of temporal integration. But the relaxation times of more complex physical processes could be much slower. How long does it take for a mountain range to be thrust up by the collision of tectonic plates? Geology would have its own really slow scale at which the network of forces and masses involved reached system-wide state of equilibration after any perturbation. A moment of geological time would take forever to unfold compared to the simplest level of universal equilibration - the establishing of regions of space coherently connected in terms of photons and gravity.
So a process view would see temporal duration as being about the time it takes for a spatially distributed action to unfold and arrive at some coherent balance. And with relativity, a fundamental rate for this integrative action was established by saying nothing can happen faster than c. And then we know that any process involving mass happens at sub-light integration rates. So the "cogent moment" for material systems can be way slower in terms of the rates at which a process of equilibration unfolds, and much smaller in the distances that are being integrated over.
So it is all kind of fractal. It has scale symmetry. But there is a fundamental relativistic baseline set by c.
In terms of your question, there would be a thinnest kind of slice - the c-scaled slice, or the lightcone story. Then in terms of other material processes, they would all have much fatter "moments". They take longer, and span less distance, to achieve the cogency that defines a duration - the time it takes to achieve a stable change, a change stable enough to be fixed as a fact of history, a constraint on future freedoms.
Quoting rachMiel
Space, time and energy together make up the process. So space is an aspect of the process. We want to get away from the simple Newtonian separation of the three, even if the three are quite separated seeming in our current state of the Universe - where it is so cold and expanded that it is pretty close to its static Heat Death condition.
One way to think about space then would be as the opposite of time. And if time is how we think of integration, then space is how we think of differentiation. If two points are distinct and at a distance from each other, then that is why it is going to take time for them to become connected and in touch with each other in an energetic or communicative sense.
For there to be an issue with integration, then there has to be differentiation. And vice versa. So really the two are the two sides of the same coin. That is why relativity can speak of spacetime.
Time then gains a direction once we stir thermodynamics into the pot. Entropy breaks the symmetry of relativistic spacetime and so gives us a direction that points to the past and a direction that points to the future. The past is all the spatial extent that is now temporally integrated. The future is all that extent yet to be integrated.
So a process view would understand reality as a web of relations not a collection of bits. And then we would see structure arise as the result of fundamental contrasts in those relations. You would have action going in two directions at the same time - integration and differentiation. And that in turn would map to what the "collection of bits" ontology has been calling temporal duration and spatial separation.
A process view would have to change its very jargon to escape the familiar clutches of the mechanical view of nature. So asking what "space" or "time" are, is still to be thinking that the holism of the process view ought to reduce to the mechanicalism of classical physics.
Now mechanics is great. It is a really efficient for calculating the state of the world - in the near Heat Death state that defines our particular moment in Cosmic history.
But a process view is about a metaphysics of relations. It is about seeing nature in terms of its coherent structuring forms rather than as an atomistic collection of parts ... floating in a supposedly a-causal void.
I would say for Whitehead the fundamental elements of existence are the "actual occasions" or "droplets or moments of experience" and that his view of this is fundamentally atomistic. Such occasions have duration. Such occasions can not be meaningfully subdivided. Actual occasions are both temporal and spatial. In many respects Whiteheads actual occasions resemble quantum events.
These occasions are the final real thing in the universe, and they are both temporal, spatial and experiential. Time can not be composed of events of zero duration just as space can not be composed of points of zero dimension. In the end both space-time consists of quanta and the argument is whether such space time quanta are purely material or do they also have experiential qualities in prehending the past and possibilities from the future?
Except that QM doesn't model the collapse to anything as concrete as an occasion. It only models the time evolution of a set of wavefunction probabilities. And this depends on an a-temporal or non-local view of reality.
So the effort here is to imagine the kind of collapse or condensation which could magic atomistic durations into existence, like droplets forming in a vague misty backdrop.
Quoting prothero
Again, Whitehead's metaphysics grew out of that collapse issue. If you believe that consciousness is responsible for collapsing the quantum potential into a classical atomistic actuality, then you might want to go his pan-psychic route.
But who still believes that consciousness is responsible for collapsing the wavefunction?
You're mischaracterizing Whitehead again; consciousness is not even of much significance in his system. For Whitehead only the tiniest fraction of what is experienced is consciously experienced.
If you have evidence that Whitehead believed consciousness caused quantum collapse you can present it but I believe that is a misstatement or misunderstanding.
It seems quite clear that reality is "process" or "change" and the question of how the change comes about is fundamental to process views. Can the process of change be infinitely divided into dimensionless points or points of time without duration? Or is there a limit to meaningfully dividing such processes, some fundamental unit of "existence" or "spacetime". Whiteheads terminology for such units are "occasions of experience" or sometimes in other contexts "moments or droplets of experience".
The fundamental units in science are roughly quantum particles which are perhaps better termed quantum events and the nature of quantum events is open to both scientific and philosophical debate but it seems that perhaps particles only exist when they interact and that the properties of such "events or particles" are really relationships to other particles and events which is not to dissimilar to whiteheads presentation of "actual occasions".
I am responding to your characterisation here. You said they resembled quantum events. But there are no events without collapse. So there remains something missing in the metaphysical tale.
Quoting prothero
That's fine. But that also hinges on collapse realism. Which is also fine. But now - like Whitehead - you owe an account of how collapse happens.
In my view, Whitehead goes astray from the off because he rejects the kind of bifurcation of nature that would distinguish between observers and observables.
Physicalism has the problem of solving the collapse issue. And a semiotic approach - one that agrees to a semiotic bifurcation in terms of information and entropy - would be the one I would take. But you can't talk about a process approach "resembling quantum ontology" without addressing the fact that quantum mechanics really challenges Whitehead's basic assumption of "no bifurcation" - the basic theme of pan-psychic thinking.
Observers and observables have to be separated somehow. They can't be co-located as if there were no basic separation. The issue is then how to achieve that without lapsing into Cartesian dualism.
Feel free to define experience then.
Experience is defined by Whitehead as any event or process. The point for Whitehead's metaphysics is that the fundamental entities are not substances but relations, and every relation is experienced, whether consciously or unconsciously.
That's why I've tried to draw parallels between Peirce and Whitehead. Just as "interpretation" is not confined to conscious beings for Peirce, so "prehensions" are related, but not restricted, to comprehensions, and certainly not to conscious comprehensions, for Whitehead. Whitehead, I believe, would say the sign is experienced by the interpretant; it prehends the sign.
It seems clear that Whitehead's notion of experience is different than our notion of consciousness. For Whitehead most of the experience of the world is non conscious experience. When two particles interact they "experience" each other, and the physical description of that interaction is only a partial description of what actually goes on. Consciousness is a very special somewhat rare and high level form of experience or so the literature on Whitehead would suggest.
.
So are you only willing to speak analogously here or are you willing to make some actual ontic claim?
Why would we call it inter-experiencing and not inter-acting?
Action, as a materialist notion, is well-defined. It can be cashed out in observables. We can measure a difference in terms of a state of motion.
But how is experience to be defined in terms of measurements? As a theoretical construct, how does it make a predictable difference to what can be observed?
Experience is just a vague and meaningless term in this discussion so far.
Quoting Janus
Yep. Completely meaningless then as it makes no specific ontic commitment. It is so undefined it can seem to cover any eventuality. As a theoretical construct, something that is always present and not changing anything, it is "not even wrong". It fails the test for even being an ontic commitment - an assertion capable of being false.
Quoting Janus
But where does Whitehead leave room for the mediating thing of a sign in his scheme? He starts by rejecting that basic division into a world and its interpretation - a modelling relation. So the third thing of a mediating sign is hardly going to come into the story.
As the Whitehead expert, you can explain how it does, and why then prehension could be understood in terms of sign interpretation.
Prehend for Peirce would be the conceptual seizing or grasping of the perceptual sign as standing in a habitual pragmatic relation with the noumenal. But where is Whitehead making the same kind of claim? Can you cite anything that would clear this up and support your view?
I would say the physcialist description of “quantum particles or events” is incomplete. With the notion of quantum entanglement one is forced into either non causality or at least non locality. The measurement of a quantum position allows only certain discrete locations; there is nothing continuous about the quantum picture of nature. Despite the continuous nature of some of the quantum equations there is nothing continuous about allowed orbits, transitions between orbits or the measured values. So collapse is basically measurement or interaction to a specific value or location. Precisely how that happens is not something explained by either physics or metaphysics.
Quoting apokrisis
I don’t see that that follows. Quantum mechanics challenges the continuous view of space-time. Quantum mechanics does not challenge Whiteheads objection to the artificial bifurcation of nature.
Quoting apokrisis
[quote=”https://footnotes2plato.com/2012/10/16/rough-draft-thinking-with-whitehead-science-sunsets-and-the-bifurcation-of-nature/”]
Instead of construing the task of science as that of overcoming subjective illusion in order to reach objective reality, as many modern thinkers have done, Whitehead takes the speculative risk of defining nature differently: nature becomes, quite simply, “what we are aware of in perception. “Everything perceived is in nature,” says Whitehead, “We may not pick and choose”.
the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon.14 Whitehead
“If the abstractions [of science] are well-founded,” says Whitehead,
that is to say, if they do not abstract from everything that is important in experience, the scientific thought which confines itself to these abstractions will arrive at a variety of important truths relating to our experience of nature.20
The “photon,” for example, is not just an invention of the physicist, nor is it simply a fact of nature. The “photon” is what the physicist has come to be aware of in his perception of light as a result of certain replicable scientific practices, laboratory situations, theoretical images, and mathematical equations. The “photon,” as a scientific-object, is said to be abstract only in that it cannot be grasped in isolation from the “whole structure of events” or “field of activity” (i.e., the passage of nature) to which it belongs and through which it endures.21 From the perspective of Whitehead’s philosophy of science, the abstract will never be able to offer a satisfactory explanation for the concrete.22 The wavelength of a photon does not explain the perception of redness, nor does even a connectionist model of neurochemistry explain the artist’s encounter with a beautiful sunset. Whenever scientific materialists try to offer such heroic explanations, they succeed only in offering descriptive commentaries in terms of the scientific objects most fashionable in their time–commentaries that presuppose the very thing they pretend to have explained away: consciousness. The only valid method of explanation from Whitehead’s point of view is the reverse of the materialist’s, an explanation which traces the genesis of abstractions back to the concrete consciousness and perceptual presences from which they emerged.23 A science that seeks to explain the concrete by way of the abstract all too easily falls prey to a form of knowledge production whose adequacy is judged economically, i.e., in terms of its capacity to transform and control nature (usually for private profit), rather than ecologically, i.e., in terms of its capacity to understand and relate to nature (for the common good). [/quote]
So the bifurcation of nature is precisely the effort to separate the subjective from the objective or the observer from the observed or the object from its place in nature (relationships and interactions). Experience in various forms and degrees is as much a part of nature as are the physical or material aspects of nature and in trying to declare one “real” and the other an epiphenomena, one denies the unified character of the process of reality (nature).
You seem to be descending into dualistic thinking here. For Whitehead the sum of the experiences (the interpretations) just is the world; there is nothing left over; so to speak of the "noumena" or 'things in themselves' is meaningless for Whitehead; that is part of the dualistic bifurcation of nature that he was attempting to circumvent. Are you saying there is something to nature other than the processes and relations, some "substance" to which processes and relations happen? If so, you are devolving form process metaphysics back into a kind of traditional substance and attributes view.
Not that I am interested in trying to interpret Whitehead in terms of Pierce's semiosis, but there are writings that one can refer to, and for all the terminological differences there are fundamental ontologic similarities.
http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2010/05/12/between-whitehead-peirce/
That blog emphasizes the purportedly "dipolar" nature of Whitehead's metaphysics compared with the triadic nature of Peirce's. But there is a long history both in the west and the east of pointing out the forgotten element in any two part relation; which is the relation itself. You have the subject and the object in the traditional view, and the relation between them is forgotten. You have the mental and physical poles as noted in that blog but the relation between two must also be as important a part if we want to claim that they are distinct and yet not really separate. So all dyadic pairs must really be triadic from a process point of view. Flour and water make bread, but you also need heat.
Although Whitehead refers to the physical pole and the experiential pole of events, it is quite clear the two cannot be separated, it is not a dualism, but a form of neutral monism, a dual aspect of a single reality..
That seems right, but the same would apply to Peirce's sign relation: the idea of just one sign relation going on at a time is just an abstract or idealized account; the living reality would be inifnitely more complex. Or think of it another way: for Whitehead in prehension would there not be what prehends, what is prehended and the act of prehension?
I quoted the following passage from Whitehead in a previous discussion with @apokrisis:
§4. Prehensions. — A more formal explanation is as follows. An occasion of experience is an activity, analysable into modes of functioning which jointly constitute its process of becoming. Each mode is analysable into the total experience as active subject, and into the thing or object with which the special activity is concerned. This thing is a datum, that is to say, is describable without reference to its entertainment in that occasion. An object is anything performing this function of a datum provoking some special activity of the occasion in question. Thus subject and object are relative terms. An occasion is a subject in respect to its special activity concerning an object; and anything is an object in respect to its provocation of some special activity within a subject. Such a mode of activity is termed a “prehension.” Thus a prehension involves three factors. There is [1. the “subject,” a.k.a. “individual,” “atom,” “monad”] the occasion of experience within which the prehension is a detail of activity; [2. the “object,” a.k.a. “data”] there is the datum whose relevance provokes the origination of this prehension; this datum is the prehended object; [3. the “affective tone,” a.k.a. “subjective form”] there is the subjective form, which is the affective tone determining the effectiveness of that prehension in that occasion of experience. [178] How the experience constitutes itself depends on its complex of subjective forms.
Note the explicit triadicity outlined in the underlined section.
So are you suggesting experience completes the physics here - supplying the collapse? Or does experience resemble the incompleteness of a quantum "event" in lack that bit of the physics?
So here we have a clear statement of qualia realism. And yet what colour is a colourblind person truly seeing when s/he confuses red and green? Is it red? Is it green? In what sense is it real?
This kind of nonsense falls at the first hurdle.
Quoting prothero
So Segall says Whitehead's intent is to collapse the abstract scientific account back to a subjective experiential account. And you say his intent is to separate those two accounts.
I still think Whitehead makes the mistake of trying to collapse the scientific (or semiotic) account and so talk right past the observer issue. What QM needs to complete it is an abstract model that includes the observer along with the observables - which is what it has got, in practice, with thermal decoherence being welded on to the quantum mechanics now.
Quoting prothero
And so back to a measurable definition of experience here - which is still MIA.
Or I am ascending towards the triadic sign relation view. As usual.
Quoting Janus
Great. So if you can sum experience, it must be measurable. Now getting back to electrons and photons, how does that cash out then? When one electron experiences another one, what is the maths involved? How does your gay talk about experiencing change a damn thing about how physics already talks about how electrons act?
And semiosis does?
I think that an occasion qua occasion, though it is said to be actual, does not have concrete existence. This is what allows it to encompass the past and future. Things in the future do not have concrete existence. It is only by means of "prehension", by which it apprehends possible relations with other occasions, and "concrescence", by which relations are established, that there is concrete existence. Use of the term "concrescence" is meant to signify the coming into being of concrete existence.
Again, still no explanation of what non conscious experience is in this physicalist description of nature such that it makes a damn difference to anything consciously experienced as an observable.
Schroedinger's cat may have an idea that it is alive - or it does not....
I'm not completely familiar with Whitehead's metaphysics, only from secondary sources, but I think he emphasizes the reality of the present, as the time when activity occurs. Each occasion would consist of a duration, and duration exists as a passage. You might call this the passage of time, I think he somewhere refers to it as the passage of nature. I think concrescence, as a concept is required to account for the apparent continuity of the passage of time, such that an event with temporal extension exhibits concrete existence. A present event with temporal extension into the past, would therefore have concrete existence. As far as I know, Whitehead doesn't offer a decisive way to distinguish present from past, as an event with temporal extension has concrete existence in the past, just as much as the passage, now, has concrete existence. So there is no proper principle to separate the past from the present as one is the continuity of the other..
With a cat, the behaviour tends to be reasonably different. We can tell. And we even have adequate physicalist explanations for why some cats are alive, other cats can be regarded as dead.
But can any Whitehead supporter explain how the posit of "non-conscious experience" makes a damn bit of different to existing physicalist understanding of the behaviour of fundamental particles. What does it change about the predictions we might make concerning what we may observe?
As a posit, the "experience" of a particle would be purely epiphenomenal on the account being given. Which is kind of ironic given the kind of anti-bifurcation rhetoric being flung about.
Whitehead’s philosophy is not anti science. As far as it goes scientific analysis and explanations are useful and pragmatic; it is just that such explanations are not total or complete. The “heroic feats of explaining away” occur when one tries to reduce say “ human mental experience” i.e. the warmth of the sun or the color red; as mere electrical impulses or the influence of neurotransmitter chemical s upon neural synapses. Such explanations are not so much wrong as they are partial, incomplete and unsatisfactory. It is in trying to reduce nature to the empirical, the objective “the real” versus the experience of color “the subjective or somehow” the unreal , not part of the “real world” that one commits a unnecessary “bifurcation of nature”. Everything that is experienced is real and is part of nature.
As for scientific descriptions of photons, they are in many senses quite complete. The notion of “photons” is however an abstraction. The behavior of electrons and photons defies our everyday notion of the continuity of space or of “simple location in space-time”, as seen with entanglement or with orbital transitions and allowed energy values and states. To say that we know everything about “photons” is quite an overstatement and quite possibly it is not possible to “know” the inner nature of such entities. We can predict their “behavior” but only by allowing degrees of imprecision, probabilities or as some would say freedoms and uncertainties. Thus for all its precision the scientific description is incomplete. One never can use the abstract to get a complete explanation of the concrete.
But in the case of Schroedinger's cat we cannot. This is why it's said it was neither dead or alive. If the cat knew it or not is not taken into account.
Quoting apokrisis
First I have to say that I am not familiar with Whitehead nor with quantum physics. But as far as I understand it the predictions, the math. apparatus is not the only problem but the interpretation thereof. If the cat has a probability X of being alive this just cannot be the whole story. It is one thing to say "we do not know exactly" and another to say "it's neither of both".
Relevance to QM?
There are to be sure parallels between Whitehead and Pierce. Fundamentally they are both process philosophers but they both invent their own terminology and concepts and there are significant differences as well. I find Whitehead speaks to me in a way more comprehensible and more meaningfully in constructing a world view than Pierce and semiosis, obviously Apokris finds the opposite. I love Shaviro for unlike many philosophers I get a sense of his meaning which does not require multiple readings and I find his exploration of Whitehead very illuminating.
That's like saying "When one human experiences another, what is the maths involved? How does your gay talk about experiencing change a damn thing about how physiology already talks about how human bodies act".
The idea of experience as applied to electrons may be a step too far, something that no sense can be made of, just as talk of semiosis may be incoherent when applied to electrons. Maybe the idea of biosemiosis is useful and the idea of physiosemiosis is unhelpful.
On the other hand we can say, and it is said, that electrons experience and respond to the kinds of subatomic forces that have become codified in particle physics and chemistry.
I think this is probably all that Whitehead intended; to suggest that human "interiority" is primordially prefigured in the the quasi-interiority of the electron, the atom, the molecule, the cell, and so on. It's a way of thinking that parallels semiotic thinking and information theory, which also rely on the idea of surfaces and interiority.
If you don't want to see the parrallels for whatever reason then fine, but I don't think that changes the fact they are there if you care to look.
For Whitehead reality is a continuous creative becoming and not any form of static being Such notions are the common theme for process philosophers. In some sense science supports this as our solid “chair” Is in scientific terms mostly space and composed of whirling electrons and vibrating atoms and is constantly losing some atoms from its surface and taking other elements in. So the nature of a “chair” is one of continuous becoming not static being, becoming is the “reality” and being is the “illusion”. Objects are really repeating patterns of events. The final elements of reality for Whitehead are “actual occasions” referred to at other times as “moments or droplets of experience”. Actual occasions have duration, incorporate data or facts from prior completed occasions and from future possibilities or potentials (through prehension) . Actual Occasions upon completion perish and become data or facts for the formation of new or subsequent Occasions.
There is very little formal discussion of time in Whitehead or in writings about Whitehead although a google literature search will give a number of articles about the issue. On the face of it, presentism would seem the closest or best explanation.
One moment or occasion would seem to perish, and a new moment or occasion would seem to form, incorporating elements of the past and possibilities from the future in the continuous creative becoming which is the world “reality”;. hence the title of his magnum opus “Process and Reality”. The status about the continued existence of the past (other than its facts or data continuing into the present) or the existence of the future (eternal objects, potentials, possibilities) would seem to hinge on one’s notion of the meaning of the term “exists” which is itself the subject of innumerable arguments and writings.
I agree with what you say here. A while ago I read Shaviro's Without Criteria and I found it quite illuminating. I have also been slowly working my way through Stenger's Thinking with Whitehead, a much more difficult text. Being an impulsive, rather than a disciplined, reader, I often find myself becoming sidetracked. :smile:
Thanks, I'll check that other Shaviro book out. Yes, both Peirce and Whitehead are difficult, but I think it's true of most of the greats. Luckily we have legions of interpreters to make the task of understanding them easier.
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/introduction/physics/interpretation/
What do we hear from the box when we shake it? A dull thud or sudden feline screeching noises ... or something spookily both at the same time?
There was good reason this thought experiment was constructed to poke fun at naive QM interpretations.
Of course. And ones that can be measured. That is the (scientific) point. As a construct, it is one with observable consequences.
But you are claiming electrons and photons would have non-conscious experience. I asked how that would change anything worth a damn about our best current physical descriptions of particle interactions. You then went off to talk about physics being incomplete, and not how a Whiteheadian physics offers any concrete step forward in terms of measurable consequences.
Admit it. Nothing is added. Nothing is explained. Talk of experience is an empty word - a good example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness indeed.
A description of the experience using informational constructs, is not the experience. Hence, people will be dissatisfied with your information theory as as a satisfying answer to the mind/body problem. How it is a process is equivalent to experience- the very thing that all other knowledge is gained from, is a more expansive theory than the simple computationalism you bring up.
But we have good reason to credit humans with "experience", even if it is just a folk psychology term. We know what we mean by the word, and we know what to expect of organisms with the kind of complex nervous systems to have it.
If I kick a dog, I expect it to feel something. Now its behaviour might be somewhat unpredictable or indeterminate. It might attack me back, or cower in submission, or run off as fast as it can. But those are the sort of responses I would expect from a creature with enough of a brain to be modelling the world in terms of rational choices.
We could certainly aim to model that complex psychology with complex maths. And science does. But just at a level of commonsense, we think experience is a thing for all animals with enough of a brain to be modelling a world.
An electron? Not so much. There is zero reason to suspect that it has experience or that experience can still mean anything in terms of its action.
But if any of you Whitehead fans can make a case for why an electron must operate by experience, now is the time to lay that story out. Where is the intelligent complexity in their behaviour? Where is the complexity in their structure that could sustain a complexity of behaviour?
Quoting Janus
If it is just a vague analogy, then who cares. Old Whitehead just had a colourful psychological way of speaking, but he meant nothing by it.
However you guys have been defending him as saying something significant - something which completes the incomplete science ... even though it changes none of the science and adds nothing in terms of measurement or prediction.
The difference with semiosis is that it is already scientific hypothesis. Fifty years after Peirce, biology cracks the genetic code. Semiosis is shown to be true at a fundamental level for the sciences of life and mind. That is how complexity works.
Now extending the notions of semiosis to the physical realm is still a stretch. But very clearly, one big difference would be that no interiority is being claimed for the physico-chemical world. All the information or interpretance is on the outside - contextual. The interoricity ain't even quasi. Pan-semiosis would be the metaphysical extension saying that we are now talking about an obviously different kind of semiosis - different in ways that are well-defined and make sense.
We are talking about bleeding electrons here. And therefore, why a description of electromagnetic interactions using experiential constructs is crackpot.
Do you really want to add your name to the list of card-carrying Whiteheadians?
This, I believe, may be debated. An event never really finishes, nor does it have a real beginning. We as human beings designate, somewhat arbitrarily, the beginning and ending of events. Whitehead recognizes the temporal duration, and therefore temporal extension of events. So as an event is occurring, part of it is already in the past. Since it's all part of the same event, the part in the past must be just as real, and existent, as the part at the present.
I believe that this is the point with concrescence. No actual occasion has concrete existence unless it has been involved in an act of concrescence. But this act of concrescence puts it into the past. So I do not think it is correct to say that actual occasions perish upon completion. It would be more proper to say that they have concrete existence.
Honestly, I haven't been reading the whole thread.. I saw that last part and thought this was the same problem of mind question that is usually discussed.
I read most of the thread now, especially @prothero' explanation of Whitehead. I think he does a very good job explaining the nuances.
What is experience if not information; and conversely what is information if not some kind of experience? Information in-forms entities, that is changes them, and so all change is relational. Change is experienced in different ways by different entities, and talk of interiority even in the case of biological entities, even humans, is a relative matter, not an absolute one. I am not a "Whiteheadian"; I am not claiming his philosophy is the "absolute truth": I find his perspective on things interesting, is all. I find it puzzling that you are so dismissive of it, becoming almost shrill at times, more apo-plectic than apo-kritical. :rofl:
We know what we mean when we says things like "The cliff experienced the erosive force of the wind and rain" , or "the electron experiences the attraction of the nucleus". Human experience is a difference of degree not an absolute difference of kind. Of course I am not denying the relative difference of kind between biological and non-biological experience.
Great. First step taken. Now how are you going to continue on to show they are two ways of talking about the same thing?
Quoting Janus
You mean like the standard Batesonian definition - the difference that makes a difference?
Quoting Janus
So change is experienced in different fashions. But let's not suddenly abandon the position you were starting to develop. What does all such experience have in common? You seem to think it might be ... life ... and interiority.
I would say semiotics agrees. But pan-experientialism wants to say something else.
Apparently electrons are also alive and have minds according to Whiteheadians. A baffling leap indeed.
Well, @prothero's angle is that the kind of experience enjoyed by electrons is the non-conscious kind. And so we should indeed expect it to make no difference to their physical behaviour.
And yet the great advantage of Whiteheadian experiential physics is that it does away with the usual dualistic charge of epiphenomenalism. Somehow. Even though the non-conscious experience of electron now makes their experience as epiphenomenal as it could get.
Gee. This Whiteheadian metaphysics really seems something. If you contradict a contradiction, do you arrive at the truth? ;)
Yeah. We don't mean the cliff or the electron are alive, model their worlds in terms of some interior system of sign, and hence felt something one way or the other.
So we can all cope with anthropomorphic analogy in everyday language. Just because we talk like the animists of old, doesn't mean we are metaphysical animists.
Quoting Janus
That would be news to a lot of folk. If they experience erosion, they tend to go "ow". We would understand their behaviour as telling us something that is a lot more than just the physics of friction and fragmentation.
Information is a difference that makes a difference. Making a difference is producing a change. In the broadest understanding of experience it just is change.
Quoting apokrisis
That is one kind of experience and the experience of a rock or electron might be another kind of experience, but, as I said earlier the difference in kind between life and non-life is a relative one, on Whitehead's view, not an absolutely radical one. So, in this view there would be a continuity all the way form non-life to life.
Anything that is affected has some kind of "interiority"; rocks will be affected according to their internal constitution, and so will electrons. This is not animism, though, since it acknowledges the almost negligible sense in which things like rocks and electrons could be said to have an "interiority".
And that's why this is wrong:
Quoting apokrisis
Because their experience, though of course non-conscious, and however minimal, and which is determined by their own constitution, is not epiphenomenal precisely because it is what determines how they will respond to any affect.
OK. So define this other kind. What would be its difference that makes it a difference, while also not being different?
You keep waving a hand vaguely. I am asking for a reason to take this seriously as some form of counterfactual-based claim.
Quoting Janus
Handwaving.
I made a clear distinction between biosemiosis and pansemiosis. To the degree that the physical world is constrained by an informational model, all the information is on the "outside" of any supposed entities. Whereas with life and mind, it is actually encoded inside the organism as information stored in a memory.
So I provide the story that underwrites the continuity - semiosis as a generalised causal mechanism based on the information~entropy distinction. And also the story that accounts for the discontinuity - the epistemic cut which distinguishes the actually living and mindful from the non-living and non-mindful.
And it is not as if biosemiosis is not already being incorporated into science - https://link.springer.com/journal/12304/11/1/page/1
If you want Whitehead to be granted a similar respect, you would need to start being specific about how it is actually suppose to work.
Everyone knows that life and mind arise from the physical realm that is nature. So there is a continuity somehow. But also a discontinuity somehow. To say that it is a relative divide - that it is a mix of the continuous and the discontinuous - is thus utterly vacuous. We already know this is the case. I am asking you how all this waffle about "non-conscious experience" takes things any further.
Semiosis clearly does take current physicalism further. That is why it is catching on in science.
Quoting Janus
Waffle.
Quoting Janus
So what is experience when it is also non-conscious? C'mon. Seriously now. Address my actual question.
Of course rocks have some kind of internal structure. But in what sense does that structure model anything?
And are you saying electrons have internal structure? This might be news to particle physics. You best explain.
You have to define what you mean by modeling, and specifically what is "happening" during this "modelling".
Right, so from your source here:
So, modelling doesn't have a "feels like". In fact, it doesn't have a metaphysical anything in the "real world". It is all abstracted information, so that it can be quantified or simplified for epistemological reasons. Again, you are mixing the map for the territory. You are waffling between words. Is it the definition you sent me, or are you cramming other concepts into this word?
Again, now that you have actually read the thread, you will appreciate that your old hobbyhorses are irrelevant.
It's relevant- I mean it's down to the level of talking about whether erosion is "experienced" by the rock, but it's the same thing. In this case, you are juxtaposing modelling with experience and again, I am explaining how modelling never even touches the metaphysics of an event, only map of what is going on, thus losing the actual-ness (actual occasion perhaps?) of the event.
You know what? I can't be bothered any more. I have no investment in Whitehead's philosophy, or Peirce's philosophy and semiosis for that matter, beyond finding them to be interesting different ways to look at things, which I think can be understood to share some commonalities, and I certainly have no investment in trying to convince you of anything or bothering to discuss anything with someone displaying such a combative and dismissive kind of attitude, either; so have a nice life, dude.
The world's smallest mind should be able to find it somewhere nearby in the world's smallest world... :joke:
"No duration" does not mean non-existent. Time can be defined as the number of events between two events. Events themselves have no duration. (Not necessarily related to Whitehead. Personally, I would stay away from Whitehead and most of the so-called process philosophers since they do nothing but introduce noise.)
Time, as I see it, is a method of measuring motion. Motion does not cease.
“Events” are really just points of a duration which impress more so upon memory.
It is in thinking that our mathematical models represent the complete "real world" that we commit the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness". Such models are only ever idealized, abstract, partial and incomplete representations of the "blooming, buzzing, confusion" which is nature. They largely leave out the feelings and experiences of their creators.
It is in forgetting that it is a thinking, feeling creatures with value judgements about the world that engages in observation, measurement and empirical science in the first place that one creates an artificial "bifurcation of nature".
The way we think about the world influences how we act in the world. If we think we are only physical-chemical machines in a valueless, purposeless, largely insentient universe we will act accordingly and the results will be in neither the best interest of the planet or of ourselves.
If by noise, you mean they introduce questions of experience and values into discussions about the "true" nature of reality, then by all means.
“A philosophic outlook,” writes Whitehead, “is the very foundation of thought and of life…As we think, we live.”
As Whitehead argues, the dominant philosophy of every age “moulds our type of civilization” (Modes of Thought, 63).
: “…the science of nature stands opposed to the presuppositions of humanism. Where some conciliation is attempted, it often assumes some sort of mysticism. But in general there is no conciliation” (MoT 136)
At least Whitehead had a little humility and an open minded approach to speculative philosophies.
Philosophy begins in wonder,” he tells us. “And, at the end, when philosophy has done its best, the wonder remains” (MoT 168). “How shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things,” he tells us elsewhere. “In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly” (PR xiv).
He also had great respect for science, although an appreciation of its limitations as well.
None of this is to say that Whitehead ignores the importance of science: “I assume as an axiom that science is not a fairy tale” (The Concept of Nature 40).
This seems to imply that time could be constructed from events of zero duration, which is about as sensible as space being composed of points of zero extension. I fail to see the logic in either assertion.
What does it mean to say that a point has no size? Does it mean that it has zero size i.e. that it does not exist? Or does it perhaps mean that it has no specific size?
Motion is one of those frequently abused terms. Motion simply means change in position. No concept of position, no concept of motion. It's a high-level concept.
Time is more fundamental than motion. Time is simply one of the properties of objects of experience. Time does not imply motion. Just because there is time does not mean there is motion. You need change, i.e. difference between points in time, in order to speak of motion. And not any kind of change but change in position.
True
Quoting prothero
True
Quoting prothero
I kind of disagree here. It is mainly an insentient universe. Even if there is "something of what it is like to be an event", that doesn't change much for ethics. It is just as motivational as other reasons to think a certain way.
No answer.. The thing is, you don't take as legitimate, any explanation that is not in terms of scientific modelling. However, scientific modelling is just a description that is refined to make it easier to understand and relevant to a certain aim. It is not the event itself. To describe that might take neologisms and language that can convey the complexity of what is going on. This is perhaps why philosophers have a hard time putting into words their metaphysics and it sounds jargony.
Where was the question that was cogently expressed and relevant to the discussion?
That was cogent and relevant to this whole thread. I believe it to be the main issue underlying all of these arguments with the Whiteheadians and other process philosophies that are not explicitly in the terms of your triadic system.
Seems to me you're talkin' tiger shit, buddy! :joke:
You keep on thinking of things in terms of predictions and verificationism. That is simply not the "actual occasions", not the events, that is the translation into mathematical models. The math is not the actual event though. So, where it cashes out in pragmatic usefulness to humans in understanding, it is silent in what is the metaphysical case of what the event IS.
That's just it, we are trying to talk. You don't want to listen, because you go back to said predictions and verification models via math and say this is the REAL because of its usefulness to human understanding in prediction models. But then of course this is just reifying the models and not the actual occasions themselves. So we can talk about the events, but this would then start resembling the poetic "nonsense" that you discard out of the gate, and so the circularity in argument continues.. What informs the human as useful predictions becomes what IS, and you don't look passed your nose. But, you will say, that is all we can do. If you will go no further, than metaphysics will always be a closed door, and there is nothing more to discuss other than science. Fine and dandy, but don't complain about those who use speculative realism, speculative idealism, or speculative metaphysics. At the least, it is not mixing the usefulness-to-humans-as-predictive-models as the thing itself. A key mistake, that has been explicated at least since Kant in the 18th century.
Which is all we can do when discussing what IS while still being a subject-for-an-object.
“Points” in time imply things/events separate from ongoing and unfolding motion.
Everything is always moving.
Nothing is still.
“Points”, in time, can only really be aspects of experience highlighted in memory. It would be like travelling down a road that one has nearly everyday and on one particular day you run over a cat.
That cat event gets remembered and becomes a “point in time”, while most of the rest of the journey becomes vague due to familiarity.
Buddhists say true existents have an unchanging essence.
Processists say true existents do NOT have an unchanging essence.
Though apparently opposed, they're actually pointing to the same thing:
Stuff doesn't have an unchanging essence. One just calls this stuff
non-existent and the other calls it existent, a matter of semantics.
I am not sure where you are getting this but the impermanence of worldly things or emptiness in Buddhism and the flux, flow and change of process have some similarities. You might want to look at the notion of "eternal objects" in Whiteheads version of process philosophy for notions of form or essence.
“In the inescapable flux, there is something that abides; in the overwhelming permanence, there is an element that escapes into flux. Permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence. Those who would disjoin the two elements can find no interpretation of patent facts.”
To me this sounds similar to the Buddhist notion of a middle way between the extremes of eternalism and nihilism. But instead of saying No! to both eternalism and nihilism, it says a qualified Yes to both in a kind of yin-yang'y way where they interpenetrate each other.
On eternal objects.
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=578
As I understand it "eternal objects" are the "patterns and forms preferred by nature". We cannot discern them (as pure potentials or possibilities) until they have ingressed into or been substantiated as actualities in nature. They ingress in during the formation of events, when the developing event prehends elements of the past and possibilities of the future. They play a similar role to Platonic forms but have much less "actuality" to them.
He is a really good lucid writer, I have a couple of his books. Lots of philosophy writing just seems dense and arcane to me, but his writing is fun to read and informative at least for me.
I think the ideas of relativity and feedback loops come to mind when it comes to thinking about how we perceive the world with its both stable and changing features.