The development of Dr. Alfred North Whitehead'sphilosophy

The development of Dr. Alfred North Whitehead's Philosophy

Frederick Joseph Parker

The modern writer in the field of Philosophy no doubt recognizes the difficulty of gaining an adequate and impartial hearing from the students of his own generation. It seems that one only becomes great at the expense of death. The university student is often tempted to close his study of philosophy after Plato & Aristotle as if the final word has bean said.

The writer of this paper desires to know something about the contribution of the modern school of philosophers. He has chosen this particular study because he believes that Dr. Whitehead has given a very thoughtful interpretation of the universe. This paper is in no way a substitute for a first-hand study of the works of Whitehead. It will have served a worthy purpose if perchanoe a reading of it prompts students to make other original researches. The writer does not claim that his inferences and deductions concerning Professor Whitehead's doctrines are all valid but will venture to say that no opinions are given without serious reflective thought. Such a paper as this could in no respects cover the vast lot of materials in the many books which Professor Whitehead has written. He has aimed at an understanding of only the main doctrines of his philosophy.

A Whitehead discussion by Tom Hunt & Matt Segall from February

Environmental lawyer, philosopher, and fellow Whitehead enthusiast Tam Hunt and I started an email exchange a few weeks ago after I stumbled upon his interview with the physicist Carol Rovelli. Our emails grew into a pretty extensive conversation on all things Whitehead, which I am sharing below. We discuss the importance of Whitehead’s ideas for a future ecological civilization, his philosophy of time (including critiques of Einstein), the role of God and eternal  objects in his cosmology, and more.

Tam: Why is Whitehead relevant today, to both the layperson, and in physics and the philosophy of physics?

Matt: Whitehead was one of the first initiates into the new cosmological story that, with any luck, will help us build an ecological civilization in the coming decades. The advances in philosophy of nature and discoveries in natural science that occurred during the 19th and 20th centuries (e.g., Schelling, Humboldt, Darwin, Einstein, Bohr, Bergson, Whitehead, et al.) were even more revolutionary than those made by Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton in the 16th and 17th centuries.

If we take a Whiteheadian lens on the contemporary natural sciences, it becomes clear that 21st century people are living in an entirely new world, a self-organizing cosmogenesis that is nothing like the mechanical clockwork universe imagined by 17th century scientists. The problem is, hardly anybody—laypeople or physicists—realizes that we are living in this new universe! We are so mesmerized by the old mechanical model of Nature and by the technological toys it has allowed us to invent and surround ourselves with that we’ve lost touch with the nonhuman world that is literally dying for us to remember it.

On a good day, I consider myself to be fortunate to live in a late 19th century universe.

Quantum Mechanics and Panpsychism

Shan Gao

Whitehead seeks to develop a process metaphysical cosmology that is self-consistent and adequate to all experienced facts (see PR Part I). According to this cosmology, the fundamental elements of the universe are not enduring objects, but spontaneous processes with experience, or "occasions of experience. What people commonly think of as concrete objects are actually successions of occasions of experience. Whitehead's metaphysics is usually taken as the sole comprehensive philosophical system which aims to take into account the radical transformation of science with the development of quantum mechanics. Indeed, Whitehead was clearly aware of and influenced by the early phases of the development of quantum theory. However, are there really deep similarities between Whitehead's ideas of process and the ideas of quantum theory? Does quantum mechanics necessarily lead to (some form of) panpsychism?

The answers of these questions are not evident. Some physicists have noticed the possible connections between Whitehead's ideas and those of quantum theory. Stapp identified the intentional conscious acts with physical wave-function collapses, and thus built a possible connection between Whitehead's ontology and orthodox quantum theory, both of which give these events a mental aspect, and make these aspects causally efficacious in the physical world (Stapp 1979; 1993; 2004). Shimony observed that Whitehead's occasions of experience could be equivalent to the collapses of wave function in quantum theory, and recognized that Whitehead's approach was potentially compatible with quantum theory. (Shimony 1986; 1993; 1997). Penrose and Hameroff further suggested that the wave-function collapses or objective reductions are actual events occurring at the level of fundamental space-time geometry, and accordingly could qualify  for Whitehead's "occasions of experience" occurring in a "wider field of proto-conscious experience" (Penrose 1994; Hameroff and Penrose 1996a; 1996b; Hameroff 2003). However, these answers seem to be incomplete before we know what kind of motion quantum mechanics really describes, and before we find the possible quantum basis of panpsychism.

In this paper, we shall re-examine the deep connections between Whitehead's metaphysics and modern quantum theory, and try to bridge the gap between philosophy and science for a description of reality.