for - adjacency - John Cobb - Whitehead - process relational ontology

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

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

for - Whitehead's philosophy of Organism