Alfred North Whiteheads Process Metaphysics
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- Опубликовано: 5 окт 2024
- An overview of Alfred North Whiteheads process metaphysics. It isn't a complete explanation of his categories but it is the main ideas. This may be difficult to understand without a bit of knowledge in metaphysics, but I did my best to make it comprehensive - you may just need to take things slow and research. It can seem rather over-speculative and all over the place at first but once you learn all of the categories, it comes together nicely like a puzzle. Alfred North Whitehead considered this to be a "speculative metaphysics" - meaning he did not see this as the end all be all of truths, but rather as a useful system of rational speculation designed to dissolve many philosophical problems. If you would like to learn more about Whitehead, I would suggest reading his "Process and Reality"
Sources:
en.wikipedia.o...
plato.stanford...
Peter Sjostedt's "Noumenautics"
Thank you Kramer. Your presentation was very clear. I have come to Whitehead as a consequence of twenty years experience with natural psychedelics that began rather late in my life. My psychedelic experiences brought me to understandings that parallel and coincide with Whitehead's cosmology in such a way as to allow me to resonate with Whitehead and your explanation. Without the capacity of psychedelics to overcome--by direct and intense experience, along with the direct teachings that mysteriously arise in the psychedelic experience--the way in which Western culture has trapped our minds in abstraction, I would likely not have had any idea what you are talking about. I discovered in that way that direct experience gives rise to a "knowing" that precedes and informs the cognitive mind--a contradiction of the fundamental assumption of modernity.
Amen.
Although I'm not personally interested in psychodelics, I must admit that your lecture is the very best Whitehead video on the Web. Really great job. I struggle with Whitehead's Process and Reality and Science and the Modern World, but they are so demanding, that I really need a map like this. Thank you so much.
What did any of this have to do with psychodelics? Or am I loosing my mind?
I am a long time student of both Alfred North Whitehead and Count Alfred Korzybski, the founder of the Inst. of General Semantics. The Philosophy of Organism and the Non-Aristotelian Philosophy of Korzybski, (G.S.) are... and have been... at the every core of my life, my heart and mind for 50 years now.
Ever heard of Terrance McKenna? or Timothy O'Leary. ?
Blessings on all you love. Remember. . BREATHE....!!!! do it again.... forgive.... all of us... for give the whole god damn world, forgive the UN - forgivable. "Why?" Because there's only one who has committed every sin; and there's only One who can forgive ever sin. Right? Y O U!
Sincerely,
Rt. Rev. Charles V. Davis, A.T.O.M. Author of "The One Foundation," and Direct Representative of The United States-of-Consciousness.
Dear Professor ----I have been struggling with the constitutive and regulatory powers of Eternal Objects, Concrescence, Societies and Nexi for 40 yrs. You do us all a great service with your steadily paced and unemotional redaction. Vielen Dank.
Thank you very much for your video. I’m currently reading Process and Reality and having a hard time. Your lecture really clarified many concepts.
Great talk. I would have liked to see the next video.
Very nice introduction to Whitehead, thank you! "Psychedelics can break through the process of transmutation and negative prehensions." Oh my, do they ever! If you go exploring, remember the wise words of Bette Davis: "Buckle up, it's going to be a bumpy night."
great video. just some clarifications:
-"laws of nature" as understood in physics are possible just if they describe the necessary conditions for experience (Kant a priori knowledge). Hume understood that we cannot formulate universal laws from always finite empirical data, but Kant explained why we can, in fact, formulate some laws. These laws don't explain the "creativity". but the conditions fot all experience. In modern physics (quantum) the fundamental conditions are time and empirically decidable alternatives, the yes/no basic information units represented as qubits.
-the uncertainty principle doesn't blur some determined facts (eg: position or momentum), the indeterminism is something real, ontological.
Od course theres a lot of debate around QM, but i think its bullshit. Bohr, Heisenberg, Weizsacker... they undestood it in this way, and its compatible with Whitehead´s philosophy. Weizsacker was the great philosopher of QM and he considered Whitehead as one of the few important philosophers of the 20th century.
I'm only a little over halfway through this video, but I wanted to say thanks for so far being the most accessible in-depth explanation of the basic functions of his system. I've spent days trying to research it via essays, wikipedia pages, etc because I find the book way too long and too hard to break into. I also greatly appreciate the various graphs!
An excellent presentation of Whitehead's novel metaphysical system. It all seems so clear and understandable now. Thank you for your efforts.
ANW would be proud. He was roundly criticized for not providing 'examples' in his many discourses.
Thank you for correcting this.
Honestly very thankful for this video. The accompaniment of the soft music in the background with your narration are perfect for me and my auditory-learning style. Take my sub
I'm glad you found it helpful!
Dear Kramer; You're doing an important work here!
Some come into this philosophy on the process side. They call it Process Philosophy. That's what they are interested in. I came into this study as The Philosophy of Organism. i.e., or Whitehead's idea that the universe functions much like a living organism.
It seems like few remember that angle on Whitehead's philosophy these days. But that's what I was taught. The universe is alive... intelligent, growing and capable of making mistakes and correcting them. Self-correcting. Self-organizing. (So, get acquainted. That's the meta-physicist of it.)
This process of getting acquainted with.... God. "Midst the ever perishing occasions of life," Whitehead gave us room to believe in an ever present God, as a "fellow companion upon the way"... with us. To know it or to intuit it... that makes all the difference in the.... cliché.
Get it? Got it. Good! Like bees we go forth seeking essence and when we 'return' we share what we have gathered upon the Way with the All That Is. And we (as human beings) are part of the whole mix.
Love to chat with you at some point in time.
Sincerely, Charles Vincent Davis, Rt. Rev., A.T.O.M. July 10th, 2022 AD. Hollywood, CA, USA.
Why are you telling us that you don't have the brain to study science, instead? ;-)
Can process philosophy and determinism coexist?
@@andrewsmith3257 Philosophy is bullshit. It can coexist with any other bullshit. What it can't and does not coexist with are scientific facts. ;-)
This was such a wonderful lecture, you have a beautiful way of articulating yourself. I've also gotten very interested in Whiteheadian philosophy in relation to psychedelics. You familiar with the work of Peter Sjösted and Leonard Gibson?
Thank you, I appreciate it! I am familiar with Peter Sjostedt, yes, I read his book Noumenautics and loved it.
You put it in such clear terms and you go quite deep into it. Thanks for the video. Process and Reality is a monstrous book with a lot of newly defined concepts which names are not really that intuitive. The system described however is genius and fascinating.
Very clear. Thank you,
Why did it take so many decades of my life to come across this world view? For me this is just one more piece of evidence that indicates that schooling is NOT about producing generations well endowed with general knowledge.
Plato says all this in the book Theaetetus, and in the Parmenides
This is the best short summery of Whitehead I have ever run into. Excellent! Very helpful. (It could do without that background noise, though.)
I hope you will produce the second video you mentioned in this one. I don't find it on RUclips.
I would love to hear the relationships with Psychedelics, great work
Thank you. This presentation is beautifully simple.
I need to read Process and Reality to understand how he establishes some of these claims. Fascinating.
Yeah Process and Reality is an absolute beast. There's still a lot more to cover.
Whitehead is the philosopher of the 21st century. I can't think of anything more profound.
Excellent explanation of the almost unexplainable.
Just listened to this again. Phenomenal job!
I enjoyed this. I just have one issue.
It seems to me that this process metaphysics is almost synonymous with Plato’s description of experience in his book Theaetetus.
The part of the theaetetus i am referring to is towards the beginning and middle.
Here Plato sets up a thought experiment where we deny the existence of all self-existent things and try to discover what would follow.
Well, what is a self-existent entity? Plato answer that in his book the Parmenides
In the latter half of that book he speaks of The ONE. Which by the end of that first hypothesis we find that The ONE is at absolute independence. It is what it is (what ever it is) independent of everything. It’s a non-plural singularity. So no parts, no distinctions, no differences. And so there’s no interdepending within itself or with entities other than itself.
So, as a Form, the ONE is the FORMLESS Form.
Formless because since it has no parts, it has no beginning, middle or end. For, in being singular it cannot be many, and parts are many. So no beginning, middle or end.
And if no beginning or end, then no boundaries or limits. And if no boundaries or limits then no shape. For shape is that which has a boundary. So, there’s no defining the ONE. AND in this way it is Formless.
But it is also Form.
In being purely singular, it is what is through and through without variation. For variation is another word for difference and to have difference there must be many because many allows for entities to be other than one another. and so the ONE is perfectly ordered, structured, in harmony with itself. In fact, the ONE is the condition for there to be many ones. For order, relation, logical ness, ratio, proportion, relativity, duration, continuity, cycles, and so on are ways of being like The One, but not really.
Ratios are how two or more things are related or how they are one or connected. The same thing with relativity, and correlation, and proportion, and love and honesty and courage.
When something is consistent it is continuous with itself. And to be continuous is to be one.
A commitment is to be one in the same now and later and endure. And to endure is to be one.
To this extent, self existence is anything that has a independence, whether absolutely or relatively. And to have this independence is to, in one sense of it concept, stand out as a one.
That said, we may see the issue now.
if we propose that there’s no such thing as self-existence i.e. independence, or oneness, or essence what follows is this process metaphysics, as opposed to a substantive metaphysics, then I don’t see how on a merely or solely and only a process metaphysics view of this type how there can be any appearance of oneness.
For on this view, oneness or essence is contradictory, and so how can anything even appear as that which cannot in principle be?
And if I grant that there in fact, at the very least, just an appearance of oneness, essence or self-existence, then in being an appearance, then it’s not a reality; it’s not really anything, because on process metaphysics all is appearing, and nothing ever really IS.
So it’s all fantasy. No truth?
What say you?
The One is Infinite and as such is inherent in all things and is ontological.
The One is all that exists but It cleverly has created junior versions of Itself as conditional parts of Itself. which can choose to continue interacting with the One and the other microcosms or not.
This is incredible!
Metaphysics = the systematic study of the nature of Reality.
Reality = That which is.
Reality or That which is, that is nothing in particular (actual), is by definition everything in general (potential).
0. Potential = Being
1. Actual = Becoming (actualized)
Since that which is not, is not, That which is, is all-inclusive: Absolute, Infinite, Eternal.
The actualization of potential is Eternal and the potential for actualization is Infinite, because only Eternity can fully embrace Infinity.
It is the nature of the all-inclusive Absolute to function as a diversified unity of Infinite Creative Potential Eternally actualizing as a unified diversity or Uni-verse.
We actualize potential by dreaming our experience (rehearsing the future), and experiencing our dream.
Randomness (change) is dual to order
Conserving order amid change is dual to conserving change amid order.
Thesis is dual to anti-thesis, the time independent Hegelian dialectic.
Alive (thesis) is dual to not alive (anti-thesis) -- Schrodinger's or Hegel's cat.
At the time of ANW's physical embodiment, there was no serious electronic assemblies that could be considered "AI". Could you speculate on the implications of a Whitehead-ian view of its place in our corporate ontology. Perhaps a venue other than RUclips would be appropriate.
Beautiful summary
Whitehead points to the major flaw of science. The need for repetition. If something can not be repeated it is not relevant. This limits scientific reality to those aspects that can repeated .
How is the desire for our claims to be repeated within a system that controls nature in certain ways a flaw?
A particular theory or system requires repetition to be validated but I'm not sure science at large does. What is not repeated is very much relevant, at best as curiosity where more research is needed and as worst as a temporary or permanent obstacle.
Science is not confined to a single theory but allows for the creation of new theories and for the interplay, oftentimes antagonistic, between various old theories to exist side by side
We grab nature by the throat and tell it to do something or manipulate it in order to know it; how intrusive; some times they don’t give us what we want
Awesome video
Very nice summary! Thanks.
Do you still plan to make the follow up video? I'd really love to see that!
This video is brilliant and thoughtful
Thank you love
Great video!
You make reference in this video to a letter from Whitehead to Russell, about the limitations of the scientific method. How can I get a copy of this letter. Do you have a citation, so I can search for it? John
Yeah, that's being emulated by the material substrate.
Nice video, Kramer, very interesting.
Thanks!
Is this really your work? Why do you have so few videos? I would love to hear the follow up
This channel is awesome.
Thanks for sharing this!
For anyone interested in a practical view on psychology that is highly compatible with Whiteheadian Philosophy, check out Roberto Assagioli's Psychosynthesis.
Good video.
I own no Whitehead tomes! Had to learn everything I know about him online, or rather I chose to. Therefore, some might say I don't know enough about Whitehead's ideas to judge that your message here is a good summary. But I can say this: Had I heard this first, a lot of time would have been saved. I don't buy Whitehead's take, but he's grappling with a difficult problem like Sheldrake, and I think there's probably at least one thing very true he tries to describe about moments...moments, say, of realization. I remember such moments as more stretched out than "actual occasions"; but who knows, the thoughts I was aware of at the time may have been accompanied by other thoughts not brought to consciousness [which now in the relative future perhaps I'm more aware of]...all of them (including one in words) may have hit me in a time span as short as that of an "actual occasion"! As I get older it does seem such vignettes have a life of their own. An old usage of "Atman" was equivalent to "World Soul." Analogous to what I believe would be the assertion that such a moment was a moment of experience of the World Soul, or for Atman, that I synched into. I don't see it that way (probably where I veer away from ANW). I see it hypothetically as a moment of experience received out of, say, a "morphic field" which souls akin to mine also received. How akin? It would be too involved to say. These moments with lives of their own make me think of the Akashic records concept. The "duality" of things as they are versus how they're experienced doesn't for me mean they're fuzzy items. It doesn't mean for me their attributes aren't "hard" and remarkable. This is probably because I see the universe from which they're derived as having for the moment significant stasis, and not overwhelming flux. For instance, the 92 "natural" elements seem to have been designed to accomadate things with fixed natures...for a species like my own. I deem soul-substance likewise, though the human mind phenomenon I do not believe can grasp the "elements" from which it is fashioned.
So whitehead is saying that experience is non-representational? Instead it is relational, and being itself is relationality? So then being and consciousness collapse into one another?
Process vs substance. Is that Spinoza's substance?
Why the background music????
You didn't upload the second video 😭🥴
Thanks for posting!!
Excellent... thanks 🙏
Thanks for this. 👌
I’m related to this guy
Thanks. This made sense. Subscribed.
Good stuff! Thank you!!
Providing Whitehead’s arguments for the assertions that you attribute to him would have made this a useful lecture. Without the arguments, it’s not very enlightening.
I'm from Indonesia, I love your videos & channel, you're a smart & deep person, which is sadly very rare in our world,. do you have facebook/twitter/anything that I can connect more? thanks
Thank you! That means a lot to me. I am going to make a Twitter very soon and I will link you to it. I also have much more material on my blog, kramerknipe.wordpress.com
Very nicely done! Now, it's time for hot dogs.
Well done.
Easier to dwell upon the mathematical and philosophical insights of him and Russell while ignoring their dotty politics, but it is artificial to separate out the two. I agree with Russell that world peace is good, as do nearly all thinking people, but his way of going about it was context-less and ineffective.
15:00
A fascinating essay on Whitehead here
www3.sympatico.ca/rlubbock/ANW.html
If universal truths don't exist according to whitehead, then so is his theory well a theory, meaning his statement is also a fundamental and disproves itself. (Terrible mathematical analogy so please correct me if i am wrong) If f(x)=y, y being true is dependant on a statement (ex y is true if its odd, even etc). Even if y is true, its not the function that is true but the statement in that respect, the truth is integral to the statement and not the function. Please correct me (i also realise that this not only disproves but also proves itself lol, what a terrible predicament)
I share a philosophy class with this genus.
And the Hegelian’s took it for primary education indoctrination.
Whitehead was Raw
Williams Scott Harris Thomas Harris Margaret
Terence mckenna
Mackenna is a gateway drug to Whitehead
That's not real Metaphysics
I can't believe it. This is the philosophy I experienced. Synchronicity off rep. Nice.