Figure and Ground

Whitehead focuses not on the figure or the ground but the interaction, the derivative. The relationship, in all aspects, is the focus. This makes the ground and figure, relative to the relationship, dynamic and variously subjective and didactic. The ground is derived  from the relationship, the figure is the relationship. What are they "saying" to each other? And as interpretants, what are we sensing? We have been trained to see things as they change in relationship. Can we move to seeing the relationship as the primary ground of interaction? Can we see the interaction as formative? That forms consist of nothing but the interaction with other forms?

Beauty Will Save The World

It is vain to affirm that which the heart does not confirm. In contrast, a work of art bears within itself its own confirmation: concepts which are manufactured out of whole cloth or overstrained will not stand up to being tested in images, will somehow fall apart and turn out to be sickly and pallid and convincing to no one. Works steeped in truth and presenting it to us vividly alive will take hold of us, will attract us to themselves with great power- and no one, ever, even in a later age, will presume to negate them. And so perhaps that old trinity of Truth and Good and Beauty is not just the formal outworn formula it used to seem to us during our heady, materialistic youth. If the crests of these three trees join together, as the investigators and explorers used to affirm, and if the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light—yet perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar up to that very place and in this way perform the work of all three.

Choice

We can choose whether we co-operate with constructive (evolving, responsive) prehension. It is this choice which is the elephant in the room.

Process as Subtle Forms

We are processes that is the result of prehension and a source of more and less evolved prehension. I just like this photo.

God as the Ultimate Process

If God is the ultimate process and process is common to all actualities, is there a impersonal ground behind that is the source of all, even the process we call God?

The Journey to Wholeness

As part of the development of the organic whole, we move toward atonement (at-one-ment).

Organic over Mechanical

Overall, Whitehead's approach was the preference of organic over mechanical (refer to J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth).

Deobjectification

The signifier is a static sign to the dynamic process. The sign has the four mythic functions: pointing to the transcendant (mystery), revealing the cosmology, establishing the social norm and providing a life lesson. Each sign, being temporal and cultural, is riveted to the time and environment. To deobjectify the sign is to challenge the transcendent signified, the current cosmology, the social norms and the personal social identity. Process thought does all four.

Some words Whitehead used have not retained their meaning

Words Tie Us To The Past

Prehension is not predictable but the words/forms (logos) that come to us show us history.

Energy is Mass

The law of the conservation of mass is equal to the law of the conservation of energy. Mass is energy, energy is mass. Things are process, process is things.

Arbitrary Nomenclature

Naming objects is a conventional way of describing sustained processes. The names (signifiers)  are arbitrary and it is only the errors of misplaced concreteness and reductionist thinking that maintain their static natures. It is the convention, the use of practical handles,  that allows these bounded definitions, these signifiers, to stand unchanged.

The roots of materialism: Parmenides

Whitehead looked at the history of philosophy and possible avenues for thought. He chose the process path starting with Heraclitus (who was alive in the same period as Parmenides) , a path that starts with the idea that Everything Flows.
The other main root of philosophy is the materialism of Parmenides, a Greek philosopher who lived around 5 B.C. He postulated that the world is made out of fixed objects. In The Way of Truth (a part of the poem), he explains how reality is one, change is impossible, and existence is timeless, uniform, and unchanging. In The Way of Opinion, he explains the world of appearances, which is false and deceitful. These thoughts strongly influenced Plato, and through him, the whole of Western philosophy.
As the phenomenal world appears to be made of objects and the practical difficulty posed by the process approach proved unpalatable for the majority, the materialism school became vastly more popular and stood largely unchallenged until the advent of scientific proof that the process path was the more accurate.

Emergent Processes

An emergent process is a coming together of other processes. It is the whole that is bigger than the sum of its parts. The emergent process has properties that are not predictable based on the constitute processes from which it emerges. For example to take Oxygen which is a reactive element and will form oxides with all other elements except helium, neon, argon and krypton. Add to it Hydrogen which is the most flammable of all the known substances. Observing the properties of these two elements you would not predict the wetness or many other properties of H20 or water.

Influences from Darwin and Einstein

Whitehead's intellectual development was strongly influenced by Darwinian evolutionary thought and the work of physicists (Whitehead was a scientist, mathematician and physicist) such as Einstein who revealed reality in new and challenging ways.

Whitehead and the Buddha

There are many parallels between process philosophy and Buddhist philosophy.

Using an Experiential Vocabulary

If we do not have the experience vocabulary, we cannot comprehend an process, we cannot "read" that part of the world. Part of "reading" process is seeing in terms of process. Whitehead's use of new terms and the re-purposing of older terms encourages the adaption of these new terms to parallel the adaption of new experience. It is the prehension of language and experience.
 
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” - Marcel Proust


What is this device used for? Why would it matter to you? What would you call it?

Whitehead the Grammarian Enters A New Space

Grammarians believe that the language we use reflects the world like a mirror. The Book of Nature is the Original, The Book of Man is a Copy. The syntax of language is the syntax of the world. The same is true for vocabulary, grammar and the changes of the language over time (parallel evolution). All changes follow changes in the real world to maintain the usefulness of the language.

By studying all languages we get insight into the nature of the real world. When we discover new processes in the real world, such as sub-atomic realities, language must follow.  What do we see when we do not understand what we are looking at? When a disconnect between the two occurs, language loses its power. Re-establish the living relationship means regaining an essential balance, even though this means extending and adapting language. It is this leap of re-imagining our language as a broad experiential  vocabulary that Whitehead offers to us so that we may, once again, read the Book of Nature.

What is this?

Three Stages of Education

In his book, Aims of Education, Whitehead proposed that there were three stages of education: Romance, Precision and Generalization. We are attracted by the beauty of a subject, take that passion and turn it to precise and bounded action then synthesize our emotional and intellectual experience into more engaged interaction with the subject, growing more aware of the more detailed features of its beauty and the exactitude it demands as the price for proceeding in active relationship.  So the cycle starts again ...

Whitehead and Bertrand Russell

In collaboration with Bertrand Russell, he authored the landmark three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910, 1912, 1913). According to Whitehead, they initially expected the research to take about a year to complete. In the end, they worked together on the project for a decade.

Enabling processes

All more complex processes are made up of a number of prehended processes. The creation of the complex process is not always immediately realized, but must wait for a complete set of processes to coalesce. The first working laser was developed in 1959 and possible applications at the time included spectrometry, interferometry, radar, and nuclear fusion. It was a scientific curiosity.  It was called the solution without a problem.  Now the laser is used in optical networks, DVD and CD players and a thousand other applications makes it essential to our modern technology-based society.

Views of foreground and background

The contrast between the background and the foreground changes. The foreground or entity comes from the background (or just ground). It can range between a high contrast, sharp or a muted, vague difference. The relationship is sometimes vague (waves and the Moon's gravity) (light from Sun reflected by Moon) or highly differentiated  (Wave and Air) (Moon and Sky).

Entity parts not the entity

 All processes are made of other processes, therefore, the "parts" of a process are "non-process parts". An Corvette engine is "made" from the block, cylinders, valves, bolts and and many other parts but none of the parts is a Corvette engine. A collilary of unity plus one.

The Endless Regression of Process

If everything flows, how can we give a name to any experience we have? Even the experience of being ourselves?

All objects are processes. All naming is a process. All conceptual ideas are a process. All ways of ordering the experience are processes themselves. Even our point of view (consciousness)  is a fluid process.

We have, of course, conventions that allow us to live our daily lives. These conventions allow us to proceed by calling processes that are prehended -- objects. They are a frame.

Relationship: Beauty

All actualities are in relationship. Beauty is an index of relationship. The relationship is beautiful as it is in close interrelation. The more beauty, the greater the positive relation, its harmony and purpose.

On being process

 Whitehead's approach reminds me of The Matrix movie. The main character, Neo, could see the code that made up the reality (the virtual construct that made up the Matrix) he was in. In the "real" world he could see the energy that constituted it. We are not the objects in the world, nor the being but the becoming. We are "in" process. We are between the code of the past and the possibility of the future through the energy of the present.  And we can be somewhat conscious of all three.

Bastien : Folk and Elementary Ideas

 

Adolf Bastien lived in the early 1800s and traveled around the world working as a ship's doctor but developing an understanding of the world like an anthropologist. He saw the same issues around cosmology coming up in all the societies he came across. The base issues were the same but the solutions followed cultural lines. He called the local solutions Folk Ideas (Volkergedanken) and the universal form of the cosmological understanding, Elementary Ideas (Elementargedanken).  Bastien also inspired others to look for these universals, such as Carl Jung in his Theory of Archetypes. 

Whitehead uses the language of his culture, especially descriptive and mathematical language, to create Folk Ideas, a cosmology that fits our culture and called it the Philosophy of Organism (what we call Process Philosophy).  Although it is difficult to see beyond the limits of the culture we are in, Whitehead strove to find a universal thread in the history of western philosophy that was both relevant to our current understanding of the world and yet stood within the cultural limits of our knowledge so as to appear natural to us. 

Monday Entry

Firstness and Feeling

Notes on the Charles Sanders Pierce influence on Whitehead. Semiotics and Process Thought.

The Changing Scientific Reality

We live in a time where aspects of the world are studied by use of the scientific method. This detailed knowledge is accessible to most of the population through education and freely available media. In creating a picture of the world we live in the question arises: Does this make sense to us? Does our way of understanding the world fit? Is our system of understanding open to the rapidly change of that model?

Symbols and Signs

Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced /ˈpɜrs/ purse^[1]) (September 10, 1839 – April 19, 1914) was an American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Peirce was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years. It is largely his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, and semiotics (and his founding of pragmatism) that are appreciated today. In 1934, the philosopher Paul Weiss called Peirce "the most original and versatile of American philosophers and America's greatest logician".^[2]
An innovator in many fields — including philosophy of science, epistemology, metaphysics, mathematics, statistics, research methodology, and the design of experiments in astronomy, geophysics, and psychology — Peirce considered himself a logician first and foremost. He made major contributions to logic, but logic for him encompassed much of that which is now called epistemology and philosophy of science. He saw logic as the formal branch of semiotics, of which he is a founder. As early as 1886 he saw that logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits, an idea used decades later to produce digital computers.

Products of Process

Process thought turns things around.

The brain as a fact is the source of conciousness
becomes
Conciousness is the source of the brain, it produces the structure we know as the brain.

Societies are products of the interaction or relation of actualities.




We know that the brain is made of cells and the cells are made of atoms and the atoms made of energy.

The brain does not create the energy but is a product of it.

Actualities are not just blind plasma. Our experience and consciousness is also a product of actualities. Actualities also possess subjective or experiential dimensions that contribute to societies of experience. The energy brings its experience to the atom, the atom to the cell, the cell to the structures,  the structures to the brain.

Does an atom feel? Yes.

Does an atom feel what I feel? No. But we bring into our selves (the society of the human being you are) the atom's experience. And the atom, being part of the society that we are, continues to experience with you as environment. Relationships continue.

So is it with all societies. We are the product of process. That product is not a thing but a process.

Scientific Reductionism

Scientific reductionism is the idea of reducing complex interactions and entities to the sum of their constituent parts.

René Decarte and Mind/Matter Duality

Which is the real René Decarte? Where is the unchanging Decarte?

First, a short description of the work of Decarte...
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By calling everything into doubt, Descartes laid the foundations of modern philosophy. In Discourse on Method he explains that human beings consist of minds and bodies; that these are totally distinct "substances"; that God exists and that He ensures we can trust the evidence of our senses. Ushering in the "scientific revolution" of Galileo and Newton, Descartes' ideas swept aside ancient and medieval traditions of philosophical methods and investigation.
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A central issue in process philosophy is around the unity of the stuff of reality. Decarte divided reality into the material and the mental or spiritual. One does not affect the other. We can use matter as so many dead objects, or as John B. Cobb, a process thinker, describes it that all we know in the world as just "matter in motion" and that all relationships are basically physical.  Thinking of the world in a Cartesian way allows us to us the material world in a disinterested way.

In Process Philosophy there is a physical and mental reality but they are not divided. Process philosophy does not unite the material and mental (because this is a model that uses objects) but focuses on process/evolution/change. All change so all are "in" process. Actualities (what is real in the world) are in process between the reality they have been to the reality they are drawn to be, between the physical and the mental poles.

Whitehead and Eastern Thought

There is a natural affinity between the process philosophy of Whitehead and Eastern thought. The division between east and west came at the time that Zoroastrian cosmology divided the world into a Light/Dark and Good/Evil duality. As Whitehead's cosmology is of one reality, it is closer to Hinduism and Buddhism thought where the world is one.

Mythic Symbols

Mythic symbols are a way of relating or coming into accord with the perceived cosmology. Mathematics and language are symbolic systems. Whitehead uses these systems to help us come into this accord with the cosmos, therefore, one of the best ways of understanding Whitehead is as a mythology.

Alles Vergangliche ist nur eim Gleichnis

Everything that is transitory is but a reference - Goethe

But the reference isn't to any thing. It is what is called the void, sunya, and it's called the void because no thought can reach it. So what these symbols are talking about is something that can't be talked about. They have to become transparent. They have to open. What we find then is that the ethnic opens to the elementary. One of our problems - and these are the two great sources, now, of the problem here in Western interpretation of these matters - is the Aristotelian accent on rational thinking and the biblical focus on the ethnic reference to the mythic symbol. These two pin us down to the world of facts and rational cogitation. But from this other standpoint, those are exactly what have to be transcended; they have to be rendered transparent and not opaque. (Joe Campbell) 

The Whitehead idea of misplaced concreteness is based on the confusing the symbolic for the referred. We see characteristics of a state and therefore see actualities as states. Symbols are like movies. A movie as reference to actual change is a collection of still images, the collection of discrete images when conjoined are not the change but only point to the process. What can be captured as state (the transitory) is but a reference.

The Whole as A Whole Becoming

Because all actualities are in the process of becoming, the whole is in the process of becoming. The subjective interactions and experience of all actualities are based on the environment they make for each other. From the subjective point of view of any one actuality, all others are environment. We are environments for each other.

Perception of the whole

"The many become one and are increased by one." (ANW)

Seeing the world in terms of a whole is an important part of the process philosophy. One way of understanding is a figure/ground. The figure is in the foreground and the ground is in the background. Looking at gestalt (meaning whole) psychology as a companion mode of thinking we see that the figures we perceive as being separate from the ground do not need to be perceived that way. Like a wave is part of the water it arises from, a figure is part of the ground but a part that is in focus (has our attention), has a sense of unity (see last entry) and yet remains part of/in contact/in relationship with its environment. The relationship is unity.

Seen this way all actualities are in relationship and there is no way of moving out of relationship. We are always in contact -- changing, being changed, exchanging experience, forming new societies and engaging novelty.

The Gestalt

Emergence

Emergence is the process of complex pattern formation from simpler rules. It is demonstrated by the perception of the Dog Picture, which depicts a Dalmatian dog sniffing the ground in the shade of overhanging trees. The dog is not recognized by first identifying its parts (feet, ears, nose, tail, etc.), and then inferring the dog from those component parts. Instead, the dog is perceived as a whole, all at once. However, this is a description of what occurs in vision and not an explanation. Gestalt theory does not explain how the percept of a dog emerges.

Reification

Reification

Reification is the constructive or generative aspect of perception, by which the experienced percept contains more explicit spatial information than the sensory stimulus on which it is based.

For instance, a triangle will be perceived in picture A, although no triangle has actually been drawn. In pictures B and D the eye will recognize disparate shapes as "belonging" to a single shape, in C a complete three-dimensional shape is seen, where in actuality no such thing is drawn.

Reification can be explained by progress in the study of illusory contours, which are treated by the visual system as "real" contours.

Multistability

The Necker Cube and the Rubin vase, two examples of multistability

Multistability (or multistable perception) is the tendency of ambiguous perceptual experiences to pop back and forth unstably between two or more alternative interpretations. This is seen for example in the Necker cube, and in Rubin's Figure/Vase illusion shown here. Other examples include the 'three-pronged widget' and artist M. C. Escher's artwork and the appearance of flashing marquee lights moving first one direction and then suddenly the other. Again, Gestalt does not explain how images appear multistable, only that they do.

Invariance

Invariance

Invariance is the property of perception whereby simple geometrical objects are recognized independent of rotation, translation, and scale; as well as several other variations such as elastic deformations, different lighting, and different component features. For example, the objects in A in the figure are all immediately recognized as the same basic shape, which are immediately distinguishable from the forms in B. They are even recognized despite perspective and elastic deformations as in C, and when depicted using different graphic elements as in D. Computational theories of vision, such as those by David Marr, have had more success in explaining how objects are classified.

Emergence, reification, multistability, and invariance are not necessarily separable modules to be modeled individually, but they could be different aspects of a single unified dynamic mechanism.^{[citation needed]}

Prägnanz

The fundamental principle of gestalt perception is the law of prägnanz (German for pithiness) which says that we tend to order our experience in a manner that is regular, orderly, symmetric, and simple. Gestalt psychologists attempt to discover refinements of the law of prägnanz, and this involves writing down laws which hypothetically allow us to predict the interpretation of sensation, what are often called "gestalt laws".^[2] These include:

Law of Closure

Law of Similarity

Law of Proximity

• Law of Closure — The mind may experience elements it does not perceive through sensation, in order to complete a regular figure (that is, to increase regularity).
• Law of Similarity — The mind groups similar elements into collective entities or totalities. This similarity might depend on relationships of form, color, size, or brightness.
• Law of Proximity — Spatial or temporal proximity of elements may induce the mind to perceive a collective or totality.
• Law of Symmetry (Figure ground relationships)— Symmetrical images are perceived collectively, even in spite of distance.
• Law of Continuity — The mind continues visual, auditory, and kinetic patterns.
• Law of Common Fate — Elements with the same moving direction are perceived as a collective or unit.

The Science-Religion Debate

Religion and Science: Finding Their Kindred Spirits (Krista Tippett)

The science-religion “debate” is an abstraction, and a distraction. It isn’t true to the deep nature of science, or of religion, or to the history of interplay between them. These are convictions I’m left with after a cumulative conversation that began a decade ago. And after spending the spring traveling around the country talking about this in theaters packed with scientists and citizens, atheist to devout, I know that others share my sense that our sound-bite friendly, politically-fueled narrative of animosity has outlived its usefulness. There is a science-religion divide — these are two distinct and separate spheres of endeavor. But in the 21st century, we can’t help but hear echoes passing back and forth across that divide and changing the way we understand our humanity, our relationship to each other and the natural world, the contours of the cosmos.

It’s not just the passion and frequency with which mathematicians talk about beauty and physicists talk about mystery that intrigues me. It is also that every time the rest of us log on to our computers in the morning, or every time we eat a meal, we are steeped in the fruits of science. We may not be fluent in the language of science — mathematics — which Galileo called “the language in which the universe is written.” But in the most ordinary moments in our doctors’ offices, certainly in near-ordinary experiences like birth, illness, and death, we receive crash courses in science of many kinds. And we turn simultaneously, without time for debate, to inner territory of morality and meaning, which science has no language for addressing.
Einstein put it this way, helpfully: science is good at describing what is, but it does not describe what should be. That is one way to talk about the role that religious and spiritual practice, our sense of what is right and sacred, plays in human life. And for the record, I don’t believe that spiritual and moral life ceases in the absence of belief in God. Einstein didn’t believe in the personal God of traditional religion. But he did profess a “cosmic religious sense” driven by “inklings” and “wonderings” rather than answers and certainties. Its hallmarks were a reverence for beauty and a sense of wonder that, he acknowledged, he shared with lovers of art and religion.

And it’s worth remembering that, in Einstein’s day, zealous religion appeared less a threat to the future of humanity than science on the loose. He watched chemists and physicists become purveyors of weapons of unprecedented destructive power. He declared, chillingly, that science in his generation was like a razor blade in the hands of a three-year-old. Against this backdrop, he called his contemporary Gandhi — and other figures such as Jesus, Moses, St. Francis of Assisi, and Buddha — “spiritual geniuses.” Einstein soberly observed that these kinds of “geniuses in the art of living” are “more necessary to the sustenance of global human dignity, security and joy than the discovers of objective knowledge.”

It seems clearer and clearer to me that, in the 21st century, genius in the art of living must draw on the best insights of both science and religion, not as argued but as lived. Or, as the Anglican quantum physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne puts it, we come ever more vividly to see how science and religion are both necessary to interpret the “rich, varied and surprising way the world actually is.” I think that the surge of spiritual energy and curiosity of our time is precisely a response to the complexity we know by way of science and technology — not a flight from that, but a turn to sources of discernment to sort, prioritize, make sense.

I was especially intrigued by how the subject of climate change came up when I discussed Einstein’s God in a packed theater in Washington D.C. There the room included scientists from across government agencies — some of them personally religious, some of them not, but all open to engaging the moral aspects of human life that science touches but does not resolve. I heard from people who are working on frontiers of climate change research, including deliberation of how, in a worst-case scenario, we might intervene to change climate, change the weather. This is a cosmos-altering idea on the magnitude of those contemporaries of Einstein who split the atom. But they are deliberating now about the ethical ramifications of this burgeoning possibility, and they are aware of their need of all the resources humanity has to offer for thinking this through.

So what if, as a first step moving forward, we focused less on the competing answers of science and religion, and more on their kindred questions? The question of what it means to be human animates each of these vast fields of endeavor, though they approach and take it up in very different ways. If we just start seeing that, how much more cohesively might we be able to take in the best insights of science and religion, honoring more of the fullness of our humanity, living more gracefully and productively with all that we can know?


In the photo above, physicist Albert Einstein (left, standing behind girl) and theologian Paul Tillich (right, standing in front wearing glasses) at a conference in Davos, Switzerland on March 18, 1928. (Courtesy of Image Archive ETH-Bibliothek, Zurich)