by Richard Goldstein
These notes start off with a brief overview of process philosophy, partially because there are not many good videos on the topic (although I included a few at the end of the notes). Give them a look if you can. This is followed by a short overview of some interesting aspects. These are all completely optional and are included as possible topics for the discussion.
We often acknowledge the changing nature of the world with phrases like ‘The only constant in life is change’, ‘Nothing endures besides change’ and ‘This too will pass.’ Yet we are surprised when change occurs and agonise when forced to confront the transient nature of our own existence. This tension has led to two different philosophical traditions in the West: the tradition of Parmenides (c. 450 BCE) emphasising the eternal and the persistent, seeing change as illusory; and the tradition of Heraclitus (c. 500 BCE), embracing the transitory, viewing everything as flux. These competing visions - permanence versus flux - shape how we conceive of reality.
Most people in the West conceive of the cosmos as filled with enduring objects that interact with each other, a conception fitting in the Parmenidean tradition. Leucippus (c. 430 BCE) and Democritus (c. 460 - 370 BCE) proposed that all matter was made up of indestructible, indivisible immutable atoms, only differing in their composition and arrangement - a view later adopted by Robert Boyle (1627 - 1691) and Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727). Plato (c. 425 - 350 BCE) considered the properties that objects might have (the ‘forms’) to be more fundamental, keeping the focus on these eternal and fixed descriptors despite the superficial appearance of change. Aristotle (384 - 322 BCE) emphasized the primary role of substances, which can exist independently while providing the substrates to which all descriptions and properties must attach. Isaac Newton's theories represent the culmination of this conception as embodied in his first law: ‘An object at rest will remain at rest, and an object in motion will remain in motion at a constant velocity, unless acted on by an external force.’ The archetypal image is of an inert object floating in space through eternity, lacking the capacity to change without a cause outside of itself.
A separate parallel tradition sees the world as interacting processes rather than discrete objects. The archetypal image is the vortex, such as a whirlpool in a river. The whirlpool involves a multitude of distinct movements, but the dynamics demonstrate a unity of form and movement. These motions are systematically linked to one another, forming a closely-coupled integrated series that organises itself as it unfolds in time. The whirlpool can only be defined by the persistence of activity and cannot be separated theoretically or practically from the flow of the water, the banks that confine the river, the rainfall that fills the river, or the entire Earth that produces the gravity that causes the river to flow - a stark contrast to Newton's isolated and passive object.
If the river is defined by its flow, as the flow changes, so does the river. Or as Heraclitus put it, ‘You cannot step in the same river twice.’ The persistence of the whirlpool results from the constant motion of the river. Heraclitus captured this paradox of stability through change and motion in another fragment about posset - a drink made from wine, barley, and cheese that separates if not constantly stirred. He wrote, ‘The moving posset stands still,’ highlighting how the drink's existence as a unified mixture depends on continuous movement. The posset exists as a dynamic process - its apparent stability emerging from and requiring constant motion.
There is change within this motion. The river erodes, the rain ceases, the water is diverted, the whirling of the water becomes faster or slower or larger or smaller or ceases altogether, perhaps to start again when conditions change. The posset is consumed, the drinker is distracted and leaves the drink unstirred, the beverage loses market share and is forgotten, replaced by retsina, ouzo and Bud Light.
We can conceptualise the whirlpool as a ‘thing’ by giving it a name, but this abstracts away its fundamental reality: pure motion. The whirlpool exists only as ongoing activity - there is no substantial ‘it’ that does the whirling: only the whirling itself. To reverse this relationship and treat the abstracted object as primary commits what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861 - 1947) called the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ - the error of taking our abstract mental constructs for concrete reality.
Even something as seemingly static as a rock is moving along a trajectory from creation to dissolution, whether from erosion, magma formation, freeway construction, or asteroid collision. Looking deeper, modern physics tells us that our rock is a whirl of activity. The electrons in the rock, without defined position, momentum, or energy, circle their nuclei at near light-speed. The electrons holding the rock's molecules together are fundamentally indistinguishable - they exist as a mixture of all possible ways of assigning specific electrons to different states throughout the cosmos. Both the speed and indistinguishability are required for the molecules that make up the rock to exist1. Even if cooled to absolute zero, the molecules in the rock keep vibrating in all possible ways2. Rather than being inert and at rest, the rock's behaviour emerges as a process where apparent stability arises from constant motion and uncertain designation, and where the constituent elements that make up the rock lack the attributes - position, motion, time, identity - characteristic of an object.3
Such a fundamental change in philosophical orientation has a multitude of consequences, as illustrated below. Although process philosophy is often identified with the initial perspectives of Heraclitus and the work of Whitehead, numerous philosophers throughout history have contributed to this tradition including G. W. Leibniz (1646 - 1716), Georg W. F. Hegel (1770 - 1831), Charles S. Peirce (1839 - 1914), William James (1842 - 1910), Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941), John Dewey (1859 - 1952), Wilfrid Sellars (1912 - 1989) and Gilles Deleuze (1925 - 1995). This rich heritage has produced a wide range of contrasting viewpoints and areas of vigorous disagreement. Nevertheless, these thinkers share an orientation that emphasises becoming over being, the dynamic over the static, relationships over independence, flow over stasis, emergent novelty over continuity and holistic descriptions over reductive analyses.
It is the nature of processes to interact, to form webs of interactions. A process is generally described by its interactions. How do we then describe what is and what is not part of a given process? How much of the river is taken up by the whirlpool? Does it include the river bottom and banks at this point? Does it include the water that is flowing through it at that specific instant, or past or future waters? Does it include the rainfall and the gravity?
What about the process that is me? Is there a well-defined activity that characterises being me? Does being me include the activities of bacteria that live in and on me, which outnumber the ‘human’ cells in my body? Does it include my relationships with friends, partners, and enemies? Can I legitimately claim to be identical with the cosmos? This lack of clear designation of what is and what isn't part of a process philosopher John Dupré calls ‘promiscuous realism.’
What makes different actions part of the same process? If the whirlpool is there Monday and Tuesday, gone Wednesday, and there on Thursday, is it the same whirlpool? If so, what makes it the same whirlpool? What makes me the same process day after day? This fundamental difficulty characterising the identity of a process is called ‘promiscuous identity’ by Dupré.
Both previous topics connect with the meaning of ‘self’. Is there a natural self that exists? Is it a process? Or is it something that is created by a process? There seems to be a unifying aspect of perception - how I experience my experiences differently than how I experience your experiences. Does this argue for the existence of a self?
Phenomenologists sometimes make a distinction between the ‘pre-reflective self’ that experiences an integrated perception, and a ‘reflective self’ that we create during those times when we are reflecting on our own existence. Does this distinction help? Can we reconcile this unifying aspect of experience with the notion that the self is something that we create? What are the consequences if the self is self-created?
There are striking similarities between Process Philosophy and Buddhist thought, such as the ‘middle way’ school founded by Nāgārjuna (c. 150-250 CE). Nāgārjuna believed that everything was ‘empty’ in the sense of lacking independent existence. This lack of independent existence extended, importantly, to the self. The nature of processes - how processes depend on each other as the whirlpool depends upon the riverbanks, the water flow, and the rain; how processes develop dependently on other processes - seems to represent a similar perspective.
There are parallels with other Eastern religions. The Buddhist notion of lack of independent self seems to be opposite to the Hindu concept that self is identical with universal consciousness, as represented by Brahman or Shiva Consciousness, and that the apparent separation is an illusion. But Hinduism, like Buddhism, encompasses the connected nature of reality - that processes naturally interact in ways that make separation difficult, and that the arbitrary nature of such separations suggests that the deeper, ultimate reality is ultimately one indivisible process.
The core concept in Taoism is the idea of the ‘Tao,’ which has been translated as path, course, and way. The Tao is an active principle, an eternal, ineffable flow from which all emerges and all returns. What we experience as persistent objects are just patterns within that flow, or as Zhuangzi (莊子, c. 369 - 286 BCE) wrote, the breath of heaven ‘blowing on the ten thousand things in a different way, so that each can be themselves.’ Harmony comes from integration with the natural patterns of change, embracing the uncertain, creative flow of nature rather than insisting on eternal universal truths.
There is a movement in Christian theology called ‘process theology’ that incorporates ideas from process philosophy. If all humans are woven into a web of interacting processes that ultimately includes all living (and non-living) entities, should this affect the way we interact with the world? How does this affect Genesis 1? Do we ‘subdue’ or ‘settle’ the earth? ‘Rule’ or ‘shepherd’ the living things that move on the ground or in the air and sea?
With a shift from objects to processes our language shifts and many nouns become verbs: the ‘run’ become ‘running’, ‘science’ becomes ‘sciencing’, ‘I’ becomes ‘me-ing.’ It seems that abstract nouns tend to become adverbs: rather than having my intelligence tested, I am tested on how intelligently I can answer the questions. People do not have courage but rather act courageously. Rather than speaking the truth, I speak truthfully.
What about ‘God’? Can ‘Godly’ mean that I approach things with a particular orientation? Can ‘I am a Christian’ become ‘I approach the situation Christianly’? Is ‘self’ an adverb, representing the manner with which I organise my experiences?
We worry about whether an electron or photon is a particle or wave, but in reality a quantum entity is characterised by the possible results of a measurement and their probabilities. When we declare the entity to be a wave or a particle or some mixture of both, are we confusing our abstractions for reality, and therefore committing the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’? Could the entity just be the potential for interacting with a measuring device in different ways?
It is standard in science to reduce everything down to the lowest possible level. Human behaviour depends on our biology, which is determined by our chemistry, which is a function of the physics of the particles that make up our molecules. In a process metaphysics, as Dupré points out, there is no ‘privileged’ level: the motion of the whirlpool is equally determined by and determine the movement of the molecules of water in the whirlpool. What happens to the tradition of mechanistic reductionism?
This mechanistic tradition underlies our understanding of causation. Causation fits naturally with the idea of inert objects, as something must cause the object to change its motion or behaviour. In a universe of processes interacting with large numbers of other processes on a variety of scales of time and space, where it is difficult to determine what is or is not a part of any given process, what happens to our understanding of causation?
If larger-scale motion can determine what occurs at a lower scale, does this endanger the very notion of ‘the laws of physics’?
The distinction between subject - that which perceives, thinks, and feels - and the object - that which is perceived, thought about, and felt, independently of the subject - is a fundamental concept in philosophy and science. Process philosophers see a ‘subject’ and ‘object’ not as pre-existing entities, but as a process that describes their mutual dynamics in time. What we call ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ are temporary patterns in the ongoing flow of experience, and a ‘measurement’ represents our focus on the changes of one aspect of this process, forgetting that experience is always relational.
Zhuangzi sees humans as carving reality into ‘this’ and ‘that’ - what we affirm, accept, or identify with as opposed to what we reject, oppose, or see as other. From my ‘this’ perspective, my ‘that’ is your ‘this,’ but from your ‘that’ perspective, my ‘this’ is your ‘that’. The two arise together: ‘that’ requires a ‘this’, as ‘this’ requires a ‘that’. So which is subject and which is object?
1We can understand why the electronic motion is necessary for the existence of the rock by noting that the more a particle is confined, the faster it moves, the higher its energy. It is this kinetic energy that prevents the electrons in an atom from falling into the nucleus, making atoms possible.
The dependence of indistinguishability is more interesting. We can consider all of the electrons in the universe, and the equally large number of locations where there is an electron. There is then a far-more-than-astronomical number of ways of assigning all of the electrons to all of the locations. Quantum mechanics says that the state of the universe is a mixture of these possible assignments. (The same is true of all protons, neutrons, photons, etc.) The electrons in the different assignments actually interact with each other, and it is the interactions between the same electron assigned to different electron locations in the molecule that makes the molecule stable. This means that the stability of the molecule does not depend on the properties of the constituents of the molecule but rather reflects the properties of the ensemble of all electrons throughout the cosmos.
2This is called the ‘zero-point energy’.
3Compatibility with modern physics was a major motivation in the development of process philosophy. One important aspect for Whitehead involved time. According to standard object-based philosophy, an object exists completely at a point of time. If there is currently a rock on the ground, it is completely there, with all its properties and qualities. A process develops over time, so that only one stage of the process that is the rock is present at any moment. And this moment cannot be too short. Just as the uncertainty principle states that the more an object’s location is defined, the less defined its momentum; similarly, the more defined its time, the less defined its energy. This means an object cannot have a well-defined energy at any point in time. The basic properties and qualities of an object can only be defined to a certain resolution over a period of time, what Whitehead calls an ‘actual occasion of experience’.
There are relatively few good introductory videos.
Short but superficial.
Wonderful discussion from a scientific perspective, from the theoretical physicist David Bohm, but somewhat technical and over an hour.
A bit strange but good when it gets going.
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, featuring an encyclopaedia entry about a society with a language lacking nouns. Download the story here.