Path as insight
What's the difference between a Narrative and a Theory? A narrative is a sequence of events, people, emotions, a happy ever after until Trey dies from eating a bad shrimp on the honeymoon. For pedants a narrative has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. A theory is an explanation for why something happens. A theory has to be testable, otherwise it might just as well be a narrative. The criticism brought against both Whitehead and Bergson is that the metaphysics of their Process Philosophy was more like a narrative than it was anything like a testable theory. In a very real way, the Book of Genesis is a narrative, it's not a theory. In their understandings both Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson made a connection between matter and consciousness. Whitehead's metaphysics has been called the Philosophy of Organism, he suggests that reality isn't a bunch of substances and objects, it's not stuff, it's a series of interconnected dynamic processes, it's the "drops of experience" constantly becoming that make up the universe. Whitehead's been praised for doing away with the mind body duality and he's been accused of coming up with a jumble of ill defined, incomprehensible words, such as "actual occasion," "prehension," and "concrescence." In the end the thing to understand is his claim that every actual occasion has a form of subjective experience. Excited? Me to.
