Process, Reality, and Context
What an honor it is to hear from the second generation of process theologians and philosophers now in their late 80s and 90s still able to share their journey with us of the third and fourth generations. The Cobb Institute, as well as many other process organizations and websites like Relevancy22, have been dissecting and weaving together their dialogues, discussions, books, journals, and podcasts over the years so that they are not lost to history, and quite open for exploration and discovery by future generations of process Whiteheadians.
Do take advantage of these living souls in their late years. It is with great honor that these several process theologians continue to share their personal journeys into the realms of the biological, quantum and psychological/sociological sciences.
Lastly, thank you to all those in the process community who have been willing to make time and effort to share their separate process insights from their respective disciplines! Each thought, each soul, helps create depth to a very complex philosophy of cosmology.
As introduction to these series, earlier this past summer the Cobb Institute began an 8-part series discussing and distinguishing substantive philosophies and sciences from those of the process variety. Hosted by Matt Segall, John Cobb, and Tim Eastman each explore Eastman's book written in December 2020 on untying the Gordian Knot of physics. Enjoy.
R.E. Slater
October 31, 2021
 |
| Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context |
* * * * * * * * *
 |
| Amazon Link |
Untying the Gordian Knot
Process, Reality, and Context
by Timothy Eastman
In Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context, Timothy E. Eastman proposes a new creative synthesis, the Logoi framework - which is radically inclusive and incorporates both actuality and potentiality - (1) to show how the fundamental notions of process, logic, and relations, woven with triads of input-output-context and quantum logical distinctions, can resolve a baker’s dozen of age-old philosophic problems.
Further, (2) Eastman leverages a century of advances in quantum physics and the Relational Realism interpretation pioneered by Michael Epperson and Elias Zafiris and augmented by the independent research of Ruth Kastner and Hans Primas to resolve long-standing issues in understanding quantum physics.
Adding to this, (3) Eastman makes use of advances in information and complex systems, semiotics, and process philosophy to show how multiple levels of context, combined with relations—including potential relations—both local and local-global, can provide a grounding for causation, emergence, and physical law.
Finally, (4) the Logoi framework goes beyond standard ways of knowing—that of context independence (science) and context focus (arts, humanities)—to demonstrate the inevitable role of ultimate context (meaning, spiritual dimension) as part of a transformative ecological vision, which is urgently needed in these times of human and environmental crises.
* * * * * * * * *
The Gordian Knot is an intractable problem (untying an impossibly tangled knot) solved easily by finding an approach to the problem that renders the perceived constraints of the problem moot ("cutting the Gordian knot"). - Wikipedia
* * * * * * * * *List of Related References
* * * * * * * * *
Tim Eastman Unties the Gordian Knot - Session 7
Jan 4, 2022
THE COBB INSTITUTE
In this session Tim Eastman provides a summary of chapter seven, after which Randall Auxier, Gary Herstein, and Brian Swimme offer a response.
Meeting Chat Text: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ae1A...
Chapter Summary, by Tim Eastman
CHAT TEXT
00:16:56 Matt Segall: ^Tim’s summary of CH. 7
00:18:55 Matt Segall: For videos and chat files from prior sessions, and for summary documents prepared by Tim, see the bottom of this page: https://cobb.institute/science-advisory-committee/ Thanks are due to Richard for collecting all this material into a great web page!
00:36:32 Gary Herstein: And don't forget theoretical physics!
00:36:57 George Lucas: Roger that, Gary!!
00:37:00 Matt Segall: In this context, I’d like to mention the late Dr. Eric Weiss’ book “The Long Trajectory: The Metaphysics of Reincarnation and Life after Death” (2012). Eric was my teacher, and is responsible for introducing me to the study of Whitehead when I began graduate school at CIIS: https://www.amazon.com/Long-Trajectory-Metaphysics-Reincarnation-after/dp/1462069649
00:40:30 matt switzer: Eric’s videos on the subject https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzByXeoxaABJ3V0hkDJmMDbO954x5E-M6
00:54:01 Lynn De Jonghe: Can you give the citation for “Life dwells in the interstices?”
00:55:16 Matt Segall: “Process and Reality,” p. 105-6
00:56:20 Richard Livingston / Cobb Institute: Link to "Life Dwells in the Interstices" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281008665_Farzad_Mahootian_and_Tara-Marie_Linne
00:56:32 Matt Segall: “The conclusion to be drawn from this argument is that life is a characteristic of 'empty space' and not of space 'occupied ' by any corpuscular society. In a nexus of l iving occasions, there is a certain social deficiency. Life lurks in the interstices of each living cell, and in the interstices of the brain.” -Whitehead
00:57:34 Douglas Tooley: Can you, uh, ‘correlate’, Cellular interstices with the microtubules of Hammeroff and Penrose?
01:00:55 Matt Segall: Good question, Douglas. I imagine Whitehead would consider microtubules to be part of the social order of a neural cell, which certainly shelter and amplify what is fed into the interstices where life or consciousness unfolds.
01:10:36 Jude Jones: It’s interesting that life is associated with “social deficiency”: societies are a way of evoking certain intensities in a robust and less free manner; life is a way of evoking intensities in a particularly acute but more free manner. Both produce robust intensity but of different sorts.
01:11:25 Farzad Mahootian: Tim, you are not a “mere” anything, but a mirror, a many-sided mirror for so many of us
01:12:25 Jude Jones: There’s an essay in that Farzad—“From Mere to Mirror: The Mind of Tim Eastman”
01:14:35 Jude Jones: By which I mean that Tim’s work here is unseating the tendency, so profound in humanity, to think in terms of ‘mere’ this or that—a starkness in conception…which he is replacing with a many-sided-mirror way of thinking that lets ideas be incomplete but actively reflective of anything else that might inflect meaning
01:14:37 Farzad Mahootian: Haha! Go bigger: let’s start that book proposal for a volume of collected essays.
01:15:08 Kent Bye: I have a question regarding with interfacing with realms of potential via the philosophy of mathematics & Balaguer's Platonism and Anti-Platonism in Mathematics. Specifically how mathematicians are somehow interfacing with the realm of potentials to discern the underlying forms of mathematical objects or patterns of potential.
01:15:26 Jude Jones: there’s an idea Farzad—a very good one!
01:22:06 Matt Segall: PR, 199: “There is no difficulty in imagining a world—i .e., a cosmic epoch—in which arithmetic would be an interesting fanciful topic for dreamers, but useless for practical people engrossed in the business of life. In fact, we seem to have been only barely rescued from such a state of things. For amid the actual occasions located in the wilds of so-called 'empty space,' and well removed from the enduring objects which go to form the enduring material bodies, it is quite probable that the contemplation of arithmetic would not direct attention to any very important relations of things.”
01:27:51 Gary Nelson: Iain McGilchrist’s new book “The Matter With Things…” discusses the necessity of opposites
01:28:13 Christian "Kam": Ain
01:28:15 Matt Segall: I think of Plato’s line in Sophist, “non-being is a kind of being” — a line Whitehead references several times.
01:28:28 Gary Nelson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U99dQrZdVTg
01:28:45 Jude Jones: Thandeka, any recommendations re Rabbi Cooper we could investigate?
01:32:22 Kent Bye: Also known as "predictive coding theory"
01:32:41 George Lucas: Thanks, Tim, Matt, and Richard for organizing this splendid discussion. Great to see everyone! NB: apparently Whitehead said a great deal more to his Harvard students about such topics, and speculations upon them, than he included in print.
01:33:45 Jude Jones: ^^^ one reason the critical edition is so exciting!
01:34:32 Kent Bye: An interview that I've done with a neuroscientist about the predictive theory of neuroscience: https://voicesofvr.com/780-invoking-psychedelic-embodiment-experiences-vr-radix-motion-meu/
01:34:47 Matt Segall: Thanks, Kent! I will definitely give that a listen
01:35:28 jonmeyer: “In the Beginning, She Was” by Irigaray has a lovely chapter on “The ecstasy of the between-us” which touches on these issues. A snippet: “A relation is never only of one’s own, never appropriable by any one alone. It exists between the one and the other, produced and saved by the two. The between-two takes place in the opening of the difference between the one and the other, but it is in no way proper to the one or the other - it arises from the two. Perhaps it is the sole place where existence becomes a substance on another kind, outside of any appropriation.”
01:38:17 Matt Segall: Re: Anil Seth’s claim that consciousness is but a “controlled hallucination,” the perspective reminds me of Whitehead’s quip that “some people express themselves as though brain and nerves are the only real things in an entirely imaginary world” (my paraphrase)
01:43:17 Farzad Mahootian: Wonderful Irigary quote. Thank you Jon.
01:47:23 Mikhail Epstein: What is “in–between” is literally “interesting” (from Lat. inter–esse). My meditations on what is “inter–esting”: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/364012
01:48:15 matt switzer: Synchronicity as developed by Pauli and Jung seems relevant to a theory
01:49:07 Anderson Weekes: Question for Farzad: I understand the distinction btw explanation and interpretation, but I'm not clear how interpretation differs from understanding. Pls clarify what you mean by understanding and how interpretation differs from it.
01:49:15 Jude Jones: I always end these sessions with about ten new tabs open on my computer but appreciate all the new mirror surfaces added to my thought-world
01:50:19 Gary Herstein: "Physics Envy" -- a term I've used as well. Clearly there's a cultural readiness for the idea when it is independently re-invented over and over again.
01:51:38 Jude Jones: I am VERY concerned for young people who are being raised/educated to think in terms of narrow physicalism, who will have to face problems in the future (climate, environment, human existence, etc—little stuff) that this thinking will be inadequate to
01:52:58 Farzad Mahootian: Great question to which I have no deep answer… I find myself regressing to simple notions of understanding as level 3 of Plato’s divided line: intellectual knowledge of which geometry is a paradigm. Not much room for interpretation there. More nuanced is level 4 knowledge, more interpretive but … I’ll say a little more live
01:55:24 Kevin Clark: Hi David G. - I keep hoping you will ask a question or make a comment.
01:55:35 Matt Segall: Perhaps we could say understanding determines its objects, while interpretation is content to leave matters more indeterminate?
01:56:35 Matt Segall: Since interpretation is always taking context and perspective into consideration.
01:56:48 jonmeyer: A friend who is a neuroscientist at NYU has told me of experiments with mice in mazes where the mice are able to construct memories, yet models of the neurons involved say they should not have been able to make those memories. He remarked that the difficulty is is that the model of the neuron is wrong but nobody yet knows a better model. There are definitely cracks.
01:57:29 Jude Jones: Farzad, I keep thinking about how Liz Kraus always thought the Divided Line and it recalls your struggle to both acknowledge the specifics of “levels” while acknowledging their interpenetration and mutual inflection and transcendence
02:01:55 Jude Jones: Jon, you mean the model of those particular neurons involved is wrong, or the model of neurons in general?
02:02:17 Matt Segall: Whitehead’s interstices are akin to what Tim called “pre-space potentiae” perhaps?
02:02:23 Monica DeRaspe-Bolles: "In Between" suggests space. But "no thing" can be understood as fundamentally relational, which will always involve developmental time, constantly in flux.
02:02:59 jonmeyer: He meant the latter: Thinking only in terms of neurons forecloses other kinds of explanations that might be applicable.
02:03:08 Jude Jones: @Monica—maybe we need a concept which is neither “between” nor “nothing”?
02:03:26 Gary Herstein: I read the "interstices" remark as resisting materialist reductionism, and speaking of the function and activity rather than the "thing."
02:04:00 Gary Herstein: And then the "quantum foam"
02:05:15 Monica DeRaspe-Bolles: I agree. But it remains difficult to think in terms of time-development rather than space.
02:05:34 Jude Jones: Maybe its in the interstices of our conception of them, more than interstices of the things themselves
02:05:35 Kent Bye: Interstitium may be the biological equivalent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstitium
02:06:51 Jude Jones: @Monica, yes: this is why I think it not only fun but essential to play with metaphors to get us there, rather than wringing impossible meaning out of certain concepts
02:08:25 Kam: And Kabbalists
02:08:48 Jude Jones: I cant WAIT to transcribe everything Thandeka just said from the recording!
02:08:51 Monica DeRaspe-Bolles: @Jude, :) And metaphors, in a time developing universe, are perhaps more like homologies.
02:09:43 Jude Jones: @Monika yes, but with a huge energizing by the possible!
02:09:56 Matt Segall: This will have to be our last question as I know Tim has to head to another event shortly.
02:10:26 Monica DeRaspe-Bolles: Yes, Jude
02:10:35 Gary Nelson: Quantum Field Theory teach us that there “is” omnipresent VOID pregnant possibilities.
02:10:38 Farzad Mahootian: To John Cobb and Thandeka: Empty of things, full of potential. Further: Regions throb, growing and shrinking in their location, sometimes enfolded within other regions.
02:12:54 Gary Herstein: Whitehead is very clear that both time and space are *logically* posterior to actual occasions. This is explicit in PR. The emphasis on "logically" above is because one cannot use spatial or temporal priority when space and time are not yet available.
02:14:37 Kevin Clark: From Matt Segall to Everyone 08:46 AM
“The conclusion to be drawn from this argument is that life is a characteristic of 'empty space' and not of space 'occupied ' by any corpuscular society. In a nexus of l iving occasions, there is a certain social deficiency. Life lurks in the interstices of each living cell, and in the interstices of the brain.” -Whitehead
02:14:52 Kevin Clark: Oops!
02:15:35 Matt Segall: I wonder if part of the issue here is that Whitehead is not always clear when he is doing genetic analysis of concrescence and when he is doing coordinate analysis in metrical spacetime.
02:15:53 Gary Herstein: The key term in the above is *corpuscular*. That means a physical body, not an active field.
02:16:05 Jude Jones: @Matt ABSOLUTELY!!!!
02:16:46 Kent Bye: Also see: "Structure and Distribution of an Unrecognized Interstitium in Human Tissues" - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-23062-6...
02:16:58 Monica DeRaspe-Bolles: The Quantum of Explanation helps immensely with this!
02:17:16 jonmeyer: I really like John Cobb’s commentary, thanks for that.
02:17:48 Jude Jones: But Matt is right that W slides between them sometimes in my view
02:18:08 Kevin Clark: I am thankful for these discussions of regional inclusion, empty space, interstices, etc. This is the kind of discussion I was hoping for when I asked my question of Tim for clarification on p. 226. Also, these questions I heard JCobb raise decades ago. THX
No comments:
Post a Comment