for - fallacy of misplaced concreteness

reply to michaljjwilk at https://hypothes.is/a/rwiI4rJYEe62aaN50r2zzQ to ensure it's properly indexed:

Most following my argument will have likely read The Two Definitions of Zettelkasten which may cover some of your initial question, or at least from my perspective. (Others certainly have different views.)

Some of your questions relate to what Robert Hutchins calls "The Great Conversation" (1952) and efforts over time to create Summa or compilations of all knowledge.

Variations of your remark about Plato can be seen in later Greeks' aphorism that "Everywhere I go in my head, I meet Plato coming back." or more recently in A.N. Whitehead's statement that everything is "a footnote to Plato".

for - key insight - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness - adjacency - fallacy of misplaced concreteness - climate denialism - mistrust in science - polycrisis - Deep Humanity

• the worry for Goethe and whitehead is that
  • we forget sometimes with the typical scientific method that = we can only ever apply concepts derived from our empirical experience
• and so if we're trying to understand experience as if it were really
  • an illusion produced by
    • collisions of particles or
    • brain chemistry or
    • something that we can never in principle experience
• what we're doing is
  • applying concepts derived from our experience
  • to an imagined realm that
    • we think is beyond experience
• but it's not
• This is Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

key insight - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness - This helps explain the rising rejection of science from the masses. I didn't realize there was already a name for the phenomena responsible for the emergence of collective denialist behavior

adjacency - between - fallacy of misplaced concreteness - increasing collective rejection of science in the polycrisis - adjacency statement - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness exactly names and describes - the growing trend of a populus rejection of climate science (climate denialism), COVID vaccine denialism, exponential growth of conspiracy theory and misinformation - because of the inability for non-elites and elites alike to concretize abstractions the same way that elite scientists and policy-makers do - Research papers have shown that the knowledge deficit model which was relied upon for decades was not accurate representation of climate denialism - Yet, I would hold that Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concretism plays a role here - This mistrust in science is rooted in this fallacy as well as progress traps - Deep Humanity is quite steeped in Whitehead's process relational ontology and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness requires mass education for a sustainable transition - This abstract concreteness is everywhere: - Shift from Ptolemy's geocentric worldview to the Copernican heliocentric worldview - Now we are told that the sun is not fixed, but is itself rotating around the Milky Way with billions of other galaxies - scientific techniques like radiocarbon dating for dating objects in deep time - climate science - atomic physics - quantum physics - distrust of vaccines, which we cannot see - Timothy Morton's hyperobjects is related to this fallacy of misplaced concreteness. - "Seeing is believing" but we cannot directly experience the ultra large or ultra small. So we have scientific language that draws parallels to that, but it is not a direct experience. - - Those not steeped in years or decades of science have the very real option of feeling that the concepts are fallacies and don't hold as much weight as that which they can experience directly, even though those concepts have obviously produced artefacts that they use, like cellphones, the internet and airplanes.

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.

for - definition - God - Whitehead - definition - initial aim - Whitehead

definition - God - Whitehead - The primordial creature is called "God" by Whitehead - by "creature", Whitehead means creativity, not a literal organism

definition - initial aim - Whitehead - Every moment of the life history of any aspect of reality is inheriting God's primordial nature. - This inheritance gives each finite creature the filtered realm of infinite relevant possibilities

for - key insight - concrescence - definition - concrescence - Whitehead - definition - The many become the one - Whitehead - definition - Res Potentia - Tim Eastman - definition - superject - Whitehead - definition - moment of satisfaction - Whitehead - definition - dipolar - Whitehead - definition - ingression - Whitehead definition - CONCRESCENCE - is the description of the phases of the iterative process by which reality advances from the past into the present then into the future - this definition is metaphysical and applies to all aspects of reality

• Concrescence is the process by which

  • THE MANY BECOME THE ONE and
  • THE MANY ARE INCREASED BY ONE
    • The "many" here refers to the past
    • the perished objects in the past environment

• There's another domain that whitehead makes reference to

  • He's a platonist in this sense, though he's a reformed platonist
  • He makes reference to this realm of eternal objects which for him are pure possibilities
  • i was mentioning Tim Eastman earlier
    • He calls this domain "RES POTENTIA", the realm of possibilities which have not yet been actualized
• And so for Whitehead
  • the realm of possibility is infinite
  • the realm of actuality is finite
• In the realm of actuality, there's a limited amount of certain types of experience which have been realized
  • but the realm of actuality draws upon this plenum of possibility and
  • it's because there is this plenum of possibility in relationship to the realm of actuality that
  • novelty is possible
  • new things can still happen we're not just constantly repeating the past

• Whitehead describes the process of concrescence or each drop of experience as DIPOLAR, having two poles:

  • a physical pole and
  • a mental pole

• Each concrescence or drop of experience begins with the physical pole

  • where the perished objects of the past environment are apprehended or felt and
  • these feelings of the past grow together into this newly emerging drop of experience
  • and then in the process of their growing together
    • the actualized perished objects of the past environment
    • are brought into comparison with eternal objects or pure potentials possibilities and
    • these possibilities INGRESS so there's
      • INGRESSION of eternal objects and
    • PREHENSION of past actualities
    • INGRESSION of potentials PREHENSIONS of past actualities

• and what the ingression of eternal objects do is provide each occasion of experience, each concrescence with

  • the opportunity to interpret the past differently
• to say maybe it's not like that maybe it's like this
• and so these ingressions come into the mental pole

• If the physical pole is what initiates the experience of each concrescing occasion

  • the mental pole is is a subsequent process that compares
    • what's been felt in the past with
    • what is possible alternatives that could be experienced that are not given yet in the past

• The subjective form is how the occasion fills the past

• The subjective aim is what draws the many feelings of the past towards the unification and the mental pole
  • where
    • the ingression of eternal objects and
    • the feelings of past actualities
  • are brought together into what Whitehead calls this MOMENT OF SATISFACTION
• it's the culmination of the process of concrescence
  • where a new perspective on the universe is achieved - This is the many have become one
• They are increased by one when the satisfaction is achieved
• It's a new perspective on the whole
• As soon as this new perspective is achieved
  • it becomes a SUPERJECT which is not a subject enjoying its own experience anymore
  • it's a perished subject
• The superject is the achieved perspective that has been experienced
  • but then perishes itself int a superject-hood to become
  • one among the many that will be inherited by the next moment of experience, the next concrescence and
• This superject has objective immortality in the sense that
  • every subsequent concrescence will inherit the satisfaction achieved by the prior concrescences

• And so this is the most general account in Whitehead's view that we can offer

  • of the nature of reality
  • the nature of the passage of nature
  • the movement
    • out of the past
    • through the present and
    • into the future

• Experience is always in the present and the satisfaction that is achieved by each moment of concrescence is enjoyed in the present

  • but as soon as we achieve that
  • it perishes and the next moment of concrescence arises to inherit what was achieved
  • and this is an iterative process
  • it's repeating constantly and it's cumulative
• It's a process of growth
  • building on what's been achieved in the past

for - quote - Whitehead - quote -creativity

quote - Creativity is what reality is made of and it's not a substance, it's a process

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 - definition - drop of experience - Whitehead

for - definition - prehension - Whitehead

definition - prehension - defined by Alfred North Whitehead - the feeling that each node of an idea network have for one another

• Think of it as short for comprehension
• Comprehension usually implies more of a conscious sort of rational reflective understanding

• When Whitehead shortens that to prehension

  • he's trying to get at something that is not yet conscious

  • certainly not self-reflective

  • but more of an aesthetic feeling of being permeated by the presence of the other beings
  • in an environment without yet reflecting on the fact

pre-linguistic - see epoche as well, seems related - like the word-less intuition before a precise word is formed to capture the new permutation of salient defining experiences

• So apprehension or feeling is a kind of unconscious apprehension
• So our conscious forms of apprehension or comprehension
  • are a further elaboration upon a much more basic form of apprehension / feeling
  • that Whitehead argued pervades the universe at every scale

for - outsider advantage - fresh eyes - outsider advantage - autodidactic - Whitehead - philosophy - paradigm shift

• He would teach at harvard from 1924 until 1937
• This is when most of his major philosophical books were written
• He reports in 1924 in the fall when he began teaching his first philosophy course to these students at harvard that
  • it was also his first philosophy course
• Of course he'd been studying philosophy but he'd never had formal education in it
• So as is often the case with major paradigm changes
  • someone from outside the discipline within which they provide some new paradigmatic understanding
  • is looking at the old problems with fresh eyes
  • They don't have the disciplinary training that would tend to leave one stuck in the existing concepts and categories
• Whitehead is coming into philosophy with fresh eyes

for - book - Aims of Education

Followup - book - Aims of Education - author: Alfred North Whitehead - a collection of papers and thoughts on the critical role of education in determining the future course of civilization

epiphany - adjacency between - Lifework and evolutionary nature of the individual - - people-centered Indyweb -- Alfred North Whitehead's ideas and life history - adjacency statement - Listening to the narrator speaking about Whitehead's work from a historical perspective brought up the association with the Indyweb's people-centered design - This is especially salient given that Whitehead felt education played such a critical role in determining the future course of humanity - If Whitehead were alive, he would likely appreciate the Indyweb design because it is based on the human being as a process rather than a static entity, - hence renaming human being to human INTERbeCOMing, a noun replaced by a verb - Indyweb's people-centered design and default temporal, time-date recording of ideas as they occur provides inherent traceability to the evolution of an individual's consciousness - Furthermore, since it is not only people-centered but also INTERPERSONAL, we can trace the evolution of ideas within a social network. - Since individual and collective intelligence are both evolutionary and intertwingled, they are both foundational in Indyweb's design ethos. - In particular, Indyweb frames the important evolutionary process of - having a conversation with your old self - as a key aspect of the evolutionary growth of the individual's consciousness

for - David Ray Griffin - followup - David Ray Griffin

followup - David Ray Griffin - https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F6uXvJAtoCiQ%2F&group=world

for - Whitehead / Morphic Resonance seminar - 2011

event - Whitehead seminar 2011 - held in Claremont theological college in California - organized by John Cobb

for - adjacency - persuasion instead of coercion - China - power

adjacency - persuasion instead of coercion - Whitehead - China - power - Whitehead believed power is most effective when it employs persuasion instead of coercion - If the Chinese government adopts more of the spirit of Whitehead, it can only mean better collaboration between states

for - adjacency - China - ecological civilization - Whitehead - process studies - Deep Humanity - Indyweb

adjacency - between - China - process studies - ecological civilization - Deep Humanity - Indyweb - adjacency statement - The communist government of China has written into their constitution the ideal of moving towards an ecological civilization - Whitehead's work plays a key role in that - This attests to the strategic role that Whitehead's philosophy plays - This is salient because Stop Reset Go's Deep Humanity and the Indyweb are based on the same process relational ontology

for - adjacency - Whitehead - process studies - China

adjacency - between - Whitehead - process studies - China - re-introducing confucianism - adjacency statement - Sheldrake shares his surprise of how many process studies institutes exist in China compared to the West - and their purpose, to revive Confucianism so that the central government receives more respect

for - influence - Sheldrake - Bergson - Whitehead

influence - Sheldrake - Bergson - Whitehead - Sheldrake was first inspired to conceive the idea of morphic resonance by Bergson but then Dorothy showed him that Whitehead had wrote extensively on the same idea

for - influence - Sheldrake - Whitehead - Bergson

for - Whitehead - readability

Readability - Whitehead seems to be a writer who is difficult to understand

for - Rupert Sheldrake - introduction to Alfred North Whitehead

for - The epiphany philosophers

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

for - talk - David Ray Griffin - time, consciousness and freedom from Whitehead process perspective

for - Whitehead's philosophy of Organism

Für mich gibt es einen Bezug des common sense zu den Commons im Sinne von Allmende, und einen Bezug zum Anarchismus als Weigerung, anderen eine Linie vorzugeben.

See full quote: https://hypothes.is/a/TTPGtl_GEe6psRsVpOxigg

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (Gifford Lectures, Delivered in The University of Edinburgh during the Session 1927-1928). Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. 2nd edition, Corrected. 1929. Reprint, New York: Free Press, 1978.

Process metaphysics advocates the perspective that the Cartesian view of nature is incorrect. Rather than starting out with inert matter and deducing its interactions thereof, nature consists of processes

This is an utterly passive statement. They are connected to it? NO. They are shown a context. The learners must be the ones connecting. Otherwise we get inert learning.

Prozess- und Performanzorientierung

Isn't this a second attempt to definition that we could add to McLuhan's 'what is ignored'? What is ignored and what is in the making - process, movement, becoming, dissolving - makes me think of Whitehead and Simondon, Heraklit of course

On the Homebrewed Christianity podcast, Tripp Fuller quotes Process and Reality by Alfred North Whitehead in a conversation with Brian McLaren (22:20).

When the Western world accepted Christianity, Caesar conquered; and the received text of Western theology was edited by his lawyers. The code of Justinian and the theology of Justinian are two volumes expressing one movement of the human spirit. The brief Galilean vision of humility flickered throughout the ages, uncertainly. In the official formulation of the religion it has assumed the trivial form of the mere attribution to the Jews that they cherished a misconception about their Messiah. But the deeper idolatry, of the fashioning of God in the image of the Egyptian, Persian, and Roman imperial rulers, was retained. The Church gave unto God the attributes which belonged exclusively to Caesar.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28) (p. 342). Free Press. Kindle Edition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_and_Reality

Apparently this book is the one that contains his quote about western intellectual endeavors being footnotes to Plato.

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

Agreed. In times of learning, say in college for instance, there will be particular aspects of school that we will never forget, and this is because we are still in our learning stage. Our brains are still developing and trying to figure out how to do certain things. When learning how to become a grown man, or woman, we take what we learn habitually and hold it in our minds forever if it sticks with us.

I appreciate this statement because the founders were right in putting their observations of education on these aspects. They included math, science, and health, and these aspects cover much of what the world needs to have solved. They focused on which subjects would be the most beneficial to human life, and I appreciate their thought process with this.

I find it interesting that the University made it a goal to cultivate the morals of the students attending their school. They also stress how they want to instill the precepts of virtue and order. They want to achieve this, yet they based the location of their school to be around the centrality of the white population. I do not believe this is cultivating the morals of their students. This is narrowing their viewpoints, and not expanding on the multitude of cultures that lie within the United States.

The University set out a goal for the parents of young boys to begin their studies of the ancient languages at the year of age ten. This is an extremely young age, considering that the boys would be going to college eight years later. The minds of the young boys seem to be too young to be able to grasp this form of art. This correlates to my Engagement, Art Inside/Out, by focusing on the art aspect. Latin, Greek, and Hebrew are forms of art in the language aspect. This piece of art is powerful and intriguing; however, it may be too complex for the minds of ten year olds who are still trying to develop.