6 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
    1. 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
    2. 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. Mar 2023
    1. // - This article provides an intersectional study of: - climate change, - collective action research - terror management theory / mortality salience - it explains the beneficial impacts of non-rational relational ontology and recommends the use of ritual practices based on this as a way to promote pro-environmental behavior

      //

    2. There is reason to think that the effects of mortality salience are different in relational ontology. Contemporary Heathens are a particular sort of hybrid in living in modern society and emerging out of individualized ontologies, but forming incipient gift economies and expressing what I term a “gift ethic,” with an appreciation for what we receive from others, and desire to give in turn, sustaining social ecological systems as distributed networks of adaptive relations.
      • key observation
      • key insight