Need a new front cover

What about a paint by number/ partially erased/ partially drawn/ partially colored drawing of ANW with the tools (eraser, pencil, brush) visible?

Adventures of Ideas Redux

AOI pages need to be resorted to follow book...

Roughs for graphic novel underway

It has started. The roughs for the graphic book on Whitehead are coming along. Older blog entries are being revised, current entries are undergoing fact checking, text is being edited and drafts are being printed. Should be done before 2012 with any luck!

Page review (1-6)

The use of the derivative and tensor

Whitehead, comparing the process of mathematics to the process of the world, connected derivatives to change and used ideas in calculus to express the current understanding of reality, a relativist dynamic. Whitehead also worked in higher form geometry. He connected the extensive properties of tensors to describe the geometry of that change.

Whitehead as Mathematician

Mathematicians work in a world between Science and Metaphysics, between proximal and ultimate causes. Whitehead worked as a scientist, mathematician and philosopher, finding commonality between these fields.

Mathematics is the tool specially suited for dealing with abstract concepts of any kind and there is no limit to its power in this field.— Paul A.M. Dirac (1902-1984), English physicist.

Whitehead's work in the second book of Principia Mathematica (Principles of Mathematics), a seminal work on the foundations of all mathematics, is indicative of the expression of his thought throughout his works. One deceptively simple but powerful entry ties together the abstract (the number "1") with the reality of a singular unity in the real world in the equation 1+1=2. This connection of the propositional and the actual provided the ground for all ideas and actualities, rendering them all 'forms' of process, tying them all into a continuum and ending the need for dualism.

Extending this work, the actual and the propositional are dynamic elements of the same process, one an instantaneous and the other a derivative expression, linked by a calculus of changes as experienced in the real world. Everything flows through states of balance, a punctuated equilibrium, yet never divided in time.

Whitehead joined the sensible and transcendent -- the pragmatic and aesthetic -- sign and referent -- past, present and future into a cohesive unity. He asks us, "How many realities can there be?"

Four Whitehead process concepts that connect to Buddhism

Corelessness (also called Emptiness)
Interbeing
Transitoriness
and
Mutual Arising

(to be expanded on)

Language and Reality

As a grammarian, the role of language for Whitehead was as a mirror that reflected reality. You could partially understand reality by this reflection but the reflection is not the reality. Language is a subset or a flattening of the experience like a mirror that shows two dimensions of a three dimensional world. The limits of language, therefore, are not the limits of reality.

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).