Problems with this section; for Frank (Agnosticism)

by Frank Paris , Wednesday, November 18, 2009, 22:02 (5483 days ago) @ David Turell

"Are the processes programed to advance in complexity as we see in the development of the universe and the appearance of life from inorganic matter?"-I prefer to think that the fundamentals are not "programmed" in any way. By the very nature of their being tiny reflections of the divine essence, they have an inherent ability to react with each other in any number of ways. If they have just the right "properties", they can unite together forming "individuals" that in our universe we recognize as ions and atoms with emergent properties that can eventually evolve into more and more complex individuals, eventually leading to conscious creatures and (we know), to human beings, and who knows what might be beyond human beings.-"Or is it all due to chance within a process?"-If chance is involved (which nobody knows for sure), it is the specific values of constants that define the nature of the fundamentals. In our universe at least, there are at most a finite number of fundamental "types". Every fundamental of a given type is exactly like every other fundamental of that type. In our universe, we don't know how many types there are. But in the standard model of particle physics, some of the fundamental types are electrons, quarks, gluons, photons, and their anti-particles. The theory of supersymmetry says there are "supersymmetric" versions of each of these. String theory says all these are species of something even more basic. Whatever the basic particles are, that's what I'm calling a fundamental.-In any case, a fundamental is a direct spinoff from the divine essence and "atomic" in the etymological sense of that word.-"I need further definition of the concept of 'processes'."-Unfortunately (but unsurprisingly), that gets into the very heart of what process philosophy is all about. It is far beyond my ability to explicate the concept of process in this philosophy. The best you can hope for from me is an intuitive notion of what process is. For more, I refer you to Whitehead himself (God help you) or one of his highly respected interpreters (also, God help you). But for an intuitive discussion of the concept, read John A. Jungerman's World in Process: Creativity and Interconnection in the New Physics. For a more formal exposition, start with Griffin's Reenchantment without Supernaturalism. If you really want to go whole hog, Read the first chapter of Stephen T. Franklin's Speaking from the Depths. If you can penetrate that, you should be teaching philosophy at the graduate level.-All I'll do here is give you a couple quotes from Jungerman's book, pp. 4-5:-'Process thought views events, not substance, as primary. According to Whitehead, 'the simple notion of an enduring substance sustaining enduring qualities expresses a useful abstract for many purposes in life. But whenever we try to use it as a fundamental statement of the nature of things, it proves itself mistaken." The idea of inert matter as considered throughout the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, which is still a pervasive idea, gives us no possible basis for explaining interrelationships -- especially those relations conceived in physics as "Forces."-'Fundamental to process philosophy are events, understood as actual occasions. In the process view, the fully actual entities are not things that endure throughout time, but momentary events. Actual entities are, thereby, called actual occasions. Such events take place during a short time interval, a fraction of a second, at a particular place. Thus, actual occasions occur in space and time, space-time.'-'Actual occasions occur at different levels, such as at the level of atoms and at the level of human experience. An enduring entity composed of actual occasions could be an atom or an organism, such as a human being. At the most elementary level, electrons and quarks can be understood as a series of actual occasions. For Whitehead, a moving electron has a different identity at every instant because its position has changed. Its trajectory is a series of events. Whitehead calls this a serially ordered society of actual occasions. A human being is a very complex society of events, the dominant member of which can enjoy emergent, unitary consciousness. A human being in process terms is described as a complex spatiotemporal society of events.