Abstract
Argument: An object is a process of becoming actual that gives way to another object. An actualization creates temporal facts out of simultaneity or timelessness. Authentic change occurs in the becoming of the object in a mind that perceives the world. Apparent change seems to occur between existing objects in the world. Authentic change is novel or emergent. The idea of causation is inferred from apparent change as a theory on the succession of objects in the course of their replacement.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
A. Lovejoy, The Revolt Against Dualism (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1930).
The fascinating topic of inverted vision is discussed by M. Solms, K. Kaplan-Solms, M. Saling, and P. Miller. “Inverted Vision After Frontal Lobe Disease,” Cortex 24(1988): 499–509.
See E. Pöppel, Mindworks: Time and Conscious Experience, English trans. T. Antin (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988).
See Self and Process, 127–146, for a microgenetic theory of duration and the nature of the specious (phenomenal) present.
A.N. Whitehead. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1919).
There is a good discussion of this point in J. Lango, Whitehead’s Ontology (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1972).
Self and Process, 127–46.
W. Newton-Smith, The Structure of Time (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), 17 et seq.
The distinction between objects as solid entities that undergo change, and change as an atomic sequence that lays down entities, is captured by some quantum theorists in the distinction of particle and wave: “We are directly aware of the particle aspect of the universe through the senses (while) the more subtle wave function is inferred by thought about our sensory experience in the domain that is manifest to the senses” D. Bohm and B. Hiley, The Undivided Universe (London: Routledge, 1993).
See K. Pribram, “Prolegomenon for a Holonomic Brain Theory,” in Synergetics of Cognition, ed. H. Haken and M. Stadler. Synergetics, vol. 45 (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1990).
G.H. Mead The Philosophy of the Present (La Lalle, IL: Open Court, 1932).
A.N. Whitehead, The Function of Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1929).
Unlike some philosophers, such as P. Van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), I do not find the distinction between determinism and universal causation persuasive.
For example, H. Price, “Agency and Causal Symmetry,” Mind 101(1992): 501–520.
The principle of alternate possibilities holds that an action is free if a person could have acted otherwise or refrained from acting; for example, S. Cahn, Fate, Logic and Time (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967). However, if the same conditions can never be exactly repeated, how can the occurrence of an “equally weighted” alternate possibility ever be established?
B. Russell, Human Knowledge (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1948).
Acceleration is simultaneous with force, though, as Earman has noted, “these immediate effects’ spread out’ in the future direction of time,” J. Earman, “Causation: A Matter of Life and Death,” Journal of Philosophy 73(1976): 5–25.
See D. Papineau, “Causal Asymmetry,” British Journal of Philosophy and Science 36(1985): 273–89.
R. Emerson, (1841), “Compensation,” in Essays, 57.
W. Salmon, “Probabilistic Causality,” in Causation, ed E. Sosa and M. Tooley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
See B. van Fraassen, Laws and Symmetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Lovejoy, Revolt Against Dualism.
The argument that freedom is the interplay “between something almost random or haphazard and something like a restrictive or selective control,” K. Popper, Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), restates this bias without addressing freedom.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1996 Plenum Press, New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
(1996). Change. In: Time, Will, and Mental Process. Cognition and Language: A Series in Psycholinguistics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-34654-0_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-585-34654-0_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-306-45231-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-585-34654-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive