Process Philosophy

Sometimes a meme changes your thinking for years or decades. You might rebuild your whole understanding of the world around it, including your morality. Physicalism can be like that and it was like that for me. Other times a meme brings you back to a baseline forgotten since childhood and process philosphy has done that for me.

From that article:

Process philosophy is based

Process philosophy and its adherents are based. What else?

…on the premise that being is dynamic and that the dynamic nature of being should be the primary focus of any comprehensive philosophical account of reality and our place within it.

If that seems opaque then an example might help. It is nowadays fashionable to describe human consciousness as an epiphenomenon emerging from brain activity. If that seems opaque then you are my friend but you are on your own; I will not even try to unpack its most tantalizing terms. Let’s instead unpack just one: brain.

What is your brain? Your brain is an organ. It is made up of cells and the cells are made up of organelles and other things like fluids and proteins and fats. The fluids and proteins and fats and other things are made up of smaller molecules and those molecules are made up of atoms.

Which cells though and in what configuration? These things are in constant flux and sometimes they get eaten by amoebas 🦠

Synapses ‘fire’. Which brain are you talking about, even? The snapshot before or after that signal went through?

It becomes incoherent to speak of your brain as anything other than a process. If it shuts down, you might object, then I cannot point to signals across synapses but in that case the whole mess becomes a decay process. It cannot in any state be characterized as, say, a particular configuration of atoms.

Like you, your brain is more of an abstraction. A pattern integrity.

“dare to be naïve”

But why are we inclined to think otherwise? One partial answer, again lifting from that article:

The bias towards substances seems to be rooted partly in the cognitive dispositions of speakers of Indo-European languages, and partly in theoretical habituation, as the traditional prioritization of static entities (substances, objects, states of affairs, static structures) at the beginning of Western metaphysics built on itself.

Others have said the same. Here is Alan Watts (citing Whitehead, by the way):

“you have to regard yourself as a cloud”

In other words, the same goes for boats and everything else; none of this is meant as an objection to the claim that consciousness emerges from brain activity.

This process view makes that claim more palatable, even 🌊