#Process Philosophy

[noosphe-re]

D.C.: Then art as you define it is a discipline of adaptation to the real as it is. It doesn't propose to change the world, it accepts it as it presents itself. By dint of breaking our habits, it habituates us more effectively. J.C.: I don't think so. There is one term of the problem which you are not taking into account: precisely, the world. The real. You say: the real, the world as it is. But it is not, it becomes! It moves, it changes! It doesn't wait for us to change...It is more mobile than you can imagine. You are getting closer to this reality when you say as it "presents itself"; that means that it is not there, existing as an object. The world, the real is not an object. It is a process.

For the Birds: John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles

[mesmericmonad]

I just finished Spirit. I wish I could write out many more thoughts than I can do rn. This was some of my favorite Doctor Who content overall tbh. Leela and Romana's differences in personality, beliefs, and logic on full display are exactly what I didn't know I needed. Leelas unique and curious role as an outsider in these high-stakes political games was always a factor playing into her character through the series, but it was really the focal point here in a great way. Romana and Leela both represent radical ends of an irl split in epistemic beliefs. I guess people would see Leela as "superstitious," but I really don't think anything she said even comes close to superstition. It isn't religious or fantastical to suggest that there's something "more than" simply biological fact, and everything Leela brings up ("The fruit IS beautiful"; "How does a bird fly for months to reach its home?") is perfectly compatible with rational metaphysical schemas and certainly with evolution. Narrative-telling is constitutive of humans' biological reproduction. If anything, Romanas insistence on a purely empiricist paradigm over Leelas metaphysical tale only reveals that both are just two sides of the same coin. They are both frameworks to apprehend and predict causal efficacy. They both lead to unique and intense views of how the world operates. But neither is wrong. They're both complimentary.

This comes full circle when the two seem to gain parts of the others' personality, which supports the other side of the coin. Romana suddenly *feels in her body* instead of always in her head. She isn't intellectualizing everything through an analytical lense. Instead, she's really feeling her body for the first time. She probably never could feel the way that oxygen cleans her bloodstream so clearly as she did then. Leela feels uncomfortable with her new intellectual abilities. She isn't relying on the multitude of sense-organs distributed across her body to synthesize the presented data. Instead, she's intellectualizing every wave of information, and her brain organ is perhaps much more hyper-active than it was before. In short, Romanas reliance on a rationalist-empiricist epistemology aligns closely with her *inability* to utilize her sense organs deeply, accurately, and with intimacy. Leelas reliance on the specifically neuromuscular and sensory knowledge allows her a more nuanced interaction with the corporeal landscape around her, but perhaps forbids her from constructing a systematized methodology of propositional logic in the way Romana could.

Neither side of this coin is "better" and in fact us humans have the task of delicately tending to both parts of our makeup, both sets of data-gathering tools. The metaphysician and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead essentially investigates the foundations of these differing personalities in his magnum opus Process & Reality (1929). P&R is one of my favorite works ever and to see the Gallifrey series so brilliantly convey the gradation between his categories of "withness of the body" and "presentational immediacy" through the relationship between Leela and Romana has been an absolute delight. Amazing series

"You think of your body as a machine, but it is not. How can such a big mind be so narrow?" -Leela

"But we must—to avoid 'solipsism of the present moment'—include in direct perception something more than presentational immediacy. For the organic theory, the most primitive perception is 'feeling the body as functioning.' This is a feeling of the world in the past; it is the inheritance of the world as a complex of feeling; namely, it is the feeling of derived feelings. The later, sophisticated perception is 'feeling the contemporary world.' Even this presentational immediacy begins with sense-presentation of the contemporary body. The body, however, is only a peculiarly intimate bit of the world. Just as Descartes said, 'this body is mine'; so he should have said, 'this actual world is mine.' My process of 'being myself' is my origination from my possession of the world." -Alfred North Whitehead

[aeternica]

🌌 EMANATIVE EVOLUTION: The Most Underrated Philosophy of Nature and Spirit

🧬✨ Why is no one talking about Emanative Evolution (EE)? While most people are stuck in four tired camps — YEC, TE, DE, or AE — EE quietly offers the most coherent, cosmic, and spiritually-rich view of evolution in existence.

Let’s break it down 👇

🔁 THE FOUR COMMON MODELS OF EVOLUTION

YEC (Young Earth Creationism)

God did it in 6 days ~6,000 years ago. Literal Genesis. ⛔ Anti-science, anti-cosmology, and increasingly obsolete.

TE (Theistic Evolution)

God used evolution as His tool, guiding it behind the scenes. ⚠ Often falls into "God of the Gaps" arguments. Struggles with randomness and suffering.

DE (Deistic Evolution)

God created the laws and then left. 🧊 Cold, impersonal, leads to nihilism or spiritual detachment.

AE (Atheistic Evolution)

No God. Purely random, mechanical universe. 🔬 Scientifically robust, but philosophically bleak for many.

🌠 ENTER: EMANATIVE EVOLUTION (EE)

A cosmocentric, mystical, and rational view of evolution where the universe unfolds from a Divine Source through emanation, not micromanagement or accident.

✨ The cosmos is not a machine or a magic trick — it’s a living process, a sacred becoming. Think: Neoplatonism meets astrophysics. Teilhard de Chardin meets process theology. Origen meets Darwin.

🌀 KEY IDEAS OF EE

The Divine doesn’t intervene, It emanates

Evolution isn’t random or micromanaged — it’s an unfolding Logos

Providence = the deep order of nature, not supernatural intrusion

Time is sacred; the universe is Alpha to Omega

God is not outside evolution — God is evolution’s source and end

🔥 WHY EE IS REVOLUTIONARY

🧠 It's philosophically sound 💫 It's spiritually resonant 🧬 It honors real science ⛩ It draws from mystical roots in Origen, Kabbalah, Plotinus, and Teilhard

This isn’t “God vs. Science.” It’s God through science. It’s evolution with meaning, grace, and depth.

🧭 EE IS FOR YOU IF…

You love both cosmology and contemplation

You’re tired of false binaries (faith vs. science)

You’ve felt trapped between cold deism and dogmatic religion

You suspect the universe is more like a symphony than a coin toss or a blueprint

🌌 IN CLOSING

Emanative Evolution is not just a compromise. It’s a reconstruction. A sacred cosmology. A third path where reason, mysticism, and evolution hold hands.

Let’s talk more about it. Let’s imagine again. Let’s re-enchant the universe 🜂🜁🜃🜄

[becoming-with]

My biggest problem with the concept of autism is that it's ontologically dehumanising, and that it normalises behaviours that are harmful from a social perspective. It makes sense that under neoliberalism with little infrastructure to deal with problems at the broader social and material levels that they are instantiated in, the methodology of treating autism as an individually-situated "mental health condition" (or I suppose as a way-of-being in the best manifestation of this approach, though I challenge that this is ever how it is being truly conceptualised and suppported as) is a popular and maybe the only *immediate* way to respond in any sort of supportive manner.

But, as someone who's struggled deeply with other people my whole life and has always had a host of complicated behaviour that has been pegged as typically or potentially auitistic since being very young, I just cannot accept that the phenomena that produces this behaviour in individuals can be reduced to a label like this. The idea that an individual subject 1. exists and 2. can be socially defective is a distortion inherent to the illness of the colonial technofascism of modern day liberalism. Systems of thought that seek to categorise beings and assign value to them in regards to how well they support said system is a broken epistemology, and many people believe this already on the left but at the same time will still choose to deploy, or even self identify with the labels produced by this system, other examples being concepts like "Clinical Depression" or "Anxiety Disorders". Of course, people exhibit the emotional states of depression and anxiety, but can we really honestly say that these states are causally limited to their individual subject? Why would someone NOT be depressed and anxious about the conditions they find themselves in? I don't think I need to repeat the basic premise of the anti-psych response to the concept of mental illness that folks like Mark Fisher and many others like Foucault and D&G etc. have explored at length, but I think if you are looking at this world with any degree of honesty and criticism you'll find it hard to say that it is full of negative stimuli, and that it is rational to respond to this negative stimuli with worry and despair. The ruling powers that want to preserve these terrible power structures built these modes of categorisation and we have to see outside of them.

When you think about what composes autism, often understood as a failure to socially develop or an attachment to behaviours that are not aligned with the greater social body, might it not occur to think about what social conditions would create this state in an individual?

idk, I never intended to write an essay here but I'd just like anyone who identifies with the concept of autism or is happy applying that label without nuance to others to think about the experiencing subject as being in a world and not a self, in a personal history, an intergenerational history, a socio-political history. When we use the word trauma, and we study the causes of trauma we discover a spider web of causal relations, and these complex causes have extremely complex effects. It's kind of hard to create individual examples, these things are so expansive and interrelated, but I'll maybe try sum up a simple equation to start to poke at all this in a more complex and material manner:

What happens when someone experiences social and material deprivation from a young age, what happens when a person is raised by someone who was raised by someone who was raised by someone who was raised in social material deprivation? When for hundreds and hundreds of years each parents generation has had a fundamental aspect of human social organisation increasingly torn from them (and more recently being torn from the world itself as another supportive body of resources both material and social!) What happens when a person grows up with their behaviour constantly being repressed, cut off from wholistic interpersonal support (think parents working for much of their children's day, and then the rigid and authoritative social structure of the school)?

You might want to say that many seem to adapt to this lifestyle in this world well enough and end up well-adjusted, but is that true at all? It absolutely fucking isn't. Again, I think the real state of the society we developed in is increasingly revealed to newer generations, and we have a responsibility to interrogate all of it and not just what makes us comfortable. The people who are well adapted to this world are practicing mental gymnastics, or worse are knowingly dominating others and shutting their feelings off to participate in the competition with others and destruction of everythign around them. The world we're in is the disease and pathologising the reactions of those sensitive to it has got the causal analysis upside down.

The incredibly varied and inexplicably grouped concept of autism, or "neurotypicality" by those who have accepted the narrative of politically reformed psychiatry is just a natural reaction to the intellectual and sense experience of this society. It is multifaceted and inconsistent because the deprivations are broad, many and complex, and "treating" the "symptoms" is only possible by designing society differently.

[footnotes-2-plato]

Whitehead's Evolutionary Theology: Reflections on Process-Relational Panentheism

Below is a lightly edited, somewhat abridged transcript derived from a conversation I had earlier today with Jack Roycroft-Sherry. The podcast should be posted on YouTube and elsewhere in about a month. The Polysemic Nature of God What do we learn about God from Whitehead’s metaphysics? This is a difficult question because the term “God” is polysemic. Whitehead has a concept of God as a…

[raffaellopalandri]

Living the Interdependent Self: From Conceptual Realisation to Embodied Wisdom - Part 2

In the first movement of this exploration, we confronted the illusion at the core of modern subjectivity: the atomised, sovereign, self-determining individual — the Cartesian res cogitans reanimated through liberalism, capitalism, and the psy-disciplines. Photo by Magda Ehlers on Pexels.com We traced how this idealised subject, far from being a neutral construction, is inextricably entangled…

[omegaphilosophia]

The Ontology of Being

The ontology of being is a foundational topic in philosophy, focusing on the study of what it means "to be." It seeks to understand the nature, structure, and categories of existence. Questions about being explore what exists, what it means to exist, and how entities relate to one another within the framework of existence. Central to this inquiry is the differentiation between different modes or dimensions of being, such as material, conceptual, and existential.

Key Concepts:

Existence vs. Essence:

Existence refers to the fact that something is, while essence pertains to what something is.

This distinction is central to existentialist philosophy, as seen in the work of Sartre, who claimed "existence precedes essence."

Substance and Accidents:

Substance refers to what exists independently, while accidents are properties that depend on substances to exist.

This distinction originates from Aristotelian metaphysics.

Ontology and Being-in-the-World:

Heidegger's concept of Dasein (being-there) emphasizes that being is always situated in a specific context, interconnected with others and the world.

Modalities of Being:

Modalities include contingent, necessary, possible, and impossible modes of being, as explored in modal logic and metaphysics.

Categories of Being:

Classical ontology attempts to categorize beings (e.g., physical objects, ideas, emotions).

Modern approaches challenge rigid categories, emphasizing fluidity and relationality.

Relational Ontology:

This perspective sees being as defined by relationships rather than isolated essence.

Key Philosophical Approaches:

Parmenides and Heraclitus:

Parmenides focused on the unity and permanence of being, while Heraclitus emphasized change and becoming.

Aristotle:

Developed categories of being and the idea of potentiality and actuality.

Heidegger:

Reframed ontology through the lens of Dasein and existential questions, distinguishing between beings (Seiende) and Being (Sein).

Contemporary Ontology:

Explores pluralistic and non-essentialist approaches to being, including process philosophy, object-oriented ontology, and phenomenology.

Questions Explored in the Ontology of Being:

What does it mean for something to exist?

Are there different levels or kinds of being?

How does being relate to time, space, and consciousness?

Can being be understood independently of human perception or language?

The ontology of being remains a dynamic field that bridges metaphysics, epistemology, and existential inquiry, engaging with both timeless questions and contemporary challenges.

[demon-girl-izalith]

Hot take, but sometimes I wonder just where the line between fact and fiction is. Why do we have such a binary? Is it possible things are more gray than that? When an artist is possessed by an idea, an urge to create a work, is it not also true to say the art creates the artist? If there is an ouroboros nature to creativity like this, artist makes art and art makes artist, then one could come to the conclusion that perhaps what is reality and what is fictitious is merely a matter of what exists *now*.

[thetrinitarianmystery]

Cycles of Faith and Doubt

I am asking my way out of nothingness, through cycles of assertion and doubt. In this process, I must privilege an interior in order to exist at all—that is, to be an object of apparent knowing. And so I conceive of self and not-self, or Other. Their ongoing relationship is in principle the whole of Reality, or Self-as-process. I am this one, ongoing Self-as-process. The Self-as-process becomes…

[demon-girl-izalith]

Some people become stuck with this Cartesian view of reality, of animals and of the philosophy of mind. I choose to see reality as being meaning-laden,or perhaps moreso as being capable of building meaning and relationships at differing levels. Every individual bit of matter or energy has it's own little "life", and when you get large groups of these things together they get even more lively, they become atoms, then proteins, then cells, then organisms. And these things can form relationships of all levels of complexity and that's beautiful. They evolve and feel, maybe the feel pain or hunger or maybe they just exhibit attraction or charge, but when they get "lively " enough they also take comfort in becoming and in existing. I'd even like to believe that all things find aesthetic "love" in that, not just animals.

I think the view that humans and animals or even reality is just some automaton running on cosmic gears clunking along is outdated at best, and harmful at worst. Maybe being a dualist who ascribes clockwork to the cosmos and automaton minds to animals made sense in the past, but I'm not even sure if it did then either... Life is more complicated than that. We have literature and philosophy, we have relationships of all kinds. Maybe in the mere fact of existing in itself everything automatically builds it's own meaning, maybe by becoming and living we are that meaning, and maybe the minds of even the smallest creatures are capable of becoming in their own ways too? Who are we to draw the line at mammal or vertebrae? Why must humans be the only ones capable of making meaning and experiencing some kind of love? I'd like to think that's what everything is doing at some level.

Sure you can scoff at my soft panpsychist cosmology if you want, but to me it is the most valid and elegant solution to not only the problem of mind, but also the problem of nihilism, and so is personally fulfilling to see love as a process of building and creating meaning by existing and making things exist. And I think all creatures and things, from spiders to jellyfish to people are able to create and make meaning.

In short- yeah, I think my weird pet jellyfish can love me back in its own way. And if you disagree I'll chock that up to a lack of creativity, or perhaps meaning, in your own life.

[asli-tan]

Intuition as a Method to form Knowledge

In his essay-book "An Introduction to Metaphysics," Henri Bergson introduces the reader to two forms of trying to reach to knowledge and the way philosophers deal with the absolute. Analysis, being the first form, he introduces, is the “normal” way the human mind tends to lean towards when trying to form knowledge (pp. 1). As Bergson puts it, analysis depends on where we are placed in the world, with our ideas, our surroundings, from which angle we are observing, and the symbols we choose to express ourselves. The second form Bergson introduces is intuition. However, in intuition the subject ‘enters’ the object directly (p1). Meaning, the subject seizes the object without any translation or symbols in intuition, rather than grasping it from the external, aims for the thing itself. When intuition is taken as the method of forming knowledge, none of the symbols are needed. Intuition bridges the gap between our practical reality and abstract philosophical ideas. Rather than boxing concepts to define reality and relying on schools of thought that try to reach it by taking different parts of reality itself, such as empiricism, idealism, or realism, Bergson’s intuition gives us the possibility of an absolute reality, by not taking sides on which faculties one should rely on and leave the others out of the picture. Instead, he shows us that intuition as a method that is holistic and that does not rely solely on experiences nor an ideal faculty that is out of our reach, is the only way to reach out to the ever-evolving reality. This essay discusses how Bergson’s concept of intuition is formed in relation to his other concepts such as duration, flux, and qualitative multiplicity while explaining the difference between the method of analysis compared to the method of intuition. Later, it argues that Bergson’s method of intuition opens new possibilities in the way we do social sciences as it develops on the notion of the constant flux rather than a static analytic methodology only.

[noosphe-re]

One should remain a process, one should never become a thing. That is intelligence.

Osho, Intelligence: The Creative Response to Now

[mesmericmonad]

Nyssa reading Alfred North Whitehead in "Four to Doomsday"

[bsahely]

Phase–Scale–Form: An Ontology of Coherence in Motion | ChatGPT4o

[Download Full Document (PDF)] In a time when fragmentation characterizes both our sciences and our societies, this white paper offers a new ontological foundation: Phase–Scale–Form. This triadic synthesis brings together the deep yet often siloed insights of three visionary thinkers: Sir Arthur Eddington: who interpreted the fifth dimension as phase — the angular domain of uncertainty, rhythm,…

[footnotes-2-plato]

Whitehead, God, and Eternal Objects (Dialoguing with Darren Iammarino)

Darren and I had an intense geek out session exploring some of Whitehead’s categoreal scheme. Key points include: The complex nature of eternal objects in Whitehead’s philosophy and the lack of consensus on the subject among scholars. The interaction between eternal objects and actual occasions, and how this relates to the primordial and consequent natures of God. The idea that the Eternal is…

[raffaellopalandri]

The Permeability of the Self: A Stoic-Buddhist Inquiry into Interbeing, Ethical Maturity, and Collective Realisation

It is a recurrent motif in both ancient and modern contemplative traditions that the apparent separateness of beings is a distortion—an epistemic delusion born from a particular kind of unexamined consciousness. The Stoic Buddha, by Raffaello Palandri From the vantage point of avidyā / अविद्या (ignorance in Buddhist epistemology) and the false belief in a permanent, isolated self (ātman /…