Ruth Kastner and I first met several years ago in the context of a seminar series focused on plasma physicist and philosopher Timothy Eastman’s work. Ruth also participated in the “Metaphysics and the Matter With Things: Thinking With Iain McGilchrist” conference I co-hosted at CIIS last March. We’ve been meaning to sit down to see what bridges might be built between her Possibilist Transactional Interpretation of quantum physics (more recently extended into relativity theory)and Whitehead’s process-relational metaphysics. This was the first of what I am sure will be many more conversations.
Ruth and I discuss my paper on eternal objects—”Standing Firm in the Flux: On Whitehead’s Eternal Objects”—which is soon to be published in Whitehead at Harvard, 1925-1927 ed. by Joseph Petek and Brian Henning (Edinburgh University Press). You can read a copy here.
I began by recounting my recent discussions with Michael Levin—a biologist exploring what he terms “Platonic morphospace.” I think Levin’s work, which challenges the reductionist confines of actualist materialism in biology by emphasizing a field of possibilities that shapes morphogenesis and regeneration, resonates across disciplines with what Ruth is up to in quantum physics. I suggested that possibility might serve as a kind of formal cause—one that has been overlooked not only in biology but also in quantum physics. I futher suggested that the tension between unitarity and non-unitarity in interpretations of quantum physics mirrors Whitehead’s idea of a continuous realm of possibilities giving way to the discrete actuality of events.
Ruth and I then delved into Whitehead’s philosophy. I explained my fascination with his concept of eternal objects and the notion of concrescence—the process by which a continuum of possibilities irreversibly collapses into a discrete actual occasion. I expressed discomfort with how Whitehead sometimes appears to overly-reify eternal objects, while I prefer to lean on his alternative affirmation of the way eternal objects are dynamically enriched when the “shadow of truth” is cast back upon them by actualized events. Ruth agreed that the exchange between the limitless realm of possibility and the sharply defined realm of actualization is fundamental, and she drew clear parallels between this process and the measurement problem in quantum physics, where unitarity gives way to the collapse of the wave function.
Our discussion shifted to the broader cultural and institutional resistance in physics to the transactional interpretation (TI). Ruth pointed out—and I concurred—that critics often dismiss alternative theories by demanding a novel, falsifiable predictions, even though similar standards would challenge well-established ideas like the kinetic theory of gases or the Higgs mechanism. We both lamented how entrenched actualist paradigms lead to a kind of intellectual double standard, one that refuses to address anomalies such as the inability of conventional quantum theory to account for definite measurement outcomes.
Ruth suggested that our experience of being embodied in space-time might be nothing more than a user interface—an illusion overlaying a deeper, more intricate network of events. I echoed this sentiment by referencing Whitehead’s view that events, or “actual occasions,” are not mere points in space-time but processes that weave or “stitch” together the fabric of reality. In Whitehead’s scheme, every actual occasion synthesizes both a physical pole, anchored in the already determined past (or what—from the perspective of the presently concrescing occasion—he calls “real potentiality”), and a mental pole, tapping into a broader field of “pure” (or at least purer) potentiality. Ruth saw some parallels to TI, where the offer-wave may be akin to the real potentiality inherited by the physical pole, while the confirmation wave is akin to the pure potentiality tapped by the mental pole.
We also explored the semiotic function of eternal objects, considering whether they might be seen as signs mediating between our perceptual experience and the external physical world. We linked Whitehead’s idea of the extensive continuum—a field of potentiality structured by rules of extensive connection—to conservation laws. Ruth suggested that, at least in the context of TI, these eternal rules might condition the flow of energy without fully determining the outcome of any given event, much as conservation laws constrain but do not dictate individual measurement results.
TRANSCRIPT:
MATT
Well, I had a chance to go back and revisit the seminar that we did with Tim Eastman a couple of years ago now. Uh-huh. Yeah. including your contributions to that conversation and some dialogue with Michael Epperson. And it was very helpful to review all of that.
And I’m almost wondering if there might even be a book there, just sort of a very, it would be a very dialogical book, but with AI nowadays, I can get really good transcripts And much easier to work with an AI produced transcript to kind of clean up the language and, you know, inform.
So anyway, I haven’t spoken with Tim about it, but I was considering.
RUTH
Okay, well, yeah, now that’s a really great idea. There’s all that material there, all that discussion that certainly would, I think you’re right, you know, in thinking back, I think that was a really, really rich exchange. And there’s a lot there that could be shared.
MATT
Yeah.
RUTH
Yeah. And we could develop it further. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
MATT
And, you know, I’ve been thinking about this conversation with you. I’ve also been having conversations with a biologist named Michael Levin, who is, is exploring um he calls it platonic morphospace but it’s a version of the realm of possibility and he’s finding that um you know he doesn’t use these terms yet but
he’s reaching out to philosophers like me to help um he doesn’t think in terms of actualism and possibleism and whatnot but he’s basically trying to break through the actualist dogmas of uh or the way that actualism has limited biology to these more reductionistic forms of explanation. He thinks to explain morphogenesis and the development of individual organisms and
regeneration of limbs in some organisms that we actually need to make reference to a kind of field of possibilities that are being kind of harvested or reached into. He’s not saying this is a quantum effect, but he’s realizing that possibility has been left out. The causal role of possibility, not as an efficient cause necessarily,
but maybe a formal cause has been left out of biology. And so I’ve just been thinking about how across the natural sciences, not just in physics with your work and Mike Epperson’s work and Stu Kaufman’s work and others. And Kaufman’s also doing this in biology. But possibility is all of a sudden becoming this new territory,
as it were, that science is exploring. So it’s an exciting new frontier, I think.
RUTH
Yeah, well, it’s good. I mean, it’s good to see this, you know, opening up a little bit. And, of course, I was looking at the Whitehead material at the piece that you pointed me to. I’ve actually gotten through most of that and didn’t get through the conclusion yet.
But, you know, I can see how Whitehead really presaged so much of this, in a sense, with his… what he called eternal objects, which I’m still kind of not feeling totally clear on that whole issue. I’m kind of a newbie as far as his project and the whole project of constructing a metaphysics,
which is not something I’ve really… looked at, you know, in my philosophical work has been just so narrowly focused on, you know, on this esoteric area in quantum theory. So it’s kind of a, it’s something that I need to get more oriented to, to kind of really be, you know,
up to speed on the whole point of the enterprise. But clearly, you know, from what little I’ve gotten so far, I do see him doing that. I do see him stressing the crucial role of possibility.
MATT
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I know that’s a dense article. And it was really my attempt to better understand what he means by eternal objects. And I discovered in trying to do so that there are some what I perceive to be tensions in his own life. attempt to elaborate how they function. Maybe we can get into that,
but he’s trying to characterize the space of possibility and its relationship to space-time and actuality. And he’s a mathematical logician and so has this sort of Platonist tendency, but he’s also a thinker of creative evolution and irreversibility and wants to make sure that these eternal objects are not cordoned off into some, you know, separate realm.
He wants there to be bi-directional, you know, a relationship between what gets actualized and that that has some effect on the realm of possibility that they’re not, he calls them eternal objects. There’s this, I think, effort on his part to think how it may be possible for actuality to affect the the ordering of these possibilities,
just as the possibilities are affecting, you know, what can be actualized. And so he wants, you know, two directional relationship there, but it’s an asymmetrical relationship. And maybe we could just dive into this now, because I think it’s relevant. The issue in quantum physics between unitarity and non-unitarity. And I feel like,
In unitarity, there’s this sense of determinism and reversibility. And for Whitehead, that’s an account of the space of possibility as a continuum, if we were to imagine it independent of actualization. Whereas non-unitarity is akin to what Whitehead is describing with concrescence. And so he would say, while possibilities are a continuum, Actuality, he says, is incurably atomic.
He doesn’t mean atoms like Newton meant atoms. He means uncuttable whole.
RUTH
Discreet. Yes. Yeah.
MATT
Indivisible wholes.
RUTH
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
MATT
And so there’s this, yeah, this element of discreteness that actualization brings where you have all of a sudden location in space-time. And it’s that interplay between the continuum of possibility or what in quantum physics we would describe as unitarity and the non-unitary possibility. actualization the collapse so to speak um where this asymmetry arises because you
know there’s the universe has a history there’s a whitehead described it as a there’s a process of creative advance and so this interplay between possibility and actuality gives rise to novel events. So you get an evolutionary universe where there’s a kind of irreversibility to time, right? Whereas if you just stay in the realm of possibility,
it can seem like, I mean, maybe in like the many worlds interpretation, it’s perfectly deterministic because every possibility is being actualized. in some other actual world that we have no access to.
RUTH
Right. That’s what you end up with when you are stuck with actualism.
MATT
Right.
RUTH
You know, you get a bunch of different actual worlds.
MATT
So does that bridge work?
RUTH
Oh, yeah. I mean, when you’re describing this, I’m like, yeah, totally. That’s just totally lines up with my little, you know, kind of tip of the iceberg, you know, the iceberg sort of picture and the two different, the levels of, you know, what I call quantum land, which does have the same attributes of it,
that time to the extent that there’s sort of a temporal quality at all to this realm of possibility, it is a continuum. It’s sort of time is kind of just a parameter that can be seen as arising from internal periodicity of quantum systems, and it can be seen as a continuum.
And then indeed with the non-unitarity does seem to line up really nicely with Whitehead’s idea of concrescence and the transformation of this sort of elements of this this realm of continuity to this atomistic actualized realm. And it, it just like, I’m hearing you say this and I’m like, yeah, that’s, that’s totally the picture. And there, there is,
there is an asymmetry to it, you know, in the sense that there are so many more possibilities that are there that are available. They can’t all be actualized for any given, you know, actual occasion, if you want to use his terminology. So there’s that aspect of kind of negation that you brought out in your piece of
the constraint, the imposition of form where you’re saying no to certain things. You’re saying, well, now I’m not going to do that because I got to have some definition here, some form, some limitation in order to have anything at all. And that’s very much an attribute of this
actualized realm, you know, the tip of the iceberg sort of space-time realm. So, yeah, I mean, I see a lot of parallel there. I mean, and they are definitely, there’s a back and forth in that Certainly once you have this actualization, that is going to have an effect on the systems, you know, that I think of as,
that I see as being, remaining in that level of possibility. But they are going to be undergoing change. They’re going to be affected as a result of, you know, what they participate in, in terms of actualization. And this is where I kind of, you know,
had to kind of struggle a bit with the idea of possibilities as eternal objects and whether that means if they’re really unchanging, I don’t see them as unchanging, but I see them as atemporal, you know, in the sense that they are not within metrical time.
They’re not in a domain that is characterized by metrical time because that’s kind of the tip of the iceberg thing. but I see them as undergoing some form of change. So that’s where I kind of had to struggle with the idea of these as being eternal. If by that he meant really changeless,
then you might have to look at, well, certain aspects of these objects could be seen as changeless, certain essential properties of them, things like charge, things like the basic properties of the fields and so on, you could maybe find some eternal, unchanging aspects to those.
But, you know, as far as an atom, you know, take an atom that’s in, you know, the substratum. So it’s in this realm of possibility. So you could say it’s atemporal in the metrical sense. It’s going to be changing states. It’s going to be, you know, an excited state or in a ground state and so on.
So it’s going to be undergoing change in that sense. So, again, it’s just kind of, you know, I’m not quite sure how. Yeah. What Whitehead would say about that. Sure.
MATT
Well, there’s that, I think I quote this enigmatic line that was actually recorded by a student of his during one of his Harvard lectures, which I wish he would have put in his published books. But he says that the truth casts the shadow or actuality casts the shadow of truth back on the realm of eternal objects,
which means when a concrescence occurs, when something is actualized, now all of a sudden we have a the concept of truth becomes relevant. Whereas in the realm of possibility, there are multiple contradictory, you know, coexisting. Like there needs to be that selection and limitation in order to arrive at something. Um,
and consistent that abides by non-contradiction and these logical rules. It’s this or that. So the shadow of truth cast back on actuality, cast the shadow of truth on the realm of eternity and enriches the eternal objects. And so what he means by enrichment seems to be something like the eternal objects,
though they have a definite or sort of essential character already, They’re enriched in the sense that the relevance of that character vis-a-vis what’s been actualized shifts, right? Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
RUTH
Interesting.
MATT
And it’s a point in Whitehead that I am uncomfortable with because sometimes he does seem to cordon off and make static the eternal objects in a way that I’m uncomfortable with. So I’m glad that that’s something you want to resist too, because Whitehead goes in different directions at different times on that question, I think.
RUTH
And I see,
MATT
I’m very much want to go in the direction you do in interpreting what, what he’s up to.
RUTH
Okay. Well, I mean, that is such a cool statement because, you know, I don’t, and I, I’m, I have to be kind of aware of, am I, am I pushing Whitehead, you know, too far? Yeah. Am I pushing to him to wear a lineup as nicely as possible with my model? But if I do that, I mean,
one way to interpret that is certainly in a quantitative sense in RTI, what seems to be required is that when you’ve got, you know, you’ve got systems like atoms or something participating in measurement, that technically it’s the photons that are doing the measurement, it’s the electromagnetic field that is carrying out the measurement,
and that’s what the transaction is, but the effect, but it has an effect on the emitters and absorbers, which are these quantum systems with mass, that they are affected by it in a way that they effectively kind of undergo collapse themselves. The collapse is directly basically where the photon ends up.
So it’s the field, the electromagnetic field, that’s technically directly collapsing. But there’s an effective indirect collapse on the sources of the field, the emitters and the absorbers, so that they are effectively collapsed. And this is how measurement happens. So if you have, you know, an atom and people are doing something with an atom, say,
in a two-slit experiment, and they want to, okay, I want to measure where this atom ended up, and it effectively collapses, say, to one slit or the other or something like that, then then that’s the sense in which a shadow has been cast on it, you could say. You know, you could say that, okay,
the photon is what really collapsed and there was an actualized event but the shadow cast on the so-called eternal object or the atom is that in fact, it got collapsed too. So that might be pushing it farther than Whitehead wanted to go, but certainly, you know, anyway, that’s what the model, you know,
that’s one of the aspects of the RTI model is we’re getting an effective collapse of these emitting and absorbing systems.
MATT
Yeah. And, you know, there’s a difference between Whitehead scholarship and exegesis of Whitehead and trying to apply Whitehead’s ideas to contemporary physics and biology and science in general. And so I think, from my point of view, and I think you should feel this way too, whatever works that you can take from Whitehead, do it. Okay. Necessarily.
know we can be clear on what he said and what might be different about how you want to interpret it but you know i think we want it to be relevant and 100 years have passed since he developed these ideas so undoubtedly you know the science has
advanced quantum physics is more or less in this you know there’s been this stalemate in quantum physics for so long that i think he still has a lot to tell us about uh how to think through the philosophy of nature which is implied these experimental findings um which is that’s another um comparison that i wanted
to offer to you between what what you’re doing and what he attempted to do with general relativity you know where he offered his own alternative tensor equations and interpretation of um einstein’s general relativity that involved um flat space, not curved space, and he was modeling it on the sort of retarded potentials of electromagnetic waves.
He makes clear in his 1922 book, The Principle of Relativity, where he lays this out, that this presupposes a different philosophy of nature than Einstein, which is precisely why Whitehead’s approach wasn’t really well understood. as an alternative. And his specific tensor equations in his version ended up being slightly…
He thought at the time it was identical in terms of empirical predictions to Einstein’s version. It turns out that’s probably not the case, but you could easily adjust Whitehead’s equations to bring them back into alignment. but the point is the different philosophy of nature and yeah a lot of the what i
seem to have you know recognized and this came through in your conversation with kurt uh jai mongol too towards the end of that conversation is that TI and the possibleist version of TI haven’t been, especially the possibleist version, haven’t been taken up by the physics community. Not so much because the formalisms don’t work,
because it seems like they do, but it’s because the philosophy of nature is… not the orthodox actualism, basically.
RUTH
Right.
MATT
And so it’s part of the problem here is that there’s this deeper philosophical set of philosophical assumptions that’s holding physics back. Right. You’ve discovered precisely what was philosophically missing from say, you know, Kramer’s original version of this, um, where it seemed like retro causality was implied,
but by taking these transactions out of space time and making it clear that this isn’t a different quantum realm where they’re not traveling through space or forwards and backwards in time. Um, then all of a sudden you’re in a totally new universe. Um, And that has really fascinating philosophical implications that I’m interested in exploring. But yeah,
I feel like you and Whitehead are both meeting the headwinds of the stubbornness of this old philosophical, natural philosophical paradigm.
RUTH
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah, it’s very, very solidly entrenched. And strangely, and this has really kind of surprised me, and I don’t know if it’s related or not, but I get an awful lot of flack about, and this has come up lately, and I’ve been ranting about it on Facebook a little bit,
where people keep insisting the transactional interpretation is not really a different theory. they say, they do this challenge. Well, you say you’ve got a different theory, so show me an experiment crucis that I can use to test it. And so there’s this slide into this, seems to be this fundamental ignorance about what a theory is,
that people think theory means empirically distinct and in a novel prediction way. And I’m getting this from physicists too. I had this little exchange with a physicist where he repeated this misconception about what a theory is and he will not stand down on it.
I finally kind of just left it alone with him because he won’t hear it. It’s almost like I feel like these people know better And I feel like that part of this is, I’m just kind of speculating and diagnosing here, maybe not being fair, but I feel like this cultural
entrenchment in this paradigm is having other symptoms of resistance so that the pushback takes the form of lapses into incompetence about what a theory is, but it’s leading to a form of irrational behavior where you’re getting from philosophers of science and physicists this pushback based on misconstruing what a theory is.
So it’s like the resistance if I’m maybe I’m, you know, overstating things, but It’s the resistance takes not only forms of people saying, no, I don’t think I don’t like your theory or or like Kramer’s, you know, unnecessarily abstract dismissal kind of thing. But it seems to be taking a form of of these double standards and weird,
you know, pseudo criticisms about, well, it’s not really a theory because it doesn’t, you know. So, yeah, it’s it’s just a bunch of sort of phenomena that I’m. getting out of, rising out of that.
MATT
I mean, the fact that you can’t test it hasn’t stopped string theory from, you know, dominating institutions.
RUTH
Of course. Do people say that’s not a theory? You know, and in fact, and of course, as I keep pointing out, The experiment crucis for TI is that it does predict measurement transitions and that you will get outcomes. So it’s corroborated by the data, whereas the conventional theory fails to be corroborated by the data and that it
cannot tell you it cannot account for outcomes. And sometimes I use the precession of Mercury as an analog, you know, where the situation is similar to back in Newtonian gravitation, worked quite well, except there was an anomaly, the procession of the orbit of Mercury, which the theory failed to predict.
So Einstein’s theory didn’t necessarily have a novel prediction in that context, but it predicted what was presently an anomaly for the current theory, and that is corroborating. In other words, that was recognized in that context, as confirmation of Einstein’s theory over Newton’s. So we have, I argue,
a direct parallel in that the inability of the conventional quantum theory to predict outcomes, that we will get outcomes, is an existing anomaly for the theory, which TI remedies. And people can’t hear that. And I said that to that physicist, and it just bounced right off. And he said something non-germane about the mercury issue.
So, you know, the issue is it’s basically a form of anomaly avoidance. So the conventional quantum theory is so entrenched that its inability to predict that we’ll get outcomes is not even seen as an anomaly anymore. And it’s basically the measurement problem, but it’s like the measurement problem has been around for so long
and the attempts to solve it in the standard paradigm have been failures, that now the cultural societal response has been to redefine it as not a problem and say it’s not really a problem because the Bourne rule works. So that’s what we’re seeing. So in other words, they can say, well,
I don’t need to consider TI because I don’t think there’s really a measurement problem. Or I think that that’s not really a problem, which is what, for instance, what that physicist I mentioned earlier says. So it’s like to define away a problem. Well, this problem, we spent a century trying to solve it within the standard paradigm. We’ve all failed.
So we’ll redefine it as not a problem because all us smart people can’t possibly have really failed at solving a problem. To get a little snarky about it. But that’s what I’m seeing. I’m seeing that it’s now that there’s a kind of a really prevailing tendency to kind of shrug it off.
MATT
Well, it sounds like they’re trying to have their cake and eat it in the sense that they want you to provide a falsifiable… You know, your theory would be falsifiable or provide some experiment that would prove. But then really what they want to do is they’re refusing to theorize and falling back on instrumental interpretations.
RUTH
Exactly. Exactly. Right.
MATT
Right. Yeah.
RUTH
So it’s like a FAP thing. Well, it works FAP and the Born Rule works. And, you know, and TI derives the Born Rule. So it’s empirically equivalent at the level of the Born Rule. But again, this is like, and I just put a new fresh rant on my Facebook page.
MATT
I need to subscribe to your rants. I don’t know about this.
RUTH
It’s on Facebook. But where, you know, take two theories. The ideal gas law, PV equals NRT, Okay, well, that’s a theory that relates. It can, you know, Newtonian gravitation is just F equals a bunch of stuff. It’s an equation that relates force to mass and distance.
So you can have the ideal gas law, say it qualifies as a theory. So I have an equation relating pressure and volume to temperature. And I can use that to predict stuff. I can predict it, you know, my volume goes down, my pressure will go up and so on. So now let’s have Maxwell’s kinetic theory of gases.
And these same people would have to say, well, that’s not a theory. That’s just an interpretation of Boyle’s ideal gas law, because it doesn’t lead to any new falsifiable prediction. It’s empirically the same as Boyle’s law. And I’m like, well, OK, but it explains where Boyle’s law comes from.
It tells you what’s going on behind the scenes that’s giving you the phenomena characterized by Boyle’s law. And that’s the position they’re taking, essentially, that the objection they raise against TI, which I should call RTT now, but anyway, is this, you know, to be consistent, they’d have to say, well, I’m sorry, the kinetic theory of gas,
this isn’t really a theory, because it’s, where’s your falsifiable new novel prediction? Where is it different from my conventional theory? So we got these strange double standards that clearly reflect incompetence.
MATT
So anyway. Just institutional entrenchment and a need to, it’s a paradigmatic tour for, and there is a scientific culture, or there are scientific cultures, and it’s like professional guilds almost that need to, to keep a particular interpretation going and to resist alternatives because that becomes a funding competitor, you know?
RUTH
Of course, there are these real world consequences and people, you know, and that, and that’s where we, we kind of stopped doing real science and philosophy and we, you know, we start doing something else and I, I, you know, it’s something that people fall into, but.
MATT
But this issue of, you know, This comes up in metaphysics, too, where, you know, in like Sean Carroll has had a lot of debates with the philosopher Philip Goff about panpsychism.
Mm-hmm.
MATT
And Carroll is always coming at Goff with what he feels is this refutation of panpsychism, which is, well, where’s the new physics? We have a complete understanding of particle physics, he says, which I think is an exaggeration. But what is adding experience or consciousness to atoms or photons or whatever? What does it change? Show me the…
you know, the experiment that would allow us that to make some difference. And that’s to totally misunderstand the relationship between physics and metaphysics, like panpsychism, the empirically equivalent as an interpretation to dualism, idealism, materialism, like the physics results would be the same. We’re trying to understand what’s going on behind what we can measure, you know.
RUTH
Of course, and you’d get a solution to the hard problem, maybe. Exactly. I mean, you know, so logical consistency, you know, you can have a theory. I mean, this is where, I mean, I… In my really snarky moments, I say these people are so smart, but they cannot reason their way out of a paper bag.
Because, you know, it’s just, it’s a logical point. And again, it’s like saying… you know, well, what is adding, look, if I use the kinetic theory of gases, you know, I still have Boyle’s law. What do I need the kinetic theory of gases for? I can calculate, I can calculate how much my volume will increase if I,
you know, change the temperature. So what do I need the kinetic theory for? So, you know, it’s like, it’s a resistance to gaining insight by denying that one needs to gain insight and just by reducing everything to empirical data and using that as the standard for what kind of explanation is needed. So at least in that context,
when you’ve got somebody who’s in kind of this materialistic, actualistic paradigm, then it’s like changing the rules of the game. So, okay, you want to present an alternative theory to me, then my rules are the data is the same, your theory predicts the same data, so why should I pay attention to your theory?
But on the other hand, if there was a theory that came along that didn’t challenge their paradigm, then they might choose to opt for gaining new insight into what’s going on. So it’s like the rules get changed depending on what’s at stake.
MATT
And there’s a neat symmetry here between the measurement problem and the hard problem of consciousness in that there are those who would want to pretend there is no problem in either case.
RUTH
Exactly.
MATT
Exactly. But if we want our understanding of quantum physics to line up with our experience of the macroscopic world and how is measurement possible, but clearly this happened. Unitarity is broken. It’s similar to the issue of consciousness. We could just pretend that there’s nothing to be explained. which ends up being quite bizarre.
It’s, it’s, these are both examples, I think of Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
Right.
MATT
Um, where we pretend like we don’t need to explain measurement, even though, uh, you know, the world that we live in is, is replete with, uh, you know, outcomes. Like we’re constantly making decisions that are irreversible, you know, and, you know, of course there’s, there’s possibilities that we’re harvesting as well, but, you know,
And I want to come back to the question of whether space-time actualization is just shadows on the cave wall. Put a pin in that for a second. Okay. But the hard problem is similar in that we’re letting… The models of physics and the models of biology and psychology stand in for our actual experience of being sentient, alive,
awake, conscious. And turning what is, as Philip Goff’s always reiterating, our most intimate interface with the world, what we know most directly is our unconscious experience.
RUTH
Right.
MATT
But we’re putting these models in place of that and then pretending that we don’t have any conscious experience, so there’s nothing to explain.
RUTH
Yeah, it’s very bizarre. To me, it’s almost a neurological disorder. It’s almost like a mental illness. I think part of the problem is that our own intimate experience of our own consciousness is It’s not an empirical matter. It’s not something anyone can corroborate. I mean, I always point people back to, you know, the Ghost Boy.
There’s this book called Ghost Boy that was written by a guy named Martin Pistorius who had, what’s it called? He was completely paralyzed.
MATT
Locked in syndrome.
RUTH
Yes, locked in syndrome. And he eventually miraculously recovered because one cared, caregiver somehow recognized there was somebody in there. And, you know, everyone assumed, because there’s no empirical demonstration of what we think of as a conscious person, that he wasn’t conscious. And the whole time he was conscious. And so later he was, yeah,
all they did was play Barney cartoons for 12 years and it drove me insane. So that’s the point, is that There’s a schizophrenia that kind of happens that these people are such hardcore empiricists that if something is not empirically corroboratable, you know, in this third party sense, they view it as not there.
They, they’re, it’s like a hardcore empiricist stance. If it’s not empirically detectable and corroboratable, therefore it’s not scientific by definition. So they, they treat their own experience as not scientific and they dismiss it as something not subject to scientific inquiry and they kind of coordinate off.
MATT
Right.
RUTH
So yeah, it’s, it’s kind of a pathology.
MATT
Yeah, it could be. Okay. I want to, let’s, Let’s transition. I wanted to ask you about some things you said in that interview with Kurt, Theories of Everything, which I really enjoyed. Well, first of all, I loved your comment that physics needs to take its mechanistic training wheels off.
I think that speaks to a lot of, you know, the hang-ups that we’ve been just discussing. You know, where the physics community is by and large afraid to… ride the bike, find its balance without, um, these old actualists mechanistic deterministic models. Um, but you, you also described, um,
you use Plato’s allegory of the cave to describe the difference, you know, as another image that you use in addition to the, the iceberg, um, use Plato’s cave to describe the difference between quantum quantum possibility and space-time actuality where you describe space-time as you describe shadow objects on the space-time cave wall. Right.
And this sounds to me a bit like what I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Donald Hoffman and his work on like cognitive agents. And he’s always saying space-time is doomed. Space-time is an illusion. Space-time is a construct. And I think he’s onto something, but I,
I also wonder if what we really want to say is that our experience of you know, being bodies in space-time say is just an illusion, or if it’s only part of the picture that becomes illusory if we think it’s all the picture or the whole picture.
RUTH
I think the latter, you know, that’s what I would say. I mean, I haven’t read Hoffman’s work in detail, but from what I’ve seen it, I think he takes it a little too far. I mean, you know, and this is a side point, because reality isn’t real. He’ll say things like that in a minute.
what are you talking about so you know um so there’s certainly something real and i think there’s more of an illusory component to to our you know what we think our relationship to space-time is so so um yeah i mean i i it’s kind of a matter of
interpretation how how one interprets literally the space-time construct um it’s it’s a matter of interpretation but you know, the bare bones ontology again for me is that all space time really is a structured set of invariant events, which aligns really with what Einstein said about it.
So now the events are not substances, you know, they’re not, they’re sort of activities. They’re, you know, like what I had said, they’re occasions, you know, so they’re not things. And so one could argue, well, like Hoffman, one could say, well, then they don’t really exist. It depends what you mean, what your ontology, what your definition is.
But for me, they have a structural character. So I see that structure as having some ontological import. But again, but our perception that we think we are bodies in this space-time container, that is what I think is illusory.
MATT
Right.
RUTH
Yeah. So, you know, it’s more like, I mean, I think the online role-playing game is really kind of a nice analogy, and I only know about it because my daughters are avid gamers, you know. So, you know, that you’ve got a user interface. And so…
What we think of as our existence in space-time is really just kind of a user interface. And the mistake is to think that we are the avatar in the game, to think that that aspect of us that uses the point of view is actually in some
domain when it’s simply kind of a view screen and you’re not really in it. your it’s sort of an interface between you and you know the other objects right so
MATT
yeah i think that tracks quite well with not with einstein but also whitehead who in some ways was just trying to be more even more relativistic than einstein was um in saying that yeah events aren’t things um events aren’t point instance either their durations or regions is another term that Whitehead would use.
So we have to get beyond point-based geometry in Whitehead’s approach.
RUTH
Oh, yeah. Well, technically, completely, yeah. That they are not, yeah, they’re not points.
MATT
Right.
RUTH
They’re finite emission absorption. Yeah.
MATT
So not only are events not things or points, but space-time is not a thing. It’s a network of events in White House terms, right? Exactly.
RUTH
I mean, you could call them happenings. You know, they’re verbs in a sense.
MATT
Right.
RUTH
So that’s where I kind of, you know, I don’t like non-thingo, you know, do the Newton thing. Like, I’m not going to hypothesize as to, like, what this ontology is simply because, you know, I don’t mind leaving that to others. I just kind of go, well, I see there’s a structure there.
I’m not going to purport to know what it is, you know, in an ultimate sense.
Right.
RUTH
You know, and I’m happy to follow if someone has a proposal that’s more specific than that.
MATT
Yeah, well, I don’t have the mathematical or physics chops to do this, but I was wondering about how, you know, Whitehead’s account of gravitation in terms of, you know, retarded wave potentials, you add the transactional, the other side of the coin to that. So not just, you know, the offer waves, but the confirmation waves. if that,
if building on Whitehead’s approach to gravity might help with, I know you’ve already done so much work on a relativistic expansion or extension of the transactional approach, but it seems to me that if we fully, if we get rid of the idea of space-time as some kind of a,
a substance or a block, which sometimes Einstein seems to suggest something like that.
RUTH
He falls into the Minkowski thing. Yeah, he does. He was struggling.
MATT
Well, of course.
RUTH
He went through a lot of evolution, you know, just trying to struggle with… with it right but yeah yeah no I mean I have I have not looked at that in detail yet and that is something I’ve been wanting to do um and in fact I should say as
far as chops I don’t really have much GR chops the person who does is my colleague Andreas and so um he’s been doing a lot of the heavy lifting with that but that’s something you know that I will I could run past him and say you know Andreas what But it’d be nice. I mean,
I can certainly take a look at it and get some general sense of, you know, where he was going with that. Because I totally agree that, you know, the Minkowski take, you know, the spatialization of time and all of that is a mistake.
MATT
Right.
RUTH
So I think we can use some input from Whitehead on that.
MATT
So. In Whitehead’s framework, you know, he has his actual occasions, which are events. You can call them space-time events if you want, but they’re also dipping into quantum land in your terms. So they’re not just space-time events. Right. Because they, and the way that he allows an actual occasion to bridge between the realm of
possibility and the realm and actuality is, he says they’re dipolar. There’s a physical pole. or there’s physical prehension and what he calls conceptual prehension. And so he’s not a dualist, but he’s a dipolarist, if you want. He thinks in terms of these polarities. And so the physical pole of an actual occasion is what locates it in space-time
because a newly arising or concressing occasion is inheriting its past. And it has to conform to the spatio-temporal structure of that past. But in the mental pole, each occasion of experience is also in touch with… quantum possibility, you could say. And what the process of concrescence is describing is the way in which the already
actualized past that an occasion has to conform to in its physical pull can be integrated with the available set of possibilities that could be realized in the next moment, right? And it’s not exactly, you know, I’ve been trying to see how this maps onto the idea of an offer wave and a confirmation wave,
because there’s a similar dipolarity, I feel like, in the transactional interpretation. And I’m tempted to want to not make an equivalence, but at least relate, you know, Whitehead’s physical pole with space-time actuality, and then his mental pull with quantum land, with quantum process and the exploration of possibilities.
And so every actual occasion is an integration or a decision or a collapse of the wave function, you could say, that’s integrating these two aspects, past and future or past and possibility, if you prefer. And I wonder just at first blush, and I know, you know, there’s so much more to,
Whitehead’s such a Baroque metaphysician in a way. Once you get the basic logic of his system, I think it’s quite elegant, but there’s just a lot of moving pieces initially. So I wonder at first blush, you know, what you think about that connection.
RUTH
Yeah. I mean, I, that does sound like an alignment to me, um, You know, of course, I’m always hesitant to specifically bring in mental aspects, you know, just because I get enough flack just from doing physics differently. But in so far as the mental pole is sort of identified with the level of possibility,
and I completely align with, you know, having it rather than past and future, past and possibility. That’s definitely how I describe it. And I have to say, Eckhart Tolle also will say things like the so-called future. Because the idea of the future as something that exists is kind of an actualist block assumption.
So in the same way as existing in the same way as the past. So I do see this asymmetry. Between the past as something that constrains, as you said, constrains what we might call the physical pole. And we can even think of that in terms of the shadow on the, you know,
the shadow that was cast that has been cast on, you know, to mix to mix the. sort of the perspectives or mix the language, the shadow that cast on say the absorbing atom. Okay, well it was in a ground state, now it is in an excited state.
So some shadow has been cast on it and it now is constrained by the fact that it has a particular well-defined state and that dictates you know, whether it’s going to emit an offer wave at any particular time, you know, with some probability.
So it has that anchor in a sense that we could identify with the physical pole. And then there is in play this level of possibility where, you know, the typical case is that there are a bunch of other eligible potentially absorbing atoms. So we have this indeterminism, we’ve got this many possibilities,
and then ultimately one becomes concretized where there’s a collapse. So, And I have kind of suggested that volition might come in here. So that’s kind of the farthest I’ve sort of dipped my toe into this idea of mental pole is suggesting that there’s an opening for free will there in the fact that
you’ve got all these competing possibilities and you might appeal to volition to explain why one of them gets actualized.
MATT
Yeah. I mean, I totally understand your resistance to bring in the mental, because you’re already, you have such a heavy lift trying to convince people of the transactional interpretation without, you know, all of a sudden saying mind is involved. Because, I mean, on the one hand, being able to explain measurement without saying consciousness collapses the wave
function is one of the,
you know,
MATT
really important aspects of the transactional interpretation. Because that… that consciousness giving consciousness so much ability uh just strikes me as it’s it’s just too idealist you know like the moon’s not there or something yeah but it’s spread out in some field of probability and it doesn’t acknowledge decoherence
and anyways so i i totally understand why you’re hesitant and this is an issue with whitehead’s um approach to metaphysics because you know he’s he’s explicitly trying to generalize our um human understanding of things like feeling and emotion and consciousness experience etc to generalize and to distill down the most basic um form of experience say or
feeling so that it would apply at all scales in nature and this is the general you know panpsychist move so we avoid to have consciousness be a rabbit pulled out of the hat at some later stage in the evolution of the physical world yeah But at the most generic level, mine for Whitehead very much is just,
or conceptual prehension, is all about the searching of possibility. And it can be hard and feel anthropomorphic at first to say that quantum systems are making decisions. But if decision just means a cutting off of a whole array of possibilities to arrive at one outcome, What better word do we have to describe?
RUTH
That it’s a choice in a very rudimentary sense. And physicists have said that. Right. You know, they might say, well, I was just speaking metaphorically, but some of them really do go on record and say that, you know, so.
MATT
Right. So, I mean, if I understand that the transactional interpretation allows us to account for how you go from possibility to probability with some probability outcomes. But there’s no real explanation for why one of those probabilities would be chosen because that’s the free choice, right? There’s something about nature.
Quantum physics in this interpretation is revealing something about nature that is at least distantly analogous to what we would want to think of as freedom at the human level.
RUTH
Yeah, I mean, there’s certainly in the sense that it is not predetermined what’s going to happen. Right. So that there’s truly, you know, so to speak, a garden of forking paths. I mean, another, the little bit of the minefield, just to kind of, you know, clue you in on the other aspect, though,
that I have to be careful of here is… that you get the following double standards. So for instance, even within the standard paradigm, the conventional approach to physics, people have things like the Higgs mechanism, whereby they claim that this is how you get mass in quantum field theory when it
looks like your particles should not have any mass. And it’s this so-called Higgs mechanism. Now this theory involves, something happening to the basic field so that it becomes, it gets a new state of the field, a new ground state that’s infinitely degenerate. Meaning you’ve got an infinity of ground states That the theory says, okay, well,
this Higgs mechanism thing, I’m going to have this weird symmetry breaking and I’m going to get an infinity of ground states and nature will pick one. And they don’t think they have to explain that. They don’t think they have any problem, you know, with the Higgs mechanism. In the sense that they are presented,
the theory gives them an array of solutions, a multiplicity of equally good solutions. But there’s only one in nature. And that is directly analogous to the collapse. So what I’ll get is, he’s saying, ah, but you haven’t explained how we get this one outcome out of your… Did they say that about the Higgs mechanism? No.
So this is why I’ve… This is one of the reasons I have avoided saying, oh, well, you know, we have to attribute mind to quantum systems. I have specifically avoided saying that because… Because, you know, this is a tactical decision on my part, because then I’ll give them more ammunition. The ammunition will be, oh,
you have to bring in mine to explain your solution to the measurement problem. See, that’s what they’ll do. Whereas they don’t think they have to do anything to explain that nature just picks one ground state in the Higgs mechanism. Same kind of situation, right? They say spontaneous symmetry breaking.
So that’s why I say, okay, well, it’s a weighted spontaneous symmetry breaking. And that’s only to not give them the tactical, you know, an extra instrument to
MATT
I totally get that.
RUTH
And it’s unfortunate, you know, because I don’t want to foreclose. And that’s why I have said, by the way, you know, an alternative approach is to allow that there’s some volition. But I never want to bring it in as, oh, this is my explanation, because I don’t think I should have to, guys.
You know, you don’t think you have to explain the Higgs, you know, thing.
MATT
Right. I don’t want to give anyone ammunition to dismiss. what you’re doing. So let me say it and they can attack me for it.
RUTH
Sounds good. Okay.
MATT
Speaking of the Higgs and high energy physics in general and all the money going into particle accelerators and whatnot, I don’t know if you saw Sabine Hassenfelder’s recent rant about… She read an email that she didn’t name who sent it to her, but someone in high energy physics complaining about an article she had in Nature
that was saying that a lot of high energy physics is basically… bullshit and that they’re not actually advancing physics. They’re just coming up with a bunch of math and reasons to spend more billions on particle accelerators to not actually learn anything of value. She’s very outspoken about this.
It speaks to some of the institutional issues we were talking about earlier. I don’t know, are you familiar with Sabine Austenfelder?
RUTH
Yeah, and I’ve met her, and the reason I kind of don’t really follow her that much is because she’s one of these people who has purported to be interested in TI, and then she invited me to a conference, a workshop, and I gave like a one-hour talk, and then later she wrote some paper
arguing for her hidden variable super deterministic approach and caricaturing T.I. in terms of the 1986 version and pretending like I never said a thing. You didn’t at all hear what you… No, she… It just never… No. She put up a straw man. That’s unfortunate. So, you know, I mean, I agree with her.
I’ve quoted her on other things. You know, she said that… closely held philosophical convictions are getting in the way of progress. I’ve quoted her on that. So, yeah, I mean, I agree with her criticisms, you know, in terms of, you know, what you just described, but I don’t read her papers anymore because she just doesn’t stay up.
She doesn’t, she doesn’t get up to date on topics that don’t support her own preferred, you know, model.
MATT
Yeah. Well, common story.
RUTH
Yeah. Yeah.
MATT
Yeah. So you, Going back to the comparison I was making with Whitehead’s actual occasion and TI, there’s an interpreter of Whitehead’s work, Belgian philosopher of science, Isabel Stengers.
RUTH
I’ve heard the name, yes. Uh-huh.
MATT
She wrote this wonderful book, gosh, over 10 years, maybe 15 years ago now, called Thinking with Whitehead, which is just about as hard as reading Whitehead directly. So I don’t recommend it as a secondary source to introduce people to Whitehead. But she worked with Ilya Prigogine on some of his chemical experiments.
Eventually, he won a Nobel Prize for it in non-equilibrium thermodynamics. But anyway, she describes Whitehead’s actual occasions as stitches. And it’s very much like your metaphor, the weaving of space time. Totally. So she says, the process of actual occasions unfolding in this creative advance is a process of
inheritance and transition from one occasional stitch to the next stitch. And these stitches are weaving together what we call space time. And so physical space-time that can be measured is a consequence of the decisions of actual occasions that have now become past. it’s a result of how they’ve stitched the past together with the future through the
medium of the present. And so Whitehead’s account of concrescence is all about what he thinks is most concrete and what science very easily and philosophy loses track of. What’s going on in the present moment, which is where we always are, is this stitching together of the actualized past with possibilities. And of course,
what becomes actualized in the past is always going to change our perspective on possibility from the present, right? Because we have to. It’s going to condition. It’s going to condition how those possibilities appear to us, right? So this is, you know, Whitehead’s account of this makes clear that there’s an asymmetry here, but Also that these eternal objects,
which is his unfortunate term for the definiteness of the possibilities in that realm of res potentia, that there is a constant movement and shifting of at least how those possibilities appear to us in the present. right? And in my paper that you read, I tried to say there’s something like a quantum measurement problem here where even
if there were some definiteness to the realm of possibilities before an actual occasion tried to prehend them, we couldn’t know anything about it. We only know that realm as we interact with it in the present in our situation. And so it’s almost like Do we even need to ask the question,
what are the eternal objects independent of actual occasions? They’re never independent of actual occasions. They’re always arrayed to some actual occasion from its perspective, right? And reordered relevant to that perspective.
RUTH
Well, here’s where I would have to kind of ask the question. Yeah. kind of point to maybe the distinction between epistemological access and ontology. And I kind of, what’s interesting is it seems like Whitehead’s, part of Whitehead’s mission is to almost kind of meld those two as a solution to the problem of truth and so on.
I put some comments in your paper, so maybe when I’m done, I’ll send them to you. You can see I have a few questions and maybe some observations that might be not on target. I don’t know. But that was kind of the way it struck me. And I see that that’s a valid effort, but I also…
am leery of, of identifying what’s, what can be known with what exists.
Oh yeah.
RUTH
You know, so that’s, that’s where I get a little bit. I don’t know, maybe that’s part of his, you know, the function of his eternal objects is to allow that there’s something there, whether we know it or not, you know, that something, something there underlying the, the ontology, whether or not we know about it,
but the fact that we could become aware of it means that it must exist. I don’t know. It’s just one way to think of it.
MATT
Yeah. I mean, if you have another 20 minutes or so, I’d be happy to talk about the paper.
RUTH
Yeah. Oh, sure. Well, yeah, I have more time, but I want to make sure, I know you had some specific questions, so
MATT
Yeah, I’ve just been rolling through them. But on this point, you know, as Whitehead puts it basically this way, he says he wants his metaphysics to be an account of what there is ontology.
Mm hmm.
MATT
He wants his account of what there is to be known to reveal also how it is that we can know. So that the nature of reality as being composed of these actual occasions, he says, that giving an account of what those actual occasions are also explains how
something like knowledge is possible for those actual occasions that are realized in the stream of consciousness of a human being, a scientist. And so he doesn’t want knowledge to be something or consciousness to be something sort of extraneous or that we explain separately from our explanation of the kinds of things that there are. Right, right.
And that’s a tall order for modern philosophers because we’re so used to, after Kant, And I mean, really after Descartes making epistemology first philosophy, in other words, always beginning with what we can know and not realizing that we are beings that exist in the world first. You know, so if you take it in perspective, it’s like, okay,
yes, the mind is organized in such a way that we can only perceive and understand the world in terms of that filtering and that organization. Yeah. But where did the mind, where did these human minds come from in the first place? How did they get here? And now we have evolution to account for that.
But if we do want to understand mind in an evolutionary way, then there’s gotta be some continuity that goes all the way down. Right.
RUTH
Yeah. Yeah. And of course I always get annoyed when people want to start with epistemology and, and pretend that I would say, pretend that what they can know defines what exists. I’m like, Whoa, what made you so important? You know, I, to me, it’s sort of like the blind man and the elephant, you know, there’s,
there’s that metaphor. And it, to me, it’s like the blind man saying, you know, well, I’m able to detect, hey, there’s the wall. So that means walls can exist. I’m like, the elephant doesn’t need you, buddy. So that’s what. right kind of react negatively to that i’m like well maybe there’s an elephant
there if if there’s an elephant there he doesn’t really need any of the blind men to exist and then the question of the blind men yes developing theories about the elephant based on what their capabilities are makes perfect sense right and and there and i agree there needs to be some account of how that works
But just from starting with saying, well, what I can know about detects what exists. I’m like, what? Yeah.
MATT
Well, I mean, this epistemology first thing is also related to you know, the demand for empirical evidence, you know, of TI or something, because there’s people who argue like that are neglecting the fact that empiricism as a methodology presupposes all sorts of things about the nature of reality. And then the question about induction, how is induction possible?
How do we make inductive judgments about the future? This is a notoriously sticky problem in the history of, philosophy and epistemology and if you don’t have some account of the nature of what there is that explains how there could be these general patterns that justify
our inductive judgments about how it operates you’re just assuming a lot you can’t just be an empiricist you have to explain how empiricism is possible or of course how how empirical knowledge is possible right and of course they don’t want to do
RUTH
that because you know it it that i haven’t i don’t know i mean Then I guess Bishop Berkeley did that and ended up with anti-realism.
MATT
Right. There are better and worse, more and less adequate philosophical approaches to these questions. I think adequacy… is one of the criteria we would use to assess the validity of a metaphysical scheme. Adequacy not just to our everyday experience, but to the empirical bindings of scientific experiments. Obviously, we want our metaphysics to not conflict,
but the problem is there’s always way more theories to interpret the same set of data. The data don’t determine the theory.
RUTH
Right.
MATT
There are other considerations that need to be brought into the picture. So… Do you want, let’s, I’d be curious to hear your confusions or questions.
RUTH
Yeah, let me just, I could look at some of these. Let’s see. Okay, well, I think you kind of helped me a little bit with, you know, my concern about eternal objects that maybe, you know, that’s partly a semantic issue. Let’s see. Okay, I guess one thing that might be fun to consider is looking at…
On page 16, when you were talking about Dewey, And Whitehead, towards the bottom of page 16, Whitehead secures truth as correspondence with precisely the same metaphysical machinery he uses to embed experience in nature. Eternal objects function as mediators between our physical percepts and mental concepts and so on. And so I just, the thoughts occurred to me that…
Is this a kind of a semiotic function here? I mean, is he thinking of eternal objects as symbols in some sense?
MATT
Or signs, at least.
RUTH
Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
MATT
Yeah. Okay. I think that would be, I mean, this came up actually in the seminar series with Tim Eastman. Oh, uh-huh. Where… Tim’s trying to bring together Whitehead and Purse, and they’re both Charles Saunders Purse who develops this triadic account of semiosis, a little semiotic logic. And there’s so many convergences between Purse and Whitehead,
but each of them is so sophisticated in their thinking, and to make translations is like… We would need, you know, several generations of philosophers and scientists to actually make that translation. But I think speaking loosely that, yeah, the function of eternal objects is something like the way that science function in Perth.
RUTH
Yeah. And I guess that’s where I kind of struggle a bit with the ontological status of these, you know, But, you know, well, why not? I mean, just because I guess I’m coming from a context in which I’m usually thinking of ontology in physical terms and to broaden that and say, you know, to reify signs.
Okay, well, why not? You know, that in order to function in this way that something has to exist, if it doesn’t exist, it can’t really function. So I don’t know, but this is where I get a little bit challenged, you know, by my habitual kind of context, you know, physical theory and so on. And where, yeah.
You know,
MATT
Whitehead has this idea of, he calls it the extensive continuum, which is a sort of field of potential and potential. the space-time of our universe would be one special form of that extensive continuum. But the extensive continuum itself for Whitehead is, you could say, a complex eternal object that is constantly being…
reorganized by the actualities that emerge out of it and then pass back into it as a past accumulates, as the truth casts a shadow back on the realm of eternal objects. But that extensive continuum he describes as having certain truly eternal rules of he calls them rules of extensive connection which have to do
with the relations of holes and parts and and how we define when something’s overlapping with something else and that he thinks that he did before you can even get any any specific metric any specific geometry of space-time you have to have these basic rules in place and he’s very cautious in processing reality but he says
you know if we were going to have actual metaphysical knowledge of anything, where metaphysical knowledge would mean, you know, the propositions that we’re uttering are true of any cosmos that there could be. He thinks that it would have something to do with these rules of extensive connection.
But he says, I’m not sure if I’ve arrived at those rules. I probably haven’t. But this is my, you know, he takes a stab at it. And so that those rules of extensive connection are part of what leads to the requirement of a confirmation to the past and the physical pull,
that there’s something inescapable about how each novel actual occasion has to physically prehend the already actualized past. And it’s not determined by the past.
RUTH
Yeah.
MATT
Because there’s also the mental pull.
RUTH
It has to take it into account.
MATT
It has to take it into account.
RUTH
Well, I mean, I’m seeing a lovely parallel here with basically the conservation laws.
Right.
RUTH
I mean, you know, in a very, you know, flat-footed physics sense, at least we could say, you know, in the most, in the grossest sense possible, an example of eternal rules would be the conservation laws. Because these really, you know, in the RTA picture, apply to the quantum level, the conditions for will you get offers and confirmations.
The key, an important rule, not the sole consideration, but an important conditioning rule is the conservation, will the conservation laws be satisfied? in order to get anything to happen.
MATT
So Whitehead speaks to that, actually. And he doesn’t want to say that his account of concrescence is contradicting conservation laws. But he does refer to the way in which the mental pole functions by, he says, diverting the flow of energy. So not introducing new energy that wasn’t there, not creating energy or destroying it.
But he refers to the diversion of the flow of energy so that if we imagine energy flow as having this dipolar transition occurring in each moment, each actual occasion, there’s not determinism in the way that energy flows, right? There’s actually, for a diversion, that’s still consistent with conservation laws and consistent with the past.
But, you know, there are always multiple probable outcomes and one gets decided. That’s collapse. That’s collapse. Yeah. And so, yeah, I hadn’t made that. I think that that’s a good bridge here with conservation laws. I’m glad you threw that into the mix. Yeah,
RUTH
because they did, they, yeah, they are conditioning a constraint, but they don’t determine what’s, what’s going to be actualized. They, they, they simply, you know, condition. That’s how I think they tie in with, um, you know, the anchoring of the physical pole in the sense with the past, because, um, you know,
whether you’re going to have a new stitch or not depends on whether those laws can be satisfied by way of your stitch that you’re going to make. So that conditions, you know, the making of that stitch according to what’s already happened in that sense, that it doesn’t uniquely determine what that new stitch will be.
So that latter aspect can be seen as, you know, when he says diverting the flow of energy, I mean, if he means, you know, that we have a genuine, that that flow is not a deterministic flow, you know, which it isn’t at the quantum level, then it does align with the idea that you’ve got, you know,
in general, multiple absorbers in play, and then one of them gets it. So you get a clear directionality that was not predetermined.
MATT
Right. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, that’s where I would go. I mean, I was trying to soften your concern about eternal objects functioning as mediators like that. The idea there is that, you know, when he refers to eternal objects that the physical pole is physically apprehending those are um say measurement outcomes that have already
then that’s already the collapses which have already occurred that that are definite determinate even and you know how is it that the past can be present without being the same as the present that’s that’s the metaphysical problem here right and so eternal objects function in this mediating role by allowing
the past to be present as a potential, as a real potential. He makes the distinction between real potentiality and pure potentiality. Eternal objects already actualized in the past in the form of definite outcomes are real potentials that can be physically prehended by the presently compressing occasion, right?
And so the distinction between eternal objects and actual occasions is his attempt to resolve this problem of how the past can be present without being the same as the present. How do you distinguish the two? Will you say the past is now a real potentiality for the present and it’s conforming to a lot of that,
but there’s also for the mental pole, if not pure potentiality, then at least far more possibility than what’s being received in the physical pole. Right. And,
RUTH
okay so we could almost think of then the following correspondence which may or may not be right but we can we can play with it is that the offer wave aspect corresponds to the what he would call the real potential of the past and that the
confirmations are kind of could be seen as the pure potentials in the sense that they they have more freedom you know they’re they’re they’re interacting with that offer wave and they’re relating to it, but they have more freedom in terms of the multiplicity of possibilities and that offer wave does.
So we might play with that as a correspondence there.
MATT
I like that. Yeah. Okay. I think there’s something there.
RUTH
Yeah, that’s helpful to me because, I mean, where I just feel like I’m so lost at sea with Whitehead’s terminology. You know, he’s got all this terminology. I’m like, what does that mean? And, you know, and I’m just one of these people, I’m like, just give me an example, you know. You’ve helped a lot with that,
kind of giving me some examples and some situations that show how these things function.
MATT
Yeah. I mean, metaphysics is so hard because it’s so abstract and concrete examples are hard to come by. Of course.
RUTH
But if you can show how it functions to relate concepts even, that’s helpful.
MATT
It’s much more fun and productive for me to talk to a physicist and a philosopher of physics than to argue with other metaphysicians because very quickly, just arguing with other metaphysicians about this stuff, it just spirals off into abstraction and it’s very hard to keep it grounded. But in relating it to physical theory,
um i feel like there’s more there are more anchors to see well how does this actually change our understanding of physical ontology like you’re saying and um and in making those bridges we can then start to say things that go beyond the remit of physics about you know for example where does mine fit into this picture
so yeah it’s very this is a much even more productive conversation so far than i was imagining um
RUTH
Oh, I’m glad. Well, I’m learning a lot, too. So, yeah, I’m just trying to find more time to get into Whitehead. So your piece came along at a good time for me. And this conversation is really helpful.
MATT
Great. So, yeah. I have a few more minutes.
RUTH
I don’t know if there was… Yeah, I have a couple more minutes. Yeah.
MATT
Was there another question or…
RUTH
Oh, you know, actually, looking back at this, I think you really resolved a lot of, you know, my concerns about those so-called eternal objects. Yeah. I mean,
MATT
in some ways, I feel like this paper opened up more issues with eternal objects than it resolved, but I’m glad it was…
RUTH
that’s okay um yeah it’s okay yeah so so i see that and i just think i threw something in okay um where was that okay that is not a big deal okay okay yeah that’s fine Oh, yeah. I guess just maybe a little minor quibble here about his use of the term feeling
that kind of made me a little uneasy. Like when he says, I guess you quoted him on or, you know, paraphrased him on page 10 where… pre prehension is a process of feeling um i agree that you know like it’s not it’s like pre-analytic and so on and i just commented here that this seems to me to
restrict prehension to a particular class of subjective experiences which seems too limiting to me isn’t perception um which seems an aspect of prehension distinct from feeling so i guess I mean, I just maybe in this just kind of gets it gets a yellow flag reaction for me, because if I talked about feeling, you know, I would get,
you know, tomatoes thrown at me. But. Right. Yeah. So, I mean, for me, the whole role of prehension that I like so much about Whitehead in terms of. this is very, you know, this is kind of the yin gets to the response and so on of transactionalism. Right. That I saw it as coming from perception, but,
you know, now that I’m talking, I’m thinking, well, you know, if you want to take something into account, yes, you need to perceive it, but there’s got to be some really intentional component there. So I don’t know, maybe that’s what he’s getting at with that.
MATT
So… in some sense prehension is his attempt to generalize what we mean by perception so that it can apply beyond the human and even beyond the living realm to to how you know an electron takes in it’s the field the electron prehends the field um it
feels the field it’s and that you know yeah i think in ti there aren’t really particles there there aren’t electrons really they’re eye excitation excitations in the field yeah they’re not
RUTH
really localized little hunks of stuff yeah yeah right and prehension has a vector
MATT
character whitehead says and you know so much of his metaphysics is just um he’s generalizing from two directions actually not only from human experience but from electromagnetic theory and so he wants and he’s He wants his account of human experience to, in some sense, be analogous to how electromagnetism operates,
just as he wants electromagnetism to be describable in terms that we’re used to describing human experience in terms of, right? And he’s also, so he’s drawing on his, he studied with one of Maxwell’s students at Cambridge, forgetting his name right now, but that’s his home base, you know, in terms of understanding everything.
RUTH
Okay. Yeah.
MATT
but he also studied William James’s psychology very closely. And James has this account of feeling and the felt transition between moments of our stream of consciousness. And James develops what he calls radical empiricism, which unlike classical empiricism would allow us to take our own experience into account, to take relations into account really. And the,
James defines a feeling as in its most generic sense, this transition between moments. And Whitehead thinks that that account of transition in terms of feeling that for James is psychological can also apply to understanding a physical transition. And rather than using, you know, feeling is a synonym for prehension, but he develops the term prehension specifically to avoid
people complaining about anthropomorphizing electrons that they prehend but that’s basically what we mean when we say we feel our environment um or when we feel possibilities because there are conceptual prehensions as well and i think in the case of an electron we might be more actually talking about conceptual prehensions
of the field because it’s a field of potentia not not an actual space-time thing
RUTH
right um Yeah, that helps. I guess I think of prehension as more active. Well, you said it has a vector character. And so I guess the term feeling for me, it sounds sort of passive. Sure. Yeah, so maybe this is just kind of a semantic quibble and, you know, maybe that’s why he really went with prehension.
MATT
Yeah, prehension has more of that connotation of grasping, you know.
RUTH
Right, taking into account, you know, so there is that intentionality. So, yeah, okay, so I see that, I see the, you know, the point of that now. So, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes I just, you know, their words have so many different connotations and contexts and, and, you know, and again, you know,
you have to be careful when, when presenting, you know, I have to be careful when presenting my ideas, especially to physicists. Cause again, if I use, you use a word like feeling, you know, that the eyes will glaze over and they will head for the door, you know?
MATT
Yeah. Well, you know, I, I hesitate to, um, give you another paper to read, but there’s one I wrote on that’s called Physics Within the Bounds of Feeling Alone, where, you know, provocative title, but I’m trying to really explain the work that the concept of apprehension can do
for developing the philosophy of nature wherein physics would make more sense in terms of being consistent with our human experience. Uh-huh. And my main target in that paper is Sean Carroll. It’s a bit polemical, but so is he. But he’s one of the few physicists that’s actually respectful of philosophy, I think.
Even if I don’t agree with his philosophy of nature, he at least is conversant with some of the main issues in philosophy and will not dismiss entirely the role of philosophers in thinking about nature, which… Neil deGrasse Tyson does as often as he possibly can.
RUTH
Right. And Sam Harris, I don’t know. I don’t know. Sam Harris, Sam Harris wants to have it both ways. You know, he’s, he’s very materialist and actualist and he wants to be a meditator.
MATT
Anyway. So, um, yeah, I might send you that paper.
RUTH
Yeah, sure. No, I could take a look. Yeah.
MATT
And, um, I have to run now, but I think this is a great beginning to working some of this stuff out. Yeah. And yeah, let’s continue. I mean, maybe we can. Absolutely. I want to keep reading through your book. I’ll send you this additional article. And when we feel like we have enough questions for each other again,
we can sync up on Zoom and do this again. Sounds good.
RUTH
Okay.
MATT
Great.
RUTH
All right. Well, thanks. Thanks a lot for spending the time with me. And the tutelage in Whitehead is very helpful.
MATT
Well, absolutely. And I’m learning so much from you as well, clarifying some confusions about how quantum theory works. So I’m glad it’s very productive for me.
RUTH
Great.
MATT
All right, Ruth. All right.
RUTH
Till next time.
MATT
I’ll be in touch.
RUTH
All right. Thanks. Take care.
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