Whitehead's "Process and Reality" dates from 1929.
In it, he argues – among many other things – that "It has been a defect in modern philosophies that they throw no light whatever on any scientific principle." (Pt.2, §IV, IV).
Does his own philosophy ("the philosophy of the organism") stand up to that requirement when confronted with contemporary scientific knowledge?
What you think to be "Quantum Physics" and "contemporary scientific knowledge" is not a science and not a knowledge. It is a pseudo-science placated upon some correct equations of evolution.
These correct equations are strictly undulatory and strictly deterministic, but contradict the infantile fairy tales that the QM teachers teach to the students.
On a given idea, always look in the mouth.
www.researchgate.net/publication/317605373_Fifteen_surreptitious_copenhaguist_and_corpuscularist_postulates_we_do_not_more_accept
Seventeen surreptitious postulates, indeed.
I made a study of this question two years ago. I was surprised to see how close Whitehead's descriptions came to a new theory that I had stumbled into. So I was curious how well his idea would hold up to the latest research, especially in relation to quantum mechanics.
Whitehead's ideas are consistent with what was known about quantum mechanics at the time when he wrote his book, Process and Reality, but some discoveries that came later show that there is a gap in his theories.
For example, Whitehead’s description appears, from what I can see, to begin with the space-time universe as if it always existed. He does a masterful job of explaining how events are based on the influence of prior events, and how these influences come together to form a new expression of the world. Thus, the current state of the world evolves from previous states. He also explains why these new outcomes are never fully determined by the past because "prehension" is only about influence, not cause and effect. All of this agrees with my own theory, but this falls short of explaining what reality looks like before actualized events take place (before the quantum wave function collapses). In other words, he can't explain how space and time emerge.
In the same book where he introduced the term, prehension (Science and the Modern World), Whitehead devoted a chapter to “The Quantum Theory.” He does a good job of explaining the dual wave/particle behavior of particles and the fact that all energy and matter are quantized. However, his insights don’t add much to untangling the quantum puzzle. In fact, they seem quite dated. This shouldn’t be surprising, considering that his book was written just shortly after the wave nature of matter was discovered and long before many important discoveries were made.
The key downfall of his theory is that he only deals with space-time events. This is the only reality his theory acknowledges. In fact, as Leemon McHenry's book shows, "The Event Universe: The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead," everything happens as relational events, according to Whitehead. Unfortunately, this does not explain the coherent pure quantum states that exist before events take place.
Whitehead also makes it clear that events prehensively influence later events and that this only happens forward in time, never backwards. This explanation falls apart with quantum delayed choice experiments. In these experiments, there are clear cases where it appears as if the influence happens retroactively. This is still one of the most baffling quantum experiments.
Whitehead can easily be excused for missing this because delayed choice quantum eraser experiments weren’t discussed until John Archibald Wheeler proposed them in the late 1970’s.
If you find this interesting, you might want to compare Whitehead's ideas with the paper I recently published through a peer-review journal:
Article The Lenses of Perception Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
- Badges
- Science method
- Similar topics
- Philosophy