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 4
September 20, 2021
THE COBB INSTITUTE
In this session Tim Eastman provides an summary of the fourth chapter, after which Alex Gomez-Marin, George Lucas, and Anderson Weekes offer a response.01:11:08 - Open ConversationMeeting Chat Text: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18xBZ...
Chapter Summary, by Tim Eastman
This series of conversations is provided by the Cobb Institute. Please consider supporting this program and others like it by giving: https://cobb.institute/donate/
00:19:42 Weston McMillan: Good morning all - good to see you all - I’ll be joining video in about 30-40 min
00:20:48 Richard Livingston / Cobb Institute: Gary, I will send email reminders to everyone with the links to RSVP. But the main link is always: https://cobb.institute/events/
00:48:25 Gary Herstein: Obviously Randy and myself had a few words to say about reducing Whitehead's metaphysics to QM.
00:50:03 Lynn De Jonghe: I wonder if Whitehead “abandoned” physics for biology or expanded his vision to include biological processes.
00:51:22 Matt Segall: Seems more like Whitehead extended the understanding of organisms as self-organizing to the rest of Nature (just as Schelling had done before him)
00:52:01 Matt Segall: Robert Rosen makes an even more rigorous case for this sort of extension (biology as more generic than physics, etc.)
00:52:38 Jude Jones: I agree Matt; perhaps the replacement or abandonment is really a reversal: biology is the more comprehensive model, rather than physics
00:53:45 Jude Jones: Precisely because it manifests the activity of com-prehending in the most evident way (i.e. concrescence)
00:54:10 Lynn De Jonghe: Perhaps Tim’s work should be described as a “theory of everything and its possibilities.”
00:54:32 Jude Jones: A Theory of Everything & Everything Else?
00:56:02 Gary Herstein: It is worth recalling that Whitehead came up not only before GR and QM, but before the atomic theory itself. The major early influence on his thinking was Clerk-Maxwell's electromagnetic *field* theory. A field is a pretty holistic way of approaching matters, and lends itself fairly naturally to that kind of holism we call "organic."
00:56:43 Timothy Eastman: I agree with Gary’s point here - thanks Gary!
00:57:12 Gary Herstein: 👍
01:00:43 Ben Snyder: If I recall correctly, when Whitehead was working on something more like a philosophical underpinning for physics earlier in his philosophy, he was already aware he was engaged in only a limited project that in some sense bracketed mind and left questions out, so I'd think he was already aware there was a wider framework that wouldn't necessarily be based on physics, though maybe not that it would be the kind of panbiologism he came to. So I'm not sure he abandoned or reversed a position so much as fleshed it out.
01:03:43 Jude Jones: But Ben, wasn’t part of that work an intense awareness that the act of conception had to be accounted for in understanding the physical world, hence there was an implicit presence of concern for mind?
01:04:49 Matt Segall: Agreed, Ben. I’m reminded of a comment he makes in “Function of Reason” about reversing the typical mode of explanation in science in light of the cosmic extent of evolution. Why explain the later more complex forms by reduction to the earlier less complex forms? Why not reverse the order, looking at e.g. life and mind to see how they amplify aspects of the physical that would otherwise slip our notice?
01:07:31 George Lucas: Well put observations, Matt, Jude, Ben and Gary. The Hersein/Auxier book, itself quite challenging, does a superb job of developing these points in terms of the quantum of explanation.
01:12:58 Ben Snyder: Jude, I had in mind Whitehead's claim in Concept of Nature that he was limiting himself to nature as what is disclosed in sense-perception and leaving to metaphysics the synthesis of knower and known. There may be other context and history to Whitehead's thought I'm leaving out though.
01:16:38 Jude Jones: Fair enough Ben, but the perspectivalism that already starts to emerge in that context prefigures things that the full metaphysics of knower and known will play out
01:19:04 Ben Snyder: I agree, it already has strong implications for his later metaphysics
01:21:37 Matt Segall: it’s hard to read “Concept of Nature” and not be left with the impression that Whitehead had every intention of blowing up the powder keg he carefully avoided for the purposes of scientific epistemology. You can definitely see he was already on his way to bringing mind back into nature in a more generic metaphysical scheme. But he wanted to make sure the special sciences were unburdened by such metaphysics (and make sure that philosophy was unburdened by confused bifurcated scientism!)
01:22:42 Ben Snyder: On the point of comparing Whitehead and Kant as Anderson brought up: there's a solid logical parallel to Whitehead's physical prehensions and Kant's intuitions too, in that they provide the indexical reference (for Whitehead, the "indicative feeling" of the "logical subject") in the propositional content of a judgment. The conceptual pole that provides the predication is, as the subjective aim, perhaps in some ways similar in function to Kant's synthetic unity of apperception.
01:25:18 Matt Segall: I like that comparison, Ben. Though despite his critique of Descartes substantial subject, Kant still seems to imply that the transcendental ego is there in advance, a priori to experience; whereas I read Whitehead as offering a picture of subjectivity as emergent from its feelings.
01:28:32 Ben Snyder: I think the subject exists first as its initial aim (i.e., its feeling of God's proposition for it) which then partially constitutes what feelings it will have (and then from there the subjective aim is, at least in some instances, further freely developed).
01:28:33 Philip: Alex asked how description of fruitfly would be different than a rock. One difference is that a fruitfly has an (individual( agenda it tries to impose on the physical world. Why is there no discussion of the agenda of one that experiences and thus participates in the coming into being of form?
01:28:58 George Lucas: Famously, "For Kant, the World emerges from the (synthesis of experiences of the transcendental) Subject, while for the Phil of Organism, the subject emerges from the (flux of experience which IS) the World."
01:31:18 George Strawn: Could Tim say a little more about the relation between emergence and causation
01:31:34 Jude Jones: The future evokes itself into being as provoked by the actualized past
01:33:32 Jude Jones: I agree with Thandeka—the future is the creative realization of what has become possibly actualized because it was not actualized in the past—the energy of creative, intensive vibration
01:35:01 Jude Jones: But new DIVISIONS of the past are possible, and the ground of possible novelty
01:35:14 Matt Segall: Whitehead talks about this in terms of an occasion’s hybrid prehension of God’s initial aim, I think? The past is totalized in each occasion but also includes the potential of the divine ideal yet to be realized. ?
01:35:46 Jude Jones: The present is the past evoking the future through it
01:37:21 Farzad Mahootian: Wonderful. Thank you, Thandeka! Assimilate, determine, i.e., you must and do REFRAME the past. The therapeutic consciousness is a good model for this.
01:39:42 Lynn De Jonghe: Years ago Imre Lakatos in “Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge described a process in which anomalous information leads to rexesmanination of “known understanding” and finding lacunae and then asking new questions based on these gaps. I believe Thandeka has described a similar process.
01:41:19 Farzad Mahootian: Agreeing also with Jude. I think of it as affirming (rendering positive, and making ”visible”) old negative pretensions.
01:41:30 Kevin Clark: Could we get Tim's response to all this via UGK?
01:41:44 Monica DeRaspe-Bolles: He said, "Becoming happens because potentiality is a real force... I impending future pressing in."
01:42:39 Ben Snyder: I think Matt was right with one of his suggestions, within Whitehead's scheme it's God's primordial nature that allows potentiality beyond the determinacy of the actual world to be real. All novelty in forms of definiteness beyond the conformal physical prehensions of the actual world occurs through conceptual prehensions of eternal objects derived from the initial prehension of God.
01:44:05 Matt Segall: Thanks, Ben. If the primordial nature of God is a “fiction,” then so are the rest of Whitehead’s categories!
01:44:57 Matt Segall: Of course it could be possible, in some alternative scheme, to account for what Thandeka is saying without a God function. But in Whitehead’s scheme, this is the role of God’s primordial nature
01:45:12 Jude Jones: I see the consequent nature as the more “fictional”. Primordial is a necessary posit for the logic of possibility, or something like it
01:45:18 Ben Snyder: Yes, and I suppose they inevitably are a fiction to some extent, which he would've been comfortable admitting. Just hopefully not entirely haha
01:45:23 Jeroen (Jerome) van Dijk: Question: Does the distinction between the Boolean and the non-Boolean (between actuality and potentiality) perhaps impose the language of actuality to what we think of as the realm of potentiality? Could there be a risk of 'historical inversion' between the actual and the potential? A historical inversion in that we may presuppose the alphabet of expression that relates to 'the Actual' as being applicable to a prior realm of potentiality as well?
01:53:27 Kevin Clark: Adjointness: <=>
01:57:59 Matt Segall: I wonder if Jerome’s question has something to do with the difference between Possibility and Potentiality. The latter has an essential relation to Actuality, while the former is untouched by the actual and so cannot be accessed without immediately collapsing its purity. Is this getting close, Jerome?
02:00:04 Jude Jones: Matt, got the link for that?
02:00:15 Jeroen (Jerome) van Dijk: You could be right with your observation, Matt. I need to look into the subtle difference between the concepts of possibility and potentiality. Thanks for noting!
02:00:56 Matt Segall: https://youtu.be/17jymDn0W6U
02:01:25 Matt Segall: That’s one example of the sort of “cosmic map” I’m talking about. The map is not the territory!
02:01:29 Gary Nelson: I think we often conceptualize the “past actual world” (PAW) as only physical stuff. If the PAW retains physical and mental poles, then It is plausible that we can affect our mental future by reinterpretation of our personal past.
02:01:39 Gary Herstein: Orders of Ten -- there was a book in the "Scientific American Library" many years ago.
02:02:00 Lynn De Jonghe: Eames “Powers of Ten” we now see one limited perspective
02:02:29 Gary Herstein: "Powers" not "orders"
02:03:54 Gary Nelson: Spatialization of the PAW assumes physical only.
02:05:05 George Lucas: Thanks to all for great questions and wonderful discussion, and to Tim and Matt for hosting a splendid discussion. Grateful to have been able to join in! Farewell for now,
02:05:11 Farzad Mahootian: Powers of Ten view of cosmos is incomplete, not false… unless it claims completeness. PS: truth and falsity as tools are highly over-rated ;)
02:05:22 Anderson Weekes: Thandeka: Is this your point? The possibility of totalizing the past as the set of all the things I experience, although this was in some sense already a possibility in the past (as a future event), is itself the possibility that transcends the past and changes what possible?
02:06:29 Lynn De Jonghe: Perhaps we do not need a new symbol but a realization and respect for the limitations of all symbols and metaphors, “Metaphors do not run on all fours!”
02:06:46 Gary Nelson: I think of the PAW as the habits of the organic universe.
02:09:00 Jude Jones: Anderson, I like that as an abstract description, curious what Thandeka will say. What needs to be added to the description is the active, feeling/affective dimension of it
02:09:52 Jude Jones: One difference between a fruitfly and a rock is that a fruit fly dies
02:10:12 Farzad Mahootian: “Strategies” of a fruit fly = Whiteheadian Propositions of a fruit fly ?
02:11:06 Jude Jones: The experience that ticks have are fascinating to consider
02:12:58 Jude Jones: Is life anything besides constant transformation? Memory is inherently reconstructive
02:12:58 Farzad Mahootian: Tick: I suck, mostly.
02:14:14 Anderson Weekes: Gary: Do we want to say there were possibilities in the past that we were not aware of, or that the possibilities of the past changed after the fact?
02:16:29 Matt Segall: https://cobb.institute/events/
