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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Human Compatible
  • Good quote from Whitehead : "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations we can perform without thinking about them" (p 88)
    • Note: this has since become a founding premise of the Protocol movement
from Weird Studies/Bergson
  • Henri Bergson is a major figure in a minor strand of philosophy, process philosophy, includes Whitehead , Heraclitus , and more recently Deleuze who is mostly responsible for revived interest in Bergson.
from nonduality
  • The nonduality of seer and seen: there is no philosophical or religious assertion more striking or more counterintuitive, and yet claims that there is such an experience, and that this experience is more veridical than our usual dualistic experience, are not rare in the Western tradition. Similar statements have been made, in equally stirring language, by such important Western mystical fgures as Meister Eckhart, Jakob Boehme, and William Blake, to name only a few. Philosophers have generally been more hesitant about committing themselves so decisively, but a claim regarding the nonduality of subject and object is explicit or implicit within such thinkers as Spinoza, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Bergson, and Whitehead—again naming only a few; later I shall argue that similar claims may be found among important contemporary fgures like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and perhaps Wittgenstein.
from neovitalism
  • Taking cues from Whitehead, Deleuze and Guattari, Stengers and Prigogine, and Margulis and Sagan, the new materialists mobilize a revivified materiality against such toxic materialisms. They accomplish this in part by rejecting traditional ontological hierarchies—especially those that seek clear distinctions between spirit and matter, life and nonlife, or sentience and non-sentience.
    • I like this. This is the humanities equivalent of a refactoring. But there's a political edge to this that "refactoring" doesn't capture – these aren't just categorical boundaries, but they mark a distinction between high and low. Shattering them is a political act.
from On Purpose
  • Alfred North Whitehead gets a whole section
    • Romanticism – a protest on behalf of an organic view of nature, and also a protest against the exclusion of value from the essence of matter of fact
from Christopher Alexander
  • There are thus two worlds in our minds. One is the scientific world which has been pictured through a highly complex system of mechanisms. The other is the world we actually experience. These two worlds, so far, have not been connected in a meaningful fashion. Alfred North Whitehead, writing about 1920, was one of the first philosophers to draw attention to this modern problem, which he called the bifurcation of nature. Whitehead believed that we will not have a proper grasp of the universe and our place in it, until the self which we experience in ourselves, and the machinelike character of matter we see outside ourselves, can be united in a single picture. I believe this. – Christopher Alexander, The Luminous Ground, p13
from Alien Phenomenology
  • Similar troubles plague vitalist and panpsychist approaches. The “akinness” of various material behaviors to human thought and feeling has promise, but it also draws far too much attention to the similarities between humans and objects, rather than their differences. Whitehead was careful to distinguish prehension from consciousness, while still managing to hold that entities are “throbs of experience.”

Whitehead

19 Aug 2025 - 22 Aug 2025
Open in Logseq
    • ‘Actual entities-—also termed ‘actual occasions’—are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real. They differ among themselves : God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space.
      • Weird this sounds like a failure of process thinking, whats all these "things" and "entities"?
    • The explanatory purpose of philosophy is often misunderstood. Its business is to explain the emergence of the more abstract things from the more concrete things. It is a complete mistake to ask how concrete particular fact can be built up out of universals. The answer is, ‘In no way. The true philosophic question® is, How can concrete fact exhibit entities abstract from itself and yet participated in by its own nature?
    • In other words, philosophy is explanatory of abstraction, and not of concreteness. It is by reason of their instinctive grasp of this ultimate truth that, in spite of much association with arbitrary fancifulness and atavistic mysticism, types of Platonic philosophy retain their abiding appeal; they seek the forms in the facts. (p24-25)
    • Then there are very precise detailed ontologies (if that is the right word) of "The Categories"
      • I. The Category of the Ultimate. II. Categories, of Existence. III. Categories of Explanation. IV. Categoreal Obligations.
      • There are 8 Categories of Existence, 27 of Explanation...OK.
    • Whitehead's Radical Notion of Prehension
      • ....he defined prehension as a noncognitive form of experiential togetherness. In *Process and Reality *(1929), prehension receives a more systematic treatment and becomes the generic process by which actual entities integrate and transform the influences of the past and the possibilities of the future into the present immediacy of their becoming. It names the way the process of reality feels its way forward moment by moment. Prehension is not simply a theory about our knowledge of reality—it is part of a description of reality (including our knowledge) as a nexus feelings.
      • Gotta say I kind of hate that, but whatever. Seems to be an alterantive to representationalism, which sounds good I guess.
      • Are we to say that its quantifiable shape and mass (or that of its molecules) are primary material realities, while the qualities of its shade and felt warmth are secondary mental additions irrelevant to nature? Whitehead refuses to sever the mental from the physical, since after all it is with our own physical bodies that we perceive the world around us.
      • OK well computationalism does the same thing without the BS (Sorry in a reactionary mood today or something)
      • As with any philosophical hypothesis prehension is a wager that comes with potential risks and rewards. If successful, it resolves longstanding problems related not only to perception but also to causation, emotion, memory, purpose, and knowledge—all by way of a single imaginative generalization.
      • It doesn't resolve anything, it just renames (maybe refactors?)
      • Whitehead’s introduction of God is not a matter of religious worship but a philosophical attempt to make good on the ontological principle: that every potential has to be prehended by an actual entity, even those not yet realized in the physical world. For Whitehead, God, or the everlasting macrocosmic concrescence, performs precisely this function. But the theological ingredient in Whitehead’s metaphysics need not be read as identical with classical theism. The process God is not to be treated as a ruling Caesar or ruthless moralist, but as an ideal lure toward future harmonies uniquely tailored to the local spatiotemporal condition of each occasion.
      • Oy vey. OK, yeah thats a god I can live with, but also so abstract as to be unsatisfying...
      • I'm reading this on my phone under a mosquito net in the jungle after a nightlong ayahuasca ceremony and it is SO fucking good. Thanks, Matt.
      • Ah that's the problem, not enough DMT in my system