Problems with this section; for Frank (Agnosticism)

by BBella , Thursday, November 19, 2009, 05:37 (5482 days ago) @ Frank Paris

"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....All I'll do here is give you a couple quotes from Jungerman's book, pp. 4-5:
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> '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."
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> '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.'
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> '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.-I believe this "process philosophy" written about above is exactly the process that I witnessed during my "experience" and have described in my poems, etc. I have mentioned this very process spoken with my own words in one or two posts here on Agweb. I can't imagine how I would find them to quote here, suffice it to say...I know exactly what is being spoken of above and I've never heard it spoken about before now in your post!-bb