Process philosophy
Explanation
Alfred North Whitehead, British mathematician and philosopher who worked with Russell on the Principia Mathematica, developed in Process and Reality (1929) a metaphysics radically alternative to the dominant substantialism. His central idea: ultimate reality is not substances (permanent things with properties) but events, processes, occasions of experience. The universe is a dynamic set of events that influence each other, each with an intrinsic experiential face.
Each occasion of experience is, according to Whitehead, a creative synthesis: it inherits influences from past occasions (its data), integrates them according to its specific subjective form, and contributes something new to the process. This scheme applies not only to human minds, but to all levels of reality: a cell, a particle, an aggregate, are all occasions of experience in the broad Whiteheadian sense.
Process philosophy is therefore a form of panexperientialism. Not everything has full consciousness like humans do, but everything has some modality of primitive experience that arises from the creative relation between events. Complex minds such as the human one are highly developed integrations of simpler occasions. Consciousness emerges, but not from nothing: it emerges from more basic experiences.
Whitehead introduces refined technical concepts: prehension (one event's grasp of another), nexus (a set of mutually prehending events), society (a nexus with continuity in time). The vocabulary is unusual but the logic is rigorous. His system aims to offer an alternative to classical physical atomism, capable of integrating relativity, quantum mechanics and biology.
For consciousness, Whitehead offers an option: instead of seeing consciousness as something that mysteriously emerges from inert matter, he sees it as the sophisticated development of an experiential aspect present in every event from the start. It is a form of panexperientialism or primitive panpsychism, very close to the contemporary proposals of Strawson and Goff.
Process philosophy influenced theology (process theology: Hartshorne, Cobb), ecology (relational interconnection), physics (Bohm and his implicate order) and philosophy of mind (contemporary panpsychists). It is one of the great alternatives to the Cartesian-Newtonian mechanistic paradigm, and continues to inspire those seeking a metaphysics compatible with life, mind and experience.
Strengths
- A metaphysics that takes experience as a fundamental datum.
- Coherent with relational and relativistic physics.
- Anticipates panpsychism and cosmopsychism.
- Influence on theology, ecology, systems thinking.
Main critiques
- Dense technical vocabulary (concrescence, prehension).
- Difficult empirical verification.
- Accused of covert panpsychism.
- Distance from normal science.