Wesley Salmon's Early Interest in Whitehead

I was reading Probability and Causality: Essays in Honor of Wesley C. Salmon, and was interested to see it included an annotated bibliography, where Salmon provides contextual commentary regarding all of his publications up to that time (1988).  The first entry was an interesting surprise.  While his post-doctoral work was squarely in the mid-twentieth century empiricist tradition of philosophy of science, his MA thesis in 1947 was on the topic “Whitehead’s Conception of Freedom”, about which he comments: 

“A relic, best forgotten, of the days when I was totally committed to Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysics.” 

In his later career, when stretching his empiricist commitments in search of a realist approach to causation, Salmon developed his own causal "process” theory (Salmon 1984).  No mention of Whitehead, but perhaps some background inspiration?

Here’s a bit longer autobiographical excerpt from Salmon’s book on Hans Reichenbach:

“On the basis of personal experience, I can testify to Reichenbach’s qualities both as a teacher and a man. I was a raw young graduate student with an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Chicago when first I went to UCLA in 1947 to work for a doctorate. At Chicago I had been totally immersed in Whitehead’s philosophy; ironically, Carnap was at Chicago during those years, but I never took a course from him. My advisors barely acknowledged his existence, and certainly never recommended taking any of his classes. Upon arrival at UCLA I was totally unfamiliar with Reichenbach or his works, but during my first semester I was stimulated and delighted by his course, ‘Philosophy of Nature’, based upon Atom and Cosmos. Simultaneously, I continued my intensive studies of Whitehead’s Process and Reality. A severe intellectual tension emerged in my mind between Whitehead, the scientifically sophisticated metaphysician, and Reichenbach, the scientifically sophisticated anti-metaphysician.

     To the best of my recollection, the tension grew to crisis proportions when I heard Reichenbach deliver his masterful Presidential Address, on rationalism and empiricism, to the Pacific Division of the APA at its meeting in Los Angeles in December of 1947.  This lecture was precisely what I – as a naïve graduate student – needed to make me face the crucial question: on what conceivable grounds could one make reasonable judgments concerning the truth or falsity of Whitehead’s metaphysical claims? When I posed this question to myself, as well as to teachers and fellow graduate students sympathetic to Whitehead, I received nothing even approaching a satisfactory answer.  By the end of that academic year I was a convinced – though still very naïve – logical empiricist.”

Salmon, Wesley C. (1979). Hans Reichenbach, Logical Empiricist, Dortrecht: D. Reidel, p.8.

A Note on Events and Causation

Presently I’m reading GettingCauses From Powers by Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum (and have finished six chapters out of ten).  I expect to blog more about this book, of which I think very highly.  I just wanted to very briefly comment on events, inspired by the treatment they are getting so far in the book.

Years ago, influenced by reading (later) Russell and Whitehead, I acquired the notion that (all else equal) there is an attraction to an ontology which gave a leading role to events rather than one primarily featuring substances (or objects) and their properties.  There seemed to be more potential for explaining the dynamic aspects of nature (including mind).

But while there has been an active modern debate on the nature of events, the most common depictions don’t seem to offer specific advantages to an event-focused ontology.  To greatly simplify, it seems philosophers would model events either as property exemplifications, in which case they are in danger of seeming much like static facts or states of affairs; or else events would be associated with spacetime locations, in which case they are little distinguished from objects, which are the quintessential occupiers of spacetime.  (The SEP article on events is here; an IEP article with additional focus on the theories of Kim, Davidson, and Lewis is here).  These sorts of models of events don’t seem to bring differentiated resources to metaphysical theorizing.

The goal of the Getting Causes From Powers book is to develop a theory of causation based on dispositional properties, or powers.  While powers play the leading role, their theory incorporates an intriguing view of events (at least causal events:  they don’t take a position on whether there are other sorts).  Specifically, causal events, which are manifestations of powers, are temporally extended processes.  The authors reject as misguided the typical “two-event” conception of causation, where cause is temporally prior to effect, in part because no one has a compelling account of how you get from one to the other.  Rather causes and effects are simultaneous – they are two aspects of a process which brings about a change.  Very Whiteheadian!

Russell and Whitehead Solved the Problem

I was struck by Carey R. Carlson’s opening lines in the preface to his book, The Mind-Body Problem and Its Solution:

“The mind-body problem demands a description of how the mental and physical parts of the world go together to make up the whole. The problem was solved around 1927 by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead.”

(1927 saw the publication of Russell’s Analysis of Matter, and was the year of Whitehead’s Gifford lectures which formed the basis of his Process and Reality.)

Since I think the Russellian stance on the mind-body problem is superior to the traditional options of dualism and materialism and also think Whitehead’s speculative process metaphysics was far ahead of its time, I was excited to see this passage and curious as to how well Carlson would back it up over the course of a short book. After reading the book I can say I think he did an excellent job in showing how the ideas from these thinkers can be put together into a compelling argument for a more coherent view of the world: that of a causal network of events which share a character which naturally underpins what we characterize as the mental and physical.

Carlson is an independent thinker and writer from Minneapolis who studied philosophy some years ago and concluded Russell and Whitehead had it right. He says he was perplexed that this seemed unappreciated. While he ended up pursuing a career outside philosophy, he finally was able to put together his views on the matter on paper (he put out this book in 2004). He and I corresponded via e-mail recently and that led to my interest in reading his work.

Both Russell and Whitehead explained why you cannot identify the world with our mathematical descriptions of it: you leave out the intrinsic qualitative character of the world we know via experience. Both philosophers showed, in somewhat different ways, that what we think of as mental events and physical events can both fit into a picture of a causal network, whereas our usual intuition of the world as a spatial container holding static objects or substance won’t work – whether one posits one kind of object or two.

Carlson’s outstanding contribution is to carefully describe what this ontology of causal relations can do: it can describe space-time and all that’s in it while also accommodating mental events. He then shows how scientific theory really is an elucidation of a causal web and how it must actually fit into our network of experiences in order to be formulated. This leads to the final postulate that all nature has a sentient character, and that this best explains how mind and world are unified. While I was already sold on this idea, I think Carlson’s book may convince other readers of the merits of a panexperientialist solution to the mind-body problem inspired by sound philosophy of science.

All in all, this book does credit to its ambitious title. Along the way, it is also a fine exposition of some of the work of two of our greatest twentieth century thinkers.

My chapter-by-chapter notes and comments follow below.

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In the first chapter, he lays out the problem. Like others, he locates the “hard” problem for materialism in the raw feeling of being or sentience. He speaks of “the sensorium” of unified experience. If materialism or physicalism sees the mathematically characterized world as all that exists, then it does not include nor will it explain sentience – that which is given in phenomenal experience. The mind-body problem could be called the “phenomenology-physics problem”, he says (p.13).

Chapter 2 deepens this discussion, taking a closer look at the history of physics. Even with the advent of modern physics, taking quantum field theory for example, there seems to be a left-over tendency to conceive the world as physical matter or energy existing in a container of physical space. There certainly is no role for mental features in such a worldview.

After touching very briefly on some historical philosophical perspectives in Chapter 3, we start to move toward the solution in Chapter 4 with a review of Russell’s analysis of the world in terms of structure and relations (and specifically causal structure and relations). Here, Carlson pulls relevant passages from Russell’s Human Knowledge (this book I had not read – I had read the Analysis of Matter). Structure is defined as a pattern of relations. Relations relate terms of a class (which is just any definite set of entities). Russell discusses a variety of types of relations: dyadic and higher-order, symmetric/asymmetric, transitive/intransitive. Relata, relations and structure together form a complex, which is a whole or a fact. This approach can be seen as applying to pure mathematics, and it can also be seen as characterizing the phenomena of the world, as presented to us. In physics, we apply mathematics to real world phenomena. But one can’t identify the phenomena as identical with the mathematical description. Here’s a quote from Russell: “There is, however, a very definite limit to the process of turning physics into logic and mathematics; it is set by the fact that physics is an empirical science, depending for its credibility upon relations to our perceptive experiences.”

While Russell’s philosophy of science is obviously not unknown, commentators I have read don’t always stress the role of relations in his analysis. The fact that the world is made of relations (rather than the static objects or “stuff” of our intuitions) is a key point for Carlson, which will also provide the link to the work of Whitehead (Carlson notes with interest the history here: while Russell and Whitehead were famous for their collaboration on the Principia Mathematica, that seemed to be the end of their formal work together – yet the “fingerprints” of this shared history writing the Principia can be seen in their similar later critiques of the role of logic and mathematics in science).

In Chapter 5, Carlson argues that the most basic feature of physics, space-time, can be analyzed in terms of causal structure. Here he gives credit to the role the theory of special relativity played in showing the way forward: in it we can see how causal relations could be responsible for both spatial and temporal order. Since causal relations are relations in time, it is the temporal ordering of events which is fundamental, while the spatial is derived.

Since “real” causation is an asymmetric relation, Carlson shows how we can use arrows to graphically illustrate causal relations. One can see how “space-like” and “time-like” relations between events arise from a causal structure. He then shows how a “particle” could be defined as a recurring pattern of activity -- a certain geometric pattern repeated along a time-like route in a larger causal lattice). One of Carlson’s interesting ideas is that since different numbers of arrows could connect two given events, one gets a notion of relative temporal frequency. This allows for the introduction of the concept of energy into a causal network of events.

With these examples, we can see how the notion of the physical world (traditionally seen as a spatial container plus stuff inside it) can be replaced by a network of time-like causal relations alone. This is consistent with a basic notion of what science does: it looks at the world and analyzes what comes before what. Carlson notes that progress in physics eventually arrived at quantum events – discrete events which “do not admit of further before-and-after analysis” (p.71). These elementary events and the causal connections among them constitute the world. So the physical world is not space plus what it contains, but rather time-like causal relations only. And this picture is one which allows for the solution to the mind-body problem.

In Chapter 6, Carlson argues that mental events can be located in the causal network in the same way as “physical” events. Our experience can be seen as participation in a sequence of time-ordered mental events. So, do mental and physical events “interact”? Interactionist dualism is often seen as an incoherent perspective on the mind-body problem. But we’re not talking about static substances. Russell reminds us that mental events are unavoidably part of the causal network which describes the world, since the structure of physics has to empirically connect to the sensations of the physicist. Mental and physical events are interspersed in the causal network. Now, our human experiences seem very different than the entities of micro-physics, but when you break down it all down, both can be situated in a causal network. “The distinction between mental and physical now hinges upon the assumption that mental events are characterized by sensory qualities, while physical events are not. (p.87)”

Carlson does a good job in this chapter in trying to break down our intuitions, and it’s hard to do it justice in this summary. But I think he does a good job showing how an event ontology can situate the mental as well as the physical in one world-web. Some questions arise here: what are the base-level indivisible quantum events connected by the arrows of causal relations, such that they can form the basis for everything? What is the quantum event’s intrinsic nature?

Heading toward an answer to this is the discussion in Chapter 7. While in Chapter 6 Carlson tries to show how mental events can be situated in a world we think of as physical, in Chapter 7 he (again leveraging Russell) shows that we really do need to invert this. All physical theorizing and experimentation does take place within the context of mental events. This shows there really is no reason to distinguish between the two kinds of events. Science gives us nothing but causal structure. We know some causal events have a mental character and the physical events are only known via the mental.

Russell “stops” at this point. He was agnostic about whether the intrinsic character of the physical (non-directly experienced) events was also of mental or sentient character in any way. He said we just don’t know. Phenomenal character is the only kind of intrinsic quality we’re familiar with, but we can’t know the intrinsic character of the rest. Given this stance, some have cast Russell’s theory as a form of neutral monism.

But Carlson wants to go further, so he states that his final chapter (no.8) “belongs to Whitehead”. Whitehead’s critique of materialism was very similar to Russell’s (for example the first several chapters in his Science and the Modern World). But in Process and Reality, he was much more ambitious. Among other things in that work, he goes ahead and postulates that all events have a sentient character. Carlson endorses the idea that it is both fitting and simpler to posit this, rather than to assume there is some other unknown form of intrinsic content. Further, under this assumption, the world just makes more sense in terms of unifying the human experience with the rest of the world. In Whitehead’s theory, the causal structure of all events are grounded and ordered in the same way.

Carlson does a good job in just a few pages in summarizing some of Whitehead’s ideas. This is difficult because of all of Whitehead’s invented terminology and his hard-to-penetrate prose “style”. Whitehead’s treatment of causation is richer than what Carlson has discussed so far, including the transition from subjective to objective poles for each event, and the inclusion of purpose and self-determination as a causal factor in the setting the course of events. He also discusses Whitehead’s treatment of the unactualized possibilities (eternal objects) which are presupposed by the view that the temporal process establishes the contingent facts of the world. He finally then discusses Whitehead’s theory of how events (occasions) are organized into enduring societies and how the parts work to satisfy the determination of the whole -- a template for describing the human mind.

I don’t have very much critical to say about the book except as it relates to my thinking about what might be added to expand the discussion. Events and causation are the primitives in the theory. Until the final chapter on Whitehead, how causation works is not described. We can probably improve on Whitehead in this area (Gregg Rosenberg’s theory would be one to possibly consider). Related to this would be drawing more connections to an interpretation of quantum mechanics to better describe what is going on in an elementary quantum event and what the status is of wavefunction associated with a quantum system. Also, we need to someday improve on Whitehead with regard to the combination or composition problem – explaining how micro-events clump up into macro-events like the ones making up human experience.

Whitehead's Philosophical Theism

I didn’t mention this in my post on panentheism, but prominent among theologians who endorse a form of panentheism are the process theists, such as John Cobb and David Ray Griffin (co-directors of the Center for Process Studies) and their influential predecessor, the late Charles Hartshorne. These theologians take as a starting point the work of Alfred North Whitehead, specifically the speculative metaphysics presented in his late work: Process and Reality, written in 1927-28. Whitehead himself was not a theologian -- originally a mathematician, he was for years a leading logician and philosopher of science. However, at the end of his career, when it came to fashioning his grand system of process philosophy, he did assign a role to God in his scheme. The result, as A.D. Irvine explains in his SEP article on Whitehead, was a skewed legacy: “Thus although not especially influential among contemporary Anglo-American secular philosophers, (Whitehead’s) metaphysical ideas have had significant influence among many theologians and philosophers of religion.”

I find the way things fell out here interesting. On the one hand, Whitehead’s work was eagerly received by religious thinkers who wished to fashion a theology which improved on classical theism. On the other hand, secular philosophers mostly ignored his work, a response not especially surprising given the prevailing 20th century attitudes toward metaphysics in general. But neither group’s perspective seems to do justice to Whitehead’s own situation: a non-theologian who found that following through on the development of an innovative philosophy led to the inclusion of God in the system.

The late Victor Lowe, who wrote a biography on Whitehead, wrote here about what he learned about Whitehead’s attitude toward God and religion. According to Lowe, Whitehead (1861-1947) started his life as a believer, but became an outspoken agnostic, and remained so through much of his philosophical career. Lowe cites the reports of family members, however, that later he may have begun to turn back toward theism, possibly in reaction to the tragic events of World War I, including the death of his younger son. Lowe also cites evidence, though, of an ongoing ambivalence toward God throughout the rest of his life. In any case, however, given the paucity of evidence about Whitehead’s thinking outside his published work (he left no pertinent letters, diaries, etc.), the hard evidence for a turn toward theism must be derived from his late metaphysical writings. As discussed below, the “theism” found there comes in a purely philosophical context, not from any appeals to experience or authority. And it remained pretty clear from this work that Whitehead, as Donald Viney puts it here, “had little truck with organized religion.(p.7)” (please note Viney also wrote the comprehensive SEP entry on Process Theism.)

Looking at Whitehead’s own words in P&R (Part V, Ch. II, Section I), he dismisses the traditional concepts of God as imperial ruler, personification of morality, or unmoved mover. He says “Hume’s Dialogues criticize unanswerably these modes of explaining the system of the world (p.343).” Whitehead wants to dispassionately analyze what his metaphysics requires God’s nature to be. He also says: “There is nothing here in the nature of proof.” His says his efforts can be thought as “an attempt to add another speaker” to the Dialogues (p.343).

The scheme in P&R (to be brutally brief and imprecise) involves re-describing the world in terms of a new elementary constituent -- an extended event or process -- called an actual occasion. Each actual occasion begins with a subjective perception (a “prehension”) of prior or adjacent events, and then proceeds to a completion of the process via a creative or spontaneous choice among available possibilities. The completed occasion then becomes the objective input for new occasions. The ontology of actual occasions offered a novel way for making sense of how mind fits into a thoroughly experiential world and how a theory of “real” causation might work. God serves three roles in the system. First, God is the principle of creativity which participates in all events. Second, his “primordial nature” provides a ground for eternal objects – the abstract entities which serve as examples or goals for events. Finally, his “consequent nature” is as a home in which completed events reside. Later in the chapter quoted from above, Whitehead discusses these attributes and makes some comparisons of this description with other conceptions of God.

Now I’m no expert, and it has been a few years since I struggled through all of P&R. But it seems that for the actual occasions of the world to do their job, they need the presence and the participation of God. God is the entity in the system which provides the creative impulse, the template for choices, and the ground for completed events.

Others disagree: Donald W. Sherburne, the Whitehead scholar who wrote a helpful companion volume to P&R, argued against the need for the roles played by God and he worked on a project to “naturalize” Whitehead. This is something I want to look at further. But even if the roles played by God are required, the decision to name the system’s transcendent entity “God” appears to me to be a choice rather than a requirement, given how distinct this entity is from the God of tradition.

I have a high regard for Whitehead’s process philosophy; it seems every time I look at his work (although it is very difficult reading) I find that many of the philosophical ideas discussed on this blog are present or suggested there. Perhaps then, I should just respect his decision to include God in his work and not try to quibble with this. But my main point in discussing the issue is to stress my view that secular “analytic” philosophy has a lot to learn from Whitehead’s metaphysics. And I would hope more can engage with his philosophy without letting God “get in the way”.

Quantum Ontology and Whitehead

The current Journal of Consciousness Studies included an interview of Henry Stapp by Harald Atmanspacher (here’s my most recent post about Stapp; Atmanspacher is also a physicist interested in consciousness). I’ve been a bit skeptical in the past regarding Stapp’s specific proposals for how quantum effects are implemented in the human brain, but I mostly agree with his metaphysical views, including the connections he draws between the ontology of quantum mechanics and that of Whitehead. Below is one paragraph from the interview which I thought captured this well.

The natural ontology for quantum theory, and most particularly for relativistic quantum field theory, has close similarities to key aspects of Whitehead's process ontology. Both are built around psycho-physical events and objective tendencies (Aristotelian ``potentia'', according to Heisenberg) for these events to occur. On Whitehead's view, as expressed in his Process and Reality (Whitehead 1978), reality is constituted of ``actual occasions'' or ``actual entities'', each one of which is associated with a unique extended region in space-time, distinct from and non-overlapping with all others. Actual occasions actualize what was antecedently merely potential, but both the potential and the actual are real in an ontological sense. A key feature of actual occasions is that they are conceived as ``becomings'' rather than ``beings'' -- they are not substances such as Descartes' res extensa and res cogitans, or material and mental states: they are processes.

Whitehead and Process Philosophy

In past posts I have advanced the virtues of the metaphysical worldview described as panexperientialism. To explain the nature of reality and the phenomenon of first-person conscious experience, one is ultimately led to question the assumption that the world is a machine consisting of matter-in-motion. The revised vision is of a relational network of interactions, where each interaction entails first person experience for the participating system.

Now this idea is not without its challenges to work out, perhaps the biggest is explaining how the “experience” of primitive entities like electrons gets scaled up to entities like us. But it is an idea that philosophers plumbing the mysteries of consciousness keep coming back to (almost unwillingly). In my own reading over the last 15 years of books on consciousness by philosophers like John Searle, David Chalmers, Colin McGinn and Max Velmans, I was repeatedly struck by this sequence: first, their arguments would naturally lead their discussions to panexperientialism; next, they might spend a few pages flirting with it; and finally they would find (to me) unconvincing reasons not to make the final leap (see this paper by William Seager which makes similar points). My own conviction has built as I have recently focused on the considerable support this worldview receives from the theory of quantum mechanics (see my previous post).

Now, a panexperientialist metaphysical scheme was proposed by A.N. Whitehead in the 1920’s! The question arises as to why Whitehead’s process philosophy has remained outside the mainstream of philosophy for 80 years.

I think I see a couple of reasons for this.

As set out in 1929’s Process and Reality, it was a hugely ambitious metaphysical scheme. Such schemes (reminiscent of Continental philosophers such as Kant and Hegel) have definitely been out of fashion. Certainly part of the problem is that the book is famously difficult to read. Filled with invented terminology, it is very detailed and elaborate and ultimately somewhat obscure. Also, Whitehead included God as an element in the scheme, which is certainly not a popular move in mainstream philosophy.

Whitehead’s modern adherents, which I believe are exemplified by John Cobb and David Ray Griffin, the founders of the Center for Process Studies, seem to also remain outside the mainstream of academic philosophy. I think this is exacerbated by the fact that their philosophy is coupled to a highly developed and specifically Christian theology. (Also, I’m a bit put off by the way they like to stretch to apply “process thinking” to social/political topics).

With that said, I must emphasize that while I started on my intellectual journey toward panexperientialism before encountering process philosophy, my thinking has been greatly aided by reading Whitehead and some of his intellectual heirs (notably Griffin). I will continue to study it. I also think the more “mainstream” thinkers would benefit from directly engaging process philosophy.

Mechanism or Organism?

A.N. Whitehead called his process system a “philosophy of organism” thus distinguishing it from the mechanistic picture implicitly assumed in the prevailing scientific worldview. He believed the assumption that objects in the world were made of an inanimate substance was fallacious and undermined science.

While it has long been clear that biological systems are based in chemistry, which in turn is based on (quantum) physics, the notion that living things and all of their remarkable features can be reduced to physics has remained problematic to this day. Philosophers of biology continue to debate the issue (see this Stanford encyclopedia entry). As an example of a paper on the topic by a skeptic of the orthodox view, see the most recent one by Rich Cameron. (Gratitude is owed again to the resource of David Chalmer’s great web site). I differ from Cameron in that I don’t like an emergence model as a solution, but his analysis of the problem is well presented.

Here’s what I think it comes down to. In realizing that biological systems are grounded in the world of physics, we have two options: first, we can picture organisms as made of bits of dead matter and then struggle to recover what makes their qualities so remarkable; or, second, we could expand our view of the world of matter and energy to include features which make life explicable (and by the way quantum mechanics is pointing us there anyway).

Obviously, I prefer option two.