6 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
    1. for - Alfred North Whitehead - philosophy - process

      Summary - This is a very insightful presentation of Whitehead's process philosophy. It's the first time I was introduced to it via Gyuri but I can see why he wanted to. I could identify many parallels with SRG and Deep Humanity ideas.

    2. there's always a little bit of novelty with each new drop of experience and so 00:17:17 there's a kind of uh reality at its fundamental basis is a kind of evolving relationship among all of these white heads technical term again 00:17:30 actual occasions of experience

      for - definition - actual occasion of experience - Whitehead - definition - society - Whitehead - Whitehead - process relational ontology - adjacency - Whitehead's philosophy - morphic resonance

      definition - actual occasion of experience - Whitehead question - does Whitehead mean that reality itself is intrinsically evolutionary in nature and that it is constantly metamorphosizing? Is he making a claim similiar to Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance? Or we might say Sheldrake follows Whitehead

      Explanation - Whitehead's Process Relational Ontology - Passage below is explanation of Whitehead's Process Relational Ontology

      • There's always a little bit of novelty with each new drop of experience and so
      • There's a kind of reality
      • At its fundamental basis is a kind of evolving relationship among all of these
      • Whitehead's technical term again actual occasions of experience and
        • as they co-evolve new habits emerge and these habits allow nature at various scales to form what Whitehead calls societies
      • An example of a society of occasions or experiential events would be hydrogen atoms
      • The first hydrogen atoms which emerge i think a few hundred thousand years after the big bang represent the growing together of what had been distinct processes
        • protons and electrons
      • to form this relationship that would be enduring which we call the hydrogen atom
      • That's a society of actual occasions of experience that has formed
      • and then hydrogen atoms continue this evolutionary process and collect together into the first stars
      • and a star would be another example of a society of actual occasions of experience
      • and as these new forms of social organization are emerging over the course of cosmic evolution
        • what physics describes in terms of laws begin to take shape
      • but again for Whitehead these are not eternally fixed laws imposed on the process of evolution that's unfolding
      • Rather what we call laws
        • emerge from out of that process itself
        • as a result of the creative relationships being formed by these actual occasions of experience
      • So rather than speaking of laws imposed from outside,
        • Whitehead understands uh physical law
        • in terms of the habits which emerge over the course of time
          • as a result of relationships
      • So for Whitehead, the task of philosophy is really
        • to situate us in our experience
      • His is a is an experiential metaphysics and
        • as we've seen in our study of Goethe
        • the idea here is not to look behind or beyond experience for something which might be the cause of experience
        • The participatory approach to science that Goethe and Whitehead were both attempting to articulate
          • requires that we stay with experience
            • so metaphysics then
              • is not an effort to explain away our common sense experience
              • it's really the effort to bring logical coherence and consistency to experience
                • to find the all-pervasive relationships among various aspects of experience
      • And so science becomes the search for those relationships within experience
        • rather than the search for some mechanical explanation which would be
          • before,
          • behind or
          • beneath experience
    3. whitehead says that philosophy is an attempt to express the infinity of the universe in terms of the limitations of language

      for - Whitehead's philosophy - Whitehead - limitations of language - Indra's Net - Whitehead - process relational ontology

      • Whitehead says that

        • philosophy is an attempt to express the infinity of the universe
          • in terms of the LIMITATIONS OF LANGUAGE
      • And i think this image of the spiderweb with the dewdrops each reflecting the others is the perfect analogy for whitehead's ontology

      • You may have heard of indra's net from madhyamaka buddhism
        • the idea of dependent co-origination of all things
          • that nothing has independent abiding existence
            • but is rather caught up in a network of
              • relations or
            • causes and conditions
          • and so you can't remove any of the nodes in the network without destroying the node and totally changing the rest of the network that it was embedded within
      • This is the key to what a process RELATIONAL ONTOLOGY is trying to reveal to us about the nature of reality
      • Dependent co-origination or you could say
        • the inter-penetration of all things
      • though in Whitehead's cosmology there really are no things
        • if by thing you mean an inert isolated entity
      • Whiteheads ontology is really composed of events or processes
      • You could say and these processes for whitehead are
        • drops of experience
      • So for whitehead, there's no node in the network of reality that is not there for itself
      • It is not enjoying some degree of experience or subjectivity or has some degree or capacity for feeling
  2. Jul 2021
  3. Feb 2019
    1. Our culture has evolved means for us to organize the little things we can do with our basic capabilities so that we can derive comprehension from truly complex situations, and accomplish the processes of deriving and implementing problem solutions.

      Small steps are how we make progress through complexity: these small steps are converted into processes and our tools enhance the processes.