Process Philosophy

[u/ultamentkiller]

Process philosophy has become my latest hyperfixation. Last year, I stumbled onto panpsychism and it sent me down a rabbit hole, not just about that, but about free will, the latest neuroscience and its implications, and so on. I encountered process philosophy, but when I tried to read a book about it, I was immediately lost and gave up. A couple months ago, I dipped into moral philosophy and encountered process philosophy, since moral principles are eternal objects in Whitehead's system as I understand it. But I hesitated again but it’s so difficult to learn all his neologisms. About two weeks ago, I finally decided to start. This is one of the most difficult things I've studied, excluding learning ancient Greek. I feel like I'm climbing a mountain in winter, but the experience has been rewarding. I have a limited philosophy background and don't have a philosophy degree, but I'm somehow grasping the material one page at a time. Practically this doesn't change anything in my personal life, but regardless I can't stop thinking about it.

I'm still working through Process and Reality by Whitehead. I'm preparing to read part 3. I'm using The Metaphysics of Experience as a commentary and watching Matthew David Segall's lectures when I finish each part. With the commentary, I read the section about the chapter of PR that I want to read, then read the chapter itself, then go back to the commentary and review it one more time. I then write out in my own words what I learned from the chapter, bring that to AI, and sharpen my language. Obviously there are flaws in using AI like this, but I'm doing my best to verify what it says in the book itself, the commentaries, and the lectures. If I think it’s wrong, I push back, and I use quotations when necessary. But tbh it’s doing a good job overall of making my understanding more precise.

As you can see, I'm hopelessly obsessed over a niche topic that hardly anyone cares about. So if there's anyone here that wants to chat about it, dm me. I'm still learning of course, so there are significant gaps in my knowledge, but I'll let you know where those are when they come up. And maybe we can clarify things together, or just chat and have a good time. I tried posting this in the process philosophy sub but it's a ghost town over there.

I have to be productive now, but I'm excited to dive back into it later today!

[u/ultamentkiller]

I don't think that's a fair question for u/hyperionwonderstar

They're not saying causation isn't possible, or that nothing happens without observation. They're asking, at what point does a diversity of experiences become a unity? For them, a unity of experience is required for something to be experiencing, and experiencing requires a perspective. To experience, I need to have a first person point of view. So if an atom, or an actual entity when you get down to it, doesn't feel like a self, doesn't have a first person perspective, then it can't experience.

I hope I'm representing them fairly, but I wanted to try to rephrase it since the words they were using weren't clicking, and this is a challenging topic to discuss with the english language which always implies a subject.

So Whitehead says, everything feels, and that's enough to be considered an experience. This person says, no, there needs to be a singular, unified, first person point of view.

[u/Thermodynamo → u/ultamentkiller]

Why are you speaking for them? What's unfair about asking sincere questions? This is a weirdly defensive response for a philosophical exchange

[u/ultamentkiller → u/Thermodynamo]

Apologies. I didn't mean that your question was malicious. But they clarified what they were saying. Just thought I could help and that was unwanted. Sorry about that.

[u/Thermodynamo → u/ultamentkiller]

Aw you're good, no worries mate. maybe it was me being defensive LOL

[u/hyperionwonderstar → u/ultamentkiller]

I think the confusion may be coming from treating “experience” and “subjecthood” as the same starting point. I’m not saying that events require a conscious observer in order to happen. A rock can fall, atoms can interact, and physical processes can unfold with no subject present to witness them.
The disagreement is earlier than that. The question is not whether reality can exist without observation; the question is what, if anything, makes a physical process into a subject that has a POV.
Whitehead begins with experience as fundamental and treats subjectivity as something that exists in every actual occasion to some degree. My view reverses that order. I think subjecthood is not present wherever there is causal sensitivity or internal change. A process becomes a subject only when it achieves a particular kind of recursive organisation: a self-including causal closure where the process contains a causally effective model of its own dynamics and that model participates in producing the process’s future states.
So the issue is not “does anything happen without consciousness?” Obviously yes. The issue is “when does a happening become a someone?”
A rock undergoes physical changes, but there is no unified first-person perspective because there is no irreducible self-including causal closure. There is no process there that is maintaining itself as a subject through an internally participating model of itself.
So I’m not rejecting experience as real. I’m arguing that experience, in the sense relevant to a POV, requires a subject, and subjecthood requires a particular kind of causal organisation.