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
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| Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context |
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| 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.
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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
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Tim Eastman Unties the Gordian Knot - Session 8
Jan 29, 2022
THE COBB INSTITUTE
In this session Tim Eastman provides a summary of chapter eight, after which Thandeka, Dan Dombrowski, Edward Kelly offer responses.01:09:10 - 02:04:22 - Open Conversation Tim Eastman's chapter summary notes:Meeting Chat Text: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rqy5...Chapter Summary, by Tim EastmanThis series is provided by the Cobb Institute. Please consider supporting this program and others like it by giving. https://cobb.institute/donate/
CHAT TEXT
000:26:42 Don Juan de la ciudad de campiones: Sorry for call name on my profile, I do not know how to change it
00:37:13 Anderson Weekes: please can Thankeka make this text available to us?
00:38:00 Jude Jones: ^^^ ditto!
00:38:00 Lynn De Jonghe: Yes, ditto. I would love to read his and have the references.
00:39:18 George Strawn: Ditto for Tim’s written comments
00:40:09 Jude Jones: ^^ yes! Maybe a file with all the various presentations over these months could be made available? It could underwrite a continuing conversation around this!
00:41:14 Richard Livingston / Cobb Institute: All of Tim's opening comments / chapter summaries are available on the Science Advisory Committee web page here: https://cobb.institute/science-advisory-committee/
00:44:33 Kevin Clark: Could we also get Dan's comments made available?
00:49:46 Richard Livingston / Cobb Institute: If the respondents would like to share them here, they're welcome to do so. And, as Matt mentioned, if they're comfortable with us posting them on the Science Committee's web page, we'll be glad to post them there as well so that we have them all in a central / easy to find location.
01:12:20 Anderson Weekes: Question for Dan. Pushing back a bit on Dan’s characterization of orality. He contrasts it with writing in terms of ephemerality vs permanence and the way writing invites and seems to require analysis. However, the most prominent character of orality was not just ephemerality -- as if there were only one performance of any given oral composition. It was essential to orality that it was a tradition, that performances were endlessly repeated and heard by auditors many, many times.
01:12:36 Anderson Weekes: Furthermore, the performance techniques they employed resulted in a fairly systematic ringing of variations in the presentation of the content, making various implicit meanings and possibilities explicit by contrasts among the different recurring performance. So I think there is already a certain kind of permanence and analysis already characteristic of orality – which is not to deny that there are nevertheless deep and important differences, but permanence and analysis do not seem to be what most distinguishes orality and writing. How bout it?
01:18:12 Matt Segall: Great questions, Anderson. If others have questions feel free to share them in the chat. We’ll transition to open dialogue in a few minutes here.
01:28:15 Thomas Royce: Does the concept of "pre-space" have any relationship to Reg Cahill's notion of "pre-geometry" or say Penrose's realm of mathematical entities as having an ontological reality that is" outside of" the space and time continuum.
01:30:22 Mikhail Epstein: To add about the order of potentialities. Possibilism assumes that a thing or event acquires meaning only in the context of its possibilities, of what it may be as opposed to what it actually is. An actual A has any meaning only in the context of a possible P. A world consisting only of actualities would be devoid of meaning and significance.
01:33:55 Anderson Weekes: Indeed, that is the thesis proven in the Funeral Games episode of the iliad
01:34:58 Douglas Tooley: A bit of a reach here tying together two questions. Would Thandeka equate ‘distress’ with the Buddhist perspective on ‘suffering’? Tibetan Buddhism also has a practice of receiving teachings via an oral(aural) ‘transmission’.
Does Dan see a qualitative difference between written and ‘musical’ teachings, such as in the musicality of the teacher?
01:37:40 Kevin Clark: If there's time, I have a question about Tim's discussion of "ground of potentiae" on pp. 254-61f and the conception of ontological ultimates on 257 as dialectic or dipolar. I'd like him to explain and/or clarify these.
01:38:25 Matt Segall: I think of Plato’s Phaedrus here, where if I recall correctly (!) Socrates suggests that literacy also has negative consequences for memory
01:38:55 matt switzer: Repeat performances, memory, instinct, reflection, unconscious motivations…preserved in poetics?
01:39:27 Jude Jones: With Douglas, I would also like to hear much more about “distress” (of separation in particular) and its various possible cognates, that Thandeka brought up
01:41:31 Jude Jones: Separation that is enforced, or that dwells on itself, is contrary to the conatus of things
01:43:37 Matt Segall: Re: nothingness, I think of the final chapter of Bergson’s “Creative Evolution.” The ‘nothingness’ or ‘sunyata’ of Buddhist thought seems like a mystical metaphor for an experience that is simultaneously ‘full’ (of compassion/karuna). I think Bergson was speaking in more logical terms.
01:44:54 matt switzer: Parmenides: “by being, it is”
01:46:14 Jude Jones: I think in part we are caught between the semantics imposed by the western history of philosophy’s use of “intelligibility” and the process of “intelligence” of a broader sort. But maybe our point is that the latter needs to redefine the former
01:48:48 Farzad Mahootian: (Sorry I’ve been in and out) The Bohr quote recall is paraphrased here: the opposite of a trivial truth is a trivial falsehood. The opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth.
01:53:21 josh hogins: It seems like these comments also imply that consciousness of some form is required for the selection process of joining potentia with the actual
01:53:22 George Lucas (It): Canalization, Bergson called it: forcing thought into limited and bounded/restrictive habits of thought.
01:54:02 George Lucas (It): Sorry: forcing intelligibility into....
01:54:09 Jude Jones: YES George! I think of his idea of “canalization” as a caution at least weekly. It has stuck with me (perhaps I’ve been canalized to the idea lol)
01:54:34 George Lucas (It): 😆🤓
01:55:13 Jude Jones: And it links with what Thandeka was doing in connecting this to the neurobiology (broadly conceived) of affect (which I take to haunt all our thinking)
01:55:38 Monica DeRaspe-Bolles: Can I ask my question here?
Can Tim speak to how the logoi framework works with Prigogine’s disapative structure and the framework of a time-developing world?
For Prigogine, “measurability” is a strength or intensity of creative movement. The system and its movement, and all “parts” of movement, break with the symmetry of time to different degrees. And everything that exists is both part and whole of larger and larger nested processes, and ultimately, the universe. Every little arrow of irreversible time is “correlated,” according to Prigogine and Stengers, with every other little arrow, and all arrows intertwined with the greatest arrow of all, namely, the universe. The deepest arrow of time is the expansion of the universe. but time finds its roots in irreversibility at the quantum level. They understand the “collapse of the wave function” as a symmetry-breaking irreversible process comparable in all ways to evolution on the micro and macro scale, except in its measurability and its depth
01:55:48 Monica DeRaspe-Bolles: of correlated involvement. From the macroscopic to the microscopic, life and non-life, quantum to cosmic – to exist is to be equally based in the creative dynamics of the universe.
01:56:31 Matt Segall: That’s helpful, George. Though of course Whitehead adds that canalization is also essential to maintaining the social order that grants living organisms their survival power (PR 107). So canalization ain’t all bad!
01:57:21 Jude Jones: Ontologically canalization isn’t bad, but in thought it has its downside (as well as adaptive significance)
01:57:41 Monica DeRaspe-Bolles: And for Prigogine, too, everything that exists is both part and whole of larger and larger nested processes, and ultimately, the universe.
01:59:36 Matt Segall: Love that question, Monica. You’re next after Anderson
02:00:27 Jude Jones: These two hours are going way too fast
02:00:54 Monica DeRaspe-Bolles: Can you read my question, Matt? I cannot come on screen.
02:01:02 Matt Segall: sure
02:01:08 Monica DeRaspe-Bolles: :)
02:02:23 George Lucas (It): Indeed! Tim's project has been both stimulating, and in a very sense, courageous. I hate to leave, but am going to have to depart. Thanks, everyone! "Live long and prosper," and "may the
02:02:35 Jude Jones: Oh good just ordered it!
02:02:48 George Lucas (It): Force be with you!"☺️
02:04:04 jonmeyer: The “order of ultimacies” (p323) seems reminiscent to me “eternal objects”, I’d like to hear more about how Tim differentiates these.
02:05:32 Matt Segall: James on nitrous: “What's mistake but a kind of take?
What's nausea but a kind of -ausea?
Sober, drunk, -unk , astonishment. . . .
Agreement--disagreement!!
Emotion--motion!!! . . .
Reconciliation of opposites; sober, drunk, all the same!
Good and evil reconciled in a laugh!
It escapes, it escapes!
But--
What escapes, WHAT escapes?”
02:07:46 María Guadalupe Llanes: Thanks for this session. I have to leave. It was a great experience for me. I plan to do some seminar in Spanish about this book. I'll keep in contact with Cobb's Center.
02:15:17 Monica DeRaspe-Bolles: Thank you!!! You are all so wonderful.
