BIG
THINGS FROM LITTLE THINGS?
The
problem of the compound individual.
Gregory
J. Moses
This
is
an exploration of some interesting philosophical
work over the years on an important problem in
fundamental philosophy, namely whether all bona
fide real events are small, e.g. sub-atomic, with
larger events as having only a derivative reality? Or if
there are large events real in their own right,
how are they related to the small events? What's
really out there?
Only little things? Or big
things also?
And if there are big things how are the big
things related to the little things?
The research recorded on the problem here
has been mainly but not only with Alfred North
Whitehead derived or influenced process
philosophies.[1] In spite
of its sometimes marginal status, the Whiteheadian
tradition has proved itself as a fairly productive
'research program' in metaphysics, which while
sufficiently limiting to make for rather detailed
proposals still allows for a good deal of
variation. In practice the tradition has been far
from totalizing or coercing. Like any
good Whiteheadian or Hartshornean
'principle of limitation', its effect has been
persuasive, not determinative, stimulating
different people in different directions. I take
this to be virtue rather than a vice, particularly
within metaphysics.
Some of this variation and hopefully some
of its value will be illustrated below.
There is quite a literature on the subject,
itself closely related to what is called, within
process circles, the dispute about 'compound
individuals'.
This is what I've found so far:
1)
Whitehead/Sherburne:
there are different kinds of events, including
sub-atomic, atomic, molecular, cellular,
animal-mental, and they take different times, but
they are all microscopic or sub-microscopic in
size. The
higher events take place in the 'empty spaces'
between the lesser events. There is no regional
inclusion, which is to say, no inclusion of one
event in the space of another. This is
the position of Prof. Donald Sherburne and
according to some interpretations[2]
probably of the Whitehead of Process and
Reality.
Every event may be construed as a more or
less creative taking into account of its total
past environment and a giving of itself to be
taken into account by the future of that
environment.
Relying less on the analogy with the
quintessential natural events which we are, every
event is reception, transformation and
transmission of something like energy and
information from total past environment to the
future of that environment. Events
do differ in quality however, in range and
intensity and degree of �creativity� of reception,
transformation and transmission from past to
future. But
they are all microscopic in size.
By way of an aside, it is the recognition
of differentiation in quality, repeated in all
Whitehead derived process philosophies, which is
the important move with respect to consciousness
in humans and other higher animals or wherever
else it occurs.
Consciousness or 'mind' is a particularly
high quality series of events which can be
expected to arise naturally in certain rich
environments.
These environments include, so far as we
know: a well connected brain in the midst of a
body within a larger environment including a
community of other such creatures, in the case of
the adult human variety at least, endowed with
culture and speaking a language. It is
not something magical but merely another example
of the kind of thing which might well arise in a
Cosmos of our type.
Back to our specific problem: one value of
the theory is that it makes space and time easy to
define. Actual
entities or bona fide events are non-spatial and
non-temporal.
Space and time are relational concepts
defined by means of the relation of these events
one to another.
They are simply the basic level ordering
principles of bona fide events, definable in terms
of events and prehension, the process term for
causality. (Cf.
James Eiswert 1987,
pp. 262, 275, 314.)
This simplicity and uniqueness of
definition of space and time however is purchased
at the cost of counter-intuitive modes of relating
higher and lower level events. Events
relate directly to events next door, both
temporally and spatially, so how do the higher
level events relate to all the lower level events
that they need to relate to? For
example, how can a heavy atom relate to all the
multitude of sub-atomic events going on within
that atom? It
appears it can only relate directly to some of
them, i.e. the ones close by as it wanders through
the empty spaces.
2)
Hartshorne/Cobb: as with
Whitehead interpreted by Sherburne, but events
come not only in different kinds but in different
sizes and the higher events spatially include
(without being identical with) the lower events:
the doctrine of regional inclusion. This is
characteristic of Charles Hartshorne, and John
Cobb and David Griffin from
This solves what we might call the 'space'
problem. But
there still remains a time problem. There
can be no causation between contemporaries,
prehension is only of the past. The atom
or whatever gets to prehend the previous
sub-atomic events, not the ones going on right
now.
The best they can do to solve the time
problem is give the higher events a 'bloc-ing' effect on lower
events, e.g. an event which takes 1 sec. projects
an intent for all the events in the following
second, which then feed into the next plus one
larger event, as in the following diagram:
large
event:
A---------A B---------B C---------C D---------D
small
events:0-0
1-1 2-2 3-3 4-4 5-5 6-6 7-7 8-8 9-9 0-0 1-1.
A
is prehended by 3, 4 and 5, which C prehends, and
C is prehended by 9, 10 and 11.
B
prehends 0, 1 and 2 and B is prehended by 6, 7 and
8, which D prehends.
B
also prehends A, C prehends B, D prehends C, and
so on.
There
would
usually be numbers of series of smaller events,
e.g. in all atoms above the Hydrogen ion (= the
same as a lone proton series). This is
solved by regional inclusion.
By way of another aside: 'compound
individuals' are possible on either hypothesis so
far, and can be of any size. So also
the distinction between compound
individuals and aggregates. The
argument is about the size of the constituent
occasions, including the so-called 'presiding' or
'dominant' occasions, e.g. the mind in case of
human beings.
The first hypothesis has all events
microscopic, including the presiding events, and
denies regional inclusion. The
second Hartshorne/Cobb hypothesis allows for
events of various size and allows regional
inclusion of one lot of events inside another. But even
here, it should be clear that while they often do,
there is no necessity for the region of the
dominant events to coincide with the whole of the
region of a particular compound individual. In the
case of human beings, an extended area of the
cerebral cortex will do nicely. Back now
to our main game.
3)
Joseph
Bracken at least in his earlier work
has reverted to 1), all events microscopic but he
complements this with the idea of 'fields' = the
combined effect of the events in the immediate
environment, and then thinks in terms of fields
within fields within fields etc. The
higher event draws on and affects the fields in
which it occurs, as do the lower events, so the
higher event does not have to be in direct
contact, either spatially or temporally, with all
the lower events.
The usual question raised here is whether
the introduction of the word 'field' really helps
much: isn't a 'field' just another name for a
determinate environment?? And
isn't my environment just events in my vicinity in
the immediate past??
However, I think Bracken is on to something
here, particularly in his more recent versions,
and we will come back to it.
4)
the
marbles in jelly theory of George Wolf. Wolf
postulates larger as well as smaller events, but
not actual regional inclusion, like marbles in
jelly, the marbles consisting of marbles in jelly
and so on, or honey-comb, the holes themselves
consisting of honey-comb with smaller holes, and
so on. The
region of the smaller event is not part of the
region of the bigger event: the bigger event takes
place around it.
The problem with regional inclusion has to
do with the criteria for identity of events. How to
distinguish part of the large event and the small
event happening in the same place at the same
time? How
comes it that these are not identical? Besides,
regional inclusion is not needed: spatial
contiguity of the kind allowed by a marbles in
jelly theory will do fine.
5)
Lewis Ford
(early):
the idea that the smaller events when
inside atoms or molecules or cells etc. are in
fact to be regarded as 'sub-occasions' rather than
occasions or fully fledged events in their own
right. You
go ahead and make the little events happening in
the same space part of the bigger events. They are
not prehended by the bigger events, but are
elements within the happening which is the bigger
event and contribute to its concrescence or coming
together. With
the collapse of the bigger event, however, some of
them are capable of becoming events in their own
right. This
doctrine is or was characteristic of Lewis S.
Ford, who saw it as the only way of solving both
the temporal and the spatial problem alluded to
above, among other things.
It does solve the time problem as well as
the space problem.
Also, it deftly outflanks the problem of
regional inclusion.
However, according to John Cobb, among
others, 5) is very un-Whiteheadian. It
involves a collapse of the distinction between
transition between events and concrescence of
events. This
is to say, it collapses the distinction between
bona fide individual processes or events and the
succession of such processes or events. Pretty
much everything that happens between events can,
it seems, happen inside events, and parts of
events can turn into fully fledged events.
However, Lewis Ford has recently (1997)
developed a rather more sophisticated position,
which we will come back to later.
6)
the
fairly early non-Whiteheadian view of Ivor
Leclerc, offered in criticism of
Whitehead. Fully
reciprocal interaction between membership of
series of smaller events can effectively bring
into existence a series of larger events with
agency in their own right, and so on up and down
the scale. It
is not then the case that unitary events only can
be actual entities or that all composites have to
be accorded a derivative ontological status. If there
is unity of action we have every right to talk of
genuine units.
This also involves not being very picky as
to what constitutes a bona fide event. But the
main problem is that it introduces fully
reciprocal interactions. Prehension
is always one way, always of the past, that is of
something else than what one gets prehended by. So for Whiteheadians it cannot be
fully reciprocal.
7)
the
more recent anti-Whiteheadian positions of Nicholas Rescher and
also Reto
Luzius Fetz, given credence also by George
Lucas (cf. Lucas 1989, pp. 160-161),
and that of the Bergson-dependent James W.
Felt (Felt 1988). There are no
irreducibly atomic units of process, serving as
building blocks out of which all larger processes
are then constituted. That was
Whitehead's mistake.
(Cf. Rescher,
1996, pp. 88-89)
Reality is processual all the way through,
all the way down.
"Nothing is more natural than that
microprocesses should join and combine into
macroprocesses, and a process metaphysics that
does not commit itself to a Whiteheadian atomism
needs no special machinery to accommodate this
fact..." (Rescher,
1996, p. 55)
There are no fundamental units, no tiny
primitives. Get
rid of Whitehead's process atomism of ultimately undissolvable processual
units and the problem of how there can be big
events and how big and small fit together solves
itself.
So also Reto Luzius Fetz. The
equating of entities with microscopic events is
not only inadequate with regard to higher forms of
unity but introduces an inconsistency into
Whiteheadian process thinking. The
inconsistency is that the model of an actual
entity, the guiding model or analogue for
constructing a theory of events, is the human
experience of self in its fulness. However,
in accordance with the theory as it plays itself
out, the self is then reduced to a multiplicity of
inexperience-able actual entities hypothetically
assumed. "But
why could actuality not be conceived as a
gradation of more and more complex beings that
include less complex subordinate units without our
ever being able finally to specify what are the
ultimate units." (Fetz 1991)
Thus also James W. Felt, but arguing from a
Bergsonian
perspective.
Whitehead makes the mistake of �confusing
the result of conceptual, intellectual analysis
with reality itself�, particularly the reality of
ourselves as given in the ongoing immediacy of our
concrete experience.
It is in fact a rather �extreme case of
what Whitehead dubbed �the fallacy of misplaced
concreteness��. When we do pay attention to the
ongoing immediacy of our concrete experience, �we
recover the unbroken unity of our selves, a unity
which seems hopelessly atomized by intellectual
analysis. We
also put the conceptualizations of our
intelligence into their proper metaphysical
place.�(See Felt 1988, pp. 149-150.)
So, should we get rid of Whiteheadian
actual entities altogether? This
would solve our problem. And it
would certainly simplify the metaphysical
discourse. No
more complicated and confusing theory of
concrescence, initial aims, subjective aims,
physical prehension, conceptual prehension, hybrid
physical prehensions, complex pure physical
prehensions, complex pure conceptual prehensions,
impure prehensions, etc. etc., all heading towards
something called a satisfaction.
On the other hand, the problem of criteria
for identification of genuine non-derived events
or processes now becomes rather extreme. It is
not solved but ignored. The main
problem for a Whiteheadian, however, is that going
this way would mean giving up on most of what
Whitehead is about in PR and beyond. Including,
among other things, the naturalising of
consciousness which his system in all its variants
makes for. For
a Whiteheadian, as already stated, consciousness
is no big deal, just a high grade natural event.
It might be too early in any case, as it
may well be possible to solve the problem within a
somewhat renovated Whitehead inspired
conceptuality.
There are at least two candidates working
at the cutting edge in the developing Whitehead
inspired process research project, namely Joseph
Bracken and Lewis Ford. Both go
some way to solve the problem, though in different
directions. They
have indeed recently been in vigorous dialogue in
a Process Philosophy mailing list.
Joseph Bracken
(more recent):
For
Bracken,
all actual entities are microscopic. However,
they prehend and put themselves together on the
basis of the "structured fields of activity"
within which they find themselves. These
'fields' are equiprimordial
with actual entities. They may
be produced and added to by actual entities but it
goes the other way around as well, just as much. Sub-atomic
particles etc. are 'ordered field entities'. More
importantly even, the fields mediate between past
actual entities, perished, finished, gone, done
for, and the present. Fields
indeed are a little like the ancient void, real
though not atoms or actual entities - except that
they are shaped and bear the traces of what
happens in them and convey these shapes and traces
through time.
Or perhaps they are more like a renovated
Platonic 'Receptacle', which bears the traces in
it of what becomes or has become.
What is also interesting is the mention of
"structure".
Environments do seem to come already
structured, prior to getting prehended. They are
not just a dispersion of events which get
structured in our experience, or at least it does
not seem so.
Structures and forms of organization do
seem to have a life of their own - as the forms
that they are.
Some are more adapted to survive than
others, as the forms that they are. They
have a bulkiness, a momentum of their own at every
level which tends to coerce events more than the
other way around.
Even people tend to fit into structures and
forms of organization and stories already going. Giving
ontological weight to 'structured fields of
activity' in addition to �actual entities� would
make sense of such features as well as making an
easy way with the influence of the past. Order is
inherited in spite of the perishing of the actual
entities because it belongs to the fields.
The only question is: why would e.g. a
human event or an electronic event clue into one
level in a nested field rather than another? Our
prehension of atomic and sub-atomic fields of
activity is so vague that it takes quite a
sophisticated science to tell us about them. Whereas
we readily prehend structures and forms of
organization and ongoing stories in our moderate
sized environments and fit ourselves into them
only too neatly.
One hypothesis which readily comes to mind
is that it depends on the size of the event. We are
not microscopic after all. This
would introduce big things as well as small things
once again, as well as structured fields of
activity nested inside each other with different
sized events clue-ing
more easily into different levels in the nested
fields. However,
I'm not sure of this. Bracken
probably has thought of this and has a neat
solution already waiting. Also,
Bracken would lose the metaphysical advantages of
Whitehead/Sherburne which he has so far retained.
Bracken
has also effectively mounted what seems to be a
coherent response to attempts on Ockhamist grounds
for dispensing with his extra ontological
apparatus of equiprimordial
structured fields (Bracken 1994). Giving reality
to structured fields, while complicating the
metaphysics at one point, simplifies it at others,
and also adds to its explanatory potential. Newly concrescing occasions have
a lot less work to do making sense of their
environment, needing now to clue only into the
structured fields out of which they are emerging,
rather than all the individual events in their
vicinity, which events no longer exist anyway
(1994, pp. 12-13). We can now once again have
something like a persisting self with the present
occasion as its here and how self-expression or
manifestation, rather than have the present
occasion by itself carry the whole ontological
burden of human and other persons (1994, pp.
12-13). We
can now make some sense of the unity of the
universe in its own right, rather than allow the
consequent nature of God the whole responsibility
for carrying this burden. Nor do
we need God any more to be calculating a precisely
relevant initial aim for each and every one of the
trillions of actual occasions in which the
universe consists. (1994, pp. 14-16) Finally,
Christian theologians get a quite nifty theology
of the Trinity, which by making fields of activity
ontologically equiprimordial
with occasions manages to chart a position which
seems to avoid both tri-theism and modalism. Beyond this,they may even get a
coherent way of thinking of life after death
(Bracken 2001, pp. 149-150).
Lewis Ford
(recent):
Ford has recently come up with two
additions to his metaphysical apparatus. There is
a new way of doing included occasions (versus
sub-occasions).[3] There is
also a new way of doing successive occasions,
where the successor starts before the predecessor
is finished, this making for a stronger process
theory of personal identity among other things. Only the
first is our concern however.
Firstly, then, there is a different way of
doing included and inclusive occasions. Included
occasions derive creativity and aim from the
larger occasion already begun. That is
to say, effectively, they clue into and get their
initial direction from the way the larger occasion
is going. The
larger event is already on its way, after all. But from
that point on, the included occasion becomes
autonomous, effecting its own concrescence in
independence from the larger occasion. However,
once completed, the smaller occasion is prehended
by a subsequent phase of the larger occasion and
in this way influences its continuing
concrescence.
There is no regional inclusion however:
that goes with the notion of sub-occasion.
This solves most of the difficulties, I
think. There
are bona fide little things and bona fide big
things. The
big things contribute to the happening of the
little things, but still remain little things of
that kind in their own right, doing their own
thing once they get going. The
little things do contribute to the big things
without meaning that the big things have only a
derived reality.
The little things contribute to the very
same big things happening in their region, not to
the next lot along.
There is no prehension of contemporaries. The
difficulty is whether one can buy into Lewis
Ford's very original and intriguing rendition and
renovation of Whiteheadian metaphysics, where all
kinds of things can happen that most Whiteheadians don't know
about. Like
prehension happening inside events and not only
between events, and the future affecting the
present.
The included occasions in this new scheme
are not sub-occasions, but fully fledged occasions
happening in a certain context, because of which
they get their creativity and aim mediated to them
from a larger occasion inside whose space they
happen. With
regard to the problem of regional inclusion: it's
swiss cheese or
marbles in jelly.
Nor do little occasions prehend the big
occasion: that would involve prehension by
contemporaries.
But subsequent phases of big occasions can
well prehend already finished little occasions
happening inside them.
If the big occasion provides a directedness
and a lure for the little occasions which gets
little occasions going, then God is the lure or
the drawcard which gets the whole cosmos going and
everything in it.
In so far as God is lure or drawcard which
works by attraction onwards, from the viewpoint of
the universe God is future, indeed always future. From a
recent email: "The world is the past, the self is
the present, God is the future." Only God
is always future:
big occasions are future to their included
occasions, as mediating creativity and aim from
God. Also,
in this scheme, the divine lure and all lure is in
the direction of a certain set of not fully
determined possibilities, not as in Whitehead
focussing on one and only one ideal solution. God
as a kind of future actuality is a single
everlasting concrescence that never results in
being, a kind of qualified indeterminacy. Finite
occasions receive both creativity and guidance
from this future activity. God is
transcendent, but �inside time�, as future, not
outside time. (For the last three sentences, cf.
Lewis Ford 2000, pp. 301-302.)
Towards a
Differentiated Ontology and some concluding
comments:
There seems to be a felt need recently for
the development of a �layered� or multi-level or
differentiated ontology, to allow ontologically �equiprimordial� realities
of different levels and sizes, with dependencies
going in all directions, interweaving with each
other. This
is evident not only in the above but also in
certain cross-disciplinary working groups both
overseas (esp. the
The importance
of the question:
Which way we go determines the flavour of
the relational side of process-relational
metaphysics.
It also determines different possibilities
for application to e.g. the mind-body problem or
the relation between God and the Universe. Is mind
nothing more than brain events in their
togetherness, which by their interaction make for
a unity of effect?
Is mind a stream of microscopic events
wandering around the brain (Sherburne)? Or is it
a series of larger events of its own, though
needing a rich environment to support it in the
first place, �prehending� and �being prehended� by
brain and bodily events (Hartshorne)? Is God
like the Soul of the World (Hartshorne), a more
radical version of the relation between soul and
body? Or
is the world rather the 'field of the divine
activity' (Bracken)?
And where is God, everywhere or in one
particular spot or like the final honey-comb or
jelly or swiss cheese
wherever there is nothing else? Or, as
with Sherburne, is there no room at all for God? Or is
God not anything to do with these: not actual
entity, not series of actual entities, not the
final Field, not Lure, not Creativity even but the
primordial qualification of Creativity which
modulates the whole of the process (Van der Veken
and Cloots), or
something like that?
Closer to home, meditation on this issue in
process perspective may also give ideas for
application in sociology, or politics, or even in
theological ecclesiology. For
example, what kind of reality do institutions and
churches have?
How to relate individual and local church,
local church and universal church? Or
individual and community, individual and state? Do all
big things have only a derived reality? Or are
they like 'structured fields', equiprimordial with the
things they contain?
Or even things, entities in their own
right??
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Joseph,
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[1]
With
the exception of Whitehead himself, we are
concerned in this paper with a research program
in the second half of last century, with most of
the players still alive or only recently dead
(Hartshorne).
Whitehead himself belongs to an earlier
research program, which included also Bertrand
Russell and C.D. Broad, �three
[2]
Lewis
S. Ford has recently put together a
characteristically very detailed exposition of
the stages of development of Whitehead�s
metaphysical atomism (Ford 1999), which gives
support to this interpretation. However,
he
comments in a footnote, �Were there an adequate
theory whereby larger occasions might include
smaller ones, then there could be occasions of
any size. Whitehead
excluded that alternative because he took it to
mean that contemporary concrescing
occasions would have to prehend
each other, which would be impossible. I
think, however, his philosophy can be modified
on this point to permit satisfactory relations
between such occasions��, which latter Ford
himself has been trying to do since at least
1969.
[3]
Lewis
is probing towards this second theory of
included occasions already in Lewis 1988,
including a partial overview of the dispute up
to that time, an exposition of his first theory
now applied to molecular and sub-molecular
occasions, followed by an earlier version of the
theory to be exposed below. The
final version of this second theory, however,
seems to have been developed only in the second
half of the 1990�s.
[4]
See
esp. The Worldviews Group: Perspectives
on the World: an interdisciplinary reflection.
V.U.B. Press,