[MD] Sneddon Thesis

[PhaedrusWolff at carolina.rr.com]

Hi All,

 
A different view of Whitehead you might find interesting. 

       Alfred North Whitehead occupies a place in the history of 
Western philosophy which makes his importance comparable only with 
that of the great masters - Plato, Kant and Hegel, who gave to mankind 
monumental systems of thought. Whitehead conceives the universe as an 
organism, a process, to understand which our notions of things, 
entities, substances, and of place and time have to be completely 
overhauled and transformed. We are generally accustomed to think that 
material bodies are located at particular points of space and instants 
in time, and that no other body can occupy those points of space at 
that time. This idea of what Whitehead calls 'simple location', which 
falsely tries to explain things without reference to other regions of 
space and time, is bound up with the common belief that causation is 
the production of an effect by a cause which precedes it in time. 
Whitehead's criticism is that a causal relation between two things is 
incompatible with their simple l
ocation, for two things which are separate from each other cannot bear 
a causally binding relation between themselves. Causation as it is 
ordinarily understood implies that a knowledge of the cause should 
give us the knowledge of all its effects. This is impossible if we 
persist in believing that things and events are separated from one 
another. If the simple location of events is a fact, even inference 
would give us no knowledge of the inferred events, for inference 
requires that the events from which we infer others should have 
an 'inherent reference' to the inferred events in order that they may 
give us knowledge of these latter; but such a reference is absent 
between events that are really different from each other. Memory of 
the past, too, would not be possible if all events are utterly cut off 
from one another in space and time. Our experiences oblige us to give 
up the belief in the simple location of things and events. There do 
not exist disconnected bodies or events a
t different points of space or moments in time.  

       If, then, events are not separated from one another, how can we 
distinguish between a cause and its effect, between the events from 
which we infer and those which we infer? Whitehead's answer is: By 
admitting a process that lies between all things, a process in which 
things themselves become parts of the process, a continuous flow of 
events, which takes us to the conception of the universe as an 
organism, a system in which every part influences every other part, 
every event is pervaded and interpenetrated by every other event. It 
is impossible to find anywhere in the universe isolated objects 
existing by themselves statically in space and time.  

       The theory of organism provides a solution to the problem of 
the relation between mind and matter. We are wont to think that mind 
and matter are two distinct facts of experience influencing each other 
in some way. But how can any mutual interference be possible if they 
are separated from each other? The problem can be solved only if mind 
and matter interact by a relation of process. Nature flows into the 
mind and flows out transformed by it into the objects of perception. 
Here, neither of the two is more real than the other. The perceiver 
and the perceived form one continuous process. There are no subjects 
and objects differentiated from one another. The perceived universe is 
a view of itself from the standpoint of its parts that are modified by 
the activity of its whole being. There is a continuity of process 
between mind and matter.  

        The relation of substance and its qualities, too, as it is 
generally understood, presents great difficulties. We cannot say how 
qualities inhere in a substance; we do not know whether they are 
different or identical. The usually accepted view is that substances 
are featureless things possessing only primary qualities, to which the 
secondary qualities are imparted by the knowing mind. Then there 
remains nothing in Nature except motion, which appears as light when 
it impinges on the retina and as sound when it strikes the ear-drum. 
The world, says classical physics, consists of mere electrical 
charges, having no colour, no sound, no beauty, no good, no value, 
nothing that we call a world. The world is in our minds. What is real 
is electrical force, mathematical point-events, symbols and formulae. 
And what of aesthetic, ethical and religious values? Science has no 
such things as these. We also know how Locke's distinction of the 
primary qualities from the secondary ones
 led to the astonishing conclusions arrived at by Berkeley and Hume. 
Whitehead points out that classical science discovers a featureless 
universe because of the notion of simple location of things. It 
committed the mistake of abstracting things and events from their 
relation to others, and substances from the qualities which 
characterise them. The remedy is the acceptance of a universe of 
organic relations, where all facts, meanings and values are conserved 
without contradicting sense, reason and experience, and in which all 
spatial otherness and temporal distinction is overcome in a system of 
universal mutual reference of things and events. Space, time and 
events are organically related to each other; nothing can ever exist 
as isolated from other existences.  

       Whitehead learns from Hegel that all things and events are 
internally related and that to abstract them from their environment or 
their context in the whole would be to misrepresent them totally and 
to conceive them as what they are not. Matter is a group of agitations 
of force which extends its body to the entire universe and constitutes 
its stuff. The configurations of this force are called bodies or 
events and their existence and nature determine everything. Things are 
without limits or boundaries, they really exist everywhere, at every 
time, in every way. We cannot pluck a leaf from the tree and know what 
it is to the tree, or cut a part of the human body and know how it 
works as its organ. The bifurcation of an event from other events, of 
substance from its attributes, of cause from its effect, of mind from 
body, of things from the rest of the universe is a deathblow given to 
all right knowledge. Whitehead propounds a philosophy based on the 
scientific theory of 
relativity. The result is the novel concept of the organism.  

       Whitehead's universe as an organism is governed by the law of 
internal relations. All things are all other things in every 
condition, and the relations themselves are not independent of the 
things. Now, we have to give up the habit of using the 
words 'thing', 'entity', etc. while studying Whitehead, for he has 
pointed out that our ideas of thinghood are bound up with our notions 
of simple location involving what he calls the 'fallacy of misplaced 
concreteness'. What we call a thing is for him a set of agitations of 
force, a group of activity or energy, a configuration of process or 
motion, and he calls such a bit of process an 'actual occasion'. We 
shall, however, for the sake of convenience, apply this term to things 
in general or objects of our experience. Sometimes, Whitehead calls 
these actual occasions 'drops of experience'. These names given to the 
material of the objects of common perception are to bring out that 
they are not isolated entities but currents of t
eleological process, continuous with all things in the universe. No 
part of the process can be abstracted from the others and studied 
correctly. Every actual occasion involves every other, and to know any 
one is to know the whole universe. Actual occasions are spatio-
temporal aspects of process, a nexus of which we call an object. An 
object is nothing but a continuous process of actual occasions as we 
experience them in their externalised condition. There is no fixed 
object anywhere. An event is a series of actual occasions revealed in 
perception as demonstrated in a molecule for a few moments. Objects 
are more complex formulations of such events. The objectness of an 
object is in its capacity to be experienced in perception.  

       Every actual occasion is sensitive to the existence of others, 
and thus to the entire universe. All actual occasions take account of 
each other, and in some way, subtler than even sense-
perception, 'perceive' each other. There is a kind of 
pervasive 'feeling' of every actual occasion for the others in the 
universe. Whitehead uses the word 'feeling' in quite a different sense 
from the one in which we are used to understand it, and makes it more 
fundamental than the conscious level of the mind in waking life. This 
feeling is a natural sympathy which the actual occasions have for the 
whole, a general connectedness and unity of the universe which they 
reveal in themselves by the very fact of their constitution. This 
rudimentary feeling or experience is, to Whitehead, of the nature of 
unconscious 'prehension' or taking into relation of the other actual 
occasions, a grasping of the characteristics of every aspect of the 
universe. The prehensions may be positive absorbings o
r negative rejections of aspects. The actual occasions are thus 
related both in physical and mental life; the two are not features of 
distinct orders of being. The process is feeling and reality, and the 
energy of physics is but what we feel within ourselves as minds, a 
feeling in our own constitutions as actual occasions for the 
indivisible process which is the universe. Every actual occasion 
represents and feels a situation of the entire process, and its very 
existence is due to the contribution of the rest of the actual 
occasions; it is produced by the whole universe by way of integration 
of characters, which Whitehead calls the process of 'concrescence'. An 
actual occasion is called more precisely a 'prehensive occasion', for 
it has no existence independent of its prehensions.  

If you would like to read more, click continue;
http://www.swami-krishnananda.org/com/com_whit.html

I must prewarn, it does mention the God word, but doesn’t appear to be 
a God which sits up on a cloud moving the chess pieces of life. 

Chin