This chapter intends to give a brief background to quantum mechanics and Alfred North Whitehead's cosmology. Several interpretations in quantum mechanics were found to be incompatible with Whitehead's desiderata. Whitehead viewed an analysis as being incompatible with his according to its coherence, logic, applicability, and adequacy. Some of the examples cited are as follows: Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity, David Bohm's “implicate order,” and quantum cosmogonic models by Stephen Hawking and James Hartle. In addition to this, there are two notable differences between quantum mechanics and Whiteheadian concepts: “pure” potentia and “inherited” potentia. Aside from this, Whitehead brings the term “satisfaction” into the picture, which he considers to be the final state of the expected output in the process of evolution.
This chapter intends to give a brief background to quantum mechanics and Alfred North Whitehead's cosmology. Several interpretations in quantum mechanics were found to be incompatible with Whitehead's desiderata. Whitehead viewed an analysis as being incompatible with his according to its coherence, logic, applicability, and adequacy. Some of the examples cited are as follows: Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity, David Bohm's “implicate order,” and quantum cosmogonic models by Stephen Hawking and James Hartle. In addition to this, there are two notable differences between quantum mechanics and Whiteheadian concepts: “pure” potentia and “inherited” potentia. Aside from this, Whitehead brings the term “satisfaction” into the picture, which he considers to be the final state of the expected output in the process of evolution.
In Process and Reality and other works, Alfred North Whitehead struggled to come to terms with the impact the new science of quantum mechanics would have on metaphysics. This book is the first extended analysis of the intricate relationships between relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and Whitehead's cosmology. Illuminated here is the intersection of science and philosophy in Whitehead's work, and details of Whitehead's attempts to fashion an ontology coherent with quantum anomalies. Including a non-specialist introduction to quantum mechanics, the book adds an essential new dimension to our understanding of Whitehead.
In Process and Reality and other works, Alfred North Whitehead struggled to come to terms with the impact the new science of quantum mechanics would have on metaphysics. This book is the first extended analysis of the intricate relationships between relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and Whitehead's cosmology. Illuminated here is the intersection of science and philosophy in Whitehead's work, and details of Whitehead's attempts to fashion an ontology coherent with quantum anomalies. Including a non-specialist introduction to quantum mechanics, the book adds an essential new dimension to our understanding of Whitehead.
An ontological interpretation is distinguished from other interpretations when it demonstrates the form among the facts of human experience through imaginative hypothetical deduction, and when it employs Whitehead's desiderata through the decoherence effect and its constituents in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. To further explain his cosmological scheme, Whitehead ventured three references: the “old” quantum theory, the “new” quantum theory, focusing on the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” and the other version of the “new” quantum theory, directing its attention to the “vector relationship” between potential and a prior fact. The evolution and consolidation of the “physical pole” and the “mental pole” constitute the final outcome state or the “satisfaction,” which in return has consequences in the future (believed to be the path to openness). Despite this outstanding investigation, the principle of “what happens between” the stages continues to be a mystery. Along with the stages are obligations pertaining to subjective unity, objective identity and diversity, conceptual reproduction and reversion, transmutation, subjective harmony and intensity, freedom, and determination.
Philosophers of science have not paid much attention to recent developments in quantum cosmology. This fact is surprising, since quantum cosmology is replete with conceptual issues involving (e.g.) the fundamental nature of time and space, the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the ultimate meaning of probability. One notable exception, Quentin Smith, has recently examined the Hartle-Hawking (1983) proposal. Trying to make sense of the view, he resorts to an instrumentalist picture, which treats the proposal as merely a heuristic device for the algorithm responsible for predictions. While we do not examine Smith's account here, we would like to contrast it with the model presented in this note, in which a fully realistic interpretation of quantum cosmology is developed. Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in the de Broglie-Bohm causal interpretation of quantum mechanics.
In his book, Nature Loves to Hide, Shimon Malin provides a wonderfully lucid and fascinating account of the development of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century and argues that the baffling puzzles of the quantum world can be understood in terms of Whitehead's process metaphysics. 1 Malin thus joins an ever-growing number of physicists who see in Whitehead's theories a useful framework for understanding contemporary physics, including for example, Henry Stapp, Timothy Eastman, Lawrence Fagg, Basil Hiley and David Finkelstein.Nature Loves to Hide is divided into three parts: "e Quandary," "From a Universe of Objects to a Universe of Experiences," and "Physics and the One."Malin also includes three appendices on the relativity of simultaneity, the proof of Bell's inequalities, and interpretations of quantum theory (i.e., quantum ontologies)."e Quandary" examines the debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein regarding the completeness of quantum mechanics.Einstein believed that quantum mechanics violates both local realism and determinism and therefore fails as a complete, fundamental theory of nature while Bohr held that quantum mechanics was complete regardless of its violations.Bohr's radical thesis was that a single model cannot adequately describe the atomic and subatomic realms.His complementarity framework of wave/particle applies to different conditions, but even here Bohr is not describing nature itself, but rather what we can know about nature.Malin distinguishes between Einstein's ontic approach and Bohr's epistemic approach (39).e latter, which became the orthodox "Copenhagen Interpretation," is often described as pragmatic or instrumentalist since quantum theory is to be viewed as merely a set of rules for calculating correlations among observations.As the Einstein-Bohr controversy continued through their disciples, John Bell demonstrated in 1964 that the issue was not merely philosophical but rather scientific when his theorem led to an experiment that proved nature violates local realism.At this round, Bohr wins, Einstein loses.Malin understands "the quandary" to be the fact that local realism must be abandoned even if it is the "eminently reasonable" world-view to which we continue to cling.Physics (post Bell's theorem) has suffered a type of "schizophrenia" since physicists adhere to Bohr's view as the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics, yet, at the same time, rely on Einstein's paradigm at some fundamental level.Malin's
IF, AS HEISENBERG SUGGESTED, potentia indeed constitute an ontologically fundamental species of reality, then the mathematical representation of the quantum mechanical evolution of the matrix of potentia to the matrix of probabilities-that is, the valuation of potentia as probabilities between zero and one-ought to be heuristically useful in understanding the ontological implications of this evolution.The mathematical representation should prove helpful in visualizing not only the process described by quantum mechanics but also, as we shall see in the following chapters, the process described by Whitehead.The basic formalism introduced and explored in this chapter is intended to be comprehensible to readers unfamiliar with mathematics.Some familiarity with the Pythagorean theorem and the addition of vectors will be useful, but not necessary.