Whitehead's Process Philosophy's value to Virtual Reality design

Primer on Whitehead’s Process Philosophy as a Paradigm Shift & Foundation for Experiential Design

Kent Bye interviews Matt Segall. An excerpt from Kent's intro ->

I think process philosophy makes a lot more sense when thinking about the process of experiential design. Human beings are not mathematical formulas, which means you have no idea who other people will experience your immersive piece until you play test it. There’s an inherent agile and iterative nature of game design, software design, and experiential design, where you have to test it lots of time with lots of people. This is different than the linear, waterfall approaches of building physical buildings or producing films where there’s clearly demarcated phases of pre-production, production, and post-production. For Whitehead, these iterative processes aren’t just metaphoric at the human scale, but he’s suggesting that these processes reveal deep insights about the fundamental nature of reality itself as having a dynamic and participatory aspect of navigating non-deterministic potentials that’s really “experience all the way down.”

I wanted to get a full primer of Whitehead, his journey into philosophy, as well as how his thinking could facilitate a fundamental paradigm shift that the world needs right now. My experience is that VR and AR can provide an experiential shift in how we relate to ourselves and others, but the Process Philosophy brings a whole other conceptual level that has the potential to unlock a lot more radical shifts in all sorts of ways. I also think that the spatial nature of VR and AR is particularly suited in order to produce embodied experiences of process-relational thinking, but also help artists and creators have a cosmological grounding that helps them connect more deeply to their own creative process of unlocking flow states and using the medium to communicate about their experiences in new ways.