Center for Philosophy and the Natural Sciences - California State University Sacramento

Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead

New York: Fordham University Press, 2004

Michael Epperson
Department of Philosophy
California State University, Sacramento

In Process and Reality and other works, Alfred North Whitehead struggled to come to terms with the impact the new science of quantum mechanics would have on metaphysics. This ambitious book is the first extended analysis of the intricate relationships between relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and Whitehead's cosmology.

Michael Epperson illuminates the intersection of science and philosophy in Whitehead's work, and details Whitehead's attempts to fashion an ontology coherent with quantum anomalies. Including a nonspecialist introduction to quantum mechanics, Epperson adds an essential new dimension to our understanding of Whitehead-and of the constantly enriching encounter between science and philosophy in our century.

"Starting from recent interpretations of paradoxical experiments in quantum physics—such as those on nonlocality and decoherence—Michael Epperson has done a

wonderful job of exploring in detail the remarkable parallels in Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophical analysis of the transition from potentiality to actuality in elementary events."

IAN G. BARBOUR, author of "When Science Meets Religion"

"Many of us in the ‘process’ community have felt a general congruity between Whitehead’s cosmology and quantum theory, even though the latter may have directly affected Whitehead's conceptuality only tangentially. We have been glad that in the past decade there has been growing interest among quantum theorists in Whitehead’s thought. We especially welcome this remarkable volume. It proposes a correlation of Whitehead's quite technical analysis of the phases of the concrescence of momentary occasions and the strange account of quantum events to which the evidence has driven physicists. At the very least, Michael Epperson has put forward ideas that warrant close attention and point fruitful directions for further inquiry. We may have here a still more successful work, which provides a definitive philosophical ground for quantum theory. In either case, this is an important, as well as a brilliant, book."

JOHN B. COBB, JR., Director, Center for Process Studies

"Coming at a time when interest in correlating physics and Whitehead’s philosophy has been expanding exponentially, the appearance of Epperson’s book is an event of first importance. Employing the decoherence-based interpretation of quantum mechanics, Epperson shows that it can be correlated rather precisely with Whitehead’s notion of ‘concrescence.’ Besides thereby showing how Whitehead’s philosophy brings out the ontological significance of quantum mechanics, Epperson also demonstrates that students of Whitehead’s philosophy will understand it better by seeing quantum mechanics as a specific exemplification of its general principles."

DAVID RAY GRIFFIN, author of Religion and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts

Quantum Relativity: A Synthesis of the Ideas of Einstein and Heisenberg

Berlin: Springer, 1996

David Ritz Finkelstein
Department of Physics
Georgia Institute of Technology

Over the past years, physicist David Finkelstein has developed a quantum language going beyond the concepts used by Bohr and Heisenberg. The simple formal algebraic language is designed to be consistent with quantum theory. It differs from natural languages in its epistemology, modal structure, logical connections, and copulatives.

Starting from ideas of John von Neumann and in part also as a response to his fundamental work, the author bases his approach on what one really observes when studying quantum processes. This way the new language can be seen as a clue to a deeper understanding of the concepts of quantum physics, at the same time avoiding those paradoxes which arise when using natural languages. The work is organized didactically: The reader learns in fairly concrete form about the language and its structure as well as about its use for physics.

The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution

New York: Oxford University Press, 1993

Stuart A. Kauffman
Founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics
Professor of Biological Sciences, Physics, and Astronomy University of Calgary

"Biology is the science of the organizational principles that make living things living. Kauffman's book is a massive attempt to provide the foundations for a theory of such organization. . .The book is as much an explication of a specific style of scientific thinking as it is a book on adaptation, the origin of life, and ontogeny. The style of thinking can be characterized by the assumption that there are deep and simple conceptual structures that will allow us to understand life and not merely describe it. . .I hope that Kauffman's book will be a strong stimulus for many scientists to search actively for the principles that govern the organization of living states of matter." --Science

" Stuart Kauffman's book, The Origins of Order, returns the problem of evolution to the central issue that evolutionists have been avoiding for too long, the problem of the evolution of a complex, organized system that we call, appropriately, an organism. Evolutionists had better take Kauffman's arguments seriously." --Richard C. Lewontin, Harvard University

At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity

New York: Oxford University Press, 1996

Stuart A. Kauffman
Founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics
Professor of Biological Sciences, Physics, and Astronomy University of Calgary

A major scientific revolution has begun, a new paradigm that rivals Darwin's theory in importance. At its heart is the discovery of the order that lies deep within the most complex of systems, from the origin of life, to the workings of giant corporations, to the rise and fall of great civilizations. And more than anyone else, this revolution is the work of one man, Stuart Kauffman, a MacArthur Fellow and visionary pioneer of the new science of complexity. Now, in At Home in the Universe, Kauffman brilliantly weaves together the excitement of intellectual discovery and a fertile mix of insights to give the general reader a fascinating look at this new science--and at the forces for order that lie at the edge of chaos. What we are now only discovering, Kauffman says, is that range of spontaneous order is enormously greater than we had supposed and, in fact, self-organization is a great undiscovered principle of nature.

Investigations

New York: Oxford University Press, 2002

Stuart A. Kauffman
Founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics
Professor of Biological Sciences, Physics, and Astronomy University of Calgary

In the tradition of Schrodinger's classic What Is Life?, this book is a tour-de-force investigation of the basis of life itself, with conclusions that radically undermine the scientific approaches on which modern science rests-the approaches of Newton, Boltzman, Bohr, and Einstein. Kauffman's At Home in the Universe, which The New York Times Book Review called "passionately written" and Nature named "courageous," introduced pivotal ideas about order and evolution in complex life systems. In investigations, Kauffman builds on these theories and finds that classical science does not take into account that physical systems--such as people in a biosphere--affect their dynamic environments in addition to being affected by them. These systems act on their own behalf as autonomous agents, but what defines them as such? By defining and explaining autonomous agents and work in the contexts of thermodynamics and of information theory, Kauffman supplies a novel answer to this age-old question, laying out a foundation for a new concept of organization and emergent general biology.

Reinventing the Sacred

New York: Basic Books, 2008

Stuart A. Kauffman
Founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics
Professor of Biological Sciences, Physics, and Astronomy University of Calgary

In this latest work, Kauffman argues for a philosophical conception of natural continuing creativity in the universe--a conception that might inform the conventional theistic definition of God as supernatural innitiator of a singular Creation event from which the universe is understood to unfold deterministically. Likewise, Kauffman's notion of natural continuing creativity challenges conventional scientific assumptions that the biosphere's evolution and human activity can be reduced to physics and are fully governed by natural laws.

Kauffman argues for a theory of natural emergence--a theory describing how complex systems self-organize into entities that are far more than the sum of their parts. He defines this emergent natural self-organization down to the fundamental language of quantum mechanics, and up to the language of population biology, neurobiology, and economics.

Physics and Whitehead: Quantum, Process, and Experience

Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003

Timothy E. Eastman (editor)
Plasmas International

Featuring discussions and dialogue by prominent scientists and philosophers, this book explores the rich interface of contemporary physics and Whitehead-inspired process thought. The contributors share the conviction that quantum physics not only corroborates many of Whitehead's philosophical theses, but is also illuminated by them. Thus, though differing in perspective or emphasis, the contributions by Geoffrey Chew, David Finkelstein, Henry Stapp and other scientists conceptually dovetail with those of Philip Clayton, Jorge Nobo, Yutaka Tanaka and other process philosophers.

"Without question this book contains some outstanding and state-of-the-art essays on the very significant issue of the relation between Whitehead's philosophy and contemporary physics. This is a truly needed addition to the growing field of process studies."

GEORGE W. SHIELDS, editor of Process and Analysis:
Whitehead, Hartshorne, and the Analytic Tradition

"What excites me most about this book is the effort of leading physicists to advance their reflections about physics through interaction with philosophy--primarily that of Whitehead. It also suggests that, after a long delay, cutting-edge scientists recognize the need of science for some of Whitehead's seminal ideas."

JOHN B. COBB, JR., Founding Co-director, Center for Process Studies

Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics

Berlin: Springer, 2004

Henry P. Stapp
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

"Scientists other than quantum physicists often fail to comprehend the enormity of the conceptual change wrought by quantum theory in our basic conception of the nature of matter," writes Henry Stapp. Stapp is a leading quantum physicist who has given particularly careful thought to the implications of the theory that lies at the heart of modern physics.

In this book, which contains several of his key papers as well as new material, he focuses on the problem of consciousness and explains how quantum mechanics allows causally effective conscious thought to be combined in a natural way with the physical brain made of neurons and atoms.

The book is divided into four sections. The first consists of an extended introduction. Key foundational and somewhat more technical papers are included in the second part, together with a clear exposition of the "orthodox" interpretation of quantum

mechanics. The third part addresses, in a non-technical fashion,
the implications of the theory for some of the most profound questions that mankind has contemplated: How does the world come to be just what it is and not something else? How should humans view themselves in a quantum universe? What will be the impact on society of the revised scientific image of the nature of man? The final part contains a mathematical appendix for the specialist and a glossary of important terms and ideas for the interested layman. This new edition has been updated and extended to address recent debates about consciousness.

"The author develops new chapters on many findings of recent research on the mind-body problem as well as their extrapolation to new and difficult technical and social areas. The book is highly recommended to physicists, mathematicians, social scientists, and intelligent general readers." (Albert A. Mullin, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1087, 2006)

Mindful Universe
Berlin: Springer, 2007
Henry P. Stapp Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The classical mechanistic idea of nature that prevailed in science during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was an essentially mindless conception: the physically described aspects of nature were asserted to be completely determined by prior physically described aspects alone, with our conscious experiences entering only passively. During the twentieth century the classical concepts were found to be inadequate. In the new theory, quantum mechanics, our conscious experiences enter into the dynamics in specified ways not fixed by the physically described aspects alone. Consequences of this radical change in our understanding of the connection between mind and brain are described. "Stapp's book is a bold and original attack on the problem of consciousness and free will based on the openings provided by the laws of quantum mechanics. This is a serious and
interesting attack on a truly fundamental problem." TONY LEGGETT, Physics Nobel Laureate (2003) "In his new book, Stapp insists that the "causal closure of the physical", in particular concerning quantum theory, is an untenable myth. He elaborates on ideas of Bohr, von Neumann, Heisenberg and, from a philosophical point of view, James and Whitehead to sketch a complex picture in which the physical and the mental are emphatically conditioned by each other. Stapp's wide-ranging proposal offers stimulating reading, a strong sense of conceptual coherence and intuitive appeal, and empirical predictions that deserve to be refined and tested." HARALD ATMANSPACHER, Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health

Process and Analysis: Whitehead, Hartshorne, and the Analytic Tradition

Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003

George Shields
Professor of Philosophy
Kentucky State University

Process and Analysis brings together an unprecedented collection of the world’s leading contemporary process and analytic philosophers to explore philosophical topics of common interest. The contributors examine a wide variety of explicit and implicit commonalities and differences of approach to such central philosophical issues as the nature and status of events, time, space, relations, particulars, and God.

This unique collection demonstrates that both traditions have important things to say to one another. In fact, a largely ignored conversation between the two traditions has been carried on since at least the days of Whitehead’s influence on early Cambridge analytic philosophy. This long awaited volume is an invaluable research tool for scholars and students alike working in the areas of analytic and process philosophy.

Whitehead's Metaphysics of Extension and Solidarity

Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986

Jorge Nobo
Professor of Philosophy
Washburn University

At the base of Whitehead's philosophy of organism is a vision of the solidarity of all final actualities. Each actuality is a discrete individual enjoying autonomous self-determination, yet each also requires all other actualities as essential components and partial determinants of its own nature. This vision of universal solidarity, Nobo demonstrates, is the fundamental metaphysical thesis whose truth the categories and principles of Whitehead's philosophy were expressly designed to elucidate. The received interpretations of Whitehead's thought, Nobo shows, have ignored the mutual relevance of the solidarity thesis and the organic categoreal scheme and, for that reason, have grossly misrepresented many of Whitehead's most important metaphysical doctrines.

Contending that the difficult tasks of interpreting and developing Whitehead's metaphysics presuppose an understanding of the solidarity thesis, Nobo explores that thesis and the metaphysical categories and principles most

relevant to its elucidation. In the process, he not only corrects many misinterpretations but also develops important metaphysical doctrines that Whitehead neglected to make sufficiently explicit in his published writings. It is precisely in terms of the neglected doctrine of eternal extensive continuity, Nobo demonstrates, that the more puzzling aspects of the solidarity thesis are satisfactorily explained. He then shows that the extensional solidarity of all final actualities is an essential ingredient of the generalized conception of experience on which Whitehead builds his ontology, cosmology, and epistemology.

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