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.