A philosophical worldview or belief system grounded on the 20th century discovery that Information, rather than Matter, is the fundamental substance of everything in the universe. It is intended to be the 21st century successor to the ancient worldviews of Materialism and Idealism. An Update from Bronze Age to Information Age. It's also a Theory – of – Everything that covers, not just matter & energy, but also Life & Mind & Love.
Post 142.February 20, 2025
The Point of Process Philosophy
The Process of Gestating a Cosmos
Whitehead's philosophy can be labeled as Spiritual³ (intellectual instead of physical) in the sense that it recognizes invisible forces & fields⁴ at work in the world. But, unlike the traditional scientific notion of local cause & effect, he speculates on universal causes that control the direction of Evolution. So, whatever Ethic is associated with Process Philosophy will be global in its effects, and teleological in its design. Although he uses a theistic term for the creator of our evolving world, I think his concept of “God” is not religious, but philosophical. Whitehead’s associate Charles Hartshorne⁵ labeled his theology as : PanEnDeism⁶. This deity is not imagined on a throne judging the creation, but everywhere, including in the material world, participating in the process of Creation. Instead of creating a subordinate material world, separated from the heavenly realm, this deity transformed some of its eternal spiritual essence (causal energy), that I call “EnFormAction”, into the space-time substance we know as Matter. One metaphorical image – not to be taken literally – would be a woman with a fetus in her womb.
Whitehead described our enforming⁷ cosmos as a living organism. From our human perspective, the process of pro-creating a universe is what we call Evolution. Based on the notion of gestation, we can imagine the Big Bang Singularity as a seed, egg, or sperm. And the event itself as a quickening (first signs of life). So, our universe is portrayed as an embryonic fetus that must develop in the womb before being born into whatever comes next. Yet the inseminator at the inception of our world should not be portrayed as literally anthro-morphic, and it would be a mistake to attribute human psychological & emotional characteristics to a timeless, dis-embodied Intellect. However, if you think of the evolutionary Process as a computer Program, an appropriate metaphor might represent the system designer as a Programmer. “Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of God and the mind includes the idea of a timeless mind that contains pure potentialities and a mind that is empathic with the world”. {Google AI Overview}
Since, 20 years ago, I was thinking along similar lines, I wrote an essay named Intelligent Evolution, A 21st Century Creation Myth, as a philosophical alternative to the contro-versial religious concept of Intelligent Creation. It’s also a different interpretation of physical evolution, which is often mistakenly portrayed as dominated by statistical randomness, hence completely aimless. Yet that purposeless meaningless opinion ignores the constructive role of Enformy{Negentropy} in countering the destructive effects of Entropy, to allow a cosmic explosion to produce living & thinking beings, capable of tracing the evolutionary process back to its inception.
Again, the myth is metaphorical and not intended to be taken literally, but merely as a different way to think about how and why, according to secular cosmologists, our world suddenly & inexplicably popped into existence about 14 billion Earth years ago. Just as there is no physical evidence for the hypothetical Eternal Multiverse, or Many Worlds substitutes for creation myths, my essay cannot be considered scientific. It’s just something to think about, philosophically.
3. Ethics of Spiritualism : The ethics of spiritualism are a system of moral philosophy that considers the relationship between evolution and the existence of the human spirit after death. Spiritual ethics can also refer to the principles that guide how people use their spiritual beliefs and practices in the world.
Note --- Unlike theological religions, Whitehead's philosophical theology was not primarily concerned with an afterlife, but in our evolutionary adaptation to the evolving world.
4. Quantum Fields : are philosophical theories tacked-on to the new physics, when the long-sought ultimate particle remained elusive, and the inter-relationships of entanglement became undeniable.
"Quantum fields are not made of anything as far as we know. They just exist in the universe based on quantum field theory." https://www.quora.com/What-are-quantum- ... hey-formed
The Process of Birthing a Cosmos
End of Blog Post 142
5. Charles Hartshorne : Panentheism (all is in God) must be differentiated from Classical pantheism (all is God). In Hartshorne's theology God is not identical with the world, but God is also not completely independent from the world. God has his self-identity that transcends the universe, but the world is also contained within God.
6. Process PanEnDeism : Alfred North Whitehead's (1861-1947) concept of God is that God is immanent in the world, and that God and the world are co-creators. Whitehead's ideas are often described as panentheistic, meaning that God and the world are not separate, but rather are in each other. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=whitehead+concept+of+god
7. Enforming : Obsolete form of the verb “to form” or “to fashion”. It refers to a process of transforming something from one configuration to another.
Process & Reality
An Essay in Cosmology
A. N. Whitehead
Mathematician & Philosopher
”The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order."
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