You can say the infinite aspect is something like the ingredients for everything is there and ready. Like the idea of green being before eyes. But it takes a specific perception to bring those ingredients to "being". Thats what humanity and other entities role is in the infinite beholding. The more we use our logic and reason to fill out the " world" then we can use our imagination to create a concept not yet actualized and bring it forward into material being.

During this discussion i kept thinking of the neoplatonic one and how the first two emmantions ( ignoring proclus sorry) are the one and the indefinite dyad. The divine mind is infinite and holistic but also there is intelligible matter from the indefinite dyad ( it becomes matter later plotinus has this neat isomorphism). So i was thinking can one ( not One) be mapped to primordial god and indefinite dyad to consequent pole of god?.

This was a great discussion and certainly had plenty of geeky Whitehead explorations to pique my interest. Given that, here’s some various sundry, overly long and technical thoughts sparked by it. Darren’s not being insensible or ridiculous in asking why other actual entities couldn’t in principle do what God once did: that is, to conceptually feel eternal objects that no other actual entities have felt before (which would, in effect, be to bring these eternal objects into existence). I do think there’s some decent reasoning behind this in Whitehead’s system, though it might not be the most rigorous argument. I think it’s important to first note that all conceptual prehensions occur outside of physical time-which is to say, they are not characterized by temporal extension. This is the case because extension of any form only functions relationally in a physical feeling-it relates the actual entity felt to the actual entity doing the feeling (i.e. for any physical feeling there is a corresponding extensive relation between the standpoints of the actual entities involved). A conceptual prehension is not relational in this way: it is an actual entity prehending in independence from any other actual entities. All acts of conceptual feeling are thus in themselves nontemporal, even though they ultimately integrate into and become parts of a temporal feeling. But then I would argue that temporal extension is not the only kind of temporality that we may have in Whitehead. The concrescence does not occur in physical time, but rather its physical feelings are characterized by time. The concrescence is, however, governed by some ultimate metaphysical characteristics providing the genuine asymmetry of “time’s arrow”: only past actual entities are prehended, and only future actual entities will prehend its own objective immortality; prehensions in earlier phases are integrated into prehensions in more complex phases, ending with the satisfaction. There is in this sense a temporal linearity to all prehension. God’s primordial nature, which is his mental pole, is thus so distinct, and “primordial,” not merely for (1) being timeless in the sense of not characterized by temporal extension-because this is not unique to God at all, being true of all actual entities’ mental poles-but most of all for (2) being in some sense the very first in the linear time mentioned above. There are no actual entities before God, and thus there are no actualities for God to physically feel, and thus God is initiated by conceptual feelings that do not have any physical feelings in an earlier phase they must be responsive to. For Whitehead, it is this unique position at the “dawn of creation” so to speak that allows God an infinite, unlimited mental pole, that therefore feels (and not merely negatively prehends) all eternal objects, and thus also values all eternal objects. So God’s primordial nature has a kind of timelessness that no other actual entities partake in at all-and, for this reason, he is the perfect actuality for providing the reason (in the sense of the ontological principle) for eternal objects. Now this is a bit more of my typical soapbox, but no actual entities generate a novel proposition except in the sense that actual entities come into being and become new facts that propositions can then be about. The distinction between the logical subjects, what the proposition is about, and the entertaining subjects, who feel said proposition, is very important here. New propositions come into being because new logical subjects come into being, not because new entertaining subjects create the propositions they entertain. The other side to the question then is if new predicates, i.e. eternal objects, come into being: I think they don’t, for at least the reasoning provided above, if not for others. I know many Whitehead-influenced theologians like to talk about things in these terms because it makes it sound so contrary to the orthodox dogma of creatio ex nihilo, but I think it’s seriously misleading to talk about there being, in Whitehead’s system, such a thing as “primordial chaos” that God then arises from-especially equating “creativity” with chaos. Creativity is the “universal of universals,” the ultimate characteristic of reality-what reality in the most general sense is like: namely, it is a reality that exists via a process of concrescence whereby new actual entities come into being by prehending other entities. It’d be fair to think of chaos-and evil-as derivative features of this essential reality, but by the same token, order and goodness just as equally are derivative from and exhibit the characteristics of creativity. On Whitehead’s quote: “The truth itself is nothing else than how the composite natures of the organic actualities of the world obtain adequate representation in the divine nature” (PR 12). This says less about what “truth” really means and more about what God’s consequent nature is like. Temporal actual occasions-which is what we, as mortal animals, consist of-have a limited perspective on the world as determined by our standpoint in the extensive continuum, which is just to say we always experience the world from a limited somewhere: we see things over there from here. Our experience thus suffers abstraction in a way that in its basic gist is pretty easy to grasp: if you’re sitting in a room at night surrounded by four walls, and you’re not looking out at a window, you’re not going to be able to see the moon. The moon is still a physical fact in the world you’re experiencing, in causal connection with everything else, and to that extent it does still enter into your experience (which is to say, you prehend it)-but you are experiencing it under the abstraction of your own perspective. Virtually the entire environment is felt under various levels of mediating abstraction, as our experience is causally arising from, and thus determined by the structure of, a particular part of our animal body. God, as the sole nontemporal actual occasion, does not experience the world from a limited perspective in this way, and does not abstract any of the details of each actuality’s determination. Thus, what God experiences is what is true: true being used here to simply mean the full determination of an actual entity-or, that is, an actuality’s determination that conforms to that determination represented in a true proposition. I think any other interpretation of the above quote renders it very mysterious, otherwise. The issue Darren raises towards the end is the really serious one: how God as an everlasting concrescence-that, therefore, never reaches one complete satisfaction-could have a superjective nature such that God could be prehended (thereby providing an initial aim). I wish more of an answer was given to this, as I think it’s one of the most inconsistent things out of everything from Whitehead’s system that was discussed in the video.

@darreniammarino1

6 ай бұрын

This was some very well written feedback! Aside from the shift to God being a serially ordered society of occasions of experience suggested by Hartshorne and Griffin, I am not sure that there is a good response to the eternal concrescence/initial aims problem. Supposedly, Palmyre Oomen and Jorge Nobo among others have defended the coherence of Whitehead's view of God as a single actual entity. I would check out Griffin's Reenchantment without Supernaturalism (pp. 150-160), which although dated a bit now, still outlines the problems well. You might enjoy Whitehead's later comment in AI page 208 where he states that although God's nature is non-temporal in one sense "in another sense it is temporal." You correctly pointed out the continual confusion surrounding primordial chaos and the ontological principle. My take on this is a panentheistic one where you have mutually presupposing and mutually grounding ultimates with God as a cosmic mind and the "world" of simple sub-atomic entities in a roiling state with God attempting to bring order to this situation via a limited set of eternal objects (e.g the mathematical objects/relational forms + a few other key forms) and the "world" although within God nevertheless is capable of "holding" or instantiating randomness understood as a universal/form. The idea is that the ontological principle states no actuality no reason, but sub-atomic particles are actual entities and can thus, have a form that God does not directly have and this chaotic element is passed moment-to-moment via hybrid physical prehensions between sub-atomic particles. There are all these vectors of chaos coming from non-social nexuses to use Whitehead's take on it. The strife or clash of these allow for a rogue wave type effect to develop within each new emerging occasion of experience (especially any occasion with a high amount of conceptual reversions, which create interference wave patterns in the event) and genuine novelty occurs this way which is then prehended back up into God via God's consequent nature. This accounts for PR 348 and the world creating God etc. New universals can be generated and in fact that is the purpose of the process of reality in my view. Universality need not entail eternality. I am also proposing an acceptance of the serially ordered society shift for God. I am not sure if this makes any sense without visual aids, but that is the best I can do in a comment!

Subjectivity is an illusion....when every perspective is activated

Really resonating with Darren's critique. If the primordial nature of god is infinite unchanging eternal, how is this not a contradictory notion to the notion that god needs the world? Expansion of a set of objects by 1 increases the set of possible propositions factorially, so i dont feel like that's much of a limitation on the possibility space

@Footnotes2Plato

6 ай бұрын

God is not just primordial, but consequent. Whitehead's position is that the creative advance of Nature enriches the Eternal, ie, that God's conceptual experience is deepened through contact with the multiply realized physical experiences of finite creatures, which the consequent nature of God "saves" for eternity like an ever-growing cosmic memory. Yes, with each newly arising actual occasion, new propositions come into the world. This does not require novel eternal objects, since this realm is already infinite.

@timothyjackson4272

6 ай бұрын

@@Footnotes2Plato so the "realm" of eternal objects is thus some maximal space of possibility - paralleled by things like Hilbert Space or the Ruliad - which contains every determinate form possible given some fundamental constraint (the primordial nature). A state space? That's how I've understood it. And this is a fairly standard piece of the modern metaphysical puzzle, but I really don't think referring to it as a "realm", is helpful (too reificatory, same issue as we find in certain handlings of "*the* unconscious"), I worry about the polyvalence of "eternal" (which can seem to mean "for all time", when it should really mean "atemporal"....even if in fact generated by a temporal process). And then the use of "God" still feels heavy-handed. I'm not sure you can't simply get the same picture in the ancient dualistic manner - a principle of change and a principle of resistance (stickiness, attraction, etc). And it's possible to retain the poetry, if we wish to. Creativity and Love. Or, to moralise it ever so slightly in Empedocles' terminology - Strife and Love. Not that I really want to use such loaded terms as metaphysical primitives, either!

@brendontomasi7494

6 ай бұрын

​@@Footnotes2Plato ever growing cosmic memory reference reminds me of toth's akashic record - does that jive? My question is, does potential diminish as it becomes manifest in condition/form or does it remain. Potential is the space that pre exists form. There was a separation and then a conjoining of what has been separated which is novel in a dualistic perspective. From a universal non-dual state, there is nothing greater than 1 as a totality and infinity exists within the combination of potential and manifested forms.

I’m suspicious of Whitehead’s claim that the entire universe recreates itself with every actual occasion. It seems to me that there are various degrees of eternal objects. An atom of hydrogen is a very stable, eternal, thing. It can of course be changed in some circumstances. I’m not a fan of the related concept of a multiverse, but I would not be surprised if every possible permutation is expressed somewhere in the expanding universe. And certainly with human free will every individual human being has the chance to remake themselves and some portion of the earth world in the actual occasion of an entire life.