Reviewed by: Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context by Timothy Eastman Dan Dombrowski EASTMAN, Timothy. Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context. New York: Lexington Books, 2020. 344 pp. Cloth, $120.00; eBook, $45.00 The title of this book reminds one of David Ray Griffin’s 1998 study, Unsnarling the World Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem. Both books rely on process philosophy to respond to seemingly insoluble problems (called the “world-knot” by Arthur Schopenhauer) created in the wake of early modern dualism, which led to late modern mechanism once the ghost in the machine was exorcised. One significant difference is that Eastman is a prominent physicist who tries to untie the knots created by deterministic views of the natural world, in contrast to Griffin’s more philosophical and theological approach. The knots in question can be untied only by thinking creatively in new ways, Eastman thinks. Eastman calls his approach the “Logoi framework,” which rejects Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation and the assumption that indeterminacy effects are mostly assigned to epistemic limitations while fundamental reality is set aside. Eastman also spends a good deal of time challenging the assumption that the real is nothing but the actual in that reality includes, he thinks, both actualizations and possibilities. That is, Eastman argues against mechanism, determinism, and “actualism.” This last sort of opposition, in turn, leads Eastman to defend not merely Boolean logic but also a non-Boolean order of potentials. Eastman criticizes various “theories of everything” and conceptions of “multiverses” that ironically continue nominalism and metaphysically parsimonious, reductionist, deflationary ontologies. In some ways he is continuing where Henri Bergson left off in his debates with Albert Einstein in 1922. By focusing exclusively on objective measurement, Bergson thought that Einstein had neglected important contextual issues. In contrast to Einstein’s deterministic outlook, Bergson (along with Eastman) argues that the future is open and indeterminate. There is no warrant for “scientism” to overrule experience. That is, it is a mistake, Eastman thinks, to hold that there are preexistent laws that result in strict entailments from causes to effects and to hold that effects are, for all practical purposes, contained in their causes. Physicists themselves undermine the metaphysical claim that the real is merely the actual in that their research presupposes as well the region of the potential; this “hardcore actualism” is bad physics by ignoring [End Page 144] altogether the reality of potentiae. The “scientism” that Eastman opposes is thus problematic because of its actualism, its assumption that reality is fully captured by quantitative laws of entailment, its reliance on dyadic relations alone (in contrast to the Peircian triadic scheme favored by Eastman), its commitment to the causal closure of the physical, and its mechanism. Eastman’s own positive process alternative involves the claim that all reality is characterized by res extensa, res qualia, and potentiae. This positive alternative makes us realize that classical mechanics is not a neutral designator in that it tends to carry with it metaphysical assumptions, including a type of substantialism in tension with a processual approach. Many or most practicing scientists do not pay much attention to the fact that nominalism and realism imply metaphysical claims, as do actualism and determinism. Although Werner Heisenberg argued several decades ago for the importance of potentiae, he was only minimally influential in the community of physicists, who unwittingly had metaphysical commitments that they were not willing to abandon. Although Eastman’s own approach is encyclopedic in the sense that he seemingly cites every author who deals with the topics he is interested in, his own distinctive approach is clear in the midst of the citations. Most notably, Eastman takes Alfred North Whitehead’s diachronic approach very seriously in his own interpretation of the results that physicists have offered. One of the reasons for Eastman’s skepticism regarding what are often called “possible worlds” is that defenders of these often offer nothing other than acutalized possibles, rather than ontic possibiliae. Eastman’s own area of expertise is plasma physics, which puts him in an enviable position to defend the common process argument against the concept of absolute nothingness. There is no such thing as...
Reviewed by: Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context by Timothy Eastman Dan Dombrowski EASTMAN, Timothy. Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context. New York: Lexington Books, 2020. 344 pp. Cloth, 120.00;eBook,45.00 The title of this book reminds one of David Ray Griffin’s 1998 study, Unsnarling the World Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem. Both books rely on process philosophy to respond to seemingly insoluble problems (called the “world-knot” by Arthur Schopenhauer) created in the wake of early modern dualism, which led to late modern mechanism once the ghost in the machine was exorcised. One significant difference is that Eastman is a prominent physicist who tries to untie the knots created by deterministic views of the natural world, in contrast to Griffin’s more philosophical and theological approach. The knots in question can be untied only by thinking creatively in new ways, Eastman thinks. Eastman calls his approach the “Logoi framework,” which rejects Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation and the assumption that indeterminacy effects are mostly assigned to epistemic limitations while fundamental reality is set aside. Eastman also spends a good deal of time challenging the assumption that the real is nothing but the actual in that reality includes, he thinks, both actualizations and possibilities. That is, Eastman argues against mechanism, determinism, and “actualism.” This last sort of opposition, in turn, leads Eastman to defend not merely Boolean logic but also a non-Boolean order of potentials. Eastman criticizes various “theories of everything” and conceptions of “multiverses” that ironically continue nominalism and metaphysically parsimonious, reductionist, deflationary ontologies. In some ways he is continuing where Henri Bergson left off in his debates with Albert Einstein in 1922. By focusing exclusively on objective measurement, Bergson thought that Einstein had neglected important contextual issues. In contrast to Einstein’s deterministic outlook, Bergson (along with Eastman) argues that the future is open and indeterminate. There is no warrant for “scientism” to overrule experience. That is, it is a mistake, Eastman thinks, to hold that there are preexistent laws that result in strict entailments from causes to effects and to hold that effects are, for all practical purposes, contained in their causes. Physicists themselves undermine the metaphysical claim that the real is merely the actual in that their research presupposes as well the region of the potential; this “hardcore actualism” is bad physics by ignoring [End Page 144] altogether the reality of potentiae. The “scientism” that Eastman opposes is thus problematic because of its actualism, its assumption that reality is fully captured by quantitative laws of entailment, its reliance on dyadic relations alone (in contrast to the Peircian triadic scheme favored by Eastman), its commitment to the causal closure of the physical, and its mechanism. Eastman’s own positive process alternative involves the claim that all reality is characterized by res extensa, res qualia, and potentiae. This positive alternative makes us realize that classical mechanics is not a neutral designator in that it tends to carry with it metaphysical assumptions, including a type of substantialism in tension with a processual approach. Many or most practicing scientists do not pay much attention to the fact that nominalism and realism imply metaphysical claims, as do actualism and determinism. Although Werner Heisenberg argued several decades ago for the importance of potentiae, he was only minimally influential in the community of physicists, who unwittingly had metaphysical commitments that they were not willing to abandon. Although Eastman’s own approach is encyclopedic in the sense that he seemingly cites every author who deals with the topics he is interested in, his own distinctive approach is clear in the midst of the citations. Most notably, Eastman takes Alfred North Whitehead’s diachronic approach very seriously in his own interpretation of the results that physicists have offered. One of the reasons for Eastman’s skepticism regarding what are often called “possible worlds” is that defenders of these often offer nothing other than acutalized possibles, rather than ontic possibiliae. Eastman’s own area of expertise is plasma physics, which puts him in an enviable position to defend the common process argument against the concept of absolute nothingness. There is no such thing as...
In Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context, Timothy E. Eastman proposes a new creative synthesis, the Logoi framework—which is radically inclusive and incorporates both actuality and potentiality—to show how the fundamental notions of process, logic, and relations, woven with triads of input-output-context and quantum logical distinctions, can resolve a baker’s dozen of age-old philosophic problems. Further, Eastman leverages a century of advances in quantum physics and the Relational Realism interpretation pioneered by Michael Epperson and Elias Zafiris and augmented by the independent research of Ruth Kastner and Hans Primas to resolve long-standing issues in understanding quantum physics. Adding to this, Eastman makes use of advances in information and complex systems, semiotics, and process philosophy to show how multiple levels of context, combined with relations—including potential relations—both local and local-global, can provide a grounding for causation, emergence, and physical law. Finally, the Logoi framework goes beyond standard ways of knowing—that of context independence (science) and context focus (arts, humanities)—to demonstrate the inevitable role of ultimate context (meaning, spiritual dimension) as part of a transformative ecological vision, which is urgently needed in these times of human and environmental crises.
In Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context, Timothy E. Eastman proposes a new creative synthesis, the Logoi framework—which is radically inclusive and incorporates both actuality and potentiality—to show how the fundamental notions of process, logic, and relations, woven with triads of input-output-context and quantum logical distinctions, can resolve a baker’s dozen of age-old philosophic problems. Further, Eastman leverages a century of advances in quantum physics and the Relational Realism interpretation pioneered by Michael Epperson and Elias Zafiris and augmented by the independent research of Ruth Kastner and Hans Primas to resolve long-standing issues in understanding quantum physics. Adding to this, Eastman makes use of advances in information and complex systems, semiotics, and process philosophy to show how multiple levels of context, combined with relations—including potential relations—both local and local-global, can provide a grounding for causation, emergence, and physical law. Finally, the Logoi framework goes beyond standard ways of knowing—that of context independence (science) and context focus (arts, humanities)—to demonstrate the inevitable role of ultimate context (meaning, spiritual dimension) as part of a transformative ecological vision, which is urgently needed in these times of human and environmental crises.
In PHYSICS AND PHILOSOPHY: The Revolution Modern Science, (1) Werner Heisenberg aims, in not too technical language, to clarify change concept of reality manifesting itself quantum theory. He means to contribute to an articulation of the (not only epistemology) that underlies quantum theory's modified logical patterns. (2) To highly unusual degree, Heisenberg is gripped by sense of responsibility of modern quantum physicist to convey, language immediately intelligible to thinking public, his most serious and far-reaching reflections on metaphysical implications of his scientific work. One may go so far as to say that there is substantial evidence, partly within Physics and Philosophy, that Heisenberg regards such reflections and their public communication as his most important task. Heisenberg is especially apt for this intensely self-conscious contribution to humanity's historical-cultural development because his stature as principal originating architect of quantum at its most fundamental level is complemented by his deployment of an unusually broad and deep erudition and lifelong preoccupation with philosophic and artistic ontology from Anaximander through Kant and Goethe to Heidegger. No thinker has yet appeared who possesses such an authoritative combination of decisively necessary learning quantum physics and historical development of philosophic ontology. Despite flurry of renewed scholarly interest development of Heisenberg's scientific work, (3) and his complex relation to dramatic unfolding of German cultural his time, (4) there has yet to be executed sustained and philosophically critical interpretative commentary on this book that is his crucial philosophical-ontological legacy. Given profound ontological puzzles that continue to attend quantum physics and its implications for humanity's past as well as present and future conception of reality, such critical exegesis of this text is overdue. In what follows I try to extricate central nerve of Heisenberg's sinuously unfolding, dialectical exposition, and process to elucidate its strengths but also its deep ambiguities and perplexities--which express, I believe, fundamental dilemmas that pervade contemporary ontology. I Heisenberg makes inviolability of principle of noncontradiction cornerstone of his discussion. Unlike Aristotle (5) Heisenberg does not wrestle with challenge posed by possible denial of principle. He understands nonmathematical articulation of quantum to escape what would otherwise be devastating contradictions--most obviously contradiction wave/particle character of basic entities described by theory--through Bohr's famous principle of complementarity (which Heisenberg closely associates with von Weizsacker's notion of coexistent states), combined with Heisenberg's own principle of potentia, potentiality, potentialities. (6) II After brief introduction, Heisenberg his second chapter sketches history of quantum theory and process begins to explain what he means by potentia. In 1924 Bohr and his colleagues tried to solve apparent contradiction between picture and particle picture by concept of wave. The electromagnetic were treated not as 'real' waves but as mathematical descriptions of probabilities, every point relevant space, for the absorption (or induced emission) of light quantum by an atom at this point. Later this idea of was applied more effectively to much more abstract mathematical in many-dimensional configuration space that was discovered through researches of Schrodinger. Heisenberg reinterprets this mathematical probability wave ontological tenus, as signaling tendency [Tendenz] for a definite happening [einem bestimmten Geschehen], thus introducing remarkable kind of physical reality, standing middle between possibility and actuality: a quantitative version of old concept of 'dunamis' or 'potentia' philosophy of Aristotle. …
Reviewed by: Quantum Processes: A Whiteheadian Interpretation of Quantum Field Theory Henry J. Folse Quantum Processes: A Whiteheadian Interpretation of Quantum Field Theory. Frank Hättich . Munster: Agenda Verlag, 2004. xiv + 280 pp. Euro 29.90, pbk.3-89688-204-x. Many philosophers and physicists—including the current reviewer—have argued that Whitehead's process philosophy provides a conceptual framework better suited for understanding the quantum theoretical account of the atomic domain than does the substance ontology that has dominated Western metaphysics. However, apart from calling attention to this issue, few (with the notable exceptions of Henry Stapp and Jorge Nobo) have attempted to do anything about it. Frank Hättich has now changed this situation by providing a sustained analysis of quantum field theory (QFT) in terms of Whitehead's ontological scheme. The result is interesting for two reasons: (1) by extending the match between Whitehead's specific metaphysical proposals and the mathematics of algebraic QFT to a level of detail never before attempted, Hättich greatly strengthens the hope that process ontology can help resolve quantum mysteries; and (2) in noting the points of noncompatibility between QFT and Whitehead's metaphysical conclusions, he suggests ways of revising Whitehead's pioneering effort to enhance the match between speculative ontological scheme and contemporary physical theory. Hättich's book is in three unequal parts: the first two are exegetical, and the third, constituting nearly half the book, is synthetic. Part I presents a "simplified version" of those parts of Whitehead's ontology pertinent to the interpretation of QFT to be presented, and Part II presents an algebraic formulation of [End Page 283] QFT susceptible to that interpretation. Although Part I is "self-contained" from the point of view of its intended application, it is unlikely that a reader wholly ignorant of Whitehead's process ontology would gain enough enlightenment to appreciate much of the author's argumentation; but it is equally unlikely that such a person would be reading this book. Part II presumes considerable mathematical sophistication and familiarity with the formalism of at least quantum mechanics and some knowledge of field theory. It is "introductory" only in the sense that it introduces the particular version of QFT, algebraic QFT (AQFT), to which process ontology is to be applied. Of course, both Whitehead's metaphysics and quantum theory have been subjected to many and various rival interpretations, and in selecting among them Hättich has clearly, and reasonably, been led by choices that maximize the connections he wishes to explore. It is misleading to see the goal here as developing yet another argument for why quantum theory must (or must not) be interpreted realistically. Rather, this investigation presupposes a realist interpretation and then gets to work constructing an ontological framework to show how this is possible, thereby suggesting that those who have argued that a realist interpretation of quantum theory is conceptually impossible have done so because they remain committed to ontological presuppositions moored in classical physics. In presenting the ontological framework for his project in Part III, Hättich accounts for the process of each occasion's creative concrescence from pure potentiality to determined actuality in terms of three Whiteheadian concepts: (1) the extensive continuum; (2) eternal objects; and (3) the underlying activity. Each one of these ontological elements is then matched up with an aspect of the mathematical formalism by which AQFT represents the quantum state of a region in spacetime. Hättich then shows that given these identifications, various consequences of the mathematical formalism imply that some of the ontological claims made by Whitehead are either inconsistent or incompatible with the presumption that AQFT gives us a true account of the world. Thus although the final conclusions of this investigation are critical of Whitehead's specific metaphysical conclusions, the extent of the applicability of his ontological categories to quantum mechanics and QFT provides persuasive grounds for hoping that future realist interpretations of quantum theory can learn much from process metaphysics. For this reason, Hättich is to be commended for keeping the project of process ontology alive by proposing specific reasons for revising Whiteheadian conclusions based on our best scientific theories of the microdomain, rather than arguing...
Amid the wide variety of interpretations of quantum mechanics, the notion of a fully coherent ontological interpretation has seen a promising evolution over the last few decades. Despite this progress, however, the old dualistic categorical constraints of subjectivity and objectivity, correlate with the metrically restricted definition of local and global, have remained largely in place – a reflection of the broader, persistent inheritance of these comfortable strictures throughout the evolution of modern science. If one traces this inheritance back to its ancient roots in Plato and Aristotle, it is clear that the coherence, scientific utility, and historical durability of the various natural philosophies that followed have been directly proportional to their commitment, tacit or explicit, to object-oriented realism. As Simondon might put it, it is a commitment to the primacy of individuated substance over the process of individuation. For Whitehead, it is the misplaced assimilation of becoming to being, of potentiality to actuality. Quantum mechanics has challenged this commitment with a combined breadth and depth of force that far exceeds any other theory in the history of science. The theory’s objectively demonstrable empirical application is manifest only by way of a fundamentally subjective, context-dependent mechanism of measurement. More compelling still, actual system states are always actualizations of locally contextualized yet globally conditioned potential system states, such that “globally objective” reality is no longer merely the object of local measurement, but also its product. Thus, any coherent, ontological interpretation of quantum theory must include a conceptual framework by which objectivity and subjectivity, actuality and potentiality, global and local, being and becoming, individuated fact and process of individuation, are no longer understood as merely epistemic, mutually exclusive category pairs descriptive of an already extant, closed reality – but rather as mutually implicative ontological categories explicative of an ontogenetic, open reality-in-process.
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