The Topology of Process Relations (1)

Getting to understand the most signficiant philosophy of the century

Authors & their works who informed this essay:
A. N. Whitehead: Adventures of Ideas
Charles Hartshorne: Creative Synthesis; Creative Experiencing: A Philosophy of Freedom Insights & Oversights of Great Thinkers; Creativity in American Philosophy
Carl Gillett: Reduction and Emergence in Science and Philosophy; Scientific Composition and Metaphysical Ground
Kenneth Aizawa and Carl Gillett: Scientific Composition and Metaphysical Ground
Peter Kakol: Emptiness and Becoming: Integrating Madhyamika Buddhism and Process Philosophy
Steve Odin: Process Metaphysics and Hua-Yen Buddhism ; A Critical Study of Cumulative Penetration Vs. Interpenetration
Thomas Hertog: On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory
James Filler: Heidegger, Neoplatonism and the History of Being

Types of Process Relations

Although many people attain an intuitive sense of something significant and important being transmitted in Whiteheadian Process Philosophy, many of us have struggled to understand process relations in a systematic way. Over the past year I have undertaken the challenge of re-reading old and reading new books to wrestle with the confusion and get down to the core of process relations. The problem is, the reason why so many people struggle, is that neither Whitehead nor Hartshorne, nor many others writing after them, have been really clear on the topology of process relations.

What I have discovered is that there are different contexts that change the meanings of the terms that we use in talking about process relational philosophy. For example, there are several different kinds of internal relations, because they arise from different contexts of meaning. An analogy would be to think of the “seed” from which the tree grows, and the “seeds” which the tree produces. We use the same word “seed” but the seed, the seeds and the tree all have different whole-part relations.

The purpose of this essay is to clarify the different ways that terms like “internal” and “external” relations are used in process philosophy. Along the way we will meet several different kinds of internal relations.

There are internal relations that arise due to epochal change, in which the antecedents of an epoch are internally related to the descendents, leading to the famous line “the many become one and are increased by one.”

There are a different pair of internal relations that arise due to evolutionary change. Here, external interactions among participant-actor-agents ingress as internal relations into each particpant. When I see the tree, something of the tree “ingresses” into me physically (light arrays), biologically (sensori-motor feedback) and psychically (meaning). My subjectivity is changed as a result. But the tree is changed as well— I also ingress and become internally related to the tree. This might sound too woo woo for some of you. You just have to think in very subtle terms— the carbon dioxide I exhale becomes part of the tree. However subtle it might be, when agent-participants interact, all participants experience ingression from the other(s).

It is keen to notice that epochal change is discontinuous temporality, while evolutionary change is continuous spatiality. Therefore, the first two kinds of relations compose a time-space gradient array in a process-relational cosmology. Notice, too that epochal change is between non-co-temporaries while ingression is always something that contemporary agents share. To emphasize that epochal change is discontinuous between non-co-temporaries, we use the terms antecedents and descendents, rather than the terms antecedants and descendants.

Consider the question - Is the first amoeba still alive? You might feel a bit perplexed, because in a sense the answer is yes, and in another sense the answer is no. In process relations terms, the first amoeba is still alive in the sense that it is internally related to all its descendents. All epochal change is analogous to this. The past is both no longer here, yet still here at the same time. It means that we might never be able to observe the actual origin(s) of things, because they are no longer there as appearances. And yet they are here, with us, all the same. Make a note, though. When the amoeba divides and divides — even after 10 trillion divisions, the descendents are not diminished. They are not 1/10 trillionth the size of the first amoeba. So this is another principle of epochal change — it is succession without diminishment. ¹

Now consider then this miracle of relations that happens with multicellular life. Plants and animals have descendants — which means the parents are internally related to the child and they can interact as co-temporaries, sharing external relations and factors of ingression throughout their time together. This situation creates explosions of novelty! Think of how Indigenous peoples talk about their ancestors. They don’t usually mean their grandfathers and grandmothers who are still around. No. The concept of ancestors in Indigenous cultures points to epochal change along with the preservation of the past as becoming to be internally related to the present. ²

Yet another kind of internal relations are compositionally internal relations. These relations have to do with what we commonly think of as “emergence.” This can drag us into the thickets of confusion if we are not careful. First, we need to take a careful look at the term “compose.” We can say that the soup is made of ingredients, and that the table is made of wood. That is a reductive way of thinking about composition. Consider instead thinking of the soup as made with ingredients, and that the table is made with wood. The preposition with pre-positions us to think differently about the soup or the table. With suggests that something else goes along with the ingredients and the wood. With points to a hidden or obscured companion. In the case of the soup or the table, the obscured companions include the recipe, the cook, the heat, the properties of water, the tree growing in the “woods,” the machine that felled it and the machines that shaped it into planks, the carpenter, their knowledge, skill and tools. The list of companions goes on and on in this and every case. In fact, in order to exhaust the list, you would need to derive the entire history of the universe! And this is exactly what compositionally internal relations means in process philosophy.

My body is made with atoms and molecules and cells — they are compositionally internally related to “me.” My subjectivity is made with language and experience and cultural rituals, and… and… my body which is made with atoms and molecules and cells and the collisions of galaxies and the explosions of stars and the animals and plants I eat (which are themselves composed with…. and …. and ….)

It is intuitive to see the difference between being compositionally internally related versus something being “merely inside” something else. I am compositionally internally related to my cells, but the bacteria in my gut biome are inside me. In this case it is useful to use the terminology of habitat and habitas. My body is the habitat of the bacteria in my gut biome. The cecum in my large intestine is a kind of eddy in a constantly moving stream of digestive flow. In this eddy the bacteria make their home. They drink from the stream and metabolize some of its contents. The contents they metabolize determines what the bacteria secrete back into the enteric system. Their output communicates directly with the cells that are true compositional members of my body.

Because my cells are all internally related, this communication travels across all the channels of the cellular society that is my body, interacting with others, some of whom are compositionally internal to me, some of whom are also merely residents of my body as habitat. Through a vast vertical network of communication flows which constitute an up-hierarchy of internal and external relations, their experiences change my body and therefore change my internal relations all the way up to my subjectivity, changing my experience as a result.

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The Gradient Array

This then leads us to considerations of the differences between compositional societies and non-compositional collectives. We can think of the concept of socieites as inhabiting a two-dimensional phase space. The vertical axis represents compositionally internal relations; the horizontal axis represents external interactions and ingressed internal relations.

Place the focal individual (FI) in the center of where they cross. Looking “down” from the FI, I see a vertical stack of compositionally internally related “parts.” The word “parts” though, does not give us a true sense of what I am looking at. What these “parts” are doing is realizing the FI through an up-hierarchy of internal relations (or an up-stream of communication flows, or as Whitehead might say, “a coherence of prehensions.” What compositionally internally related parts do, is to realize properties,, propensities, potentials, degrees of freedom and/or powers for the FI, such that the FI experiences those properties, potentials, degrees of freedom and/or powers as themself. Above a certain threshold of coherence, many internal relations in the vertical stack below, become a single congruent identity at the level of the FI. Hence they compose a compositionally coherent society, or a compound individual.

Moving right horizontally from the FI, we see a collective of individuals all participating at the same level as the FI. They share many external interactions, which through continuous ingression, become a single shared culture. This is a collective society. Similarly moving right horizontally at any level — cells, molecules, atoms — we will find a collective society, all participating at the same level, interacting with and ingressing among each other.

What happens when we move along the diagonal starting with up and to the left? Here we enter the epochal dimension, where past antecedent layers of reality have become concretized as present structural layers of experience. Moving up and left from the cellular level, we meet the biotic, molecular, atomic, and subatomic levels of our cells’ deep epochal past. Moving up and left from the FI of the human, there are more layers to travel though, including layers sedimented by human cultural and cognitive evolution.

If the purpose of the deep to upper part of the vertical stack is for compositionally internal coherence to realize greater scope of external interactions, then the purpose of the diagonal upper-left to lower-right part of the horizontal stack is to first enfold the past epochal change to create potential states for more complex collective societies to emerge.

Now what if we look upwards on the vertical stack from the level of the FI. If we consider the FI to be a human, compound individual, is there a higher compound individual above us, or, to put it another way, are individual humans realizers for a higher compound individual? And if not today, is the human level itself an epochal moment that one day might be enstructured (enfolded structurally) into the left-hand horizon of a higher level compound individual? All of this is to suggest that the furthest edges of human development in a given generation is “the future arriving early” whereas compositionally internal structures are the recordings of the diachronic historial contingencies of epochal change.³

These are crucial questions, which are beyond the scope of this introductory article on the topology of process relations. My hope is that having a clear topology can support more generative dialogue around these deep questions.

For now, it is sufficient to see how this 4-dimensional heuristic represents what I call the gradient array of reality, along which all of existence and all experience, at all scales and durations grow. Hartshorne simplified them into one unifying metaphysical principle — the principle of asymmetric mutual interdependency.

Let’s zoom out to the metaphysical level and look at the pairings we have made. They all related in the same way. For example, antecedents are internally related to descendents; compositional realizers are internally related to the individual (person, property, process, power) they realize. These are all versions of many/one or part/whole relations. In process relations terms, the one is internally related to the many, and wholes are internally related to parts. Hartshorne identified all metaphysical pairs as being related in this way. The internal term he labelled as the a-term (absolute) and the external terms he labelled as the r-term (relative).

This gradient array is crucial to understanding reality from a spiritual perspective. We cannot have a one-to-one external relationship with those beings, entities and realizers with whom we are internally related. We cannot have an external relationship to God, Time, Space, Subjectivity or Self. What we do, over and over again, in forms revised through cultural evolution, is externalize representations of them, so that we can then interact with the products of our own creation. And science seeks to make those things with which we are compositionally realized, external to experience through the scientific method. Science is the pursuit of harnessing that which is prior to our being, like harnessing the power of atoms and the creative powers of microbes and genes.

The gradient array is a story of flows, from internal antecedents to externally interacting descendents and back again, in novel ways through processes of ingression. Epochal change is uni-directional, but leads to compositionally coherent internal realizers who re-member, literally, that which they are made with. The fact that antecedants can interact externally with their co-temporary descendants make a world of difference for the cumulative sophistication of the lifeworld. Societies are both collectives of external interactions (and their ingressions) as well as precursors to the internal relations of the subject.

Every external interaction made by a compound individual is realized by the collective but compositionally coherent interactions of its realizers, where coherence means an up-hierarchy of shared communication flows of the realizers which, from the perspective of the FI, are its own internal relations. The simple principle of the array are responsible, after eons of epochal change, for the inevitable compositional sophistication of reality.

The entire dynamical system grows exponentially through increasingly greater and more complex whole-parts to whole-parts relations.

The gradient array is replete with more flows than we can ever know, since the origins of reality are no longer here in external form to be discovered. Rather, they are internally enfolded in us, in a sense, “closed in as us” but ready to be dis-closed. This is fundamentally a religious pursuit, whose own patterns disclose the very same (g)radiance of the array. Furthermore, some flows — perhaps many more than not — subsist in the background, compositionally realizing the latent potential that is always threatening to appear. The notion of latent potency is key to our story here.

The notion of a gradient array is very much like the idea of Pythagorean forms, which specify the possibility space of geometric relations. This lends itself to what Michael Levin calls “The Free Lunch Principle” which he describes in this video with the example of evolution solving problems of morphogenetic space. He says “you have to solve for the first angle, you have to then solve for the second angle, but you get the third angle for free. In similar fashion, we imagine the gradient array to enable “free effects” which would appear to be “effects of necessity,” rather than effects that result from causes!

The gradient array is also represents the most fundamental property of reality — that it is not value-neutral. Rather, its creative advance is directed toward preferred states. This means that reality is value-laden, embedded in a continuous flow of values.

Metaphysical Ground and Causality

Grounding is a relatively unknown branch of contemporary philosophy that has to do with metaphysical explanation of vertical stratifications of reality. People have an intuitive sense that some entities (processes, properties, forces) are more fundamental than others. Jonathan Schaffer describes grounding in the following way:

Once one distinguishes more from less fundamental entities, it is natural to posit a relation linking certain more fundamental entities to certain less fundamental entities which derive from them. Grounding names this directed linkage.

It is intuitive for us to think of reality as stratified from more fundamental (less complex) to more complex (less fundamental) as for example, in thinking of matter to life to mind. This is called “vertical stratification” the the role of grounding metaphysics is to explicate the forces at play which create this one-way directionality from bottom to top, from more fundamental to less fundamental, from less complex to more complex. Reductionism conflates the stratification of reality for a causal map, making the error of equating grounding linkages with causal ones. There is nothing about matter that causes life, and nothing about life that causes mind, although in both cases one can be recognized a precursor to the other.

Think of the case of pizza. Using the same terminology we derived above, we can say that pizza is made with dough, the dough is made with wheat, the wheat is made with… This sequence allows us to see something important when approaching stratified reality through grounding philosophies. Each component level leaves out more than it says. For example, dough is made with wheat and a host of activities and conditions — kneading, yeast blooming, water temperature, etc… The processes and conditions that are left out are the contingencies. The further down we go, toward the fundamental, the contingencies more than just accumulate. The contingencies at the deeper, more fundamental level, are vastly greater than those at the higher level. In our example, what makes wheat wheat entails a lot more contingent relations than what makes dough dough. In other words, the absented contingencies in grounding philosophies grow exponentially.

Similarly, consciousness is made with brains, and with bodies, and with environments and with evolutionary-developmental histories, including the genealogy of the earth with its own cosmic journey.

We can point to brains, and to bodies, and environments and dissect them down into the parts we can also point to, but the process substracts all the crucial on-goingness that consciousness is mostly made with. That on-goingness is made with temporal passings which by definition cannot be pointed to. Some people like to say that the on-goingness are made of stories, but this is a mistake. The on-goingness is very real, we realize it in a very direct way. But to represent temporal processes, we must en-story them. Putting it another way, we can say that “story” is the representation of temporal process. It is in this sense that the universe is a “story” — instead of a story made with words, the universe is a story made with the things that we can observe, interpret, and name— the galaxies, stars, planets, clouds, species, elements, cells, molecules— they are the concrete nodes that represent the temporal processes which the universe is mostly made with.

Another way to say this is to consider the focal individual as having an experiential “light cone” that illuminates the space-field where direct experience is possible for that individual, similar to the notion of a markov blanket. These fields are specific and limited to the focal individual. I have only so much capacity to concretely experience my societies at the same level, and much less capacity to concretely experience societies that are compositionally internally related to me, or societies at a higher level of complexity. Humans, however, have a unique capacity to investigate these higher and lower levels through different means — empirical science, inference, and induction— all of which depend on processes of abstraction. Whitehead said that the concept of “matter” was the most extreme abstraction that humans have ever created. The further out we go from out experiential field, the more abstract the reality becomes, which means that “at the bottom” all of the reality is abstracted out (substracted) from the category, that we call “matter.”

This is the first reason why grounding philosophies (and the models associated with them) can never ever serve as a causal explanatory framework. The second reason is that causality in the scientific sense, implies a diachronic relation. If X causes Y, then X must in some sense be present before Y, because causes precede their effects. But if I am looking at a real dog, in what sense could it be true that the material elements in the dog precede the living elements? If I am true to empirical observation, I must admit they all come all at once. And even those aspects of dogginess that come later only after processes of development (sexual maturity, knowing how to play fetch) don’t just magically appear due to some diachronic causes that trigger subsequent effects. The sexual traits and mental traits are latent in the dog from the start.

Instead of thinking of cause and effect, grounding models must use the language of thresholds and threshold breaching. The notion of threshold reminds us that there are lots of contingencies that are involved, and that unless the contingencies align in such a way to breach a threshold of necessary and sufficient processes and conditions, then no such event we are studying would have ever happened.

Hence, this is exactly the challenges that contemporary science faces. Matter does not simply cause life. Matter does not simply become life. Rather, matter has the latent potential for life, a potential which will remain latent, unless certain processes and conditions—the enormous set of contingencies across large spans of time that are both necessary and sufficient for life “to emerge.” Again, this notion of latent potency is key to our story here.

In other words, life is made of historical contingencies with matter. We can’t point to the historical contingencies — which are necessary and sufficient processes and conditions — in the same way we can point to the carbon molecules that are compositional realizers of the diamond. Nonetheless, the contingencies are also compositional realizers of the diamond, which in this case refers to the geological (or technological) conditions by which carbon turns into natural diamond (or man-made diamond).

Retrospection, Substraction, and Relations

The limitations of grounding points out an enormous epistemic constraint we have when thinking of origins and the grounds of stratified reality. Retrospection is like looking with x-ray vision. We only see the bones that are left behind after the contingencies have been substracted from the scenario, like tissues that are subtracted from the X-ray results. Here I use the term substraction to refer to a process that has both to do with abstraction and subtraction— something is taken out of the equation through processes of abstraction. ⁴

Is reality made of relationships?
The idea that reality is made of relationships is gaining popularity today. This is a good thing in so far as it takes us away from thinking of reality in terms of substances. Unfortunately, if you listen carefully, most people who are speaking about the relational nature of reality, seem to have a mental model in their minds something like a complex entangled network where parts (or hubs, or nodes) are connected to other parts by some kind of relationality. Many people come to the notion of reality as relationship from studying eastern thought and the Buddhist scholastics. They imagine reality to be a sort of “Indra’s net” that represents the interpenetrating dependent originations of reality in Buddhist philosophy.

Process relations are not relationships of this kind for several reasons. Firstly, process relations entail diachronic contingencies that play out as epochal change across enormous swatch of time; secondly, retrospection illuminates evidence of only the concretized actual occasions, and substracts the infinite field of potentials that conspired to realize them; thirdly, whereas Buddhist philosophy construes mutual dependent relationships as equivalent, whereas mutually dependent relations in process philosophy are asymmetric (see above).

Relationships may be what we see retrospectively, as the relations themselves become substracted from experience. For each relationship we can specify, we would have to derive the entire history of the universe to explicate all the relations with which and from whence it arose. But by then, the moment will have moved on, and we would be, once again, behind in retrospective substraction.

The misunderstanding of ecologies as relationships leads to ecological damage. If we try to preserve the relationships, we interrupt the natural cycles of coupling and decoupling that a living ecology requires. I have written about this elsewhere.

A Metaphysics of Experience

Is relation, then the ontological ground of reality?
No. Experience is!

Process relational philosophy is grounded in a metaphysics of experience. Reality cannot be made of relations, because relations are themselves abstractions. Reality is fundamentally grounded in experience — it’s experience all the way up and all the way down. In deriving a metaphysics of experience, process philosophy hopes to describe the most fundamental ways that all experiences are the same, regardless of scale, duration, or level. If experience is like a process that emanates outward and forward, then metaphysics is an attempt to best describe the topology all experience follows. Metaphysics is like describing the curvature as the topology of space in order to explain the apparent force called gravity. ⁵ Yet to say that experience “follows” a typology would itself be incorrect, since experience is just the ordinary word we use for the topology of the gradient array. By paying attention to experience and grounding reality in experience, we can derive a metaphysics of experience, through processes of creative induction.

It is through paying attention to experience that we realize the asymmetry of relations. It is though paying attention to experience that we realize the insubstantiality of things.
It is through the paying attention to experience that we realize epochal change.
It is through the paying attention to experience … that we realize that experience is the ontological ground of reality.

Given our proclivities for metaphysical reasoning, once we realize these principles, we seek to formulate them well.

What makes for a good metaphysics?
The main qualification of a good metaphysics are

• Clarity - precision in language, clean definitions, sharp reasoning

• Simplicity - capturing the essence of, by releasing the complexity without reducing the complexity

• Error correction - correcting errors within or contradictions across disciplines

• Unity and scope of the concepts — expanding the capacity to say more with less

• Resonance with experience — always coming back to experience itself.

The good metaphysician must be able to think in terms of clear and simple (distinct) abstractions that avoid error and contradictions on their own terms. But without being able to assess whether the conceptual landscape is resonant with direct experience, they will get lost in hopeless abstraction. Entire philosophies have been constructed upon the faulty foundations of logological thinking — i.e. thinking with thoughts. Rather, we must think with experience, and find good conceptual indices that resonate with the experience of thinking with experience. Too many philosophers are stuck in what I call “philosophistory” which is the project of building more structures on top of the already overly complexified edifice of the main figures in the western cannon. They do not follow the path of experience. Rather, they are tracing the history of ideas, which travel further and further away from experience as they age.⁶

In the past, those process philosophers who have remained loyal to experience, have not been especially clear, simple or correct in their work. This is not unusual, because new investigations are always on tentative conceptual ground. Hence we have missed two great opportunities: 1) the chance to inspire a larger audience, and 2) the ability to seed a process relations view in other disciplines where it is desperately needed. What is especially needed today is a greater consilience between science and religion, and a good process metaphysics can close that gap.

A hundred years ago a group of American philosophers, which included Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), William James (1842-1910), Josiah Royce (1855-1916), John Dewey (1859-1952), Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), and George Santayana (1863-1952) plus the junior member, Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000 ) produced the most important metaphysical innovations of our time. The “American group” as Hartshorne called them, were grappling with making sense of the scientific advances, namely relativity and quantum theory. Along with the scientists, they were tasked with replacing the categories of a Newtonian, mechanistic, linearly causal world, with categories that made sense in a new world where time, space and motion were relative, matter had self-agency, and the boundary between physical reality and mind was becoming porous to both material processes and participant observation. Science was exposing us to a new world, and the philosophers were exploring a new understanding of reality, through the lens of experience and process, instead of mechanism and law.

“It was a golden opportunity,” Hartshorne wrote, "not only because they were situated in the advances of science, but also because each philosopher was also steeped in the classic traditions from ancient Palestine and Greece, which made them “richly sensitive to the religious and humanistic.”

One of the challenges we have today is that most process philosophers have declared war on science, rather than trying to make sense of it from a process philosophical view. Sure, there is still plenty of reductive physicalism to go around in the sciences, and it is good that scientists are now willing to adopt a “minimal physicalism” — but a minimal physicalism is not the same as a maximal psychism — a trap that too many process-oriented philosophies have set for the intellectually curious scientist. There are curious scientists working at the leading edge of scientific research, who are now facing the same theoretical boundaries that process philosophers are well equipped to breach. It seems clear to me that we are situated in another “golden opportunity.”

Feeling Feelings

Consider a beautiful handmade chair. The chair as the focal object does not feel. However, the molecules that it is made with do experience, which means, feeling. But the chair is also made with feeling, and its design, construction, and feeling (how it feels to the touch) are all experienced by the person who considers it. Which means that we can feel the protocols that the chair has been made with — although they themselves are “there and not there at the same time.” This is the definition of “feeling a pure abstraction.” Everything else that went into making the chair has been substracted from the simple perception of it. However, we also can feel that in a very real sense. This is what the architect Christopher Alexander was writing about.

Latent Potency as a Religious Idea

In this essay I have used the term “latent potency” several times. For me, Latent Potency is a religious term that signifies God-as-origin of the universe. If we travel back to origin, we end up at a singularity, before experience, before existence, before topological process relations, and hence before time and space. The word “before” here isn’t helpful, because here there was no “before;” just as the word “here” isn’t helpful, because there were no spatial relations — the topology didn’t exist. Except, we might imagine, as Latent Potential.

The phrase “Latent Potential” echoes the metaphysics of Charles Sander Peirce, as it is meant to capture Peirce’s notion of “First.” To say that something is “first” is to say not only that it is, but also that is followed by a “Second.” If you run a lap around the track alone, it doesn’t make sense to say you “came in first,” if no one else is running. However God-as-origin can’t be “first” in the sense that someone else is coming in second, because as origin, there is nothing else that could be second.

God is often named as One-without-a second, but this cannot be correct, because we live in a universe of multitudes. God-as-origin therefore must be the one-that-gives-rise-to-its-own-seconds. Another way to say this is that God-as-origin is Latent Potential.

Now, curiously, Peirce’s notion of “Firstness” implies a “Secondness” and the notion of “Secondness” also implies a “Firstness,” — which means they are mutually interdependent terms. Hartshorne identified Peirce’s pair, “Firstness and Secondness” as metaphysical twins. Like ultimate contrasts, metaphysical twins related in the same way — namely, through asymmetric mutual dependency. Or, as I showed earlier, they are, respectively a-terms and r-terms, where Firstness depends on Secondness in a way that Secondness doesn’t depend on Firstness. This is a long argument that leads to this simple, but powerful conclusion: Latent Potency already entails a gradient, and it is from this precursor of asymmetry that the entire universe can be born.

However we construe of Latent Potency, along with theoretical physicists, I see it as a singularity — a supersymmetry which has not yet breached a threshold of asymmetry for existence to happen. Here, with the notion of Latent Potency, we come closer to the science — with a twist.

Unbounded science

Theoretical physics in general, and cosmology in particular, thrust scientists into the deepest questions that metaphysics thrives on. Physicists use the empirical method, but at the edges of science, “direct observation” of experimental results is heavily dependent on theory. Why this is so, and how it works, I explain in this essay. Suffice it to say here, that we can see blips on a screen, or data from an infrared telescope, but in order to interpret what those observations mean, we need to use a theoretical framework. There is no escape here, because the phenomena that theoretical physics is interested in — the origins of the universe — cannot be directly perceived or experienced. A good theory, like a good metaphysics, strives for clarity, simplicity and error correction; where here clarity = the precision of the language of mathematics, simplicity = deriving fundamental laws or principles and error correction = correcting errors exposed by new experimental set-ups and resolving contradictions across disciplines. The problem of the incompatibility of relativity theory and quantum mechanics is a classic example of this last point.

What we must understand, however, is that physics operates within a deep metaphysical assumption that for the most part goes unexamined (with the exception of the amazing pugilist, Sabine Hossenfelder). Hossenfelder argues that the notion of symmetry has distracted physicists from important work, placing false demands on the mathematics of physics to follow the beauty and simplicity of symmetry. Hence physicists search for a Unified Theory.

Physics is currently bound to the notion of supersymmetry. But we live in a profoundly asymmetric universe, even to the surprise of physicists.⁷ Explaining the origins of the universe, then, boils down to explaining why the supersymmetry breaks down and explodes into the first, fundamental forces and particles. Of course, the first forces and particles have to reconcile with the original supersymmetry, so each time we discover a new particle that throws the symmetry out of whack, we search for the suspect particle that must be there, because of the assumed reality of supersymmetry. This leads to all kinds of fudging, to the point that some (like Hossenfelder) suspect that the theory is driving the physics, and not the other way around.

What if science didn’t have this bias? What if we envisioned the origin of an asymmetric universe as itself having subtle asymmetric relations? This could be the case of Latent Potency (or God and their many pseudonyms)? I have often thought that this is the answer to the koan What is the sound of one hand clapping? — that it points out the mind’s intolerance for asymmetry. This is an epistemic constraint that we can avoid.

Theoretical physics has a second bias — the tendency to think of symmetry breaking as bifurcation events. Symmetry breaks and there is space-time, which bifurcates into space and time. Symmetry breaks and there is the electro-weak force, which bifurcates into the electromagnetic force and the weak force. On and on we go, building a decision tree with only simple bifurcation patterns. Our universe grows like this

Bifurcation, of course, guarantees symmetry, and the two have much in common. But why couldn’t the breaking of asymmetry lead to xfurcation, where “x” is a variable greater than 2? Why couldn’t the universe have bloomed like this instead?:

The structure of the galactic flows of Laniakea

In his book On the Origin of Time, Thomas Hertog recounts his intellectual adventures with Stephen Hawking’s across their lifetime friendship, leading up to the final theory Hawking’s settled on which he shared with Hertog. As it turns out, Hawking and Hertog were contemplating such things. Maybe time was there before space (or is it the other way around). But what if when symmetry broke into a million features of the early universe, most of which, by reasons of retrospection and substraction as I talked about above, and, given the very real epistemic constraints of the human mind, we are only left with a small piece of the picture. Maybe this is what “dark matter” and “dark energy” are pointing us toward.

Process relational philosophy construes the background as a vast field of complex potential states (or many local fields of complex potential states). Zoom out, and we see this field is itself latent potency, spread out across the gradient array, which gives it propensities to relate in some ways more than others. Existence — the coming into being of latent potentials— is predicated on threshold events. It is only those relations that breach a certain threshold that come into existence, but it is more likely that the “subsisting” potentials represent far greater influence on the character of our universe than those that make it across some local threshold. At the cosmological scale, these are called “event horizons” by the physicist. At the quantum scale they are features of indeterminacy. This might be surprising to a natural philosopher, but it would not be surprising to a physicist, since it turns out that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy, while dark matter makes up about 27% of the universe. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe.

Hertzog reports that Hawking’s final theory began to look more like an unruly tree of biological species evolution, complete with surprising radial expansions and large extinction events, than a simple algorithmic bifurcation map. Here, focal events are not random, but deeply purposeful; but contingencies are by far the greater causal forces. This echoes the role of contingencies in epochal change in the typology of process relations, which “withdraw” due to retrospection and substraction. Hertzog writes:

[The] retroactive character of quantum cosmology runs far deeper than the retrospective character of biological evolution. Biologists don’t speak of multiple trees of life coexisting in a ghostly superposition until they find fossil evidence favoring one of the other. Instead, they assume, rightly that we have been part of a given tree of life all along and that we just don’t know which one until we have pieced the evidence together. … At every branching point in Darwinian evolution, different possible evolutionary pathways immediately decouple from one another … that is, the environment continuously transforms, bit by bit, a superposition of trees of life into clearly separated evolutionary trees— on of which is ours.

Hertzog is drawing a parallel between quantum superposition and decoherence, and biological evolution, where the environment plays the role of the observation/measurement which decoheres the wave form in the former case, and the intermediate forms in the latter: “The physical environment has already performed the more fundamental quantum observation.”

Remember, though, that this role is filled by contingent operations, by processes, properties, propensities, and productive and non-productive powers that are left out of the evolutionary map. Humans are not made of animals; we are made with animals. Life it not made of matter; life is made with matter. The superposition decoheres because the contingencies — the larger causal realizers— disappear.

Of course, there are still many holes in Hawking’s theory, and process relational philosophy should be interested in helping the cause, not distinguishing it. Hawking himself hoped that the new sciences would branch out from studying ‘what is’ as a given, to ‘what may be’ as a possibility. As Whitehead reminded us, the past is not lost, but reimagined through the experience of the ten thousand beings in each epochal transformation. In Stephen Hawking’s work, and the challenging life he led with dignity, Hertzog saw the possibility that “we can learn to love the world so much that we aspire to reimagine it and never to give up. To be truly human.”

Transcendence & Eternal On-Goingness

Where does the process end?
The process doesn’t end. Ultimate reality is Eternal On-Goingness

If we trace the compositional realizers of the human person, we can go back and bacl further into the origins — of humans, of animals, of life itself, of complex molecules, down to atoms and the subatomic particles and forces that realize them. But here we find ourselves in a pickle, because we don’t actually experience subatomic particles and forces. We experience the observations of the experiments but not the particles directly, because the atoms are not made of them, they are made with them along with all the human enterprise we called “science”. Somehow, something as large and complex as “science” — which includes the evolution of human cognition, collective intelligence and technology, as well as industry that builds the equipment, educational institutions that teach and train, financial systems that fund it, and all the bureaucracy across all time that have has slipped into the “insides” of an atom. More correctly, “science” is internally related to the atom, at one level of scale, while atoms are internally related to people (as compositional realizers) when we look from the level of the human (compound individual). This is what Hawking was pointing to, about the entanglement of human evolutionary biology with the structure of the universe. “Some people will be very disappointed if in the end there is no ultimate theory,” Hawking told his team. “I used to belong to that camp, I’m now glad that our search for understanding will never come to an end, and that we will always have the challenge of new discovery.

By jettisoning the idea that we are looking for the unique set of rules, science in several corners is branching out from studying “what is” to “what may be.”

This brings up to a staggering view of our place in the story of the universe and its eternal on-goingness. The gradient array is an impossibly complex dimensional space where, like a Klein bottle, things are inside other things which are inside themselves; where, like an Escher drawing, we can go up the down staircase and down the up staircase and end in the same place; where we can run the clock backwards in order to arrive at the future earlier. This unusual picture, however, is a result of an impoverished metaphysics, where, for example, we use the same terms to describe completely different levels of reality and the same phrases to answer questions coming from completely different perspectives.

Every cognitive entity has a limited cognitive light cone, — we can only directly experience things that occupy our own dimension, and even then we subject that to interpretation and retrospective sensemaking. Human knowledge, therefore, can never grow beyond the cognitive light cone of the species. In a deeper dimension, however, it is the light cones that are growing, and they are growing themselves, together. This is the transcendent nature of reality. It is both that which illuminates itself, in the everyday on-goingness of the ten thousand things, as well as that which is luminous in their experience— and both aspects participate in the eternal on-goingneses of the cosmos.

Cognitive Events that Grow

All good essays have to close somewhere. I want to close this essay with the notion that the universe is made with cognitive events that grow. This shifts the question away from either an idealist position (the universe is made of consciousness) or materialist position (the universe is made of matter). While I might agree that the universe is made with fundamental particles and forces, I would argue that those words stand in for external and internal relations (respectively). That is not, however, the juicy part of the story. Those fundamental particles and forces operate within a gradient array of entelechies — and as a result, leads to a universe of cognitive events that grow.

The cognitive events grow via the three cosmological principles and the four transcendent virtues.

Cosmological Principles
Latency
Potency
Asymmetry

Transcendent Virtues
Intimacy (ingression)
Love (epochal change) – being fully metabolized into one’s descendents
Meaningfulness (intrinsic realization)
Purposiveness (extrinsic realizing)

…. to be continued

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1. This was the dramaturgy in the TV series Succession, wasn’t it. That when a patriarch dies, and divies up their fortune, it is perceived as a diminishment, not as many new seeds for prosperity and growth.

2. Please don’t confuse this with some western notion of intergenerational trauma!

3. Readers familiar with my Origins of the Self model might notice that the self as FI, grows along the same gradient array, where the depth dimension (down the vertical axis) is the dimension of past epochal change, the breadth dimension (across the right hand line) is the growth of the collective society as ingression (shared identity), and the third axis (left, upward) represents the external interactions of the FI.

4. Retrospection is also an epistemic constraint in anthropology, as David Graeber and David Wengrow noted in Dawn of Everything — the archaeological record contains primarily a record of men’s work because men built large enduring structures, whereas women’s work — at least equally but arguable more significant in cultural evolution— is mainly processural and made with stuff (like food and fabric) that doesn’t outlast the wear and tear of time.

Also, here, in his book The Human Phenomenon, (Sarah Appleton-Weber, trans.) is Teilhard de Chardin describing “the suppression of the peduncles” which is bascially the same as our notion of substraction:

The exaggeration of the apparent dispersion of the phyla. This first effect of perspective, visible to all, derives from the decline and “decimation” of living branches as a result of aging. Only an infinitesimal number of the organisms that have successively sprouted on the trunk of life still survive before our eyes in nature today. And in spite of the diligent efforts of paleontology, there are many extinct forms that will forever remain unknown to us.

The same duration that multiplies its creations ahead with one hand, works just as effectively with the other to thin them out behind. By this act, it separates them and isolates them more and more in our view— and meanwhile, through another more subtle process, gives us the illusion of seeing them floating like clouds, rootless, over the abyss of past ages. (p. 73-4)

Further on he writes, concerning our own epistemic limitations to name the beginnings of things:

In every domain when something truly new bgins to break through around us, we do not distinguish it— for the good reason that we would have to see its unfolding in the future to notice its beginnings. And after that very same thing has grown, when we turn back to find the germ and first sketches of it, these first stages in their turn are hidden— destroyed or fogottern. … Except for fixed maxima and for consolidated achievements, there is nothing left (neither witness, nor trace) of what has existed before us. In other words, it is only the terminal enlargements of the fans that prolong themselves into the present through their survivors, or thier fossils. … And so there is nothing surprising in the fact that retrospectively things seem to arise ready-made. Automatically, through the selective absorption of the ages, what moves tends to disappear from our perspective only to resolve itself in the whole domain of phenomena into a discontinuous succession of levels and stabilities.

5. For an explanation why gravity is not a force, see

“Gravity is most accurately described by the general theory of relativity (proposed by Albert Einstein in 1915), which describes gravity not as a force, but as the curvature of spacetime, caused by the uneven distribution of mass, and causing masses to move along geodesic lines.”

6. This is the core problem with James Filler’s approach in Heidegger, Neoplatonism, and the History of Being. Filler begins by accusing process philosphers of a subtle kind of substance thinking by confusing process relations with “relational ontology” and grounding his argument in the history of a concept (Being, Daisein) rather than in experience. Furthermore, he misses entirely the asymmetric relations between ultimate contrasts, bemoaning instead that metaphysics has a problem deciding if Being is One or Many, completely sidestepping that the asymmetric relations between One and Many predicates the very possibility of Being.

7. For example, why is there more matter than anti-matter in the known universe? If it weren’t the case, then they would just cancel each other out, and we wouldn’t have a universe. So that’s not a surprise, really. It’s a persistent unexplained anomaly.