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ladies and gentlemen welcome to our second public lecture in this year's medanexis uh sponsored conference join me with the six for process studies
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we are in the second of a three-year series having uh resolved all questions about evolution last year we've decided to settle fundamental physics and this metaphysics this year's
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process metaphysics and then we'll move on to something larger next year we'll do cosmology so if you want to know where did the universe and everything come from stay tuned for next year
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um it's a it's an awe inspiring task to be asked to introduce david ray griffin and so when i walked up to him and i said david how should i introduce you he said well all you need
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to do is tell them that i'm widely regarded as a conference and then i um he had used my computer uh to check his email earlier today and i found a fortune which was reported to the cookie
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which i presume david had left right there on the keyboard and as good advice to me for life it said go to the elders when you feel a confidence crisis david baker mr professor emeritus of
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claremont school of theology where he taught for over 30 years retiring in 2004 dave is one of the founding co-directors of the center for process studies he's authored or edited over two dozen books
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including god power and evil a process the odyssey unsnarling the world's not consciousness freedom and mind-body problem physics and the ultimate significance of time i know i've heard about it
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religion and scientific naturalism and re-enchantment without supernaturalism i should mention the re-enchantment of science post-modern proposals as well after retirement he launched on a new career one which has sold him more
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copies since retirement of all the things he sold of all his books during his whole career probably uh and his publications since then include the new pearl harbor disturbing questions about the bush administration
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and 9 11. if you have interest in questions about the bush administration in 9 11 david will be happy to talk with you after this and so with no further ado i'm happy to introduce david to present his paper
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tonight with the title whitehead in physics its implications for time consciousness freedom and everything bye food here please welcome [Applause]
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thank you phillip for those of you who didn't get the word no i i'm not battle highly nor am i original cahill
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i'm the substitute um when i gave out the instructions for uh writing the papers for the conference i suggested that the authors put the things that were
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more readily intelligible in the body of the text which they could then present at the public lecture and then all the complex explanations and qualifications
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and so on in the footnotes so if you hear anything tonight if you think it's untrue or unpersuasive just remember it's all in the footnote there have been countless discussions
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of the implications of modern physics especially quantum physics for various issues of importance for theology and the philosophy of religion these issues have included problems
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involving time consciousness and freedom with regard to time it has been widely argued that modern physics shows time as we experience it with its distinctions between the past
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the present and future to be ultimately unreal with regard to consciousness it is widely thought that any philosophy of mind to be compatible with modern
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physics must regard conscious experience as a non-efficacious byproduct of the brain's subatomic particles with regard to freedom
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it is widely thought that any understanding of reality based on modern physics must rule out the possibility that our decisions could really involve self-determination
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in the light of these supposed implications of modern physics it is widely assumed that a worldview that takes physics seriously is necessarily a worldview
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that contravenes the world views of the world religions and the biblically based religions in particular in reality however none of those implications follow from
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physics as such rather in every attempt to derive philosophical and religious implications from physics the physics is not pure physics
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in the sense of ideas that have been experimentally verified rather the physics is always physics as interpreted from some particular philosophical perspective
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accordingly physics has interpreted from a different philosophical perspective might have radically different implications the point of the present lecture is to show that physics as interpreted in terms of
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plain head's philosophy rejects all three of the so-called implications of physics just mentioned [Music] the basic reason for these radically different conclusions is that quite any
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in physics replaces the materialistic view of nature which has been presupposed in conventional discussions of the implications of physics
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with a pan experientialist view according to the materialist view the ultimate constituents of nature are devoid of at least five characteristics that characterize our own
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experience temporality experience intrinsic value internal relations and even the slightest capacity for self-determination to whiteheads and experientialist
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worldview the ultimate units of nature are experiential value realizing internally related partially self-determining events
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in the remainder of this lecture i will explain how fight a and physics leads to conclusions about time consciousness and freedom that differ radically from the implications that have been widened and falsely assumed to follow from physics
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exception i will begin by explaining why physics interpreted in terms of the materialistic view of nature has been thought to support the ultimate unreality of time
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speaking of time i'm referring to experienced time which can be characterized in terms of three features asymmetry constant accounting and irreversibility and precedence
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asymmetry means that the relations of the past to the present is different from the relation of the present to the future
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we express this difference by saying that whereas we anticipate the future we remember the past past we take it for granted is completely separate
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if something happened nothing we do now can change the fact that it happened you presuppose by contrast the futures can still be shaped by our present decisions
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whereas the past settled actuality the future involves potentiality to be settled the present the now between the past and the future is the time in which potentialities
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are being settled the statement that in that time involves constantly coming refers to the fact that this now does not stand still rather it always divides a different set
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of events into past and future to say that time is irreversible in principle means that a series of events could not conceivably turn around and go in the opposite direction
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events in my past could not be in my future time as we experience it clearly involves symmetry positive atomic and irreversibility in principle however
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it has widely been agreed time characterized by these three teachers is not detected by physics that's one of those places where there's complex setup
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it is often said to be sure the time is provided by thermodynamics with its law of interest according to which organized systems gradually increase their entropy
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that is become more disordered the differences in the entropy of successive states means that the order of events when read off in one direction will be distinguishable from the order of advancement read off in the other
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direction the result is the kind of time called anisotropic which simply means not isotropic because the direction of measurement makes a difference
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however although thermodynamic entropy is widely said to provide times arrow the time in question has virtually nothing in common with experience time because it involves no distinction in
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time between the past and the future the order of events as measured by increasing entropy does in fact go from what we call the past to the future but the order of events is said could in
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principle go in the opposite direction so that the entropy would decrease the time the thermodynamics does not therefore provide any categorical distinction between the past and the future
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as finished bindig puts it although thermodynamics finds the two directions of time to be distinguishable it does not display the one direction as being in any sense more real than the reverse
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direction if one direction is not more real or over it would seem that it would be possible for things to go in the other direction richard feynman in fact wrote that
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irreversible irreversibility is caused by the general accidents of life things are reversible only in the sense that going one way is likely
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but going the other way is possible according to the laws of physics time in this reversible sense is different in kind from time as we experience this point is brought out by this
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statement that mental processes display irreversibility of a kind not shown by physical processes that is in the sense that it is not even conceivable that
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they could ever occur in the reverse temporal sequence besides not being characterized by asymmetry irreversibility moreover the time of physics is also devoid of the
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constant becoming that characterizes time as not just the experience physics says paul davis has shifted the moving present out from the superstructure of the universe
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into the minds of human beings where it belongs as davie's statement suggests the failure of physics to detect time as we experience it has led to the conclusion that time in this sense
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simply does not exist for the entity studied by physics and since time characterized like a symmetry constantly becoming an irreversibility and principle is what we mean by time
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this conclusion really means that time simply does not exist for the end of these settings but if that is the case where does time exist
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david says that it exists in the minds of human beings but what does that mean one possible meaning is that ours is a dualistic world
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in which time is real for one type of entities but unreal for the other time this idea however creates at least three serious problems
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one problem is how these two types of entities of the world could interact we know that our minds too interact with the world studied by physics because the
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molecules constituting the brain both influence and are influenced by our thoughts feelings and decisions and how the things for which time does not exist
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interact with things for which time to treat the second problem is how things for which time is real could have emerged out of things that are completely timeless
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a third problem is that the very idea that time emerged in the evolutionary process is self-contradictory because the notion of evolution itself presupposes time
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more popular than this dualistic view at least the among well-known factors has been the inference that if time does not exist in physics it does not exist period this inference has been expressed in
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henry milberg's book time causality and quantum fit theory in which we read it would be either a miracle or an unbelievable coincidence if all the major scientific theories somehow
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managed to cooperate with each other so as to conceal times arrow funds there would be neither a miracle nor an unbelievable coincidence in the concealment of times arrows from us only
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if there were nothing to conceal that is his time had no error according to this view the statement of the time exists only in our minds means that it is an illusion
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this view was endorsed by greg's favorite einstein who said famously for us believing physicists the distinction between past present and future is only an illusion
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even if a separate one one of the best known statements of this position was provided by physicist louis roy who said in space time
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everything for which which for each of us constitutes the past present and future is given in block each observer as his time passes
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discovered so to speak new slices of space-time which appear to him as successive aspects of the material world though in reality the ensemble events constituting space time
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exist prior to his knowledge of it this position has led some interpreters to argue that the western biblically-based worldview which regards time and thereby the historical process
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has ultimately real is undermined by modern physics in the dao of physical freitag copra argued that modern physics with its complete symmetry between past and
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future teaches the same lesson as huayin and zen buddhism which speak of the mutual interfusion of past present and future essentially the same message is conveyed by
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gary zuccoff in the dancing huli masters who like capra quotes degroya to support the idea that time is an illusion this view that we in the present moment
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are related to the future in the past in a symmetrical way has some startling implications one of these is that we should be able to remember the future
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louis carroll expressed this view whimsically by having the white queen say the house it is a former memory that remembers only backwards
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virgin russell echoed this idea evidently without tongue in the cheek i say it is a mere accident that we have no memory of the future another counterintuitive implication is
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that the idea of making free decisions through which we bring about a future different from what might have been is an illusion we should neither be praised nor criticized
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for our actions we have all simply done what it has been true from all eternity that we were to do given the radically counter-intuitive implications of this position
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we should hope that the problem of the relation of physics to time has a better solution and it does instead of trying to assimilate experience time
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to the limited kind of time provided by physics we could reinterpret the world of molecules atoms from subatomic particles in light of time as we experience it this reinterpretation could be justified
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in part by saying that physics as a discipline abstracts from the full nature of the entity's studies this solution was suggested in a 1937
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about time and its importance to modern thought by mary club remarking that a fundamental feature of time and experience is its irreversibility she pointed out that the physicist's
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variable t abstracts from this irreversibility she then added that although this t is a legitimate abstraction when it is restricted to the purpose of physics
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which merely concerns measurement it becomes a falsifying abstraction when it is taken to be a metaphysical truth about the very nature of time with which physics has no concern
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it was this approach that was taken by the idea that time is unreal for what he called for what we call the physical world results from what he called the fallacy in this place not greek
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which involves the error of mistaking the abstract or the concrete the primary example of this fallacy is the idea that the things studied by
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physicists are fabulous actualities meaning entities that are fully actual and yet void of subjective experience it's this idea that leads to the idea
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that time besides being undetected by physics is in fact unreal for the entity studied by business but electrons and atoms are simply bits of matter with nothing even remotely
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analogous to experience our experience then they have nothing even remotely analogous to our memory and anticipation through which we distinguish the present now from the past and the future
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accordingly for electrons and atoms there would be nothing remotely analogous to our experience of constantly coming with its ever changing now also the only relations that could exist
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between vacuum of actualities are purely external relations so that interactions between them would involve nothing analogous to our memory in which our present experience is
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internally qualified by prior events there would therefore be nothing to make the succession of events irreversible those electrons and atoms consist of
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experiential internally related events in this situation is entirely different according to whitehead's fan experientialism an enduring individual
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such as an electron or an atom is not a single actual entity enduring through time it is a temporally ordered society of actual entities these natural entities are events called
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actual occasions actual occasion is an occasion of experience each occasion of experience whether electronic atomic or human
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begins by preventing prior events which means taking aspects of them into itself each occasion ends with anticipation of
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causally influencing subsequent events according to times symbols asymmetry which is based on memory and anticipation exists for
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electrons and atoms as well as for dollars and human beings likewise our experience of constantly coming in which the present now always provides a different set of events and to pass the future would not be
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completely absent for electrons and atoms and finally the fact that past occasions and exerting causal individuals on present occasions are pretended into these occasions
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that fact makes the temporal process irreversible in whitehead's words the passage of the cause into the effect is the cumulative character of time the irreversible
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irreversibility of time depends on this character according just as it is inconceivable that the general order of our experiment could be reversed so the past events
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could be in our future such reversal is also inconceivable for the entity study measures it is important to realize that physics as such neither affirms nor denies an
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experientialism in my head words in physics there is abstraction the science ignores what anything is in itself its entities are merely considered in
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respect to their extrinsic reality is only when physics based on this abstraction is turned into benefiting by means of the fallacy of this light's concreteness that we get the idea that the entities
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studied by physics are back to its actualities to commit this fallacy is to ignore the true influence by whitehead that an abstraction is nothing else than the
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omission of part of the truth the truth in relation to this issue whitehead maintained is that experience goes all the way down to the ultimate units of which our road
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is imposed and if that is the case then so does time and experientialism implies and temporalism we need not therefore
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waste time on the insoluble problems created by the assumption that time does not exist for the level of nature studied by physics turn now to the problem of consciousness
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which can be stated as the question of how the existence of our conscious experience is compatible with the world as revealed by the physical sciences the main presupposition behind this
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problem called both the mind body problem and the problem of consciousness is the assumption that the body is composed of matter that is in cynthia
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meaning only devoid of experience in a book entitled the problem of consciousness colin began says that the problem is how the aggregation of millions of individually
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insensitive neurons constituting the brain could generate subjective experience given that assumption about our bodily components
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there are two possible solutions materialism and duels philosophers representing these two positions have been working on the problems since thomas hobbes and renee cut descartes representing the cherry
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living and dualism respectively since they struggled with it in the 17th century contemporary materialistic duelists however are no closer to a solution
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again writing from a materialist standpoint has said that the problem of the rise of consciousness is not merely a problem rather it is a mystery which we cannot
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resolve jeffrey medell a contemporary duelist admits that the appearance of consciousness in the course of evolution must appear for the duelist to be an
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utterly inexplicable emergence the reason this problem is insoluble in principle as mcginn points out has been stated classically by thomas
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nato using the french term in schwa for be being that exists merely in itself and the term poor schwa for one that exists for itself
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angle wrote one cannot derive from an insult this gap is logically unbridgeable a conscious being cannot be created by
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combining together in organic form a lot of particles with none but physical products some scientists and philosophers have thought otherwise arguing that the emergence of experience
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out of non-experiencing entities essentially one more example of the not uncommon phenomenon of emergence in which the combination of two things each of which is devoid of a certain
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property results in the emergence of something with that property for example either hydrogen or oxygen has the property of liquidity or salinity
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when they are combined into h2o molecules however liquidity emerges and when this water is frozen solidity emerges consciousness says cyril
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is a higher level or emergent property of the brain in the same sense however as some of cyril's fellow materialists have pointed out his
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analogy is invalid because the examples are actually different in common one way to state this difference is to point out that liquidity and solidity are features of things as they exist for
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our sensory perception whereas experience is a feature of things as they exist for themselves in other words the emergence of liquidity or solidity is the emergence of a new kind of experienced
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property it is since different in kind from the alleged emergence of and experiencing entity out of entities holding devoid of experience
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a latter kind of alleged emergence of subjects with an inside from mirror objects with nothing but outsides hence remains absolutely unique with no analogy
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we're left therefore with the fact that knowledge fight nagel mcginn and model that if we accept the assumption that the ultimate units of nature are vacuous actualities wholly devoid of experience
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the emergence of conscious experience yes the seriousness of this problem is illustrated by mcginn's statement that the transition from incentive matter to things with an inner aspect
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could be affected only by a supernatural entity and against words only a kind of miracle could produce this from that it would take a supernatural magician to
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extract consciousness from matter even living back but again holds that any appeal to a supernatural agent of course is unacceptable whitehead agreed
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rejecting any appeal to a deus ex machina of rising superior to the difficulties of metaphysics if we agree that an answer to be philosophically and scientifically
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acceptable must not presuppose supernatural intervention then there is only one way to dissolve the mind-body problem we must abolish the idea of vacuous actuality on which both dualism and
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materialism are based in favor of and experientially and experientialism makes the emergence of consciousness is evil because what needs to be explained is
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not the emergence of experience out of non-experiencing entities but merely the emergence of conscious experience out of non-conscious experience
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as that statement implies whiner did not equate consciousness and experience rather he famously said consciousness presupposes the experience and not experience consciousness
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most experience is in fact not conscious because consciousness is a very high level type of experience the task therefore is to explain how conscious experience could have evolved
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out of sub-atomic entities that must by comparison have only a very low level of experiments many discussions of this problem often under the heading of the physics of
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consciousness assume that the vastly claimed the right of conscious experience is a task for the physicists as such these discussions are extremely reductionistic reason folding the
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conscious experience somehow emerged directly out of subatomic particles perhaps as organized into atoms and ordinary molecules this presupposition is embodied in the program known as hard
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ai for artificial intelligence which holds that there is no reason in principle why computers built out of ordinary molecules could not be conscious according to whitehead scan
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experientialism by contrast conscious experience presupposes a long evolutionary development during which many levels of actuality have emerged paving the way for the emergence of very
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high level actualities with the capacity for conscious experience the notion of various levels of actualities involves a distinction between two different ways in which temporally ordered societies
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can be spatially ordered they can on the one hand be organized so as to produce an aggregation of society which can neither experience nor act of the old
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sticks and stones are obviously although each of the stone's individual molecules by hypothesis has experienced the billions of molecular experiences do
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not give rise to a higher level experience the stone as such has no experience on the other hand various temporary organic societies can be organized so as to result in the emergence of
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higher level experiences thereby producing a compound individual to say that this compound entity with an individual means that in each moment can experience
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and act as a unit from this perspective even some extremely low level entities would be compounding individuals for example electrons protons and neutrons
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would seem to be composed compound individuals arising out of the pores this notion is fully consistent with quantum physics according to philosopher william sigel seeger who says
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quantum tools are not just the sum of the parts higher examples would be atoms molecules macromolecules still higher level examples would be bacteria and other
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prokaryotic cells in which the new level of actuality consists of living mutations higher yet would be eukaryotic cells and then multicellular animals in which the dominant occasions belong
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to that championly ordered society that we call the animals mind the soul it is only the experience of the of these dominant occasions belonging to the mind
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that sometimes enjoy conscious experience in this view consciousness is a type of experience enjoyed by the mind not the brain the materialist view according to which
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their mind is identical with the brain renders entirely mysterious or experienced unity of conscious experience this identity is reflected in daniel dennis assertion
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that the human head contains billions of mini agents and microagents with no single boss and that's all informal because that is all that's going on in
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the human head we cannot explain the unity of conscious experience as thomas nagel says the unity of consciousness poses a problem for a theory that mental states
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are states of something as complex as a brain dubalist by virtue of saying that the mind is a full-fledged actuality numerically distinct from the brain
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do not have this drop john echols for example said that the unity of conscious experience is provided by the self-conscious mind not by the neural machinery
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the dualists of course have the insoluble problem of explaining how experience could have emerged out of non-experiencing entities and how it can enforce them in return
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white hispanic experientialism avoids these problems of dualism while being able to say with duelists that the unity of our conscious experience reflects the unity of the mind in any moment
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the mind in each moment rather than being somehow identical to the billions of cells constituting the brain is a higher level occasion of experience that synthesizes data from the brain
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cells into a unified experiment at a higher level and experiential living besides allowing for a view of the mind granulation it does justice to our experience
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and also show how consciousness could have emerged out of non-conscious experiences as we have seen there are at least seven major levels of
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actuality between the lowest level of nature and the level at which consciousness can emerge so we can think of subatomic entities and then subatomic energies such as
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electrons and protons and then atoms molecules macromolecules prokaryotic cells eukaryotic cells to understand why these various levels of compound individuals are necessary
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we must understand why compound individuals presupposed by and experientially according to which actual entities are experiential internally related events
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to return to the mind-brain relation brain is composed of billions of brain cells or neurons each of which has its own living occasions of experience the mind
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is a simply ordered society of still higher level dominant patients or experience each dominant occasion arises out of and synthesizes the experiences
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contributed by these billions of neurons it is because of the variety richness and intensity of the experiences provided by the brain cells that dominant occasions with the capacity for conscious experience were
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able to emerge the experiences enjoyed by each neuron are quite trivial compared with the experiences of the dominant occasion however in comparison with the
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experience of the parts electrons and atoms the experience enjoyed by the neurons are extremely rich the experience of diversities at the level of quarks electrons and atoms
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could not have directly provided a wherewithal for the emergence of conscious occasions and spirits whitehead's words apart from life with a high grade of
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mentality apart from life a high grade of mentality in individual occasions seems to be impossible nor could any of the intermediate steps
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have been skipped the experiences of atoms by virtue of synthesizing experiences from their subatomic parts are richer than the experiences of those parts as such they had more to contribute
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likewise the experiences of natural molecules by virtue of being internally constituted by their appropriation of experiences from the many ordinary molecules making them up are far richer than those of you and
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their monitors themselves they are accordingly able to contribute experiences out of which living cells dominated by living occasions and experienced and emerged
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designing only these cells and organized into brains that can give birth to the high-level experiences constituting an animal soul in whitehead's words the whole body is
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organized so that a general coordination of mentality is finally poured into the successive occasions of the dominant personal society the body in this process acts as a
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complex amplifier in which the experiences of the various parts of the body are enhanced and rooted to the central occasions of experience main point of this discussion is that
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without the assumption that into the entities making up our world are events that are internally related to previously thereby being partly constituted by them the idea of progressive evolution
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in which more complex higher level actualities emerge would be impossible to conceive why had made this point explicit saying that the materialistic view of nature
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which rules out internal relations cannot account for evolution as he put it an aboriginal stuff or material from which a materialistic philosophy starts
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is incapable of evolution evolution on the materialistic theory and produces the role being another word for the description of changes of the external relations between portions of matter there is nothing to evolve
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because one set of external relations as good as any other set of external relations they can be merely changed purposeless and unprecedented one can get an intuitive idea of
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whitehead meaning by trying to imagine how a bunch of billiard dogs even if arranged in a very complex pattern could give rise to a higher level individual only if we understand the actual
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entities of the world who have experience and hence internal relations might have pointed out can we do justice to the basic idea of the evolutionary worldview named
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the evolution of complex organisms from antecedent states of less complex organisms whitehead's explanation of the evolution of organisms complex enough to enjoy a conscious
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experience involves his notion that every occasion of experience has three or four phases the highest of which is not realized in low-grade occasions all occasions have the first three
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faiths which are physical phase in which dated from prior actual entities are beginning a conceptual phase in which possibilities eternal objects in the actualities presented in the
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physical phase are felt and an elementary comparative stage in which the data from the first two phases are synthesized in very low grade occasions the
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synthesis result in mere physical purposes in which the possible forms are not felt as possibilities but are simply reaffirmed each low-grade occasion
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germinating with this phase thereby simply repeats its predecessors for the most part electrons protons and atoms can hence remain virtually unchanged century after century
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in higher grade occasions however the third phase may involve propositional feelings in which the possibilities are lifted out from the prior occasions in which they were embodied and felt flawed
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possibilities that phase hence provides the basis for a through their face and which the propositions are compared with the data from the first phase it is in relation to these higher
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comparative things it's called intellectual fields that consciousness arises it's not necessary for present purposes that the details of this explanation be
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understood in front of you here it is essential only to understand two points one of these is the idea that consciousness rather than being synonymous with
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experience is a very high level rare form of experiment which is evoked into being only in very high level occasions of experience conscious experience involves the
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capacity to be aware not only of what is but also of what is not what might have been consciousness therefore can arise only in may beings capable of entertaining
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this contrast which whitehead calls the affirmation negation contracts this is this not that when you're aware that something is you know is this not that then that's how he defines
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consciousness the second essential idea is that whitehead's division explains how consciousness could have emerged in a purely naturalistic way
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a canine or human occasion of experience in which some of the ingredients are illuminated by consciousness is not essentially different from a protonic atomic or molecular occasional
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experience it simply actualizes possibilities that while possible in principle all along were not really possible until the evolutionary process that
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brought forth bees with dominant occasions of experience with sufficient richness of experience to stage the affirmation of patient contracts
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accordingly given the idea of evolution as involving increasingly complex individuals which can provide their knowledge with increasingly complex data
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we can get a glimpse of how experiences with consciousness even self-consciousness could have arisen through an incremental very long process
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out of extremely trivial experiences the same set of ideas can be used to solve the long-standing problem of how to reconcile science and human freedom
00:45:08
for science-based intellectuals in the modern world the question of what to say about human freedom has been one of the most difficult problems philosopher thomas nagel has said for example that he changes his mind about
00:45:21
the problem of freedom every time he thinks about it john cyril is spelling out why the problem is so difficult says on the one hand a set of very powerful
00:45:33
arguments forces to the conclusion that free will has no place in the universe on the other hand a series of powerful arguments based on
00:45:44
the facts of our own experience inclines us to the conclusion that there must be some freedom of the will because we experience it all along
00:45:56
this philosophical conundrum and serotonin existed already in the 19th century which white had called a perplexed century because of a radical inconsistency in
00:46:08
the thought of the century's leading intellectuals a scientific realism based on mechanism is conjoined with an unwavering belief in the world of men and of the higher
00:46:20
animals as being proposed to self-determine organisms in that century it was almost universally assumed that the entity studied by physics interacted in a holy deterministic way
00:46:34
it was widely assumed therefore that unless one was willing to accept dualism in spite of the insoluble mind-body problem that they create one had to accept a completely
00:46:46
deterministic understanding of human behavior given the unattractiveness of both options the emergence of quantum physics but this doctrine of indeterminacy
00:46:58
was widely hailed as a godsend because it seemed to provide a scientific basis for confirming human freedom the dominant position among philosophers however
00:47:12
is that quantum indeterminacy is a right to this question this position has been based on three arguments whiteheads and experientialism however provides an answer to these three
00:47:25
articles one argument is that the indeterminacy of which quantum clearly speaks is not necessarily haunting it may be purely epistemic that is it may exist only because of the
00:47:39
difficulty of measuring what is going on at that level without disturbing the system what is going on may be in itself fully deterministic the argument goes however
00:47:53
the main reason for suspecting the interactions to be fully deterministic is the belief that the entities at that level are devoid of experience so that nothing analogous to human
00:48:04
freedom of choice could possibly exist but according to whiteheads and experientialism every actual occasion after beginning with a physical poll in which prior actuality is reprehended
00:48:16
as a mental hole in which possibility if apprehended mentality hence signifies at least some slight capacity for self-determination the second argument against the
00:48:29
relevance of quantum indeterminacy is that even if indeterminacy at the quantum level is launching reflecting something that can be called a decision it must be such a trivial decision
00:48:42
that is not does it not even begin to account for the extremely complex decision-making process involving hamlet's question to be or not to be
00:48:55
a white-headed response to this objection would begin by agreeing that the freedom at the quantum level must indeed be extremely trivial so that it could not directly account
00:49:06
for increase however by virtue of the way in which the human body as a compound individual functions as an amplifier the trivial freedom that exists at the
00:49:19
quantum level can be amplified so as to provide the basis for the kind of freedom enjoyable in mind so although quantum indeterminacy does not provide a
00:49:31
sufficient condition for human freedom it does provide a necessary condition it is accordingly far from irrelevant a third argument is that any
00:49:43
anti-indeterminacy that exists at the quantum level far from being amplified within the human body would be entirely canceled out i will treat this third argument which
00:49:55
is quite widespread at greater length two philosophers who articulate this argument are john searle and william lightning cyril who says that the science that science allows no place for freedom of
00:50:09
the will says that the fact of quantum indeterminacy does not change this fact a statistical indeterminacy at the level of particles he argues
00:50:21
does not show any indeterminacy at the level of objects that matter to us human bodies for example like seeking to explain why says that the non-deterministic quantum
00:50:35
phenomena cancels each other out so that at the macro level determinism still holds as near as mass their truthful point is that the
00:50:48
indeterminacy that exists at the micro level is canceled out at the macro level in accordance with the law of large numbers and this law applies not only to non-living objects such as billiard dogs
00:51:01
but also to human beings lying behind this conclusion is the materialistic view of nature held by these two philosophers from that perspective as we have seen
00:51:14
there is no basis for thinking in terms of compound individuals this means that all visible objects whether they be billiard models toasters or human beings
00:51:26
exemplify the same heart hole relationship in each case the whole is no more than the sum of the parts and their relations to each other
00:51:37
the whole is never a higher level actuality but the power to act as the unit so it has no power to act back on its parts from whiteheads and experientialist
00:51:50
point of view by contrast a billiard ball and a human being are structurally different in kind where the billiard bubble is an aggregation of society of billions of molecules a human being is a compound
00:52:03
individual in which the ordinary molecules are within macromolecules which in turn are within living cells and these living cells especially those in the brain support a line composed of
00:52:16
dominant occasions of experience accordingly although pan experientialism rules out ontological dualism it does allow for an organizational duality
00:52:29
this duality is crucial for the question of freedom because diverse modes of organization satisfy that can produce diverse modes of function
00:52:43
the organization of an inorganic aggregation of society such as iraq is such that the kind of analysis given like searle enlightenment is and why it's perspective largely accurate
00:52:57
the parts such as the atoms molecules can make spontaneous choices but these flashes of selection according to whitehead here if any are sporadic
00:53:09
and ineffective because there is no dominant as a result like it said these functionings toward each other and average out so as to produce a
00:53:20
negligible total effect the behavior of a stone is therefore a near aggregation of the facts as a result its behavior is describable even predictable
00:53:33
in terms of the laws of inorganic matter which are mainly the statistical averages resulting from confused aggregates it would be a category mistake power to assume that this kind of political
00:53:46
analysis is applicable to compound individuals in which there is a dominant member that can coordinate the various spontaneities in line with its aims
00:53:59
in societies of this type especially human beings an adequate causal analysis must take into account take into account the final causation the purposes
00:54:13
of the dominant ninja which through its dominance guides the body the person's movements if we do not accept this distinction between compound individuals and aggregation society however
00:54:28
we are led into absurdities according to the materialistic analysis whitehead pointed out a person's bodily actions must be thought to be governed purely by the physical laws
00:54:40
which need a stone to roll down a slope and water to boil the very idea is ridiculous thorough interestingly agrees that none of us can actually live
00:54:54
as if we believe this idea because cyril says we can't act otherwise than on the assumption of freedom no matter how much we learn about how the world works as a determined physical
00:55:07
system cyril concluded accordingly that he simply had to live with a contradiction between theory and practice
00:55:18
to his credit carl as his unsatisfactory outcome makes him confident that in our entire philosophical tradition we are making some fundamental mistake in the whole
00:55:31
discussion of the free will probably several decades earlier whitehead had identified that fundamental mistake as the fallacy of misplaced concreteness which leads to the idea that the
00:55:44
fundamental units of nature our vacuous actualities by replacing this materialist view with an experientialist white its philosophy shows not only how
00:55:56
the indeterminacy discovered by quantum physics and revealed but also how it provides a necessary condition for human freedom thank you very much for your patience
00:56:19
thank you we have time for discussions david can you handle the question yourself see i i understand that heart sword once said that um experientialism already called psychism
00:56:39
implies theism can you explain the revelation how did you know that the question i didn't come to discuss um yeah i mean it's a very complex
00:56:58
issue i i agree with it um in fact he he argues it goes both ways that theism properly understood implies
00:57:10
and experientialism and experiential and applied uh theism panicked realism properly used to apply part of it is simply the uh
00:57:28
you know the different ontology that a lot of what has ruled out theism for a lot of people is just that believing in god doesn't make sense in a materialistic world and so
00:57:42
if you've changed to a world in which the real things are experienced in the idea that there is some all-inclusive experience in which we live live move and have our being
00:57:54
that makes sense so partly it's just a matter of permission and intelligibility but it's more than that [Music] and i don't recall actually right now but
00:58:07
what all hearts aren't had in mind so i'll just give my only answer to that uh one factor is and this is more vidalian than arthorney
00:58:19
is that if you've got these experiences you've got spontaneity and you've got possibilities so this is very
00:58:31
light-headed and not cartoony then um first of all there has to be somewhere if those possibilities are going to be real before they've been actualized in our
00:58:45
finite world some place for them to be this is the platonic prop uh the airstone right you know where did those forms be they can't be holding the void somewhere
00:58:57
and then you've got uh what i call the uh [Music] i've been away from the israel so let me just forget the name
00:59:09
but uh there's a principle that also uh a lot of philosophers have accepted in writing so which is that things that are not actual
00:59:22
cannot act called this the analysis and [Music] i don't know why i can't think of this guy but anyway uh
00:59:36
the problem is even if you could imagine that these platonic forms of these eternal objects these possibilities could somehow exist in points how could they exert any agency in the
00:59:48
world so you know how could how is it that mathematics is exemplified in the world or to move right to our level how is it that moral norms
01:00:01
have any kind of efficacy on this or they put a little pressure on us too to actualize that uh so it's a problem of agency so that would be yet another
01:00:16
you probably remember max better than i do why don't you get the max max has some amazing memory and i have amazingly badminton uh help me out a little bit max what what
01:00:33
what if some what what did you have in mind if you did you know what arsenal meant well that was it i was trying to i guess the question was
01:00:47
can one accept fan experientialism without having to accept theism as a possibility and still stay coherent you'd certainly be better off to be a
01:01:04
pan experientialism pan experientialist without them than you would be to be either a duelist or a materialist without theater so i call it a good start
01:01:19
and i would say it would probably take quite a bit of argumentation to get somebody to see that they couldn't have a fully coherent view and it wouldn't be the first item of my agenda to try to convince them that but
01:01:32
if they asked me sure then so i mean i developed this in uh uh my one of my latest books one called supernaturalism without uh
01:01:48
re-enchanting without supernaturalism and originally was writing this book for a series in which they wanted sort of old-fashioned classic religion in which there would be a chapter on
01:02:02
natural theology in the sense of arguments for the visions of god i don't know that i would have written it if i hadn't accepted that science because it was never a topic that i particularly formed to once i got into it i
01:02:15
found it very interesting but first i thought oh i'll just i'll just kind of copy down hartsorn's arguments um but then when i started looking at him i thought that's really not a very strong argument that's not such a strong
01:02:28
argument and so i went back to whitehead and i saw that he had a whole bunch of implicit arguments and he knew what he was doing i mean he knew these were blizzard arguing he just didn't spell him out and
01:02:40
so i ended up with about 11 light-headed arguments and uh so that would be the way i you know in a long discussion i would
01:02:53
flesh out my answer to that uh so some of them are you know the distinction acts between a cosmological argument and metaphysical art if you've got metaphysical principles
01:03:06
they all they also need to be somewhere and so on and then you've got the aesthetic argument the moral the logical argument the math and that
01:03:21
argument from mathematics and so on some of them clearly involve and experientialism others don't they just involve maybe human experience
01:03:34
so i really do believe the the worldview only makes sense fully makes sense and coherently with and in theater um
01:03:47
so let me stop it yes uh internal relations does it work the other way too that is if the general if internal relations been therefore experienced
01:04:06
well that's what we've been arguing with damn uh i'll repeat the question i argued that uh and experientialism implies that everything has internal
01:04:19
relations anything and experience is internally constituted by its appropriation of data experiences from others you're internally qualified followed by
01:04:32
those so she's asking does it go the other way if something has internal relations does that mean it necessarily has experience and uh
01:04:44
firsthand okay yeah so we've been debating that quite a bit and i think a fully intelligible doctrine of internal relations
01:04:56
does require experience but you know i'm very happy to have somebody confirm internal relations even if they don't believe
01:05:09
that that requires an experience so i'm not going to try to cram and experientialising down dan's throat i'm just very happy that he believes in universal and relatedness and it's you know like the lawyer joke
01:05:22
it's a good start and so dan said you know three-fourths of the way that's good enough for now he's still a young man yeah first of all thank you for the paper a
01:05:35
number of us read it out loud to each other during the break and we thought we did quite well but you did it even better so that's wonderful i have um
01:05:47
i have a brother-in-law and i fully expect him to say you know professor griffin professor griffin makes his own experience of the world normative for everything else that goes
01:06:05
on and that's the problematic i expect him to say how would you think i should respond you should say oh yeah
01:06:28
well there's a there's a large animal of truth in that that we don't really have a choice uh in the sense that if we're gonna raise the metaphysical
01:06:41
question what are things in themselves not how do they appear to us not how they behave not what kind of point of readings do we get from anything we're going to ask them
01:06:53
questions what are they in themselves i don't think we have any choice but to think in terms of analogy with animal experience there's a long tradition that has affirmed this
01:07:08
goes back to barclay and because he said a lot of idiotic things bishop arthur i mean he's generally dismissed and you know i'm an idiot and he didn't say
01:07:20
many other things you know this podium doesn't really exist as a set of actuality but it's simply a set of ideas
01:07:32
that god is impressing on my mind so the chapter title i had in the goddarn was god makes a sensational impression on us
01:07:46
because the effects are sensory uh my little triforce um and but barclay had a an out in inside and whitehead picks up this side and
01:08:00
very interestingly nobody i think in the history ever thought of bartling in the same graph with the romantics wordsworth a whitehead does
01:08:12
in the chapter on romantic reactions and uh what he says they have in common is the rejection of the notion of natural sexuality because barkley said we only have two choices if you're
01:08:26
asking what does the word to be mean if we say something is what does that mean uh he says well he's one of the first empiricists so he said you know it's got to be rooted in
01:08:39
our experience unless it's rooted in a direct experience it's not a meaningful notion so he said in our direct experience we've got two faces that something can either be a perceiver and he had a very
01:08:52
generous meaning of procedure by perceiver he meant something that perceived but also acted so it's very similar to an actual industry of quite a natural energy so he said
01:09:04
there can be those kinds of things and we know what they're always because we're one of them and by analogy we think of god as one of them but then otherwise all we have are perceived things
01:09:20
this voting and but what does it mean to call something a perceived thing it means that it's very essence you know the thing is saying essay is
01:09:32
chipping the very essence of it to it is to be perceived well if it's very essence is to be perceived then it can't exist apart from being perceived and so and then you have the question you go to the library and there's a book there and
01:09:47
you do glance at it and a year later you go back to the library and there's that same book and there's more dust on it except your fingerprints from last year or there you say now was this book did it
01:10:00
pop out of existence while i was away and nobody else came in here and then it popped back into existence with a little additional dust on no so he says therefore god was perceiving
01:10:12
it all along so that led barclay to be visited but his argument was a good one if you you know accept his premise then you have to say
01:10:25
something so he was rejecting dickhart he was saying descartes you told us there are new minds there are these bodies that are mere external things that just think and you're saying they're actual
01:10:38
but you can't give us a meaning for it what does it mean for that thing to exist other than for it to be perceived and so yeah now the connection with the the romantic sentence was that
01:10:52
whitehead said barkley and the romantic shared this notion of the rejection of any actualities devoid of intrinsic value so for whitehead this was inside some
01:11:04
other world this notion of everything had intrinsic battle this was his new insight as he had moved from philosophy of nature to mental physics and then did generalize
01:11:16
so he says with uh green apartment if you're going to ask not just how do these things behave and and find finding the way he did as floss of nature he said
01:11:28
there uh by nature we mean the objects of our sensory perception something like that
01:11:40
where and that's that's what things appear to be less so he said they're going to move the metaphysics and say okay what's really going on here what is this we have no choice but to generalize our own experience down and then that's
01:11:55
the big question what do you when you generalize what do you subtract because nobody thinks their dogs have experience white as complex as their
01:12:07
elbow um well certain kinds of thoughts but generally not and then nobody really thinks you know as you go on further that that
01:12:19
amoeba say have experienced anything close to adults but uh we generalize the notion of experience so in that sense i would agree with your friend
01:12:33
a minute of a hustle question i would say that's just very receptive on your part and then point out that you know we really don't have a choice but to think by an analogy with our own experience if we're going to ask another question
01:12:47
now people a lot of people don't want to ask that question but if he said okay well griffin's playing this game called metaphysics you can't criticize that unless you've got an alternative how would you do metaphysics
01:13:00
some other way and uh nobody seems to be able to stay good consciousness they talk about what it does now you can't say what it is and get a
01:13:33
hold of something there's nothing though you can get something like looking for of the development of consciousness the question is
01:13:58
biologically an evolutionary where did this start in the first place first of all she had said that everybody talks about consciousness that nobody gives an idea of what it is
01:14:22
um i think to some extent that's right and as i just say experience you've either got to know what experience is or you know it's like the
01:14:32
color yellow famous example if you're color blind or you're blind entirely and somebody tells you something is jello you can't define yellow it's a simple thing you've got to be able to have it
01:14:47
well experience itself is that way if there was some entity that didn't have experience you couldn't explain to what it appears like so in that sense it isn't in the final but whitehead did give a definition of conscious experience and that's what i
01:14:59
was talking about with the affirmation negation contrast now i'm not saying that's the one and only true right definition of consciousness but it's the one he was working with and so when he argued that
01:15:14
not all things that are conscious that are experiential are conscious this he was both in that definition that at a certain level
01:15:26
you know we now know that bacteria respond to things and they actually have some memory so if bacteria that have experienced a certain chemical that they don't like you know it's very
01:15:39
unpleasant to them they avoid it whereas you get some bacteria that haven't experienced it before they'll get closer to it so there is learning of a sort going on but i don't think anybody would think
01:15:51
well i shouldn't say that but i wouldn't think that uh that i would want to say the bacteria were conscious of that stuff you know where they'd be kind of communicating the details
01:16:04
don't go over there that's that stuff you know that's the green stuff and not the redstone red stuff's good so that would be conscious we can do that sort of thing we can say
01:16:17
this is a red state not a flu state [Music] so we're conscious of that for good and for real but so it is a kind of definition now your
01:16:30
further point about we only understand things by uh understanding how they came about sure a large degree of truth is that if you really want to fully understand
01:16:42
something in an evolutionary world and that's what we're in um you're gonna have a much fuller understanding by by knowing its history and have some idea how it came about so that's what i
01:16:56
was trying to give here at least a likely story how you could have gone from a primitive chaos where you just got back into what why they call it chaos just random
01:17:11
events i didn't actually go that far but then you get uh emergence of things such as uh subatomic subtitles and then out of those electrons and
01:17:24
things at that level in the atoms so i was trying to give an account because in showing that there's some reason why history and evolution are necessary and
01:17:38
therefore why hard artificial intelligence is a crazy program to think that somehow we could jump directly from silicon molecules to
01:17:50
conscious experience yeah in your paper you say each actual occasion is an occasion of experience each occasion experience whether electronic atomic or humans begin by
01:18:04
preventing prior events which means taking aspects of them into itself and then a few lines on down finding the fact that after asians and exerting causal influence on
01:18:17
the present occasions are committed into these is there any speculative mechanism for that happening uh i'm not sure what you mean by inspection how does it how is this presented into
01:18:31
the actual occasion oh well i think in any in any metaphysical view you just have to take some things that this is the way things are this is an ultimate nature so there's no
01:18:43
speculativeness as of yet well you know even why should we assume that the mechanism is what we need mechanisms that one could argue
01:18:56
arrived out of organisms not the other way around that in this view whiteheads don't turn for it was not processed philosophy it was the organismic
01:19:08
worldview and in science modern world he called it organic mechanism we put the two together but he gave that he never used that again um so he called it the organic worldview or
01:19:20
the philosophy and then he showed how whereas the you know the materialist starts with mechanistic interactions and tries to
01:19:33
ask him okay now how did living things and how the conscious things emerge out of those mechanisms whitehead says we've been trying that for a long time and then we're how do we try the opposite protein
01:19:46
and say organisms are fundamental and then sometimes organisms get organized in such a way that they produce things that we call
01:19:59
you know that operate mechanistically so this has been one of the biases of modern thought is the idea that to explain anything
01:20:12
you've got to have amenity for it so what whitehead is suggesting here is that the ultimate nature of reality is that there are occasions of experience
01:20:27
and even back in the primordial chaos you had occasions of experience now they were not ordered in such a way that you could say there goes that electron there were no enduring objects things that kept up
01:20:40
stable form over time but they had the capacity to organize into those and so even at that level you you had entity actual occasions that
01:20:54
were pretending stuff from their path the difference being that when you get an ordered entity like an electron this present electronic event
01:21:07
inherits primarily from the previous electronic event that we say within that same society it's influenced by the other events in the neighborhood too but not to the same degree so for the
01:21:19
most part it repeats the form of that and this is just the way reality is the reality is made up of pre-ending incidents act preventing actual entities
01:21:32
not their very nature so that and that's a direct appropriation so take your own experience if you accept this for the sake of hypothesis
01:21:45
except the view that your mind your your series of conscious experience experiences here that have consciousness are pretending at each moment
01:21:58
your various brain cells so that the brain cells that are bringing visual stimuli from your eye and likewise the ones from your ear and one from your hand somehow you synthesize all of those into this
01:22:11
unified experiences seeing things you're hearing things and you're touching things simultaneously um let's just tell you you don't need a mechanism but then you have to be a mechanism between your mind
01:22:24
and your brain cells you just directly appropriate the data from the brain cells so that's the basic model but that's just the way reality is and he suggests that
01:22:37
metaphysically attempt to try to say what is it about the world that is necessary not what has just contingently risen in our particular universe that maybe
01:22:49
started 14 billion years ago so um and that's why i was remarking today on the uh this book is called uh emergence of everything because i think that's nonsense you
01:23:02
can't have you can't talk about the emergence of everything as if certain basic metaphysical principles could emerge or that something you know the old thing nothing
01:23:15
can emerge out of nothing there always has to be something the question is basic physical presence what is that basic something that is always existent that is eternal
01:23:26
that just necessarily exists and whitehead says occasions so it's a you know it's a vast hypothesis but it's always every other world here
01:23:41
a lot of them just don't recognize their you know their hypothetical nature yeah assuming that this today process that that happens
01:24:18
oh well as i say here we're talking redundant cosmology and see this work a lot of people don't make a distinction between metaphysics and cosmology so they assumed that the beginning of our
01:24:31
universe if it were 14 some billion years ago was just the beginning of stuff beginning of everything you know so i mean they call it singularity so it's the beginning of times in space at the beginning of
01:24:44
a finite actuality whitehead explicitly ejects that deal they were going back to the platonic view that our world was created out of chaos by bringing order out of tails
01:24:57
by the way that just happens to be biblical worldviews the idea of creationx nihila if by evil you mean absolute nothingness not a biblical view at all it arose
01:25:09
at the end of the second christian century and it was good old marcia whose heresy stimulated the development of the canon it turned out
01:25:25
who also stimulated this worship all christian doctrine from franciac neil in my opinion so uh whitehead is returning to the sonic view
01:25:41
[Music] so it makes a distinction between uh the universe and our universe the universe in the sense of a uh world of
01:25:58
multiplicity of finite actualities and then as a pan enthusiast i would say a worldline act tax on living within an all-inclusive by man that's always been
01:26:12
but then uh these things come and go so from that point of view if if it would turn out that brian greene was right of course the graduate thanks to his presentation on einstein therefore probably
01:26:26
not quite right but let's say he turned out to be just right you know process is going to go on so that's what process philosophy is the processes are ultimate
01:26:40
they don't begin a particular kinds of processes so that you know our kind of gravitational forces and electromagnetic
01:26:52
entities and these are all contingencies but finance speculation is that there have always been actual occasions at
01:27:04
so that god will always be interacting with some realm of initiate more or less conflict more or less interesting yes philip has given me the choice of doing one or two more questions so let's let's
01:27:19
try one and see how it goes [Music] uh this i think will be extremely short um i am always grasped by the subject object
01:27:33
distinction and you've seen that i'm not having probably the concept of experiences at this lower level because it seems to if you lose the term experience there always has to be an experiencer who is a
01:27:46
subject of some sort which is not explainable by causal theory of our goals in physics it's just irrelevant and it seems like there is intent
01:27:59
to want to bridge the subject object uh concern here is this is this basically what i'm thinking of yeah so in this view there's still
01:28:12
subject object experience but it's different than generally western thought has understood so in the first place
01:28:23
in this thought it isn't true that to have an experience you first have to have an experience they're already existing rather the the actual entities come into existence
01:28:35
they are occasions of experience so they are evoked into existence by the the previous uh world plus the divine interest and so you have new subjects arrived so
01:28:49
each occasion of experience arises as a subject presenting perceiving previous objects objects is a relative term an object is always an object for a subject
01:29:02
we've come to think of objects as mirror objects in cartesian things with just a piece of matter but in the strict sense of object object is something that lies before a subject
01:29:16
and so take your present moment of experience and now remember what you were thinking just a moment ago that moment of experience is now an object for your present subject
01:29:29
so whitehead has an oscillating view the universe oscillates continually between objects and subjects these objects equal to subjects into distances when these subjects uh complete their
01:29:43
existence as a subject and then immediately are objects for the following subjects so again i could give the same answer ladies and gentlemen here uh if somebody said well why
01:29:56
well that's just uh the nature of reality and whitehead would suggest and whitehead in heartsword would probably have suggested even stronger that uh
01:30:08
that's necessary and that if we if we had the mind of god if we were on mission we would see there couldn't be another kind of universe that this is the way the one and only way
01:30:23
that reality could be so it sounded like that was the one question that took plenty of time so uh please join me
01:30:39
[Applause] this is a really difficult lecture i'm glad i'm not out there listening to it i'm very amazed that you all stayed
01:30:56
there so thank you you
End of transcript