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p.1 Process philosophy... As yet, however, no compact introduction to this philosophical approach exists - no conveniently synoptic, compact, and accessible exposition for the use of readers who would like to inform themselves regarding what process philosophy is all about. The aim of this present book is to remedy this lack.
p.2 Process metaphysics as a general line of approach holds that physical existence is at bottom processual; that processes rather than things best represent the phenomena that we encounter in the natural world about us.
p.3-4 Process philosophy represents an attempt to come to intellectual terms with the world's empirical realities by deriving a framework of conceptions and ideas to integrate the products of modern inquiry into a coherent framework of thought linked to a metaphysical tradition reaching from Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle, in antiquity, to Leibnitz, at the dawn of the modern age.
p.7 The philosophy of process... The guiding idea of this approach is that natural existence consists in and is best understood in terms of processes rather than things - of modes of change rather than fixed stabilities. For processists, change of every sort - physical, organic, psychological - is the pervasive and predominant feature of the real.
p.8 What is characteristically definitive of process philosophizing as a distinctive sector of philosophical tradition is not simply the commonplace recognition of natural process as the active initiator of what exists in nature but an insistence on seeing process as constituting an essential aspect of everything that exists - a commitment to the fundamentally processual nature of the real.
p.9 The Greek theoretician Heraclitus of Ephesus (b. ca. 540 B.C.) ...is universally recognized as the founder of the process approach.
p.13 For Hegel, whatever exists in the world of reality or of ideas is never a stable object but a processual item that is in transit and cannot be properly understood through its stable properties or as a succession of stable states, a matter of now this, now that. It is a process, an item constantly reshaped in an ongoing development proceeding through the operation of a dialectic that continually blends conflicting opposites into a unitary but inherently unstable fusion... For Hegel, the real in all its dimensions can be understood and accounted for only in processual terms.
p.15 Reality, as we humans do and must come to experiential terms with it, is nothing but a structured manifold of processes.
p.16 truth and knowledge... They are not things we find but things we make.
[JLJ - for me, truth and knowledge are concepts we develop because we are programmed by our human nature to construct them from the bloomin' buzzin' confusion of James, in order to 'go on,' much like squirrels are programmed by their nature to collect nuts and acorns (but without the twitching tail...)]
p.17 We see material things but miss the energy that creates them and makes them go... Reality consists of process but thought deals in stable "things." And herein lies the problem.
p.17 Everything in the world is caught up in a change of some sort, so that it is accurate rather than paradoxical to say that what is changing is change itself.
p.21 Whitehead... For him, temporality and its changes are basic - a "perpetual perishing" matched by a perpetual emergence in the "concrescence" of new reals... For him, novelty and innovation is ever the order of the day; as he saw it, the natural world is a sea of process.
p.24 Sheldon saw the conflict of philosophical systems... as products of failure to realize the existence of productive polar tensions through the distorting overemphasis on one or two interconnected polar opposites... The real phenomena we confront are one and all products of a creative opposition of polar opposites. These opposites do not cancel each other out but create a tension or destabilization that gives rise to process of development. The result of opposition is thus not neutralization but a tension that engenders processual change.
p.26 the Society for Process Studies
[JLJ - perhaps they do not produce a Journal with fixed articles, publication dates, and material that is dated in time, but rather produce links to the various versions of the articles that are updated in time, as they are changed by their authors after reflection and readers comments. You would be a hypocrite otherwise, as far as process theory is concerned.]
p.28 As process philosophers see it, the supposed predominance and permanence of "things" in nature is at best a useful fiction and at worst a misleading delusion. "Material objects" are ultimately comprised of energy that is in an ongoing state of flux and motion. All those supposedly constant things that seem to maintain a continuous identity throughout the vicissitudes of time and change are, in fact, little more than the loci of comparative (and transitory) stability within a manifold of continual change
p.28 Becoming and change... constitute the central themes of process metaphysics.
p.29 Process metaphysics... insists on seeing process as basic in the order of being or at least of understanding. We cannot adequately describe (let alone explain) processes in terms of something nonprocessual... The processual order is, in this sense, conceptually closed.
p.31 "process philosophy" is best understood as a doctrine committed, or at any rate inclined, to certain basic teachings or contentions:
- that time and change are among the principal categories of metaphysical understanding
- that process is a principal category of ontological description
- that processes - and the force, energy, and power that they make manifest - are more fundamental, or at any rate not less fundamental, than things for the purposes of ontological theory
- that several if not all the major elements of the ontological repertoire... are best understood in process terms
- that contingency, emergence, novelty, and creativity are among the fundamental categories of metaphysical understanding.
p.32 Process philosophy issues an invitation to accept the world's arrangements in their full complexity... process metaphysics is not, in the final analysis, so much a doctrine as a tendency - a mode of approach to the philosophical issues.
[JLJ - if our concern is how to 'go on,' process philosophy can help form an analytical framework that aims to reduce the complexity of our predicament to a much simpler level so we can understand the existing forces and position ourselves accordingly, and in the end maneuver with appropriate leverage within it.]
p.33 Metaphysics after all is not a battle over concepts as such but rather of their significance... what process metaphysics wishes to do is to argue that the items we categorize as "things" (as ordinarily understood) are more instructively and adequately understood as instantiations of certain sorts of processes or process-complexes.
p.33 Process philosophy is concerned with modes of understanding, not modes of discourse.
p.37 Process thinkers thus favor the idea of macroprocesses that organize microprocesses into systemic wholes. The idea of system has ever been prominent in their thought
p.37 [Leibnitz]
[The] interlinkage or accommodation of all created things to each other, and of each to all others, brings it about that each simple substance has relations that express all the others, and is in consequence a perpetual living mirror of the universe, [In nature] all is a plenum, which renders all matter interconnected, and as in a plenum any motion has some effect on distant bodies in proportion to their distance - so that each body is affected not only by those that touch it, in some way feeling the effects of all that happen to them, but also through their mediation feeling affected by those in contact with the former by which it is directly touched - it follows that this inter-communication extends to any distance, however great. And in consequence, all bodies feel the effects of everything that happens in the universe.
p.38 A process is a coordinated group of changes in the complexion of reality, an organized family of occurrences that are systematically linked to one another either causally or functionally... A process consists in an integrated series of connected developments unfolding in conjoint coordination in line with a definite program... events exist only and through processes.
p.39 A natural process is not a mere collection of sequential presents but inherently exhibits a structure of spatiotemporal continuity. A natural process by its very nature passes on to the future a construction made from the materials of the past.
p.39 All processes have a developmental, forward-looking aspect. Each envisions some sector of the future and canalizes it into regions of possibility more restrained in range than would otherwise, in theory, be available. The inherent futurition of process is an exfoliation of the real by successively actualizing possibilities that are cast aside as so many useless husks as the process unfolds.
p.40 The contribution of the process idea is to help us keep together in function things that thought inclines to separate in idea.
p.40 Identifiable processes generally have their ordinary course of programmatic development... its unfolding can be blocked by uncooperative developments.
p.41 the programming of a process need not be totally deterministic - it can leave room for some degree of inner looseness - of variation and alternative possibilities.
p.46 As far as process philosophy is concerned, things can be conceptualized as clusters of actual and potential processes.
p.47 And here process ontology takes a straightforward line: In its sight, things simply are what they do - or rather, what they dispositionally can do and normally would do.
p.47 The fact is that all we can ever detect about "things" relates to how they act upon and interact with one another - a substance has no discernible, and thus no justifiably attributable, properties save those that represent responses elicited from its interaction with others.
p.48 processes are, by their very nature, interrelated and interactive. A process - unlike a substance - can simply be what it does.
p.49 A process ontology thus greatly simplifies matters... it sees things not just as the products of processes... but also as the manifestations of processes - as complex bundles of coordinated processes. It replaces the troublesome ontological dualism of thing and activity with a monism of activities of different and differently organized sorts.
p.52 Process philosophers do not, indeed, deny the reality of substances but merely reconceptualize them as manifolds of process. They are perfectly prepared to acknowledge substantial things, but see them rather in terms of processual activities and stabilities.
p.53 Process metaphysics accordingly stresses the need to regard physical things - material objects - as being no more than stability-waves in a sea of process.
p.53 process philosophy sees "things" as processual complexes possessing a functional unity instead of as substances individuated by a qualitative nature of some sort. On such a view, physical particulars become concrete instantiations of processual structures.
p.56-57 Just what are those "properties" of things that are supposed to identify and individuate them? Clearly they are nothing other than the effects produced by those putative things upon ourselves and/or upon one another. But if this is so - if the very being and identity of things as the particulars they are consists in their status in a matrix of interaction - then the very nature of those identity-engendering factors (cause and effect, activity and passivity, action and interaction) make manifest the fundamentally processual nature of the "things" at issue.
p.57-58 process ontology comes in two major forms or versions, the one stronger and causal (ontological), the other weaker and explanatory (conceptual):
- Causal processism: processes are causally/existentially fundamental relative to things; substances are merely appearances, the correlates of processes of "being taken to be a thing."
- Conceptual processism: processes are conceptually fundamental vis à vis things in that (1) the explanatory characterizations of what a thing is always involves recourse to a processual account of what a thing does; and (2) the identification of any particular thing as such always involves reference to various processes, a thing being constituted as what it is by means of identificating processes.
p.66 if coming-into-being is actually to be a process, then there has to be a period or interval of transition - of reification or concrescence - during which it can neither be said truly that the thing at issue actually exists nor on the other hand that it does not exist at all.
p.71 At the basis of the relevant deliberations lies the fact that processes can, do, and must have a structure of patterns and periodicities that render them in-principle repeatable. And to say that an item has a structure of some sort is to attribute to it a feature that other items can in principle also have.
p.76 When we first see an innovation - whatever it be - first emerging in nature's handwriting on the wall of existence, we cannot yet tell what is to come. Process philosophy... insists that processes themselves both instantiate and transmit structural patterns. What process metaphysics denies is the exclusive prevalence of inevitable preestablished patterns that make prediction unfailingly possible.
p.81 since processes are by nature transient and transformatory, they naturally make room for evolutionary development.
p.90 Nature is not something fixed and given; it is "a world that is ever being born instead of a world that is" - change, development, and evolutionary emergence are the world's only pervasive and enduring features.
p.90-91 process philosophy's conception of the natural world... is a position that insists on seeing nature as a manifold of processes... that includes sectors both of rigid causal determinism and open unforeseeability
p.91 The salient idea of process philosophy is that the world consists of - and must, in consequence, be understood in terms of - changes rather than fixed stabilities.
p.92 nature... it is the mathematical language of differential equations that best represents its language of process.
p.94 Process metaphysicians regard the natural world as one vast interconnected manifold of process... Processes throughout nature intertwine and interrelate; they run up against one another in one vast but cohesive manifold of occurrence.
p.95 Process philosophy sees every natural process as having an inherently spatiotemporal connection, and has it that the ramifications of space and time encompass all of nature.
p.97 [Mead] "The actual passage of reality is in the passage of one present into another, where alone is reality, and a present which has merged in another is not a past. Its reality is always that of a present."
p.99-100 On the issue of purposiveness in nature, process philosophers divide into two principal camps. On the one side is the naturalistic (and generally secularist) wing that sees nature's processuality as a matter of an inner push or nisus to something new and different. On the other side is the teleological (and often theological) wing that sees nature's processuality as a matter of teleological directness toward a positive destination. Both agree in according a central role to novelty and innovation in nature. But the one (naturalistic) wing sees this in terms of chance-driven randomness that leads away from the settled formulations of an established past, while the other (teleological) sees this in terms of a goal-directed purposiveness preestablished by some value-geared directive force.
[JLJ - it seems to me that it is the interaction and mutual feedback between two such processes (one asking "how might I proceed?" and the other "how much should I care about that?") that leads to an effective meta-process useful for a machine "playing" a complex game of strategy.]
p.101 What arises in the course of time perishes in the course of time.
p.102 To be sure, there are, in theory, both productive and destructive processes, degeneration and decay being no less prominent in nature than growth and development.
p.130 All real things are necessarily thought of as having hidden depths that extend beyond the limits not only of experience but also of experientiability.
p.131 To be real is to be something regarding which we can always, in principle, acquire further new information, which may not only supplement but even correct that which has previously been acquired... In view of the cognitive opacity of the real, we always do well to refrain from pretending to a cognitive monopoly or cognitive finality.
p.132 Our knowledge of fact is always in flux. It is not a thing, a definite corpus, but an ever-changing and ever-growing manifold of process.
p.133 For present purposes, the crucial consideration is that our knowledge of reality itself has an operational/practical and thus processual dimension.
p.136 Human knowledge is geared to activity
[JLJ - is "activity" the best word choice here? Our knowledge might tell us to remain still, or to postpone planned actions. I tend to think in terms of the mind grasping knowledge in order to 'go on,' which is a more general-purpose phrase which handles standard activities, in addition to other 'actions' such as remaining very still, strategic thinking, scheming, reducing the complexity of the present by observing subtle cues, posturing, estimating potentials such as adaptive capacity, and simple waiting for better conditions to act.]
p.143-144 In empirical inquiry, we generally cannot tell in advance what further questions will be engendered by our endeavors to answer those on hand. New scientific questions arise from answers we give to previous ones, and thus the issues of future science simply lie beyond our present horizons.
p.144 In cognitive forecasting it is the errors of omission - our blind spots, as it were - that present the most serious threat. For the fact is that we cannot substantially anticipate the evolution of knowledge.
p.150 Where there are inaccessible phenomena there must be cognitive inadequacy as well.
p.166 Change is, first and foremost, the moving frontier that separates the past and the future and thereby characterizes the productive present.
p.168 All philosophizing is a matter of imperfect approximation.
p.170 In philosophical debate there is no closure.
p.174 process metaphysics... invites us to regard what we see when we look about us, not in the light of an aggregation of perduring things but in that of a vibrant manifold of productive activity. It pictures the world not as a museum where objects are displayed but as a show where things happen
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