A Cocklestove Event

Scandinavian Art Nouveau Cocklestove 

November 10th, 1619. René Descartes was alone, he was frustrated, he was looking for solitude and warmth. He found it in a small room heated by a cocklestove. He went to sleep, and according to Descartes himself he had a vision from God about Algebra and Geometry, the Cartesian Way and a mechanistic model of the future which laid out how best to pursue thinking about stuff through the interactions between causes and effects.  And lo, no one yawned, instead the world soon became plodding and mechanical, magic was hidden under a rock, shopping became therapy and unless you were someone like Thomas Aquinas or had a hard on for choir boys or you were a con artist the church became a less and less attractive career choice. Thank God for Alfred North Whitehead, who was born in 1861, and who might have described Descartes' vision from God through the concept of Concrescence. A word that means: a growing together of parts originally separate. For Alfred, concrescence is a subjective process that allows a new Actual Occasion to come into being. During concrescence, the actual occasion, Prehends or Feels information or data from all past occasions. Guided by the Actual Occasion's subjective aim, the actual occasion synthesizes this prehended or felt information from the past into a new whole. Then when the Actual Occasion's moment of consciousness achieves a Platonic satisfaction, it dies. Whitehead called this corpse a Superject. A superject is a new solidified fact of the past waiting around for another actual occasion to give it a wink. And yet probably the most valuable point about Descartes Actual Occasion when he woke-up beside a cocklestove was that he reintroduced rigor and skepticism to western discourse, something we're constantly in danger of losing to the power hungry, the indolent trickster and the retarded.  

Whitehead's "Drops of Experience."

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.