Whitehead's Process and Reality

Whitehead's background was an unusual one for a speculative metaphysician. Educated as a mathematician, he became, through his coauthorship and 1913 publication of Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, a major logician. Later he wrote extensively on physics and its philosophy, proposing a theory of gravity in Minkowski space as a logically possible alternative to Einstein's general theory of relativity. He was conversant with the quantum mechanics that emerged in the 1920s.[citation needed] Whitehead did not begin teaching and writing on process and metaphysics until he joined Harvard at 63 years of age.[citation needed]
In Whitehead's Science and the Modern World (1925), he noted that the human intuitions and experiences of science, aesthetics, ethics, and religion influence the worldview of a community, but that in the last several centuries science dominates Western culture. Whitehead sought a holistic, comprehensive cosmology that provides a systematic descriptive theory of the world which can be used for the diverse human intuitions gained through ethical, aesthetic, religious, and scientific experiences, and not just the scientific.[3]
Whitehead's influences were not restricted to philosophers or physicists or mathematicians. He was influenced by the French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson (1859–1941), who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. Process philosophy is also believed to have influenced some 20th-century modernists, such as D. H. Lawrence, William Faulkner and Charles Olson.[citation needed]
[edit]Process metaphysics
The process metaphysics elaborated in Process and Reality[6] posits an ontology which is based on the two kinds of existence of entity, that of actual entity and that of abstract entity or abstraction.
The ultimate abstract principle of actual existence for Whitehead is creativity. It is manifest in what can be called 'singular causality'. This term may be contrasted with the term 'nomic causality'. An example of singular causation is that I woke this morning because my alarm clock rang. An example of nomic causation is that alarm clocks generally wake people in the morning. Aristotle recognizes singular causality as efficient causality. For Whitehead, there are many contributory singular causes for an event. A further contributory singular cause of my being awoken by my alarm clock this morning was that I was lying asleep near it till it rang.
An actual entity is a general philosophical term for an utterly determinate and completely concrete individual particular of the actually existing world or universe of changeable entities considered in terms of singular causality, about which categorical statements can be made. Whitehead's most far-reaching and profound and radical contribution to metaphysics is his invention of a better way of choosing the actual entities. Whitehead chooses a way of defining the actual entities that makes them all alike, qua actual entities, with a single exception.
For example, for Aristotle, the actual entities were the substances, such as Socrates and Bucephalus. Besides Aristotle's ontology of substances, another example of an ontology that posits actual entities is in the monads of Leibniz, which are said to be 'windowless'.
[edit]Whitehead's actual entities
For Whitehead, actual entities are of two kinds, temporal and atemporal.
With one exception, all actual entities for Whitehead are temporal and are occasions of experience (which are not to be confused with consciousness). An entity that people commonly think of as a simple concrete object, or that Aristotle would think of as a substance, is, in this ontology, considered to be a comoposite of indefinitely many occasions of experience. A human being is thus composed of indefinitely many occasions of experience.
The one exceptional actual entity for Whitehead is at once both temporal and atemporal: God. He is objectively immortal, as well as being immanent in the world. He is objectified in each temporal actual entity; but He is not an eternal object.
According to Whitehead, the occasions of experience are of four grades. The first grade comprises processes in a physical vacuum such as the propagation of an electromagnetic wave or gravitational influence across empty space. The occasions of experience of the second grade involve just inanimate matter. The occasions of experience of the third grade involve living organisms. Occasions of experience of the fourth grade involve experience in the mode of presentational immediacy, which means more or less what are often called the qualia of subjective experience. So far as we know, experience in the mode of presentational immediacy occurs in only more evolved animals. That some occasions of experience involve experience in the mode of presentational immediacy is the one and only reason why Whitehead makes the occasions of experience his actual entities; for the actual entities must be of the ultimately general kind. Consequently, it is inessential that an occasion of experience have an aspect in the mode of presentational immediacy; occasions in the grades one, two, and three, lack that aspect.
There is no mind-matter duality in this ontology, because "mind" is simply seen as an abstraction from an occasion of experience which has also a material aspect, which is of course simply another abstraction from it; thus the mental aspect and the material aspect are abstractions from one and the same concrete occasion of experience. The brain is part of the body, both being abstractions of a kind known as persistent physical objects, neither being actual entities. Though not recognized by Aristotle, there is biological evidence, written about by Galen,[7] that the human brain is an essential seat of human experience in the mode of presentational immediacy. We may say that the brain has a material and a mental aspect, all three being abstractions from their indefinitely many constitutive occasions of experience, which are actual entities.
Inherent in each actual entity is its respective dimension of time. Potentially, each Whiteheadean occasion of experience is causally consequential on every other occasion of experience that precedes it in time, and has as its causal consequences every other occasion of experience that follows it in time; thus it has been said that Whitehead's occasions of experience are 'all window', in contrast to Leibniz's 'windowless' monads. In time defined relative to it, each occasion of experience is causally influenced by prior occasions of experiences, and causally influences future occasions of experience. An occasion of experience consists of a process of prehending other occasions of experience, reacting to them. This is the process in process philosophy.
Such process is never deterministic. Consequently, free will is essential and inherent to the universe.
The causal outcomes obey the usual well-respected rule that the causes precede the effects in time. Some pairs of processes cannot be connected by cause-and-effect relations, and they are said to be spatially separated. This in perfect agreement with the viewpoint of the Einstein theory of special relativity and with the Minkowski geometry of spacetime.[8] It is clear that Whitehead respected these ideas, as may be seen for example in his 1919 book An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge[9] as well as in Process and Reality. Time in this view is relative to an inertial reference frame, different reference frames defining different versions of time.
The actual entities of Whitehead, the occasions of experience, are logically atomic in the sense that an occasion of experience cannot be cut into two other occasions of experience. This kind of logical atomicity is perfectly compatible with indefinitely many spatio-temporal overlaps of occasions of experience.
This is because occasions of experience have some topological character, expressed in Whitehead's theory of extension. Fundamental to both Newtonian and to quantum theoretical mechanics is the concept of velocity. The measurement of a velocity requires a finite spatiotemporal extent. Because it has no finite spatiotemporal extent, a single point of Minkowski space cannot be an occasion of experience, but is an abstraction from an infinite set of occasions of experience, as explained in Process and Reality[6]. Whitehead did not define the topology of his actual entities in modern terms, but it seems that he envisaged them as convex compact or 'oval' sets in Minkowski space. The open sets of the path topology, explained by Naber[8], cannot be occasions of experience because they are centred on a single spatially isolated point of an underlying Minkowski space in a way that makes them very far from 'oval'. In one view, the occasions of experience have a topology in which they are the open sets, each defined by two points with timelike separation in an underlying Minkowski space. The initial of the two points has a forward light cone and the final of them has a backward light cone; the intersection of these two light cones can be used as the extensive definition of an occasion of experience as an open set. Such an open set cannot be cut into two constituent open sets with the same structure, and that is the meaning of its atomicity. The essence here is that an occasion of experience comprises a finite extent of space time and can be the extensional 'receptacle' of a process. Though the occasions of experience are atomic, they are not necessarily separate in extension, spatiotemporally, from one another. Indefinitely many occasions of experience can overlap in Minkowski space. An example of a nexus of overlapping occasions of experience is what Whitehead calls an enduring physical object, which corresponds closely with an Aristotelian substance.
Another aspect of the atomicity of occasions of experience is that they do not change. An actual entity is what it is. An occasion of experience can be described as a process of change, but it is itself unchangeable.
[edit]Whitehead's abstractions
An abstraction is an idea that involves more than one single actual entity. Whitehead's ontology refers to importantly structured collections of actual entities as nexuses of actual entities. Collection of actual entities into a nexus emphasizes some aspect of those entities, and that emphasis is an abstraction, because it means that some aspects of the actual entities are de-emphasized or dragged away from their actuality.
Whitehead admitted indefinitely many eternal objects. An example of an eternal object is a number, such as the number 'two'. Whitehead held that eternal objects are abstractions of a very high degree of abstraction. Many abstractions, including eternal objects, are potential ingredients of processes.
[edit]Causation and concrescence of a process
For Whitehead, besides its temporal generation by the actual entities which are its contributory causes, a process may be considered as a concrescence of abstract ingredient eternal objects. God is ingredient in every temporal actual entity.
[edit]Relation between actual entities and abstractions stated in the ontological principle
Whitehead's ontological principle is that whatever reality pertains to an abstraction is derived from the actual entities upon which it is founded or of which it is comprised.
[edit]Further aspects
However, Whitehead is not an idealist in the strict sense. Whitehead's ideas were a significant development of the idea of panpsychism (also known as panexperientialism, because of Whitehead’s emphasis on experience).
Process philosophy, for some, gives God a special place in the universe of occasions of experience. God encompasses all the other occasions of experience but also transcends them; thus Whitehead embraces panentheism. Since, it is argued, free will is inherent to the nature of the universe, God is not omnipotent in Whitehead's metaphysics. God's role is to offer enhanced occasions of experience. God participates in the evolution of the universe by offering possibilities, which may be accepted or rejected. Whitehead's thinking here has given rise to process theology, whose prominent advocates include Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb, Jr., and Hans Jonas, who was also influenced by the non-theological philosopher Martin Heidegger. However, other process philosophers have questioned Whitehead's theology, seeing it as a regressive Platonism.
Whitehead enumerated three essential natures of God. The primordial nature of God consists of all potentialities of existence for actual occasions, which Whitehead dubbed eternal objects. God can offer possibilities by ordering the relevance of eternal objects. The consequent nature of God prehends everything that happens in reality. As such, God experiences all of reality in a sentient manner. The last nature is the superjective. This is the way in which God’s synthesis becomes a sense-datum for other actual entities. In some sense, God is prehended by existing actual entities.