You seem to be descending into dualistic thinking here. — Janus
For Whitehead the sum of the experiences (the interpretations) just is the world — Janus
Except that QM doesn't model the collapse to anything as concrete as an occasion. It only models the time evolution of a set of wavefunction probabilities. And this depends on an a-temporal or non-local view of reality. — apokrisis
Again I would say that the absolute separation of "reality" into subjective and objective is the artificial "bifurcation of nature" to which Whitehead takes strong objection.So Segall says Whitehead's intent is to collapse the abstract scientific account back to a subjective experiential account. And you say his intent is to separate those two accounts — apokrisis
When two particles interact they "experience" each other, and the physical description of that interaction is only a partial description of what actually goes on. — prothero
how about things in the past do they have "concrete" existence? Not to derail the discussion into one about time but it did start as a question about duration and existence in process philosophy. — prothero
Whitehead’s philosophy is not anti science. As far as it goes scientific analysis and explanations are useful and pragmatic; it is just that such explanations are not total or complete. The “heroic feats of explaining away” occur when one tries to reduce say “ human mental experience” i.e. the warmth of the sun or the color red; as mere electrical impulses or the influence of neurotransmitter chemical s upon neural synapses. Such explanations are not so much wrong as they are partial, incomplete and unsatisfactory. It is in trying to reduce nature to the empirical, the objective “the real” versus the experience of color “the subjective or somehow” the unreal , not part of the “real world” that one commits a unnecessary “bifurcation of nature”. Everything that is experienced is real and is part of nature.Again, still no explanation of what non conscious experience is in this physicalist description of nature such that it makes a damn difference to anything consciously experienced as an observable. — apokrisis
But in the case of Schroedinger's cat we cannot. This is why it's said it was neither dead or alive. If the cat knew it or not is not taken into account.With a cat, the behaviour tends to be reasonably different. We can tell. — apokrisis
First I have to say that I am not familiar with Whitehead nor with quantum physics. But as far as I understand it the predictions, the math. apparatus is not the only problem but the interpretation thereof. If the cat has a probability X of being alive this just cannot be the whole story. It is one thing to say "we do not know exactly" and another to say "it's neither of both".What does it change about the predictions we might make concerning what we may observe? — apokrisis
Or think of it another way: for Whitehead in prehension would there not be what prehends, what is prehended and the act of prehension? — Janus
Whitehead necessarily challenges the founding assumption of modern scientific reason: that of a “split subject”(Lacan1978,138ff.),or a figure of Man as “empirico-transcendental doublet” (Foucault 1970, 318ff.). For Whitehead, the experimenter cannot be separated from the experiment, because they are both present in the world in the same manner
Therefore there can be neither phenomenology nor positivism, and neither cognitivism nor behaviorism
He writes without embarrassment of the “feelings” and“ satisfactions” of a plant, an inorganic object like Cleopatra’s Needle, or even an electron. Every event or entity has what he calls both “mental” and “physical” poles, and both a “private” and a “public” dimension. In the vast interconnections of the universe, everything both perceives and is perceived.
When Whitehead writes of the “mental pole”of an electron, or a monument, we must remember that “mental operations do not necessarily involve consciousness ”;indeed, most often they happen entirely without consciousness (1929/1978, 85). Whitehead derives his terms from our ordinary language about human thought, feeling, and behavior; in this way ,he signals his distance from any sort of positivism, or from what more recently has come to be called “eliminative materialism.” But he also radically de-anthropomorphizes these terms, in order to distinguish his position from any simple privileging of the human, or from the “panpsychism” of which he is sometimes accused. It is not the case that we human beings have some special essence of “mentality,” while trees and rocks and electrons don’t. But neither is our sentience just an illusion. The difference is rather one of degree. The “mental pole” of an occasion contributing to the existence of a tree or a rock or an electron is never entirely absent, but it is so feeble as to be “negligible.” In contrast, the “mental pole” of an occasion that contributes to my consciousness, or to my identity, is intense, active, and largely dominant.
To avoid the anthropomorphic – or at least cognitive and rationalistic – connotations of words like “mentality” and “perception,” Whitehead invents the term prehension for the act by which one actual occasion takes up and responds to another. Clear and distinct human sense-perception, as it is conceived in the classical philosophical tradition from Descartes to the positivists of the twentieth century, is one sort of prehension. But it is far from the only one. Our lives are filled with experiences of “non-sensuous perception” (1933/1967, 180-181): from our awareness of the immediate past (181), to the feelings we have “that we see by our eyes, and taste by our palates”(1929/1978,122). In the same way, “a jellyfish advances and withdraws, and in so doing exhibits some perception of causal relationship with the world beyond itself; a plant grows downwards to the damp earth, and upwards to the light” (176). These are all prehensions. For that matter, the earth prehends the sun that gives it energy; the stone prehends the earth to which it falls. — Steven Shaviro
When one electron experiences another one, what is the maths involved? How does your gay talk about experiencing change a damn thing about how physics already talks about how electrons act? — apokrisis
I'm not completely familiar with Whitehead's metaphysics, only from secondary sources, but I think he emphasizes the reality of the present, as the time when activity occurs. Each occasion would consist of a duration, and duration exists as a passage. You might call this the passage of time, I think he somewhere refers to it as the passage of nature. I think concrescence, as a concept is required to account for the apparent continuity of the passage of time, such that an event with temporal extension exhibits concrete existence. A present event with temporal extension into the past, would therefore have concrete existence. As far as I know, Whitehead doesn't offer a decisive way to distinguish present from past, as an event with temporal extension has concrete existence in the past, just as much as the passage, now, has concrete existence. So there is no proper principle to separate the past from the present as one is the continuity of the other.. — Metaphysician Undercover
But in the case of Schroedinger's cat we cannot. This is why it's said it was neither dead or alive. If the cat knew it or not is not taken into account. — Heiko
The notion of “photons” is however an abstraction. — prothero
But the information theoretic turn in fundamental physics is founded on a measurable dualism between information storage and entropy production. It is proper theory. — apokrisis
That's like saying "When one human experiences another, what is the maths involved? — Janus
On the other hand we can say, and it is said, that electrons experience and respond to the kinds of subatomic forces that have become codified in particle physics and chemistry.
I think this is probably all that Whitehead intended; to suggest that human "interiority" is primordially prefigured in the the quasi-interiority of the electron, the atom, the molecule, the cell, and so on. It's a way of thinking that parallels semiotic thinking and information theory, which also rely on the idea of surfaces and interiority. — Janus
A description of the experience using informational constructs, is not the experience. — schopenhauer1
Actual occasions have duration, incorporate data or facts from prior completed occasions and from future possibilities or potentials (through prehension) . Actual Occasions upon completion perish and become data or facts for the formation of new or subsequent Occasions.
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One moment or occasion would seem to perish, and a new moment or occasion would seem to form... — prothero
We are talking about bleeding electrons here. And therefore, why a description of electromagnetic interactions using experiential constructs is crackpot.
Do you really want to add your name to the list of card-carrying Whiteheadians? — apokrisis
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