Problems with this section; for Frank (Agnosticism)

by David Turell , Monday, November 23, 2009, 00:26 (5479 days ago) @ David Turell

And by the way, your challenge worked. I'm doing a little introductory reading on process theology. I'll be back with some thoughts later.-Some thoughts: 
DJT:"I need further definition of the concept of 'processes'."
FP: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. 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.
DJT:Just from your introduction above it should not be surprising that I said I was in a fog. "It is far beyond my ability to explicate the concept of process in this philosophy", but yet you favor it. I went to feel mentally competent and comfortable with any philosophy I wish to follow. If it is that complex and far out, why bother. Our favorite friend Occam (we both spell it the same way) demands simplicity. I do not see what you have described as your personal theology, in this or in other statements, as parsimonious.
FP: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."
DJT:Of course, I know that when I look at a table, its real structure is mostly space, and its firmness is due to the fact that its molecules have almost no motion. Quantum uncertainty, force fields, strong, weak, electromagnetic, gravity, Brownian motion, can fully be understood by me (and many others) without introducing the approach in 'process'. I know clearly that the universe started with a Big Bang, was hot plasma, and is now filled with 100 billion galaxies, and is expanding. That is a process. My life began with sperm and egg, and the matter I'm composed of has turned over many times in my 80 years. That is process. 
'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.
DJT: And my above reasoning is why I said this put me into a 'fog'. I don't have to get involved with these intellectual contortions to understand current physics and cosmology. Perhaps I'm unsophisticated, but I've always felt simpler is better and more comfortable. You are comfortable with 'process', I assume, because of your mystical experiences. We have different needs.