Hi,

Any wise thoughts on getting newbies to understand Mutual Immanence?

I can understand mutual immanence in a cosmic sort of way, that as WH said in MT 163 "the world is included within the occasion in one sense, and the occasion is included in the world in another sense."

But is this just a cosmic statement, like Blakes? Surely something is different between the included and the includer. But just how so is this on a more descriptive level?
My background perspective is the great debate these days about whether or not all our data is mere abstract representation or whether or not we (mostly unconsciously) get it direct. or both.

I take it this is not a literal mutual inclusion and that the whole universe is not literally in me. If so, spatial issues need to be addressed. But I take it that this is not just poetry either, and the inclusion is more than metaphorical. I'm trying to get at the status of the representations, are they direct passages (how can that be if they are being micro synthesized?) or re-constructions, or re-playing like a staging of an essence, or do they have some other ontological quality?

Nobo says "Actual entities are interdependent because they are mutually immanent. The doctrine of mutual immanence is a straight-forward theoretical interpretation of the paradoxical relationship that obtains between any one concrete moment of our experience and the world of which it is a component. Since, on all plausible accounts, any concrete moment of human exerience is contrued as embodying a finite locus within the world, the said experience and the remainder of the world must be outside each other. Notetheless, what is manifested within that moment of experience is the entire world and not a finite reagion of it--at least, it is the world as extending well beyond the here and now of exerience in question. " 229 Whitehead and te Quantum Experience


So, when we say the whole world in included in an occasion, just what does whole world include? Is it, like in Kant, a reception of space/time that is formal only, and reconstructed in the subject? Or does content get passed into this whole world? Or are we just talking about the way subjectivity sucks the whole world into a viewpoint?


I'm also curious about this as the interdependence of AE seems to rest on Mutual Immanence.


Sherburne has mutual immanence under Nexus in his KEY glossary p 231 , and he talks about it in a temporal nexuas as the "causal immanence of each actual entity prehending the entity immediately preceding it in the thread. "

Anyway to set me straight on this concept?

thanks.

DreamBat

Here is the authentic doctrine, from p. 254 of Adventures of Ideas:

DM: Here mutual immanence seems to be limited to particular sets rather than Everything is in everything.

>>Thus the earlier will be immanent in the later according to the mode of efficient causality, and the later in the earlier according to the mode of anticipation<<

This seems to hold the clue to how the two are held together. Again, I don't get why God is evoked.

>>>>The unity of such a nexus may be of a trivial description, if the various occasions are dispersed through the Universe, each with a widely different status from the other. <<<

So would this be like a TV in a room with the sound off not being of much relevance to the blind man? Or "All in the Set of facing Southwest on Tuesday, March 5th, 2004"

>>>When the unity of the nexus is of dominating importance, nexus of different types emerge, which may be respectively termed Regions, Societies, Persons, Enduring Objects, Corporeal Substances, Living Organisms, Events, with other analogous terms for the various shades of complexity of which Nature is capable.<<<


This seems to be another way of saying nature is really habit. That would mean that the whole of Whitehead's metaphysics is to provide a productive way of looking at habit formation. Interesting. Deleuze must have picked up on some of this in saying "Even gravity is a habit."

dBat

God seems to be the ultimate context for all the forward and backward lightcones, representing anticipatory and causal prehensions, respectively. God, in the Milne and in the Whitehead theories, is the entirely anticipatory actual entity, who does not come to completion until the omega point at the end of time. Hence, God anticipates everything and is causally influenced by nothing, nor does he causally influence anything. This is the spirit of prophecy and also the essence of what Jung and Pauli called synchronicity, an acausal connecting principle.


No, because that is not widely dispersed. It is interesting that Whitehead recognized the need for both conditions: widely dispersed and widely different status. This shows that Whitehead did have some grasp of the EPR phenomenon.


This of course he gets from John Dewey, one of his acknowledged predecessors.

It seems that the status of Mutual Immanence is different for various interpreters. See nobo quote below. What I am curious about includes this, but is more basic. Its more like, generally, just what all in included in a simple occasion (embedded in a table's AE's)? When we say the whole universe, does that mean a reduced representation of the universe (gotten directly either through the previous AE aim or Eternal Objects) or as a new summary of the universe - the whole universe - and its parts in some reduced form from *all* other occasions. Further, if the universe is updating itself each new moment with creative novelty, is this absorbing AE getting the updated universe or some past edition?



"....the major interpreters of Whitehead are divided into two groups: one group, which includes Hartshorne and Lowe, asserts the literal immanence of the universe (as such) in each occasion;7 the other group, which includes Christian, Johnson, Leclerc, Schmidt, and Sherburne, apparently denies the immanence of earlier occasions in later ones, holding instead that there is immanence only in the sense that an eternal object characterizing the subjective form of an earlier occasion is repeated in a later occasion so as to characterize the latter?s subjective form also.8"
Whitehead?s Principle of Relativity - by Jorge Luis Nobo
http://www.religion-online.org/showarti ... title=2477

Thanks for any help with this.

dBat

Also - why does an actual entity *have* to be connected to another one? Can't a subject die? Or do old actual occasions just become less and less relevant?

I'm thinking of what happens if I keel over here alone in my room. Where does my AE at the level of mind go, besides into the atoms of the room?

dBat

In Nobo Whithead and the quantum Experience 232-233, he gives two angles of mutual immanence.

The first is past to future, and seems to basically be that in several ways, AE's take on the full length of the past history of previous AE - hence their is a kind of linear mutual immance of the past into the present.

The second way, how the inter or between AE mutual immance occurs, is more difficult for me to understand.

"... the metaphysical past of any given occasion is the nexus of all occasions that are causally objectified in it. .....all occasions in the occasion's metaphysical past are causally objectified within the occasion's nature and locus. " 232
"Yet this doctrine makes complete and non paradoxical sense once it is understood that each attained actuality is in essense a quantum of information; for any determinate quantum of information is inherently a reproducible reality" 233


So, he seems to be saying that an AE gets from any immediately past AE the whole of the past inter-AE wise, in some form.

This is because why?

?Because like quantum, AE can reproduce anything they want?
?Because things in the AE's nature and locus are all part of the same nexus and so hip-hop-ergo-sum they are part of the emerging AE?

Help, drowning,

dBat

dBat,

This question (in your former message) is exactly the question I was wrestling with some 20 years ago, before I knew about Whitehead, and which lead to the basic idea of my "alternative ontology" (that time and matter may be interpreted as a propagating transformation of "original chaos" into light) as a possible answer. This idea fascinated me and it seemed to solve so many philosophical problems, that I thought there must be a serious error somewhere. But I haven't been able to find any real errors in it at all, instead it has helped me a lot.

The idea is now a little more elaborated (as in my english pdf paper below). To me it seems to be clearly formulated, and it should in principle be accessible to everyone, as my starting points are well established facts (e.g. the equivalence matter-energy) and common experiences (which evidently distances it from the ideas of Peter Mutnick). Yet it doesn't seem to be very accessible. -- But I once heard a physicist tell about a very accessible essay he had written; nobody understood it, just because it was really more easy to understand than anybody had been able to imagine.This is perhaps also the case here. To me the idea doesn't seem to be so far from important aspects of Whitehead's philosophy. -- And I think it gives a good answer to your questions, dBat -- but don't bother too much if it doesn't. Perhaps someone else has an idea in that case?

Bo

So Bo,

Are you saying in your diagrams & paper that there is mutual immanence because time is just a perspective?

dBat

DM:

I would rather unfold your quote than go after Nobo, though I have to have that book back to the library next week.



So if all occasions are mutually immanent in all other occasions, what is determining the various degrees of constraint?



This is the somewhat contoversial idea you mentioned. It seems though that Whitehead, and you DM, are implying it is more than anticipation. If it were just anticipation as I generally understand the term, its guessing. But there is something actual or real, being implied that is in the past occasion that is actual, or real, in the following occasion - I'm assuming, beyond strict casual determination?
In more plain talk, though just analogy, I've got something of the future in me, in my 'anticipation' that is more than guesses or trajectories of causal determination?


Dbat

Yes, precisely. You hold state vector knowledge of the future, and that state vector knowledge is the real substance of the future. It does not exist in any other way, nor is there anything else that exists, except for the present experience and the settled concrescences in the cosmic memory (sometimes called the akashic record, in a more phenomenal sense).

No, dBat, I think that time is a very complicated phenomenon, involving both the experienced and recordable flux and "references to the past" -- a past which is real in my hypothetic model (existing now) but not directly perceivable "from the outside" although we may feel it inside ourselves. One may say that the past exists as "the settled concrescences in the cosmic memory", as Peter M says in his last message, which I happen to agree with (even if I may not have understood his understanding of it).

What I say about perspective is that you may be aware of the complexity of time if you imagine it from an other perspective, perhaps from an other, imagined, universe. This is possible if you think of our real 3-dimensional space as 2-dimensional -- or 1-dimensional, i.e.just a line, as in my diagram 4.

One could make an animation of the diagram, with the horisontal line of the actual world slowly moving upwards, corresponding to the normal flux of time. Then the events (movements of the red dots) on that line would continue to create the network (the blue lines in my diagram) beneath it. This network (made of past events and considered as real) may contain processes (waves) that propagate faster than the movement of the horizontal line. Such processes may be needed to explain the stability of the processes of the world (their repeatability and thus the existence of eternal objects), and they bind the events of a society together in a mutual immanence, as I understand it.

What is difficult here is to realize that our perceived reality may be just an extremely thin, propagating, slice of our "real reality". Another difficulty may be that you have an other, conflicting (perhaps incorrect) worldview, which, for an understanding, would have to be abandoned or changed.

DM:



In what way is vector knowledge real? I would consider vector knowledge mathematical and therefore abstract. Or are you just referring to the processes having direction and magnitude more generally outside of measurements?

dBAT

The state vector is the equivalent of the deterministic laws of classical mechanics, which are supposedly in direct correspondence with real physical matter. We now know they are not in such a direct correspondence, and that the relation is much more complex and extra-physical. We ourselves experience in classical terms, but nature does not obey classical laws. It does obey laws of state vector evolution, and the state vector has a strong subjective component, which is very much in accord with the reformed subjectivist principle of Whitehead: "Apart from the experiences of subjects, there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness!" One might well say that the whole philosophy of Whitehead was evolved to deal with this extraordinary new conception of reality.

Dm:

When you say "One might well say that the whole philosophy of Whitehead was evolved to deal with this extraordinary new conception of reality"

...you mean the extraordinary part that each individual/AE has subjectivity and not just one's self? I mean, Descarte, Hume, Kant, phenomenologists and more have been keen on starting with experience. But it has always been limited to the cognito or "me".

Speaking of this topic, what do you find as Whitehead's best argument that 1. its not a solipistic universe of my own making (other people also have subjective experience) and 2. and so all individuals have subjective experience, given the abstraction of being alive or not.

That is, what is the most convincing argument to you that one can both say one is developing a theory FROM experience only, and then saying that other's have a similar subjective experience, even though we don't experience it?

This is part of my confusion about how Whiteheads AE are not considered abstractions, but everyone else's assumptions are. Do you feel we can really move out of a solipistic universe if we start with our own experience?

thanks for any comments or help,

dBat