# Presentation: 310739

## COMMENT’S ON SHA XIN WEI’S

- “WHITEHEAD’S POETICAL MATHEMATICS”

## Sha Proposes to:

- “yield a way out of the static and ***atomistic ***aspects of Whitehead’s metaphysics”,
- “enrich a ***plenist*** and process-oriented concept of unbifurcated nature.”
- Replace Whitehead’s topological methods with more modern tools.

## My Comments Will:

- Defend Whitehead’s atomism on the basis of its concordance with, and utility for, contemporary basic physical theory.
- Suggest a different modern way to improve Whitehead’s topological method.

## Whitehead’s Core Idea:

-    “_CONTINUITY_ CONCERNS WHAT IS                               			_**POTENTIAL**_,
-                          WHEREAS
-    _ACTUALITY_ IS _**INCURABLY**_ _**ATOMIC**_”

## Whitehead’s ontology is built out of atomic (indivisible) actual entities!

- “The final facts are, all alike, actual entities, and these actual entities are drops of experience” p.18
- “an actual entity is an act of experience” p.68
- “ ‘Actual entities’---also termed ‘actual occasions’, are the final real things of which the world is made.” p.18

## Atomism

- “The actual entities atomize the extensive continuum. This continuum is in itself merely potentiality for division.” p.67
- “The contemporary world is in fact divided and atomic, being a multiplicity of definite actual entities. These contemporary actual entities are divided from each other, and are not themselves divisible into other actual contemporary actual entities” p. 62

## Atomism

-  “in the actual world there are definite atomic actualities determining one coherent system of  real divisions throughout the region of actuality. Every actual entity ...is...somewhere in the continuum...” (p.67)

## Atomism

-  “every actual entity in the temporal world is to be credited with a spatial volume for its perspective standpoint.. These conclusions are required by the consideration of Zeno’s arguments in connection with the presumption that every actual entity is an act of
-    experience.” (p.68)

## Atoms of Action:Decisions

- “Actual entities  atomize it [the extensive continuum] and thereby make real what was antecedently merely potential.” (p.72)
- “every decision is referred to one or more actual entities...Actuality is decision amid potentiality.”  (p. 43). “Actual entities are the only reasons.[causes]. ” (p.24)

## Continuity, Causation, and Discreteness in Physics 

- Newton/Classical physics. Continuous process satisfying “causal closure of the physical”: mind/consciousness is left out of the causal structure!
- Quantum theory has discrete events: the Geiger counter clicks or does not click.
- Bohr: “The element of wholeness symbolized by the action, and completely foreign to classical physical principles.

## Quantum theory has causal gaps and discrete decisions.

- Two kinds of discrete decisions needed!
- Process 1 “free choice” by experimenter.
- Nature’s choice of outcome.
- Like “Twenty Questions”
- Each discrete decision is associated with a particular region in space
- Drops of experience, active or passive.

## Actual and Knowledge inQuantum Mechanics

- Heisenberg: “The observation itself changes the probability function discontinuously; it selects of all possible events the ***actual*** one that has taken place. Since through the observation ***our knowledge*** of the system has changed discontinuously, its mathematical representation has also undergone the discontinuous change”

## Transition from possible to actual in Quantum Mechanics

- Heisenberg: “the transition from the ‘possible’ to the ‘actual’ takes place during the act of observation.”

## Tomonaga-Schwinger and Whitehead

- Ψ(t)Ψ(σ)
- t~A continuous three-dimensional surface in the four-dimensional space-time continuum, with all spatial point lying at the same time t
- σ~A continuous three-dimensional surface in the four-dimensional space-time continuum, with no pair of points light-like
-    separated.

## Slide 15

## Compatible with relativity

- Predictions are independent of ordering of space-like separated events.
- Newton’s “receptacle” space and time: exists even if nothing is in it, versus
- Leibniz’s relational view.