BothAndBlog Forum

What exactly is Process Philosophy?

But the answers I get make even less sense than the wikipedia entries on it and so I figured I'd try to ask it on here to see if anyone knows what it is and what it means, because I just get more lost on it. — Darkneos

Years ago, I too, got lost in Whitehead's complex & convoluted abstract & abstruse explication of Process and Reality. So, although the general gist seemed to be agreeable to my own Holistic & Information-based amateur worldview, I couldn't answer your question. Therefore, I was prompted to do a Google search on : "process philosophy compared to what?"

Here's the response from Google A.I. Overview : "Process philosophy is often compared to substance metaphysics, which is the dominant paradigm in Western philosophy. Process philosophy differs from substance metaphysics in its focus on becoming and change, rather than the static nature of being."

I suppose "substance metaphysics" is the modern scientific worldview : reductive and materialistic. But Whitehead's dynamic "process" of the universe may be more like a living evolving Organism than a soulless cycling Mechanism. I'm still not sure what "transient occasions of change" might be in a more vernacular expression. It may refer to the perplexing Phase Changes of Physics, or to the unmeasurable exchanges of energy & information (Entanglement) on the quantum level of reality. The Information Philosopher says : "in PNK Whitehead calls the instantaneous and infinitesimal points of special relativity "event-particles." Not much more enlightening.

Even the quantum pioneers, who inspired Whitehead, didn't understand what was going-on in the basement of the world. Heisenberg called that essential mystery & unpredictability "The Uncertainty Principle".


"Process and Reality" by Alfred North Whitehead is a philosophical work that presents a system known as "process philosophy," arguing that reality is fundamentally a process of becoming rather than a collection of static objects, where the core concept is "creativity" as the driving force behind this ongoing process of actual entities coming into existence; it emphasizes the interconnectedness and relational nature of all things within the universe, with each "actual occasion" (moment of experience) drawing from past events and contributing to future ones, essentially viewing the world as a dynamic flow of becoming rather than a fixed state.
___ Google A.I. Overview
Note 1 --- In my own thesis, I refer to that creative "driving force" as EnFormAction : Energy + Form + Actualization. It's basically aimless Energy combined with a program of Information --- like a guided missile --- to convert static Matter into dynamic substance (Life) and sentient stuff (Mind). Does any of that make sense?
Note 2 --- The Big Bang, as described by physicists, would be like a bullet : powered by momentum, but otherwise unchanging. Yet if the power was EnFormAction, the material bullet might transform into a living butterfly along the way : a Process of Becoming. The universe began as formless Plasma, and eventually became the living & thinking organism we call Our World. It's a philosophical metaphor, not a scientific fact to be taken literally.

Here's the response from Google A.I. Overview : "Process philosophy is often compared to substance metaphysics, which is the dominant paradigm in Western philosophy. Process philosophy differs from substance metaphysics in its focus on becoming and change, rather than the static nature of being." — Gnomon

What is a substance. What is a process? Which one is more difficult to define?

We've discussed our ideas before and I think we share a lot in the way we view the world. I would add that process and relations can be used interchangeably here, and information is another relation or process - a causal process/relation.

I personally do not like to invoke the term, "becoming" as that seems to imply some sort of goal, or intent, and nothing lasts forever, so becoming nothing would essentially be the case for everything and "becoming" becomes meaningless. — Harry Hindu

Whitehead's Process philosophy is over my head. But it seems to be describing a worldview that is similar to my own. For example, reductive physical Science tends to use the word "substance" to mean composed-of-static-stable-immobile-Matter. But quantum Science has found that Matter is fundamentally a process of energy & form exchanges*1. So Aristotle's definition of "substance"*2 may be more appropriate for our understanding of Nature's fundamentals. On the sub-atomic level of reality, nothing stands still, and formless Energy (causation ; E=MC^2) is the essence of the material substances we see & touch, and depend-on to stay-put when we leave them alone.

Therefore, our world is not a finished product, but an evolving process. Yet classical Newtonian*3 Physicists tend to dislike the notion of progression toward some future goal, as in Teleology. I don't know what that final denoument will be, but I doubt that the end-state of this process will be heat-death. That's because disorderly Entropy is off-set by a tendency toward order (Negentropy) that I call Enformy*4. And the root of Enformy is Information : knowledge of inter-relations as both frozen snapshots and dynamic movies.

The Big Bang universe is typically portrayed as an open-ended expansion from almost nothing (singularity) to a lot more of nothing {image below}. But my Enformationism thesis describes it as Progression {image below} instead of just Expansion. That's because the original Singularity of big bang theory is an immaterial mathematical concept, so where did all the organized Matter and sentient Minds come from? Some scientists think the Big Bang ex nihilo notion is erroneous --- implying a Creation event and Teleonomy --- but so far no other First Cause concept has taken its place as a scientific Theory of Everything.


*1. Quantum form change refers to the transition of a quantum system from one state to another, such as a phase transition.
___Google A.I. Overview

*2. In Aristotle's metaphysics, essence is what makes a thing what it is, while substance is what makes a thing a general thing. Aristotle believed that primary substance and essence were essentially the same.
___Google A.I. Overview

*3.Newtonian forces push and pull physical bodies in specifiable spatiotemporal directions. But, in an important sense, evolutionary forces do not “act” like physical Newtonian forces. Evolutionary forces push and pull populations of organisms (not bodies) in evolutionary space, not in space and time.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/605799

*4.Enformy :
In the Enformationism theory, Enformy is a hypothetical, holistic, meta-physical, natural trend or force, that counteracts Entropy & Randomness to produce complexity & progress.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html


Universe-Expansion-Over-Time.jpg

Cosmic%20Progression%20Graph.jpg

PS___Since the notion of Dissipative Systems*5 has been raised --- presumably to deny the possibility of cosmic or social Progress --- I here note that what some scientists dismissively call "Negentropy" is what I call positive "Enformy", in order to emphasize the role of Information (power to enform or transform) in physics. The depressing prediction of ultimate Heat Death, due to triumphant Entropy, ignores the subtle ways in which thermodynamic digression can be transformed into progressive forms, such as Life & Mind & Technology.

The dominance of information-sharing humans on Earth is merely one sign of Enformy at work, converting world-destroying Entropy into a world-conquering species of Information consumers and Entropy expellers. Purpose is the paddle by which we propel ourselves into the future (telos). Enformy is the fuel of Progress and Entropy is the exhaust. Elon won't make it to Mars --- in his dissipative rockets --- if he surrenders to Entropy.

*5. The maintenance of the structural, non-equilibrium, low entropy, order involves continuous entropy production, which is exported to the outside the system (its environment). In other words, dissipative structures import negentropy (“negative entropy”) and export entropy to maintain internal order.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-c

Whitehead invokes God as a fundamental part of his metaphysical system which, I believe, is why he uses the term, "becoming" in describing the behavior of processes. — Harry Hindu

I too, postulate a philosophical god-like First Cause*1 as an explanation for the something-from-nothing implication of Big Bang theory. The Multiverse hypothesis just assumes perpetual causation, with no beginning or end. But what we know of physical Energy is that it dissipates. So, I find the open-ended Big Bang theory to be adequate for scientific purposes.

Although it could be interpreted in various ways, the notion of becoming*2 does not necessarily imply moving toward a specific destination. But, if an intelligent designer initiated the process, some teleological destination would make sense.


*1. What is the Whitehead concept of God?
Moreover, Whitehead understands God as the Principle of Limitation in the sense that it is God who gives structure and order to the universe. In the Whiteheadian understanding God is the source of potentiality and source of novelty and the wisdom that permeates the universe.
https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/12345 ... Unit-3.pdf
Note --- I would interpret the "principle of limitation" as the Natural Laws that limit infinite possible states to the few that we humans view as "structure & order".

*2. In philosophy, becoming is the process of change, growth, and evolution. It's a way of understanding reality as dynamic and ever-changing, rather than fixed or static.
___Google A.I. Overview

Faster processes will appear as blurs of change (waves?) and may appear to have no cause at all from our perspective. — Harry Hindu

Yes. I interpret the use of "acausal" in quantum physics to mean simply "no known cause". On the macro scale, sudden Phase Transitions, such as water to ice, also seem mysterious because there is no instantaneous change in the gradual inflow or outflow of energy. So, the potential to transform a liquid to a solid or gas state may be inherent to the geometry of the system, not to a particular cause.

I still have not completely bought into the Big Bang theory. How do we know that the rate of expansion has been the same through time? — Harry Hindu

Some scientists object to the Big Bang theory, primarily because of its implication of a creation event. But they have not yet found a better alternative. The current rate of expansion can be measured, and is called the Hubble Constant. Yet some scientists hypothesize that the early rate of inflation was faster than the speed of light, then suddenly slowed down to its current leisurely pace of "67.4 kilometers per second per megaparsec." But the exponential inflation rate is theoretical, not measurable.

I don't like the term, "physical". Evolutionary forces are natural forces. — Harry Hindu

Evolutionary "forces" are metaphors*3 based on the physical forces of nature. And the "mechanisms" --- mutation, genetic drift, gene flow, and natural selection --- are also metaphors, not directly observable procedures. Would you prefer to call them "meta-physical"?

*3. “Force-Talk” in Evolutionary Explanation: Metaphors and Misconceptions
https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentra ... 010-0282-5

It seems to me that the sun's energy is the biggest player in the battle against entropy, here in our local area of the universe. The sun won't last forever. — Harry Hindu

Yes. The sun is a blob of stored energy from the big bang, and is the source of anti-entropy (Enformy) for our local system, including Life & Mind. Since Sol's stores of energy are finite, those living & thinking beings may need to find a new home in about 5 billion earth years. So, Elon Musk needs to step-up the pace of his Starship program. :joke:

God is a something from nothing and isn't necessary as the universe could be eternal without intelligent design. God just complicates the matter. I find it easier to contemplate a perpetual causation than the idea of something from nothing. — Harry Hindu

Perhaps, prior to the 20th century, a self-existent universe may have been plausible. But the astro-physical evidence of a singular point-of-origin for space-time made our cosmos seem contingent upon some outside force. Also, the laws of physics indicate that our evolving space-time world began with high energy and low entropy, and will eventually end in a Big Sigh*1. Moreover, "Perpetual Causation" is an illicit violation of the second law of Thermodynamics, unless an inexhaustible source of Energy can be found outside the finite physical system we find ourselves dependent upon.

So, apart from non-empirical speculations, the before & after states are missing from our current scientific model of reality. Hence, philosophers are free to theorize about those gaps in the empirical facts. Personally, I long-ago gave-up on the Hebrew Genesis model of creation. But the Greek notion of First Cause*2 and Prime Mover are still in play, logically. Also, the emergence of human intelligence, has yet to be explained in terms of Biology & Physics. So, some kind of apriori creative Mind is a philosophically reasonable account for that explanatory gap.

We can dismiss these non-empirical conjectures as God-of-the-Gaps-guesses, until science fills-in the lacuna in our understanding of how physical evolution could produce human beings and worldwide culture from chaotic random mutations without an algorithm of Intelligent Selection criteria. But there's no law against philosophical speculation is there? Is it pseudoscience or merely creative thinking?


*1. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the state of entropy of the entire universe, as an isolated system, will always increase over time. The second law also states that the changes in the entropy in the universe can never be negative.
https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves ... book_Maps/

*2. Plato (429-347 BC) was an early proponent of intelligent design (ID), a pseudoscientific idea that posits an intelligent cause for certain features of the universe
___Google A.I. Overview

Really great post! — PoeticUniverse
Thank you, although i'm sure others might not agree. — punos

On a philosophy forum we expect to have disagreements. But we also have a right to expect the disputes to be articulated in calm rational counter-arguments ; instead of infantile schoolyard name-calling with big words, such as "Dunning-Kruger", as a supercilious way to call someone an idiot, and get it past the forum censors, who frown on ad hominems.

A more acceptable response might be : I don't understand ; please define "X", or explain "Y". But mutually exclusive worldviews, such as Atheism vs Theism and Immanentism vs Transcendentalism, have ancient dug-in roots. And for those with dogmatic positions, no amount of reasoning would be persuasive. Even moderate positions, such as Deism or Preternaturalism, would be unacceptable for those who style themselves as defenders of Truth & Science.

TIP : Be on the lookout for a forum ID image of a mean 'widdle kid ; they bite with sarcasm!

3656363_m.jpg

Although i agree with you, i'm not sure what to say or how to say it. — punos

When bullied by a forum troll, the best thing to say is nothing. That's why I long ago stopped responding to my own philosophical gadfly, who doesn't know what he doesn't know. Since he considers himself to be superior, he doesn't need my opinions anyway. My role now is to warn others being browbeaten to use the best pest control : silence. It doesn't affect him, but leaves him isolated in an echo chamber.

This would be a problem for your god as well. As I pointed out before, for you god to exist eternally prior to the universe it would have to have done something, move, think, etc. to exist at all, which would require an inexhaustible source of energy. It seems to me that you're saying that god did not exist until it created the universe. — Harry Hindu

Thermodynamics is not a problem for "my god"*1, because it is not a physical system subject to natural laws, but the source of those laws. This Platonic First Cause*2 did not exist as a real thing, but as an Ideal Potential. Potential doesn't do anything until Actualized. Aristotle's Prime Mover doesn't move, because it's the Unmoved Mover. Infinite Eternal Potential --- not limited by space-time --- is, by definition, an "inexhaustible source of energy". Space-time energy is doomed to entropic anihilation ; so where did our limited supply come from?

These First Principles are not Gods, in the usual anthro-morphic sense, but fundamental logical Necessities to explain the ontological origin of the finite material & thermodynamic world we live in. Do you have a better philosophical answer to the Cause of the Big Bang? My "god' is more like Spinoza's 17th century pantheistic deity, except that it takes into account the 20th century evidence for a Big Bang beginning. If the physical world is temporal instead of eternal, his all-god requires a creation story.

Are you aware of a scientific answer to the Big Bang ex nihilo problem? The Multiverse Conjecture is not scientific because it has no physical evidence. Instead, both Multiverse and Many Worlds are philosophical conjectures that are no more empirically valid or explanatory than my own notion of Infinite Potential. Besides, they may be bound by their own definitional Paradox*3. Since our brains are physical systems subject to the given laws of Nature, we are baffled by the notion of anything outside of space-time. And yet, the Big Bang was the birth of space-time. So we go in circles trying to make sense of timelessness and placelessness.


*1. G*D :
This eternal deity is not imagined in a physical human body, but in a meta-physical mathematical form, equivalent to Logos. Other names : ALL, BEING, Creator, Enformer, MIND, Nature, Reason, Source, Programmer. The eternal Whole (panendeism) of which all temporal things are a part is not to be feared or worshipped, but appreciated like Nature.
I refer to the logically necessary and philosophically essential First & Final Cause as G*D, rather than merely "X" the Unknown, partly out of respect. That’s because the ancients were not stupid, to infer purposeful agencies, but merely shooting in the dark. We now understand the "How" of Nature much better, but not the "Why". That inscrutable agent of Entention is what I mean by G*D.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page13.html

*2. Platonic Potential :
In Platonic philosophy, the "first cause" or "potential" is often understood as the realm of "Forms" - perfect, unchanging, and eternal ideas which serve as the ultimate source and blueprint for everything that exists in the physical world, including the potential for all things to manifest and become actualized; essentially, the Forms act as the underlying cause of all existence, without themselves being directly created or caused by anything else.
___Google A.I. Overview

*3. The Multiverse Paradox :
Physicists say the multiverse saddles us with a paradox. Multiverse cosmology builds on cosmic inflation, the idea that the universe underwent a short burst of rapid expansion in its earliest stages. Inflationary theory has had a wealth of observational support for some time but has the inconvenient tendency to generate not one but a great many universes. And because it doesn’t say which one we should be in — it lacks this information — the theory loses much of its ability to predict what we should see. This is a paradox. On the one hand, our best theory of the early universe suggests we live in a multiverse. At the same time, the multiverse destroys much of the predictive power of this theory.
https://bigthink.com/hard-science/parad ... cosmology/
Note --- Cosmic Inflation is not a scientific theory because it has no possible empirical evidence to support interpretations of abstract arcane mathematical calculations.

Whatever cosmic architect drew up these plans
Clearly wasn’t thinking about the tenants; — PoeticUniverse

Yes. The architect of our cosmic habitation apparently was designing for non-divine inhabitants who are subject to the same natural laws as the house itself : gravity, entropy, cause & effect. If humans were supposed to be angels, we would be walking on clouds in heaven. Instead we are temporary tenants, not owners. We are no more divine than the other tenants, including rats & roaches. But we do have an extra clause in our lease : we get to complain to the landlord. But the maintenance is up to us.