Whiteheadian Metaphysics and the Open Universe - Experimental Video

All right, so this lecture is about Whiteheadian metaphysics and its implications for an open universe. So, before I begin, I would like to discuss what we mean by an open universe and how we can relate the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead to the idea of an open universe. We will use his philosophical terminology, his concepts, and the implications of his philosophical system to support the latest research in physics which conforms to the idea of an open universe.

Alfred North Whitehead was a philosopher and a mathematician in the 20th century who is better known for his collaboration with Bertrand Russell on the *Principia Mathematica*. Basically, I am going to trace the philosophical roots of Whitehead's own ideas before I explain what he had to say, and then I'm going to relate it with how we can use his ideas and his concepts to clarify our notions of an open universe. How we can use his ideas to look at the results of physics and our own experience in order to support the idea of an open universe.

So what is an open universe? Basically, it goes against the grain of contemporary implicit metaphysics that physics has unconsciously adopted from the Newtonian era. And we all know what that is because it is hardly ever questioned; it has become second nature to us. The idea that the universe can be totally reduced to some eternal laws which, if we can discover them, deterministically describe how reality evolves and flows. And there is this master equation or a Theory of Everything which is going to unite all areas of physics into one coherent framework where even the fundamental constants of nature are going to be explained.

So what we actually see in physics is this patchwork quilt in which there are various models that we use to predict the results of experiments. These models are not universally applicable; they vary according to the context, the level of energies that we are looking at, and the scale in which we are performing our experiments. So you might have heard of the incompatibility between general relativity and quantum mechanics, and even the standard model of particle physics does not conform well to an idea of a master equation. Because there are a lot of arbitrary elements in the model which have been adjusted not by predictions from the model itself, but by experimental results which actually modify the variable terms that we use in order to predict the results of experiment. So the standard model of particle physics is not an explanation; it is basically a predictive framework.

Now what I am going to argue in this talk is that science is better viewed as a predictive framework. We go a step too far when we take our scientific models and we either think of them as natural laws which we implicitly assume are explanations of the phenomena. Now we are going to discuss all these different things, but basically what I'm trying to say is that we should not think that physics is isomorphic to certain eternal and necessary mathematical objects that exist in some Platonic realm out there. And basically, we are trying to uh refine our models and come up with ever more expensive frameworks which we think will conform to the Platonic natural dynamical law which controls the evolution of the entire universe. There is nothing like that which is waiting to be discovered because the universe does not work that way. Assuming that the universe works that way is not a part of science; it is an implicit metaphysics. And we can interpret every scientific result in an alternative metaphysical framework which conforms more closely to what we actually observe rather than what we bring into the experiment. The conceptual model through which we look at reality might not be adequate.

So, at the end we are also going to see how order evolves in an open universe and what that actually entails about the kind of metaphysics that we should have. How actuality interacts with possibility, and whether we need to discard all notions of Platonism or adopt some features and radically modify Platonism to conform with the idea of an open universe. And what flavor of Platonism can actually not conflict with the idea of an open universe. So we come to the concept of radical empiricism.

In ordinary empiricism, what we find is that the idea is basically very simple: the test of a model is experiment, and all explanations of phenomena should have their ground in some experimental result. But as we are going to see, if we do not all become radical empiricists, then we are actually operating at a level which is far removed from experience. We are bringing certain theoretical notions into the way we interpret nature and the way we think of nature which are not supported by the empirical evidence. And there is actually a very mutilated version of empiricism which we think of as empiricism.

So what William James tried to do was that he said that we should become radical empiricists by including those features of experience into our explanations of natural processes which we have illegitimately excluded from nature. Now, meaning, values, subjectivity, emotions, feelings—these are seen as human phenomena which have been relegated to the domain of the human brain. It is somehow thought that all these different things—purposes, meaning, values, emotions, feelings—are somehow unique features of our experience, and we should not claim that these features are also pervasive in the natural world. We segregate all these things to the side of the human and we claim that either these things are illusory because only the bottom level is real, which follows from the concept of reduction.

Now, as Sayyadina has coined this term, reduction and holism as compared to holism. So what reduction means is that we apply a methodology to interpret our scientific results; it is a way of making experiments in which we try to break down the phenomena conceptually into smaller components, and then we try to study those components in order to understand how the system which emerges from their interactions works. Now, in certain cases we can actually model the system just by the interactions of its parts, but as we have seen in biology and looking at the work of Michael Polanyi, the emergent levels of organization in which living organisms work, and if we use the results of the mathematical framework of Erich Jantsch, we can see that there are real levels of causal emergence in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts. And there is an emergent causality which acts to constrain the activity of the lower levels in a top-down fashion. So there is no privileged level of causality in nature; reality is arranged in these hierarchical modules, not only in biology but as I would argue in physics as well. And it would be better if we reject reductionism and keep reduction, because reduction is just a tool; reductionism is the metaphysics that we illegitimately assume.

So what William James said was that our human experience is a very special exemplification of the general processes by which nature works. So if we are to understand the ground of meaning, values, intentionality, emotions, and feelings, we should not exclude them from the rest of nature. This is a sort of panpsychism, and I'm going to explain exactly how it differs from contemporary notions of psychism and how Whitehead utilizes this notion.

Now this should feel like I'm talking about idealism, but I'm using this term in a very specific sense. Idealism does not mean solipsism; first of all, I should make that clear. What it means is that the ground stuff of reality, or the way natural processes are in themselves, the way they work, actually incorporate all these different things that we observe in our experience. Now there are certain factors in our experience which we cannot impose on nature; that would be committing the anthropic fallacy. We should not anthropomorphize nature; we should not think that, for example, natural processes occur because of some agent which is controlling those processes, like the animistic notions of the past in which the weather and the volcanoes and all these different natural phenomena were controlled by the gods. That is not what it means. So it means that they should find a way to incorporate these notions in a simpler manner at all levels of organization in nature, because if we do not do that we would have to face up with the problem of what is known as the hard problem of consciousness: basically, how does physical matter give rise to consciousness? And since we have separated all these mind-like phenomena from the concept of physicality in the first place, there exists no explanation which can bridge this chasm. And this is not a problem which pertains only to discussions of neuroscience; this is—if we do not solve this problem or dissolve this problem, as I would say—our entire ontology of how the natural world works is threatened by it. And I think an open universe, the idea of an open universe would benefit if we come up with an ontology in which the hard problem does not even arise, in which we do not illegitimately bifurcate nature into mind and matter.

Now this is not to say that we should adopt a non-naturalistic philosophy, because as I'm going to argue, the very idea of what we mean by physical needs to be updated. It does not mean that there are two separate realms, the mental and the physical, that somehow interact with each other or they do not. We need to modify our notion of what we mean by physical to incorporate both features of what we call matter and of mind into one common substrate.

So William James argued that we have fetishized the notion of this senseless, valueless, purposeless, non-mind-like stuff which we call matter, and we model nature by the interactions of all these material particles. So this is a hypothetical construction because it is an inference; we make this inference because we observe that our consciousness, in our experience, is not the totality of nature; the totality of nature is independent of us; there exists an external world out there. We cannot adopt a solipsistic point of view. So now we need to explain how our experience is embedded and arises because of the processes occurring in nature.

Now he says that the hypothesis of such a senseless, valueless material is actually not needed if we can come up with the connective support which is connecting all the experiences of the entirety of nature into a coherent framework by utilizing the relations which are embedded within experience itself. William James said that not only does concrete experience have the qualities that it has, it also has an inherent relationality into it. Now we are going to see exactly what he means by that, but what he claims is that the world does not need extraneous, trans-empirical connective support; experience possesses it in its own right, a concatenated or continuous structure. And the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience, because experience can be immediately observed. If we are to become empiricists in the true manner, then we should only talk in terms of things that we have actually observed in experience, in the articulated structure of experience. We do not need to posit hypothetical entities which somehow give rise to experience, as for example Kant did by positing a noumenal realm. The noumena—the phenomena is basically an illusion, its appearance—and the noumena somehow gives rise to it. And because we can only sense the phenomena, the perceptions, we cannot actually see what the noumena is or sense it or feel it or think it in any way, because all our mind-like perceptions are phenomena.

So what we are going to argue for here is that there is no noumena; there is only phenomena, and in phenomena we find this concatenated structure which we can use to bridge the gap between our artificial conception of mind and matter. So coming towards Hume.

Now Hume is famous for his problem of induction, the problem of causality. Basically, Hume divided our perception into these bare sensa. These bare sensa are the sounds, the colors, the feelings, the emotions, everything that is represented on our screen of perception. Basically, he said that we only observe succession in the changing phenomena on our screen of awareness, and we derive our notion of causality as an inference from the succession of these perceptions as they pass on our screen of perception. There exists no necessary connection between how these successive phenomena appear in front of us. We derive the notion of causality through induction and generalization when we observe that certain phenomena without failing repeat each other under certain circumstances. So we think that under this context and under these limits this phenomenon is going to happen, this phenomenon is going to unfold in this manner, and then we extract the mathematical form of the regularity that we observe in the passage of phenomena, and we use that to come up with the notion of not only causality but laws that explain this phenomenon.

Now I'm going to argue that generalizing from experience does not constitute an explanation, but first of all let us get past what Hume is saying. So Hume is saying that causality is an inferred, derived notion; causality cannot be directly observed; causality is only posited through generalization and induction. So this is Hume's problem of causality. Secondly, what I would like to bring your focus to is his notion of atomizing experience. Hume, like Locke, both atomized experience into these bare sensa, and then they wondered how these bare sensa get integrated into a unified experience. They start with the notion in which experience is cut up into these various parts, bare sensa, and then they would have to explain how it is integrated.

Now, in modern philosophy, especially in the work of Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead as well, we see this notion of Gestalt psychology in which there is no sense in which we can treat these bare sensa as isolated individuals. The very concept of a bare sensa is a result of a conceptual operation; it is not a part of direct experience. Direct experience is always whole; it always has a Gestalt character, and the very idea of individual sensations is a result of the operation of our discursive intellect.

So now we come to the idea of the discursive intellect and how whenever we apply the discursive intellect to phenomena, we come up with these mutilated concepts which are useful in describing experience perhaps, but they cannot claim to be experience or to explain experience. Now we come to Bergson.

Bergson says that through the process of reasoning, or the process by which the discursive intellect operates—what Iain McGilchrist calls the operation of the left hemisphere—the intellect cuts up reality into these distinct, isolated, clear conceptions because it likes clarity. Now our original direct experience is always holistic; it is vague; it has somehow an implicit character. There are certain things which are suggested in experience which cannot be clearly, distinctly analyzed unless we operate on it by the discursive intellect. So in direct experience, experience always has a connected, Gestalt-like, holistic structure, and not everything is clear; some items of experience are vague as well. But the very idea of picking out various components of our experience and isolating them and cutting them up is the operation of the intellect.

So similarly, Bergson said that the idea of time that we use in physics is different from the way we perceive time in our phenomenological experience. So Bergson came up with this idea of duration. Now duration is the real living moment which we experience phenomenologically, and he said that the essence of time is the way it flows in concrete experience, the way it flows in consciousness. This is not to say that the entirety of nature is conscious; consciousness implies self-awareness under the definition I am using. I'm not saying that he's saying that the way time flows concretely is experiential. If we are to become radical empiricists, we would have to attribute experience to all of nature; nature's processes should all be experiential, because otherwise we cannot make sense of an insensate noumenal substructure which is valueless, purposeless, mindless, which can somehow give rise to experience. In this ontology, experience is fundamental; consciousness is special; it comes later in evolution, but the living moment is, or duration is, what constitutes time. And when the intellect operates on it, we come up with these various paradoxes, like the paradoxes of Zeno, which are an artifact of the way the intellect has cut up duration into the concept of time, time seen as succession.

Now Bergson says that duration should not be viewed as succession; the essence of creation and novelty is time; time is where facts are created. So once we try to incorporate the notion of time into our dynamical equations in physics, we use the variable T. Now in this transposition, we can easily reverse the sign of T and symmetrically reverse the flow of time. So now the arrow of time becomes a problem which we have to explain because we have illegitimately mutilated duration to come up with the notion of succession which we call time in physics. And then since our dynamical equations do not care whether we run time forwards or backwards, it is going to result in the same predictions in either direction. So we come to think of the arrow of time as an illusion as well.

What Whitehead said is that, "I am greatly indebted to Bergson and William James and John Dewey. One of my preoccupations has been to rescue their type of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly has been associated with it." Because Bergson had these debates with Einstein in which he actually acknowledged the results of special relativity, but he did not like the metaphysical presuppositions under which Einstein was interpreting his results. Now, as some physicists say, special relativity does not necessarily lead to a universe in which time is a fiction, even though Einstein, as he was inspired by Spinoza in Spinozistic monistic philosophy, time does not make sense because everything is given all at once; everything is deterministic, and there is no creation or novelty. So since he was inspired by Spinoza, he wanted to discover this eternal order of things, and he brought those philosophical ideas into his interpretations of relativity. Now it's a debate which I do not want to get into right now as to what special relativity has to do with the reality of time, but let's move on.

So before we get into Whitehead's notion of the actual occasion, which is his original philosophical concept which I would argue is not a metaphysical notion, as Randall R. Dipert argues in his book *The Quantum of Explanation*, it is a conceptual tool which Whitehead utilizes for a specific purpose under certain limits. Because whenever we apply the discursive intellect to time, we come up with concepts which are abstracted from the flow of time, and so those abstractions can never replace the original living moment. The original living moment is the foundation, and our conceptions and our abstractions can never explain concrete experience because they are derived from it; they are secondary notions, and they are descriptions of experience under very specific conditions, but they can never replace experience. Whitehead calls this the fallacy of misplaced concreteness when we mistake our abstractions for reality itself. The very notion of dynamical laws existing in this Platonic space out there waiting to be discovered which control the evolution of concrete experience is a form of fallacy of misplaced concreteness. But we are going to explain it in a better way once we get to that slide.

Now let's see what Bradley had to say about this. Now I've shared a paper, "Bradley, James, and Whitehead on Relations," and I think it develops a very beautifully crafted argument in which Bradley shows how the notion of external relations between entities suffers from infinite regress and so it cannot be part of any system in which we are trying to understand how concrete reality works. Now since I haven't actually seen any presentation or a lecture in which Bradley's regress was mentioned before explaining Whitehead, now I am going to argue that jumping straight to the notion of the actual entity does not explain why Whitehead thought the actual entity is the solution. But if we understand what Bradley's regress indicates about our metaphysical systems, then we would better appreciate the role that Whitehead's actual entities play in explanation. So I would suggest that you should go and read the article that I have mentioned because if I start explaining it it would take a lot of time. So I am assuming that you have read the article and you have seen how the notion of the actual entity as modeling the flow of time solves the problem that Bradley has identified in this notion of Bradley's regress.

So both internal relations and external relations were seen to be inherently paradoxical. Bradley actually came up with this Absolute in which he wanted to ground all of relations inside this internally connected system which he called the Absolute; that is how he wanted to solve the problem. But as William James also criticized him and Whitehead also did, we can neither come up with an absolutely monistic system with pure internal relations, neither can we come up with a purely external system which is pluralistic. Now we are going to see that if we adopt any metaphysical system in which there are entities or things and there are relations between those things, then we are going—that is going to be a form of pluralism—and that suffers from Bradley's regress. So this is going to be a metaphilosophical critique of the very idea of materialism and the entire class of materialisms, because in materialism what we have, we have a concept of externally related, insensate material parts. It is never explained what the internal nature of those parts are. So, for example, if we have the notion of an atom or a quark, we can actually describe it using its properties, but it is neither explained how the properties of mass, charge, momentum, spin, and everything which we observe in these entities come together to give you a united object. It is just said that the object is a substance in which these qualities inhere, but it is never explained why these qualities have to relate to each other in such a way to inhere in a single object, what the notion of object actually means, and whether it is a legitimate philosophical notion. Actually, we have adopted uncritically the substance ontology of Aristotle, and we have not modified it to our present purposes, and we have—we speak in the language of subject and predicate logic in which the notion of extrapolating our notions in language and imposing them on concrete reality or how nature actually is is not seen as something illegitimate because it naturally occurs to us and nobody questions it.

So if you look at Bradley's article—basically the article based on the work of Bradley—so we you would get to know how there are certain problems with a system of purely external relations and also with a system in which relations are symmetrical. Now we need asymmetrical relations in order to explain how time flows, and once I've explained the notion of the actual entity, then you can go back to this article and see how Whitehead solves the problem of the paradoxes of Bradley and how the notion of asymmetrical relations actually grounds the very notion of the asymmetrical, unidirectional flow of time itself.

Whitehead's conception is actually a marriage of rationalism with empiricism. Now rationalism is basically how we think of these concepts and we try to derive our metaphysics through the articulation of how these conceptual creations relate to each other, which I tried to derive these from either possibility or necessity. But Whitehead said that he is going to build his metaphysics as a descriptive metaphysics. Now what this means is that we are not going to presume a priori conceptions; we are not going to build our metaphysics from deduction or necessitarianism in which there are some pre-existent notions like the Absolute, and we are going to describe or explain how particulars arise from it or how the phenomena of nature flows. We are not going to build a deductive metaphysics; metaphysics should not be used as an explanation of phenomena; metaphysics should adopt a more modest role of description.

Now what this means is that the only thing that we are certain of is the flow of our concrete experience, and in order to explain how concrete experience flows we cannot look to an explanation which lies outside of concrete experience, because it is assumed under radical empiricism that there exists nothing outside of concrete experience. So the best that we can do is that we can identify the general notions which are exemplified in every instance of concrete experience, and we can build a descriptive metaphysics from it, because there are going to be certain notions which are going to be present in every instance of becoming, every concrete flow of experience, and then there are going to be certain notions which only appear in certain special class of experience. So we can build a descriptive metaphysics in which we can gradually come to identify the general notions. For example, the most generalized notion is process; the very idea of becoming. There can be no experience without becoming; there exists no static conception of reality; everything is dynamic; everything is flowing; concrete experience is undergoing creation and it is flowing in concrete reality. So this flow of experience is actually called process by Whitehead, which is why his philosophy is also known as process metaphysics.

So Whitehead came up with these four different notions which he used to explain what a descriptive metaphysics should adopt; basically, the four conditions that any descriptive metaphysics should adopt. Now we all know that a metaphysical system should be logical and it should be consistent. Then there is this other notion in which Whitehead says that these conceptions should be coherent as well. Now what he means by coherence is very special; he says that every notion in our metaphysical system should implicate every other notion, which means that we cannot understand an individual notion without making reference to all the other notions; it is an interconnecting system of relational conceptions. Basically, this diverges from the earlier metaphysical systems. For example, if we consider the hard problem of consciousness, the very reason it is called a problem is because we have come up with these two notions which do not mutually implicate each other: the notion of mind and matter, *res extensa* and *res cogitans*. *Res extensa* corresponds to physical extension and matter, and *res cogitans* corresponds to mind. Now we can easily imagine in our conceptual imagination how mind can exist totally independently from matter, and matter can exist totally independent from mind. Now once we have made these conceptions so distinct from each other that they do not mutually implicate each other, then we cannot bridge the gap or the chasm between them. So the hard problem of consciousness is basically the result of our own conceptual confusion because our very basic metaphysical notion of matter and mind are so distinct from each other that there exists no point of contact between them; they do not mutually implicate each other. So Whitehead wanted to come up with this system in which not only was Bradley's regress avoided—because in materialism all you have is externally related, insensate material—and then you have mind, and not only does matter not explain mind, the external relations of the matter itself are actually not coherent notions because they suffer from Bradley's regress. So we have to come up with a system in which not only the asymmetry of time is explained, things are not just externally related nor are they purely internally related; there is neither a pluralism nor a monism, but something between the two, a pluralistic monism.

Now the second criteria is the criteria of applicable and adequate; every metaphysical notion that we come up with should apply to some instance of concrete experience; it should refer to or describe some part of concrete experience. And if it does not refer to concrete experience and we do not need to posit it, because our metaphysics is not explanatory; it is descriptive. So the last notion is adequacy: all our metaphysical notions which are applicable to some portion of concrete experience should, as a combined whole, refer to the entirety of experience; all our conceptions combined together should apply to the entirety of the properties of concrete experience; there should be no part of concrete experience that should be left out; there should be a notion corresponding to every part of concrete experience.

So if we have these four principles, we can come up with an adequate and applicable, logical and coherent metaphysics. Then there is this very important notion of Whitehead's ontological principle: that whatever reality pertains to abstraction is derived from the actual entities upon which it is founded or of which it is comprised. Now this sounds—I don't know—I think if somebody heard it for the first time they would not understand it, but what this actually means is that there exists no abstractions in concrete reality; basically, every abstraction that we come up with has to refer to concrete experience. The explanations that we have of phenomena are basically referrals to concrete experience itself; we cannot use abstractions to explain concrete experience; concrete experience explains abstractions; the arrow of explanation is reversed.

Now in physics we see that we undertake experiments, we observe regularities, then we capture that regularity in a mathematical form. Now we take a step which I don't know why we take that step, but it is so counterintuitive once you come to think of it, once you break out of this spell that you ever wonder why it was accepted by the majority of scientists in the first place. The notion is that the very thing that needs explaining is order and regularity; once you convert your regularity into mathematical equations, dynamical laws, then you claim that the explanation of that regularity is that dynamical law. But how can it be an explanation of that regularity because all you have done is more precisely define that regularity in a mathematical form? How can a more precise description of a regularity explain the regularity itself? This can only be done if you posit a Platonic realm in which somehow that dynamical law lives, and by capturing that regularity in that dynamical law we are trying to make an illegitimate isomorphic connection between our dynamical law and that supposed law of nature that governs how reality flows.

So what we are going to see is that since abstractions can never be explanations, only concrete experiences can be explanations. Now this not only goes against reductionism, it goes against dynamical law Platonism; this is basically called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, like I was saying. We reify or hypothesize our abstractions and claim that they are the foundation of our explanations; we forget that they are basically the way that we have captured the regularities which need explaining in a precise form. So we use that mathematical form in order to explain those regularities. Once again, this is known as reification or hypothesizing, taking the abstract for the concrete; concrete concreteness is the foundation of explanation. Now this is a very difficult notion to wrap your head around if you are still stuck in that old ontology, but it makes perfect sense once the insight clicks.

So theories are not explanations; they are pragmatic tools for experimental prediction. The role of science should be to make predictions under such a context, under such limitations, under a particular set of conditions. So theories are pragmatic tools that we develop; theories are never explanations of phenomena. We illegitimately call these explanations because we have a nested structure of abstractions in our scientific theories; some abstractions are more universal than the others, and so we come to think of these universal abstractions as explanations of these lower-order abstractions. But what this is saying is that we should only take these theories as predictive tools; they should not form a part of our ontology. And what this means is that natural laws are not laws; basically, they are persistent regularities, and the fact that we observe them so regularly does still does not prove that they are universal or they are timeless, because we have not checked them at all times; basically this is just an assumption that we make that they are applicable at every scale, at every time, in every place. They are applicable under certain conditions; there are laws which are invariant under a whole host of different conditions, but that still does not give you the license to illegitimately claim that they are universal and eternal and timeless, because not only does that not explain them in any way, because you have basically just pushed the explanation under the rug; you have taken the law as fundamental when the law was the very thing that needed explaining. So laws are not laws; they are basically regularities; the word regularities should be used for them.

So now I have written down a passage from Alfred North Whitehead's book *Process and Reality*, which is the main exemplification of his metaphysical system, and I would like to read it for you. It basically describes the ontological principle: "Every condition to which the process of becoming conforms has its reason either in the character of some actual entity in the actual world of that concrescence, or in the character of the subject which is in the process of concrescence. This category of explanation is termed the ontological principle; it could also be termed the principle of efficient and final causation. This ontological principle means that actual entities are the only reasons, so that to search for a reason is to search for one or more actual entities. It follows that any condition to be satisfied by one actual entity in its process expresses a fact either about the real internal constitution of some other actual entities or about a subjective aim conditioning that process."

Now you might have heard a lot of different terms: subjective aim, or concrescence, or actual entity, real internal constitution; these definitions will make sense once we analyze what we mean by actual entity, and then you can come back to this definition.

So now we come to Whitehead's metacritique of materialism, which I said follows from the impossibility of having externally related entities, which is what we assume in materialism. "The material is in itself the ultimate substance. Evolution, on the materialistic theory, is reduced to the role of being another word for the description of the changes of the external relations between portions of matter. There is nothing to evolve, because one set of external relations is as good as any other set of external relations; they can be merely changed, purposeless and unprogressive. But the whole point of the modern doctrine is the evolution of the complex organisms from antecedent states of less complex organisms. The doctrine thus cries aloud for a conception of organism as fundamental for nature; it also requires an underlying activity, a substantial activity expressing itself in achievements of organism."

Now Alfred North Whitehead calls his philosophy the philosophy of organism, and he's basically saying in this quote that if we merely assume a universe in which externally related parts interact with each other, then there can be no real change or novelty; all change is merely difference of position or change in the external relations, and nothing new ever happens; everything that can happen is actually defined by the entirety of ways in which these parts can relate to each other. So novelty is impossible in a materialistic universe if we assume things and relations between things. So then he says that we get this false idea that nature is a mere aggregate of independent entities, each capable of isolation. According to this conception, these entities, whose characteristics are capable of isolated definition, come together and, by their accidental relations, form the system of nature. "The explanation of nature which I urge as an alternative ideal to this accidental view of nature is that nothing in nature could be what it is except as an ingredient in nature as it is." So this actually supports what he was saying earlier.

Now we come to Whitehead's reply to Hume. Basically, since Whitehead is a radical empiricist, he has observed certain segments of experience which give us a direct perception of causality itself. Now causality, which we think of in physics as—everything has a cause—all right, I'm not going to give you a precise definition, but that is what we mean by causality or the principle of sufficient reason, you can say. So causality, Hume says, is never directly observed; it is always inferred because there exists no necessary connection between the flow of perceptions on our screen of consciousness or awareness. But what Whitehead is saying is that there are two ways in which we perceive: either in the mode of causal efficacy or in the mode of presentational immediacy. Now since when we think of perception we almost always think of the visual metaphor in which things appear to our vision, Whitehead says that this is a level of perception which is far removed from causality. We can actually directly perceive the causal connection between events if we look at the proprioceptive processes of our bodily sensation. For example, if I touch a hot stove, I'm going to feel a sharp pain, and that pain is going to be the reason why I pull my hand away from the stove. So there is no reason to look for causality anywhere else, because under radical empiricism the explanations are always inside concrete experience. So the reason I pulled my hand away from it is because I experienced a very unpleasant sensation once I put my hand on it, and that impelled my hand to move away from it; it is a reflex, but the reflex is predicated on this thing which we call causal efficacy. Causal efficacy is the direct perception of causality. This is a very difficult concept if we do not let go of the old ontology, but what this is basically saying is that once we—sometimes we feel a certain ease and sometimes we feel impulsion. When, for example, if you are getting tackled on a rugby field, the feelings that you are getting, the constraints that are being applied on your body are directly felt in the unity of experience, and those are causal efficacy.

So Whitehead is claiming that the entirety of nature, which is all the streams of experience, causality is transmitted through these feelings; feelings are the vectors that transmit causality. All right, and the reason why we do not observe causality in our present mode of presentational immediacy, in vision, is because our body has filtered all these causal levels, and the mode of presentational immediacy is a high-grade experience; it has abstracted out all these causal influences, and the objects that we see on our screen of perception are in a mode in which only the essential features which are useful for modeling the rest of the environment are present on the screen of perception. And so since they do not contain feelings, once the sensations or the colors and shapes and objects in our field of awareness shift and we observe regularities between them, we do not observe causality because we are looking for causality in the wrong place. Causality can be immediately felt in the perceptions of our body as feelings; feelings are the ground of energy, and feelings are the transmission of causality.

So now we come to Whitehead's solution: the actual occasion. Actual occasions are basically conceptual tools which Whitehead uses to articulate experience. So Whitehead says that in the living moment, facts are created; the process is how time gets its asymmetrical direction. So in the present moment, we can come up with certain conceptual tools in order to understand what is actually happening.

In our descriptive metaphysics, this is not to say that actual entities are atomic divisions of time, and they succeed each other, because that would be like beads on a string, and we are looking for a continuous philosophy. So actual entities are not explanations, all right, but they, they give us a window from which we can actually understand how experience flows concretely.

So, in the living moment, the actual occasion prehends the past; facts perish as soon as they come into being. That is how we live in an eternal present. This is not to say that I'm espousing presentism, but just saying that the past transforms into the present by perishing, all right.

So an actual occasion prehends, or integrates, a disjunctive diversity of individual prehensions from the actualities of the past. So, for example, all the facts that have existed in the past make a contribution towards the forming of a new fact, and the actual occasion has a subjective form. Now that subjective form is basically, uh, a way in which the actual occasion selects which prehensions it needs to integrate into its subjective unity and which prehensions it has to exclude. So the prehensions that is, it excludes are those facts which do not come into the formation of a new fact.

Now this is an instance of the notion of local becoming. Becoming is not something that evolves holistically as a whole; becoming is actually local. All facts that are created in the universe are instances of local becoming. So the actual occasion is basically constituted by its relations to past actualities. The actual occasion is not an object, all right. It is not an isolated system which is, which whose internal nature we don't know about. Its internal nature is not some entity; its internal relation literally is its relations with all the previous actualities of the past which have made a causal contribution towards it.

So these prehensions flow in through feelings, and, uh, there are, there are physical prehensions which are basically the prehensions of all the past actualities, and then there are also conceptual prehensions. And conceptual apprehensions are the pure potentials. So what is actually happening is that process happens by the process of the many becoming one, and then they are increased by one.

So let us analyze the statement: the many become one and are increased by one. So the many become one when the actual occasion prehends the prior actualities by positive or negative prehensions, and the way it apprehends them is under the guidance of its subjective aim or the unity that it is going towards. Now, once I would start giving you examples from concrete experience, it would actually become very clear what I'm saying, but one instance is that when we look at conceptual prehensions. Conceptual prehensions are these pure potentials, all right, uh, they are what Whitehead calls the Eternal objects. Now do not let your mind go into a Platonic realm, right now, just think of these Eternal objects as potentials, all right.

Now all these prehensions that have been inherited from the past can be integrated in a wide variety of different ways, all right, and every potential that is relevant to that forming concrescence—concrescence is the way in which these, uh, disjunctive unity of all these different prehensions develops into a unitive subjective experience—now this subjective experience can be integrated in a wide variety of different ways, and these ways are the potentials, all right. So there can be a variety of different potentials under which this concrescence can happen; there is not just one way. So what the concrescence aims towards is the subjective aim, which is also a potential, and it also aims for harmony under contrast.

Now I'm going to explain that what Whitehead means by evolution is the achievement of aesthetics. Right, aesthetics is the ground stuff of reality, and once we go into music, I am going to explain what I mean by this. So what happens is that a disjunctive diversity of different elements are brought together under a unity in which they can be harmoniously integrated. So the greater the diversity, the more difficult it is to bring them under a unity, but when they are brought under a unity, uh, you have to think of this in terms of the concept of the coincidental oppositorum, or the unity of indifference. Basically, once we think of beauty, beauty can actually be conceptualized as the coincident oppositorum, because it is the tension between diversity and unity which actually gives us the experience of beauty. So every process in nature aims towards this aesthetic achievement, and the potentials which are relevant for combining this disjunctive unity into a unitive experience can achieve various grades of harmonies. This harmony fails, and that is when tragedy happens, or when frustration happens. I'm using anthropomorphic terms to describe this, but what I'm actually trying to say is that sometimes the integrations are not, the, the subjective aim cannot properly integrate these prehensions, and, uh, failure can also result from it. So pain or frustration or, uh, all these different negative qualities result when, uh, these, time does not flow in a way in which this aesthetic achievement is achieved.

So this is basically a conceptual tool, the actual occasion, which helps us to arrest the temporal passage and the flux of the physical universe in order to see what is going on. So it should not be used as an explanation; it should be seen as an articulation or a description of experience. So once this subjective unity is attained, that is called the satisfaction of the actual entity. So the satisfaction of the actual entity results in a superject, which is basically another entity. Now once this process is undergoing formation, when concrescence is, is basically going on, this fact is not available to the rest of the entire cosm, which is the entirety of the other actual occasions in existence. So basically, once the fact is in the process of formation, it is causally insulated from all the other facts that exist. So once it is fully formed, then it is available for integration into all the other facts which follow it. So the process becomes a superject; superject is basically, uh, available for integration in other forming actual occasions.

Now I have tried to explain this the best that I can, but, uh, I am pretty sure that my explanation is not sufficient, and there are many complexities and details that go into this, and Whitehead utilizes the majority of his book to explain the process of concrescence and how it arises. But basically what I would like you to take away from this is that an actual entity has both internal and external relations. It has internal relations which actually form the essence of that actual entity to the past actualities, which actually explains how entities arise, how entities, the intrinsic nature of entities is explained in the universe, and it does not suffer from Bradley's regress, as you can read about in the article, and it is externally related to the forming actualities. Basically, once it becomes the superject, it is externally related to the all the other actual entities which are forming, which can integrate it. So the actual entity is a form of a subject; superject simultaneously feels the actualities of the past, and then it becomes available for integration in, in the other forming facts. So once the fact is under the process of form, it is causally insulated from the rest of the actualities, and once it achieves satisfaction, then it becomes available. This is how the universe undergoes process in these acts of local becoming.

So how can we use this notion of process in order to explain how order evolves in our universe? So Whitehead challenges the notion of things; basically, he calls this the myth of simple persistence. So, for example, when I see a table in front of me, the table has, has a very definite shape, and under the conditions in which we live, the table remains a table; it is stable, it is persistent, and it does not change unless something happens to it, or it undergoes a process which transforms it. So from the time of Aristotle, we have been seeing all these stable things in nature, and we illegitimately think that process is what needs explaining, and things are the way we explain process. Because even in, under materialism, we have these fundamental particles, and we use the relations of these fundamental particles in order to explain how on the emergent microscopic scale we observe change, all right. So what Whitehead is saying is process is fundamental; what needs explaining is persistence. Persistence should not be taken for granted; if, if time is the creation of change and novelty, then if something is persisting in time, that needs explaining. So in the process worldview, things are derivative; process is fundamental.

So how does this stability arise? Now Whitehead explains it by the concept of conceptual reproduction and conceptual reversion. Now in the very simple streams of process, or concrete flows of reality, you see a way in which we can explain persistence. For example, we see the vibratory character in the simplest, uh, particles, and that vibratory character is an undulatory process in which the same thing is repeating, all right, or it is undergoing, uh, repetition in a way which gives rise to that undulatory character. So what Whitehead is saying is that in those forms of process, the, the process actually repeats the subjective form across a succession of temporal occasions by copying or transmitting that same form into the next occasion, and it is very rare that that same, uh, prehensive process should undergo integration under a different form. The same form is getting transmitted, or a very small diversity of forms is getting repeated in that process, and that is how we can explain persistence. Process in reality explains it better than I'm explaining it, but basically we can now explain the difference between persistence and novelty by differentiating between conceptual reproduction and conceptual reversion. In conceptual reproduction, the same form is getting repeated in a succession, in a stream of concrete experience, but in conceptual reversion, what happens is that the actual occasion integrates its prehensions in a different subjective form or using a different potential. So something new happens in the universe; something new happens when a diversity of elements, diversity of feelings, are integrated in a subjective experience under a different novel form. This is how change happens, and new, new things occur in the universe.

Now we are going to see how this, these actualities interact with potentialities, but now I would like to bring your attention to Schopenhauer. So Schopenhauer said that music is the purest expression of the teleology of life. Now Schopenhauer had this idea of the will and representation, which he explained in his book, *The World as Will and Representation*. We are not going to go into that, but he said something very interesting about the nature of music. He said music stands quite apart from all the other arts; in it we do not recognize the copy, the repetition of any idea of the inner nature of the world, yet it is such a great and exceedingly fine art; its effect on man's innermost nature is so powerful, and it is so completely and profoundly understood by him in his innermost being as an entirely universal language whose distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself, that in it we certainly have to look for more than an unconscious exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know it is counting, which Leibniz took it to be. We must attribute to music a far more serious and profound significance that refers to the innermost being of the world and of our self. What does he mean by that? What does Schopenhauer mean by this?

Now what he says that music actually exemplifies our innermost being. Now since we have said that concrete experience, under radical empiricism, can be used to explain the entirety of nature—everything is under process, everything is a flow of concrete experience—so how do we explain that music represents the innermost being of the world? This is because Whitehead had this notion of life which is quite different from the notion of life that we have, but if we use this definition, basically life is synonymous with novelty; life is synonymous with what this processual universe is actually trying to do, all right. Now this is a very different notion from determinism, in which the universe deterministically flows. As I've said, the very teleology behind process is that of aesthetic achievement.

So why does Schopenhauer call music as the purest expression of the teleology of life? Whitehead says that the teleology of process is aesthetic achievement, which is, says harmony of contrasts, or the coincident oppositorum. So how can music exemplify that? We have seen that aesthetic harmony is the inner telios and drive of process, and aesthetic achievement is the go towards novelty. Basically, novelty happens when distinctive diversity is brought together under a novel unity. Basically, that is the good of, or the telios, or the inner drive of process. So what Schopenhauer says that music represents the purest achievement of the telios of time itself. Time is equivalent to process; time is process, and when time actually achieves a succession of aesthetic harmony, that is the purest expression of what life is. So, so we can understand this if we think about music. Basically, if a musician is producing improvised music, sometimes if we have the ear for it, we can predict what is going to happen, all right. Now if it predictively flows according to our expectations, then after a while we would get bored, and if it changes dramatically in no apparent order or with no rhyme and reason, then that would be just noise. But when music is aesthetically pleasing, what is actually happening is that music is not a succession of moments; each moment is contextually dependent on the previous moments; it actually contains the previous moments as prehensions, and it actually looks forward into the future, and once we are listening to music, we become one with the flow of time undergoing in music; we become time itself, and then all these possibilities are opening up in front of us when the present is flowing into the future in which we can integrate the entire past of the musical composition that has occurred into a conceptual form. Now if that conceptual form is not novel, then the aesthetic achievement will not have intensity, but if the musician brings in the next note in such a way that it makes an entirely new meaning of the entire preceding acts, the entire preceding series of notes that we have heard into an entirely novel unity, then that is the achievement of aesthetic order, in that we can say that conceptual reversion has occurred; novelty has occurred; real creation has happened in that moment. When the musician sometimes puts the entire context of the music in an entirely new light by putting forth a new note which is related to all the rest of the music that has gone before, sometimes a musician also does a thing like this in which he, or she goes against your expectations and introduces another section into the music which you did not predict, and then after a while you expect that something is going to happen, but you cannot predict exactly what is going to happen because the next series, section of music is, although related to the previous section, but still it does not make sense as a whole. So there is an entire risk of frustration or failure or noise if the musician does not manage to integrate the, the next section which is somehow tonally or, uh, contextually different from the preceding section, but then sometimes the, the bead drops, or something happens in which the context changes, and the preceding section, the section before that are seen in the light of a, of a new unity. So that is a conceptual reversion of a higher grade of complexity, and that is how we get this experience of awe and satisfaction; we feel intensely alive when this is happening. This is the explanation, basically, because Whitehead's ontology is purely based on experience; we are not positing anything theoretical; we are actually referring to experience and actually articulating and describing it. So this descriptive metaphysics actually explains why we feel the most intensely alive in relation to music. Aesthetic achievement of music, when it is not, devolving into, uh, frustration or failure, when it is being achieved is actually giving us evidence and direct experience of what creation and novelty looks like.

Now let us see how Whitehead explains the evolution of natural laws. So he has this concept of the cosmic epoch. Any is that the cosmic epoch is the spatiotemporal region in which we currently find ourselves, which contains a whole nested hierarchy of modes of achieved order. So, for example, we find certain characteristics among all actual entities, among all streams of experience, basically factors which are present in every instance of our becoming which do not seem to shift, which were illegitimately called natural laws by the physicists. So he says that those are basically the primordial achievements of order, because if that order did not happen, then the order that we come up with, or the creation that is happening in the present moment could not happen, because the constraints imposed by the order achieved by those primordial actualities in the early evolution of the universe changed the entire character of the rest of the evolution of the universe. So the order that they achieved simultaneously constrained the space of possibility for the newly emerging levels of organization, and it simultaneously opened up affordances. So constraints can simultaneously open up affordances of possibilities and curtail possibilities. So this whole process was contingent; it could also have occurred that the primordial actualities in our past came up with a different sort of order, all right, and that order got exemplified in the rest of the evolution of the universe, but since they came up with one particular kind of, uh, order, that order is what we find today, but that does not mean that it, it is deterministic. If the universe is to evolve again, and these all these acts of becoming repeat themselves, then we might end up with a completely different universe; we might end up with a kind of life, but which is so different from our own that we cannot recognize it. The way, the reason we find fine-tuning in nature is because that is the way that the universe has constrained itself, so that the very emergent level of order which is asking the question about fine-tuning would not be possible if that, those constraints did not exist, and those constraints are not a priori; there is no, uh, universal law that pre-existed in Platonia or fundamental constants which existed over there; they are achievements, and the process of creation is still undergoing; there are still emergent levels of organization in which novelty and creation is occurring, and human beings are actually the drivers of change now, and the way that human beings are going to behave now, and the, the novelties that they are going to come up with basically are going to shape the entire future history of the universe. And Whitehead claims that the moral order that we observe is actually an emergent form of the underlying aesthetic order of the universe.

Then finally we come to the problem of possibility. So the real is not only the actual; the real is a dynamic that undergoes play between actuality and possibility. Now Whitehead comes up with something that calls the primordial nature of God, but before your ears get pricked up and you think that this is some sort of creationist thing going on, I would like to say that, uh, there is a very technical reason why he does this move, and what he means by God is very different from the traditional notion of God, and so just forget the word God here and try to understand what he is referring to by it. We can discuss how he explains the dynamic between what he calls the primordial and the consequent nature of God, but we do not need to go into that, and for the record, I am claiming that, uh, I am not, I do not believe in Whitehead's metaphysics in the sense of having faith in it; I just feel like it explains a whole diversity of, the problems of philosophy, and it exemplifies concrete experience in ways that we can confirm for ourselves in music, for example, and it is actually supporting the idea of an open universe. So, so I do not think that I am attached to Whitehead's ontology, and if the problem of possibility can be explained in any other fashion, then I'm all ears for it, but the way Whitehead explains it is that potentiality is not neutral. The way that actualities get integrated into a novel unity is subject to constraints. Now some constraints are imposed by the way that these prehensions have happened, and the entire context of the cosmic epoch, basically the regularities which we call natural laws are constraining what can happen, but there is another sense in which possibility is constrained, or you can say that possibility is valued possibility. Basically, refers to aesthetic achievement, and aesthetic achievement is the achievement of harmony, harmony under contrast. In music, not every way the musician plays his music is going to sound aesthetic; there is going to be a very, very, very minute fraction of, possibilities in which we can achieve aesthetics, and Beethoven's Symphony cannot be replicated by almost everyone, and we actually consider musicians geniuses who can come up with these pure potentials which put the entire musical piece in context. So basically what Whitehead means by the primordial nature of God is this structure of possibility, all right. Possibilities are structured and interrelated, all right. Possibilities do not exist in isolation from each other; possibilities are not neutral with respect to each other; possibilities are arranged in constellations; you can say they are valenced or they are interrelated and structured, and the way that actual occasions perceive possibilities, they, every actual occasion cannot perceive every kind of potentiality; only the potentialities that are relevant to that actual occasion. So this graded relevance of possibility needs to be explained, because if we imagine the converse, we would have a universe in which every actuality would have access to the entire penopoly of all possibilities, but, uh, due to the problem of, of searching through an infinite space, it would be highly improbable for that actuality, because it is not an algorithm, to search through all those possibilities; only the relevant possibilities which are necessary to integrate the disjunctive unity in concrescence should be made relevant to that actual entity. So if the possibilities are not graded for relevance, if they are not interrelated, then that is impossible.

Now the question arises as to where this structure occurs; is there some Platonic realm in which these possibilities occur? Now as Whitehead says in his ontological principle, we should not mistake abstractions for reality, and possibilities are a form of abstraction. So how do we ground possibilities? So Whitehead claims that the primordial nature of God is concrete; that basically all of these possibilities do exist, and I have read Lee Mullin's article in which he tried to explain, uh, how possibilities occur, and he denied the existence of a Platonic realm, but what I found unsatisfactory in that was that there is an, a way in which he's, he's saying that these possibilities do not pre-exist. Now what would happen if these possibilities did not pre-exist? I think it might be a way of talking about things, or the way we use the word existence in our explanations, but what I think is that whenever a certain order is achieved, certain possibilities open up. Now when the conditions are favorable, that possibility becomes available, and we actually see evidence for this at multiple scales in nature: the structure of galaxies, uh, the way in which we see spirals in sea shells, uh, the way in which clouds form stable patterns; all of these things can be replicated in any other part of the universe, assuming the same cosmic epoch in, in which the same conditions repeat themselves. Now this can also occur at, so for example, we can see a mathematical order in a very low scale which is exactly replicated at a, at the macro scale, because the conditions necessary for the realization of that possibility occurred both at the macro scale and at the micro scale. So the possibility did become available. Now this is the way I understand possibility. So I don't know why there is so much of a problem of saying that the possibilities cannot pre-exist, because what I take the meaning of pre-existence to be is that when the conditions become available, that same selfsame probability, or the, uh, possibility, or the constellation of valuated possibilities would become available for ingression in actual occasions, and even if you do not accept Whitehead's ontology, even then you see all these different mathematical patterns in nature. Now I'm not saying that those patterns are the only way in a deterministic manner in which, uh, actuality can evolve. Basically, I am also saying that under the category of conceptual reversion, there can be other levels of order in which those same, uh, conditions or that disjunctive diversity can be integrated into a higher form, and those are basically other attractors in the landscape. So, for example, sometimes you have to climb over a hill in the potential landscape and then fall into an attractor which is deeper, which has a deeper intensity, a deeper satisfaction of aesthetic harmony. So I think that Lee Mullin is right that when the conditions occur, for example, when you set the rules of a game, a chess game, then all these different possibilities open up, and the chess game is constrained in a way, and the constraints not only, uh, disallow certain possibilities, they also open up a whole host of different possibilities. Now all I'm saying by the notion that these possibilities pre-exist is that if the very conditions that allow chess to happen occur at any time, at any place, anywhere in any cosmic epoch, the same conditions arise, then we would have chess. So why can't we say that these possibilities pre-exist? So I think that is how I would like to frame the problem, but I am not, uh, attached to one cosmology or one metaphysics, and I would like to hear any alternatives as to how the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics is explained in nature, and, uh, what would a cosmos in which a possibility space did not pre-exist would look like, because what I fear, what I have problems with is that if we had an evolving universe in which there were no fixed laws, and they were these instances of local becoming, or drops of concrescence, or actual occasion as Whitehead calls them, and there was no graded relevance of possibilities for them, then how would novelty become stable? Because if we claim that novelty is not aesthetic achievement, novelty is just some change, something new that happens in the universe, then if possibilities are not graded with respect to each other as more aesthetically harmonious and less aesthetically harmonious, then how would order persist? Because I think order persists because some novel achievements are more aesthetic or more relevant or solve some optimization problem that other possibilities don't. So not all possibilities are equal, and if there exists no pre-existent order of possibilities, then how can this change ever become stabilized? This is what I fear, because if in such a universe in which there was nothing stable, we would have pure becoming, because in philosophy we have the notions of being and becoming. Now if we adopt Nietzsche's metaphysics of the will to power and, uh, the eternal recurrence of the same, that is a cosmology in which there is total becoming, and there is no being. By being, I mean stability, or some, some fixity in nature which interacts with, uh, the process and becoming. In eternal recurrence, every possible thing, every rearrangement actually occurs and occurs infinitely many times; it repeats itself. So nothing new is actually happening; everything new that we think happens actually is an infinite repetition of everything that has happened before. So if we do not have a pre-existent possibility space, we would end up with something like Nietzsche's eternal recurrence of the same, and the only way that we can come to believe in an evolutionary cosmos in which higher emergent levels of organization evolve—not deterministically, I think there can be an infinite number of ways in which higher order, order complexity can arise even when all the pre-existent levels are given; still there is a lot of freedom. So the universe can evolve in a lot of different ways, not in one deterministic way; that is what is meant by an open universe. So the existence of a possibility space does not preclude the possibility that novelty is going to happen; novelty is going to happen a different way. The only reason that a possibility space of graded potentialities is referred to is because it explains a direction to the universe, a way in which some order stabilizes; some order is actually has a higher probability of being exemplified by all the actual entities, and there is something that the universe is trying to do, basically, and if we do not have that, then we would have either total chaos in which no order ever stabilizes, or we would have something like Nietzsche's notion of the eternal recurrence of the same. So with that, I end my presentation.