Physics and Whitehead: Quantum, Process, and Experience

10. Dialogue for Part II

103 10 Dialogue for Part II The dialogue presented below occurred in response to presentations by Shimon Malin, Geoffrey Chew, and Henry Stapp. Stapp: Let me ask about your vacuum. In Whiteheadian thought you have the impression that experiential or objective events are at work here, so is there any possibility that experience as we know it would be understandable and explainable as a property of your vacuum? Ordinarily, physicists think of the vacuum as particles without any experiential quality. Would you say that your vacuum could be something different? Chew: Yes. I’m coming more and more to believe that it could be. Nobo: I’m very excited about Professor Chew’s paper because it brings physics closer to features of Whitehead’s thought that are generally neglected among Whitehead scholars. These are features having to do with a theory of extension which is metaphysical—that is something prior to the becoming of actualities, prior in a supersessional sense, and which gets structured as a result of the becoming of actualities and those structures, in some cases, can be construed as spatio-temporal. The internal structure of the occasion or the pre-event mirrors certain extensive-genetic relationships in the becoming of eventities [see Bibliography: Nobo, 1986]. But the immediate issue concerns entropy or disorder increasing as a function of particles. We’re talking about a different kind of information if I read Chew right. It’s an information regarding the history and relationships of pre-events. You could have order increasing there that is not manifested in the decreasing order of particles. One of the things I’m interested in is that what you’re calling the historical element seems to correspond to what Whitehead called supersession, and a supersessional order is much more primitive, more basic, than temporal order. It gives rise to it and is connected to the theory of extension in that the supersessional order is encoded into the very structure of the extensive standpoint of the eventities, or the actual occasions. The whole history of the universe up to the 104 Physics and Whitehead becoming of that eventity is projected into its internal structure so that the information about that history is in that event—the complete history of the universe up to that point. That temporal dimensions or durations arise presupposes not only patterns of eventities, but their interaction. We can correlate those patterns that we can measure as so much physical time, but the supersessional relation is much more basic. I’ll formalize what I am talking about so physicists can make use of it [see Nobo, ch. 17]. Stanley Klein: It’s very clear to many people that religion has a powerful role in shaping human behavior and influences the way the culture is going to go. It’s my feeling that with a stronger coupling between knowledge of science and its images, and expressions of spirituality, the world would become a better place. And it seems to me that Whitehead’s process thinking can play an important role in that. Thirty years ago at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Geoffrey was doing very adventuresome thinking. Those were the bootstrap days, and one of the things that came out of the S-matrix approach that he pioneered was that it got coupled into the popular domain. Fritjof Capra’s books and a number of others linked bootstrap theory with Buddhism and Eastern ways of thinking, and that actually had some influence on the big world, on theology, and how people thought about the universe. Physics has some amazingly beautiful understandings , incredibly beautiful symmetries that haven’t made it to the outside world. It might be that the Whitehead intermediary, process thinking, is enough—it might be other things. What is it that we physicists can do to better connect with philosophy and theology? I don’t think that we need to go to Chew’s complex 4  4 matrices and pre-events to get a sense of how physics has a strong non-material aspect. In fact, the present standard quantum mechanics that we know and love has a dual structure and a non-material element. Henry points out this duality in his eloquent writings. The public needs to see better physics images and metaphors than we’ve provided. I came to this conference because of my belief that a coupling of Whitehead with quantum mechanics is the avenue to link physics better with philosophy and the “man in the street...