Abstract
The ideas of process philosophy in general, and Alfred North Whitehead in particular, will soon come into greater use and wider familiarity. This emergence of his ideas into wider use will be a great aid to education and to the reforming of our institutions and practices around the very different educational (and scientific) requirements of the sort of world that sits just beyond the horizon of our present vision. There will be discontinuities in the world to come (huge ones), but there will also be continuities. Whitehead’s ideas about time and possibility, and their practical applications, place us in a position to do better than guess and conjecture about what is coming.
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I should note at the outset that although Whitehead wrote extensively on education, and in ways very much applicable to what I will discuss hereafter, I will not be making explicit use of these writings. My approach is rather to examine ideas from his metaphysics and show how these foreshadow practices in the coming decades. Still, readers may find it valuable to examine Whitehead’s explicit writings on education in this context. See, especially, Aims of Education and Other Essays (New York: Free Press, 1967 [1911]). There is a generous body of secondary literature on Whitehead’s philosophy of education and the relation between education and process philosophy generally. For many years there was a scholarly society dedicated explicitly to such study, The Society for the Process Philosophy of Education, which released periodic collections of studies from its members. Most important among these scholars is George Allan. See his Modes of Learning: Whitehead’s Metaphysics and the Stages of Learning (Albany: SUNY Press, 2013) and Higher Education in the Making: Pragmatism, Whitehead, and the Canon (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004).
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Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected edition, eds. D.R. Griffin and D.W. Sherburne (New York: Free press, 1978), p. 3.
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See Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Machines Transcend Humans (New York: Penguin Books, 2006) and The Age of Spiritual Machines (New York: Viking, 1999).
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See the article in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns, accessed November 1, 2017.
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See, for example, Johann Gottfried Herder’s observations on Martin Luther’s effect of the German people. Herder, “Luther: Ein Lehrer der Deutschen Nation,” in Herder’s Werke in zwei Bände (Dortmund: Hanser Verlag, 1982), vol. 2, 632–633. Due to printing, translation of the Bible became a viable project, and due to its mass distribution, it was possible for one person to become the “teacher ” of a whole nation. The effects of translation of the Bible into vernacular language and its mass availability, added to hymnals and other worship aids (all made possible by the printing press), were foreseeable, even before 1517.
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This effort was well underway before Gutenberg’s press, as the storied career of John Wycliffe (d. 1384) and the wide diffusion of his English translation of the Bible makes clear. Such forces are still with us, of course, from the suppression of websites by the People’s Republic of China to the abandonment of net neutrality by the Trump administration. The enemies of the free exchange of ideas and information always form a predictable portion of humanity and always for the same reasons: the maintenance of power and wealth is facilitated through keeping people in the dark. That will not change in the future. Whoever has the power will try to control the flow of information.
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In the past, digital computing worked with discrete bits of information that behaved “classically,” from a physical point of view. Quantum computing is based on “qubits” which is a kind of “information” (in a sense I will describe) that is non-discrete, that is, continuous, and which is transformed and controlled by the manipulation of entangled photons. One current theory for how triple entanglement may pave the way for the creation of analog computing systems that could physically support the low-entropy fields required for these improvements, see Paul Werbos and Ludmilla Dolmatova, “Analog Quantum Computing and the Need for Time-symmetric Physics,” in Quantum Information Processing 15:3 (March 2016), 1273–1287. This set of ideas has received some further confirmation in Yanhua Shih’s lab at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, discussed here: http://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2016/02/new-experiment-as-important-as.html, accessed May 10, 2017. The call for a “time-symmetric physics” in this model is of interest because such a model treats the second law of thermodynamics as non-universal in principle (that it may not apply in microphysics as it does in macrophysics). This is just a theory that attempts to go around the main obstacle to treating time as symmetrical (i.e., entropy). I doubt time will ever be shown to be symmetrical (i.e., invariant and reversible) in physical fact, but that doesn’t mean we cannot model it as such. I would say that those who are trying to model the physical universe as time symmetric could do better if continuity were defined in terms of possibility rather than using ideas about “the physical” inherited from earlier models of space.
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See Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: The Phenomenology of Knowledge (volume 3), trans. Ralph Mannheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959 [1929]), esp. Chap. 5, pp. 191–206.
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Taking an informal poll of my own students, 18–22 years old, I found that all of them would seriously consider having a device installed in their bodies, such as the wrist, which would give them internet access any time they wanted it, so long as they could turn it off. Yet, not one was willing to have the device installed in the cranium to be controlled with, for example, eye movements that could be learned. For some reason they perceive these as being radically different, but I think it is a clear indicator that they are a transitional generation. The idea of powering the devices with their own body-electrochemistry was met with mixed reactions.
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Much of the research centers on language and getting computers to grasp our intentions in speaking. This can be replicated by asking computers to translate one language into another language when it has never been programmed to do so, but has been taught a third language with which to compare the two it is asked to translate. This can be done. See the article in TechCrunch, November 22, 2016, https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/22/googles-ai-translation-tool-seems-to-have-invented-its-own-secret-internal-language/, accessed May 5, 2017. This type of advance in getting computers to understand natural language can be built upon, although it is not yet well developed. See the article on “emotibot” in TechNode, March 22, 2017, http://technode.com/2017/03/22/ai-chatbot-emotibot-understand-emotions/, accessed May 5, 2017.
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The issue of how soon is hotly debated, but it seems like a pointless dispute to me. Everyone agrees the change is coming. Whether Ray Kurzweil’s overworked numbers or Sam Harris’ more careful numbers prove correct, the outcome is the same.
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The hypothesis I favor, and which accords with Whiteheadian cosmology, in my view, is that the flux is best characterized physically as a quantum vacuum, the lowest energy possible for physical existing, below the level of particles. See Peter W. Milonni, The Quantum Vacuum (New York: Academic Press, 2013). Some of the work of Giancarlo Basti is, in my view, exemplary of the approach Whitehead would favor in the physics of today, although I do not think he would embrace the theological implications Basti favors. Basti defends the idea of the universe as a quantum vacuum and emphasizes continuities in AI and physics with evaluative processes we can easily recognize. See, for example, “The Quantum Field Theory (QFT) Dual Paradigm in Fundamental Physics and the Semantic Information Content and Measure in Cognitive Sciences” (2014), accessible here: http://www.stoqatpul.org/lat/materials/basti_paper_aisb_london.pdf. Also see Basti, “From Formal Logic to Formal Ontology: The New Dual Paradigm in Natural Sciences” (2014), accessible here: http://www.stoqatpul.org/lat/materials/basti_paper_cle_def.pdf; accessed January 2, 2018.
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See Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected ed. by D.W. Sherburne and D.R. Griffin (New York: Free Press, 1978 [1929]), pp. 61–82.
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See Whitehead, Process and Reality, pp. 219–221. The prehension is an analytical division of the “actual entity” (which cannot be actually divided) rather than a real division of the extensive continuum. Many, even most, interpreters of Whitehead get this point wrong, treating prehensions as actual divisions of the real, since prehensions include physical as well as conceptual feelings, and most people cannot imagine physical existences that are indivisible themselves and which exist without actually dividing other things. Whitehead explicitly says these things, but his interpreters often forget or fail to comprehend.
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See Empedocles’ Fragments, esp. 2, 36, and 60, for example, http://history.hanover.edu/texts/presoc/emp.html#book1, accessed November 4, 2017.
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The classic case of this regrettable attitude was the conscious strategy employed by Einstein to close down genuine philosophical discussion of general relativity. This history has been well documented by Jimena Canales in The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). Unfortunately Einstein and his followers gave physicists a circle of irrelevant excuses to ignore philosophical objections, to remain untrained in reasoning (apart from narrow and dogmatic, almost quasi-mystical, Platonistic interpretations of number), and to be dismissive of genuine dissent that comes from philosophical concerns. These physicists continue to reason poorly enough that they make the simplest mistakes and then hide behind their academic titles and prejudices to convince or intimidate dissenters into silence. The greatest offenders have been people like Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jack Sarfatti, Sean Carroll, and anyone else who takes general relativity to be an indisputable scientific fact . All are reductionists and anti-philosophical, while posing as substitutes for philosophers on matters that are more appropriately described as theological than as scientific . Indeed, “physicotheology” is the name Kant gave to the sorts of stories these people force upon the public in the name of science . Gary Herstein and I have done our best to debunk this model-centrism in our The Quantum of Explanation, but there is little reason for optimism that this pseudoscience (and crypto-theology) will be recognized for what it is anytime soon.
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Whitehead, Process and Reality, pp. 90–91.
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Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 91.
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Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 91.
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Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 91.
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This point is the essence of Whitehead’s argument contra Einstein in The Principle of Relativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922). See also Gary L. Herstein, Whitehead and the Measurement Problem of Cosmology (Frankfurt am Main: Ontos Verlag, 2006).
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To the extent that I follow the current discussion (which is fairly chaotic), it appears to me that Sarfatti and his small band of ideologues is pressing for a relaxing of the de Broglie guidance constraint so that one needs no hidden variable to account for non-local quantum communication; see Sarfatti’s “On R.I. Sutherland’s Retro-Causal Action-Reaction Lagrangian Quasi-Gauge Model of Relativistically Invariant Many-Particle Entangled Bohm Pilot Wave Theory in 4D Space-Time without Many-Dimensional Configuration Space,” which is a working paper he has made public . See https://www.academia.edu/15700723/UPDATED_091515Post-Quantum_Theory_with_Entanglement_Signaling_for_Sentient_AI, accessed May 13, 2017. Obviously, avoiding local hidden variables is required by Bell’s theorem. Sarfatti’s view also remains, by his understanding, within Einstein’s general relativistic interpretation of space-time and allows that the wave function collapses. The view I am suggesting, and with which I think Whitehead would agree, seems closer to that of Antony Valentini. See Antony Valentini, “Pilot-wave Theory of Fields, Gravitation and Cosmology,” in Bohmian Mechanics and Quantum Theory: An Appraisal, eds. James T. Cushing, Arthur Fine, Sheldon Goldstein (The Hague:, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), pp. 45–66. In a view like this, there is no need to accept wave-particle duality at all. Continuity in the wave function is hypothesized. This is closer to Whitehead’s general attitude, but Whitehead’s theory is much more general, and Valentini, along with the de Broglie-Bohm thread of interpretation, would be a special case of what Whitehead is theorizing. Whitehead can avoid the prohibitions of Bell’s theorem because the hidden variable would be non-local, in the required sense. The hidden variable is the conservation of energy in a cosmic epoch, which may allow for a decay of order at this broad level which is not necessarily a loss of energy for the cosmic epoch, and although the causal laws associated with various levels of complexity and “information” may appear to violate the first law of thermodynamics locally, the broader conservation of energy is assured, but now as a conservation of order. Most physicists would not accept such a distinction between order in general and the order of physical systems, but some do (e.g., Gianfranco Basti and his supporters), and still more computer scientists and mind scientists are willing to entertain such hypotheses. For Whitehead, this view would only be a hypothesis, not an assertion. The trouble with Sarfatti and other contemporary model-centric theorizers is that they do not believe their theories are hypothetical, even when it is patently obvious they are making untestable assertions.
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For my part I think that those who try to get formulations of “gravity” to do much theoretical work in the present have shackled themselves, and unnecessarily so, to an idea (i.e., gravity) that is almost certain to be redefined into oblivion and meaninglessness as science progresses.
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The question and surmise came from Helen Milne in an e-mail exchange, in May of 2017, about the nature of the flux. I appreciate the question and thank her for the summary.
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Arguably, our bodies have been created within the constraints (the modes of stability) that just are the overlapping of the vibrations congenial to the forms our present bodies use and (with the senses) interpret. This is a “space” in the relevant sense. Whether we might also say that in evolutionary time, that is, the “space” of life, these same vibrations actually create our bodies is a speculation we might make, and once that is continuous with the kinds of bodies we might have after the singularity. For more on the “space of life” in the sense I use it here, see my “Evolutionary Time, and the Creation of the Space of Life,” in Space, Time, and the Limits of Human Understanding, eds. Shyam Wuppuluri and Giancarlo Ghirardi (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2016), Chap. 31, 381–400.
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See Thomas O. Buford, Trust: Our Second Nature (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009).
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See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1990 [1966]), Chap. 9.
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See the detailed analysis of “perspective” and “standpoint” in Auxier and Herstein, The Quantum of Explanation, Chap. 7.
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I have set out a detailed account of the differences among “act,” “action ,” and “activity” in my book Time, Will, and Purpose (Chicago: Open Court, 2013), pp. 130–185.
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This idea is far richer than I can summarize here. An excellent book-length study of this idea in Whitehead’s philosophy has been published by Judith A. Jones, Intensity: An Essay in Whiteheadian Ontology (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998).
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See my discussion of “docility” in my Time, Will, and Purpose , Chap. 5.
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I borrow this term and its meaning from E.S. Brightman, who might be aptly described as “the Whitehead of moral philosophy .” See his Person and Reality, eds. R.S. Brightman, P.A. Bertocci, and J. Newhall (New York: Ronald Press, 1958); see also Moral Laws (New York: Abingdon Press, 1933).
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Auxier, R. (2018). The Coming Revolution in (Higher) Education: Process, Time, and Singularity. In: Stoller, A., Kramer, E. (eds) Contemporary Philosophical Proposals for the University. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72128-6_11
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