On the Non-serial Character of Creative Advance into Novelty.

The Compatibility of the Conceptions of the 'Order of Coming into Being'
in Whitehead's Theory of Process and Relativistic Quantum Field Theory.

Henry P. Stapp

Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory

University of California

Berkeley California 94720

(August 2008)

1\. Introduction.

At the beginning of Section III of Chapter III of Part I of Process and
Reality (PR 35) Whitehead (ANW) asserts:

"There is a prevalent misconception that 'becoming' involves the notion
of a unique

seriality for its advance into novelty. This is the classic notion of
'time, ' which philosophy took over from common sense. Mankind made an
unfortunate generalization

from its experience of enduring objects. Recently physics has abandoned
this notion. Accordingly we should now purge cosmology of a point of
view which it ought never to have adopted as an ultimate metaphysical
principle. In these lectures the term 'creative

advance' is not to be construed in the sense of a uniquely serial
advance."

Thirty pages later Whitehead says:

"Curiously enough, even at this early stage of metaphysical discussion
the influence of the 'relativity theory' of modern physics is important.
According to the classical 'uniquely serial' view of time, two
contemporary actual entities define the same actual world. According to
the modern view no two actual entities define the same actual world.

Actual entities are called 'contemporary' when neither belongs to the
'given' actual world defined by the other." (PR 65-66)

In spite of this seemingly unambiguous rejection of the idea of a
metaphysically fundamental unique seriality in Whitehead's notion of the
process of creative advance into novelty, the complexity of Whitehead's
prose has led some students of Whiteheadian thought to conclude that
Whitehead's theory of the extensive continuum, as elaborated in Part IV
of PR, ultimately does provide, at a deep metaphysical level, a
fundamental "serial-inclusive ordering of all occasions and their
regions"..."in Whitehead's Theory of Extention...the 'more special'
relativistic spaciotemporal 'disordered' extensiveness...necessarily
presupposes...the logical-mereological serial-inclusive ordered
extensiveness " (EPP, page 1: I have re-organized the cited statement in
order to more clearly convey its central meaning.

Michael Epperson has recently published in this journal a paper entitled
"Logical Causal Order in Whitehead's Theory of Extension: Relating the
fundamental mereological order and the relativistic spatiotemporal order
in modern physics." That paper presents Epperson's view of a rather
lengthy correspondence between us in which I was arguing specifically
that Whitehead's words in Process and Reality, including in particular
the words in Part IV, do *not* entail or suggest that the "mereological"
structure developed in Part IV provides a unique serial ordering of the
occasions of the creative advance into novelty. I argued that Part IV
elaborates upon, but in no way retreats from, the commitment made in
earlier parts to the *absence*, at the deep metaphysical level, of any
uniquely serial ordering of the contemporary occasions that occur in the
creative advance into novelty.

The resolution of the conflict between 'classical-intuitive' and the
'relativistic' conceptions of the 'advance into novelty' is, in a very
deep sense, the subject matter of Process and Reality. That resolution
depends essentially upon the logical and causal aspects of the subtle
relationship between the experiential and physical aspects of the
creative advance into novelty whose structure Whitehead is attempting to
describe. That 1929 solution ties beautifully into the precepts of
relativistic quantum theory developed in the middle of the twentieth
century by Tomonaga (TOM)and Schwinger (SCH).

Process and Reality represents in a deep sense a 500 page description of
one complex and far-from-familiar idea. As a matter of historical fact
it has elicited in the minds of its careful readers a diverse spectrum
of interpretations. This diversity has impacted very adversely upon its
reception by the academic community. There seems to be no consensus on
what it means. The differences between Epperson and myself is a
manifestation of this fact. But I believe that our difference can be
resolved by a careful attention to Whitehead's words in Part IV, and
that this resolution, taken together with

the resolution of essentially the same problem by relativistic quantum
field theory creates a burst of light that illuminates the whole of
Process and Reality in a very profound and profoundly useful way.