This passage on Whitehead & his Process Philosophy, transcribed from a 2020 Rupert Sheldrake lecture, is one of the most beautifully well-argued & succinct introductions to these ideas I have come across.
(The transcription has been lightly edited for clarity.)
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The most interesting 20th century panpsychist was Alfred North Whitehead, a British philosopher who was a mathematician as well. He wrote a fundamental book in twentieth-century mathematics called Principia Mathematica with his student Bertrand Russell when they were both at Trinity College Cambridge. And Alfred North Whitehead, because he was a mathematician, was the first philosopher who properly understood quantum theory. In the 1920s, when quantum theory was just coming into being, Whitehead got it straight away. Most philosophers weren’t mathematicians, couldn’t follow it; but Whitehead instantly realized what a radical break quantum theory was.
In quantum theory, which treats light and matter as wave-like entities—the quanta are wave-like—Whitehead realized that you cannot have a wave ‘at an instant’. You can’t have an instantaneous wave. Think of waves on the sea. You can’t take an instantaneous ‘slice’ of a wave and say: ‘here’s a wave at an instant’. A wave takes time to wave in. And it takes space to wave in. So, it’s spread out in time and space—you can’t define it in a particular time or place.
And that’s the fundamental reason for the so-called “uncertainty principle” in quantum mechanics—fundamental particles are wave-like. Everything, in fact, is wave-like: Atoms are wave patterns, a nucleus is a pattern of waves too, and the electrons in their different orbitals are resonant waves of activity.
What Whitehead showed is that matter is not ‘stuff’. Nineteenth-century physics had treated matter as stuff—atoms were like tiny billiard balls—hard, impenetrable stuff that just persisted. He showed that actually what modern quantum physics has demonstrated is that matter is a process. And it’s a process because everything is wave-like, even the smallest particles, even the smallest subatomic particles that you find in the Large Hadron Collider are wave-like.
If it’s a wave, and if it’s a process, then it takes place in time. And if it takes place in time, it has a polarity in time—a past and a future pole. And what Whitehead argued was that this completely transforms our view of the nature of matter.
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His most original idea about this—the one I find most exciting and interesting—is that it gives us a way of thinking of the relation of mind and body in terms of time, rather than space.
We’re used to the idea that the mind is the ‘inside’; the body is the ‘outside’. There’s the external world, the inner world. We use these metaphors all the time, and they’re spatial metaphors—my inner life, the inner world, inner consciousness… And indeed from a materialist point of view, the brain literally is ‘inner’—your thoughts are supposed to be nothing but the activity of your brain. They’re inside your head, they are inside; and the external world’s outside; and the body’s outside the brain, most of it.
We’re used to that spatial metaphor, it comes into ordinary language as well. We’re less used to the time-layer version that Whitehead was putting forward. And what he was suggesting is that the mental pole, the pole of the mind, is the future pole; and the physical pole, the pole of the body, is the past pole.
He pointed out that when you’re working out the equations in quantum theory—the Schrödinger wave equation, for example, is the equation that enables you to predict all the possible things that an electron or other particle could do… you fire off an electron in a cathode ray tube and the Schrödinger wave equation describes all the possible things it could do—that these are possibilities, they’re not physical facts. They’re part of physics, but they’re not physical. They coexist as possibilities. But as soon as the electron interacts with something—a measuring apparatus, or with another atom—then all these possibilities collapse down until you’ve got one measurable fact, which is now a physical fact. It’s now the body, as it were. The body of that electron has a definite place. You can measure it in a particular place. This is sometimes called the ‘collapse of the wave function’.
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What Whitehead showed was that this is a general principle about the way minds work.
Our own conscious minds are ‘arenas’ of possibility. Our consciousness is an arena where we hold together a range of possibilities. If (in some case) we don’t have many possibilities, we don’t need to be conscious of it. Most of our habits don’t involve considering possibility—we just do it the same way we’ve done it before. Habits are generally unconscious. They’re mental, but they’re unconscious.
Conscious minds are concerned with possibilities and choosing among them. So for example, all of us chose to come here today. We could have done all sorts of other things this afternoon, but we chose to come here. Among the many possibilities, we chose this one, and we made it happen. It’s realized; it’s now a physical fact. We can be measured, photographed, weighed in this room. It’s a physical fact that we’re here, and our mind’s now open to new possibilities.
So, it’s a constant interplay of possibility becoming physical.
But as soon as it’s physical it’s in the past. And then new possibilities open in the future. This is Whitehead’s conception of the mind’s work. It gives us a way of thinking of consciousness as something that deals with possibility; it’s a very helpful way of thinking about the nature of consciousness.
Since possibilities aren’t physical—they’re virtual, virtual futures among which we choose—it helps us to understand that consciousness is part of nature, but it’s not something you can physically measure any more than you can measure all the possibilities that an electron has. You can only measure the physical facts when the wave function collapses. The Schrödinger wave equation just gives us the probability distribution of what might happen, not what will happen.
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Beautiful!
Your perceptual awareness—in this & every
instant
of your life—
is (like a pane
with zero thickness)
the divider
/intermediary
of the future
& the past,
possibility & physicality,
of the mind
& the body.
The conscious mind
is the arena
of the future; &
The body
is (always,
already) past
Rupert Sheldrake - “A Conscious Universe?” at The Weekend University; Aug 9, 2020.
(ca. 15m47s - 22m46s)
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