UPDATED AND CORRECTED - 8/30/08

In his latest post, Henry writes:

“Mike’s position has been that W’s full scheme does entail an absolute serial order. My position is that W’s words do not entail such an absolute serial order of the coming into being of the occasions (or of their initiation and termination “dates”), and implicitly that Nobo’s supersessional ordering involves adding essential content to what W said (at least in PR). Whitehead’s words permit, I believe, a “relativistic” notion of coming into beingness in which the ordering of the parts of occasions whose standpoints are wholly spacelike is not ontologically or metaphysically or logically significant.”

I believe this to be an accurate summary of our respective views.  More accurately, my position is that Whitehead’s metaphysics and cosmology do imply a fundamental serial ordering of concrescences, as described above–but not one that is spatiotemporal.  The serial ordering is strictly mereological-logical and described fully in Whitehead’s Theory of Extension (Part IV of Process and Reality). Read the rest of this entry »

The issue here is whether Whitehead’s theory of nature, particularly as described in Process and Reality (PR), entails the existence of a universal/absolute/objective linear ordering in which all occasions (or at least their initiation and termination “dates”) can be placed. Nobo’s theory contains such an ordering (supersessional time), and one question is whether the existence of such an ordering is entailed by Whitehead’s actual words.

This issue has been the subject of a discussion involving Mike Epperson, Jorge Nobo, and myself. These exchanges have served to define the issues, and our respective understanding of W’s scheme. Mike’s position has been that W’s full scheme does entail an absolute serial order. My position is that W’s words do not entail such an absolute serial order of the coming into being of the occasions (or of their initiation and termination “dates”), and implicity that Nobo’s supersessional ordering involves adding essential content to what W said (at least in PR). Whitehead’s words permit, I believe, a “relativistic” notion of coming into beingness in which the ordering of the parts of occasions whose standpoints are wholly spacelike is not ontologically or metaphysically or logically significant. Read the rest of this entry »

Stapp’s Comments of 7/30/08 on the first part of Epperson’s:

Whitehead’s Theory of Extension as it Pertains to Henry’s Question: Part 2

Dear Mike,

Many thanks for sending your more concise attachment, which focuses on the particular passages in PR that you believe lead to the logical conclusion that W’s scheme, as described in PR, entails a single universal time in which the coming into being of the ALL occasions can be plotted.

MGE: Well, nothing in my attached document said anything about time ordering. The ordering he talks about in his Theory of Extension is purely mereological. Again, the thesis in W’s Theory of Extension, which I attempted to summarize in the attached document, is that Spatiotemporal ordering is a ‘more specialized’ form of ordering embedded in a more fundamental, purely mereological, serially ordered, inclusively related regions—regions that are NOT spatiotemporal! These regions are, for Whitehead, purely first-order regions describing the internal relatedness of actualities. They are, in other words, metaphysical regions, not physical regions. They are denumerable. They are serially ordered. Read the rest of this entry »

Hi everyone–

In his 7/28 post, Henry makes a great point here re: my last post, and it brought up what might be an important question:  Could PNC taken as an a priori metaphysical first principle (implied by Whitehead’s desideratum of logical coherence), writ large and within the context of the metaphysical system given in Process and Reality, yield a well-ordered series of occasions in a scheme where:

1. The physical-causal efficacy of every actual occasion is restricted to its forward light cone.

and

2. Each and every becoming actual occasion is logically, internally related to each and every being.

I believe that Part III and IV in PR together posit both of these, respectively. With respect to 2 and its relationship to extensiveness, for example, Part IV.II.II Assumption 2 (PR 295) states that any two regions A and B are mediately connected such that both A and B are connected with some region C. (Fig. iii, p.296) The question is, if we bring 1 and 2 together, with added attention to governance of internal relations by PNC, will that yield an interpretation of “The many become one and are increased by one” that is free of the problem Henry raises?

Here is our exchange: Read the rest of this entry »

wmes-passages-on-objectification-and-creativity

One and all:

I am attaching a file with selected passages from my Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity. I will add a second file in a few days with passages having more to do with the theory of metaphysical extension. I hope these passages will make my meaning clearer and enable the discussion of supersession and absolute order of initiation and termination dates significantly to advance beyond its present point.

I apoligize for the length of the file, but the book is over 400 pages long and I am shooting for quoting no more than 10 % of it.

Best to all,

Jorge

In Jorge’s Reply to Henry’s comment on the issue of absolute ordering, Jorge makes an important point:

…There is an objective well-ordered series of alpha and omega dates that can be read from the well-ordered causal objectifications found within the regional standpoint of every occasion. That follows from the logic of the theory of causal objectification, which is wholly a metaphysical theory. Therefore, the relations it attributes to occasions cannot depend on the contingent features of our cosmic epoch [see my previous message]. They would obtain even in epochs in which phrases like space-like and time-like separations are meaningless.

Such an order, in other words, is necessarily implied by Whitehead’s theory of causal objectification. The latter simply doesn’t work without such an underlying objective ordering of occasions.  It would lose all coherence as a theory given that its signature feature is that every becoming is internally related to all beings antecedent to it. Read the rest of this entry »

I concur with Jorge in his last post: Continua, absolute order, and causal objectification. I would like to offer some supplemental ideas.  (Again, this is in answer to Henry’s question on whether we can find IN WHITEHEAD any unequivocal endorsement of the idea of absolute [as opposed to partial] ordering of the terminations of the coming into being of occasions.) I would like to again offer the following 3 passages (from my July 17 email) and suggest that they be added to the excellent list Jorge compiled in his latest message:

PASSAGE 1

Whitehead writes,

“…in the ‘electromagnetic’ society the ambiguity as to the relative importance of competing families of straight lines (if there be such competing families), and the ambiguity as to the relative importance of competing definitions of congruence, are determined in favour of one family and one congruence-definition. The transformations into an indefinite variety of coordinates, to which the ‘tensor theory’ refers, all presuppose one congruence-definition. The invariance of the Einsteinian ‘ds’ expresses this fact.” (PR 98) Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Henry,

I copy below a passage from your last response to me. Mike and you have had further exchanges on the topic, but, at this time, I want to address only your original question on whether we can find IN WHITEHEAD any unequivocal endorsement of the idea of absolute (as opposed to partial) ordering of the terminations of the coming into being of occasions?  Here are the relevant passages:

In addition to absolute in the sense I specified above, a metaphysical past is also absolute in the sense you have in mind. Yes, there is an absolute order of the coming into existence of the occasions. But we have to distinguish between the coming into existence of the occasion as incompletely determinate and its coming into existence as a completely determinate being. One and the same occasion first exists as a becoming and then as a being. The distinction makes perfect sense in respect to supersession, but not in respect to physical time. The distinction also means that there are two supersessional dates associated with an occasion: one marking the initiation of an occasion’s becoming; the other, the termination of the occasion’s becoming (and, hence the initiation of its existence as a superject). These dates situate the occasion, whether as a becoming or as a being, in an absolute, but complex, ordering system. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Jorge,

I have been pressed for time and only now have been able to look at
the notes (From Nobo’s working notes on supersession) that you had attached
to your earlier message. You asked whether I encountered
any problems.

I do have some troubles with the second paragraph (Nonetheless…being)
and the third paragraph (Physical time …block universe).

The second paragraph seems to blur or eliminate the distinction
between “being” and “becoming”, which is a distinction that W took great
pains to draw. Read the rest of this entry »

On PR 66 Whitehead says:

“Apart from the initial conditions proper to [our] cosmic epoch….the properties of this continuum … do not include the relationships of metrical geometry.”

“This extensive continuum expresses the solidarity of all standpoints”

“In its full generality, beyond the present epoch, it does not nvolve shapes or dimensions, or measurability; these are additional determinations of real potentiality arising from our present epoch.”

I take this to mean that in our present epoch we can identify the extensive continuum with the spacetime continuum of physics, and the standpoints to be definite regions of spacetime.

Restricting ourselves to the present epoch, and considering the fact that the unitary dynamical evolution in relativistic quantum field allows causal connection only into the future light cone, it is temping to conclude the that actual world of any occasion must be confined to the backward light of the standpoint of that occasion, and past, present (contemporary}, and future to be defined by light-cone conditions.

But of course that is hard to reconcile with the idea the “The many become one, and are increased by one!” Read the rest of this entry »