Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (American Philosophy) by Michael Epperson

Author:Michael Epperson [Epperson, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780823223190
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2018-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

THE PHASES OF QUANTUM MECHANICAL CONCRESCENCE

The process of concrescence is divisible into an initial stage of many feelings, and a succession of subsequent phases of more complex feelings integrating the earlier simpler feelings, up to the satisfaction which is one complex unity of feeling. This is the “genetic” analysis of the satisfaction. The actual entity is seen as a process; there is growth from phase to phase; there are processes of integration and reintegration.

Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

The process of concrescence described here by Whitehead is exemplified by the process of quantum mechanical state evolution, which entails the evolution of a closed system of objectively extant facts (data) correlative to the concrescent evolution of a single subject-fact (the indexical eventuality of the measuring apparatus). This evolution consists of a succession of phases in which manifold potential specifications of each datum are integrated—relative to the measuring apparatus and, particularly, its preferred basis. This integration entails the elimination of incompatible and irrelevant specifications via a process of negative selection, productive of the decoherence effect. The result is a matrix of decoherent, mutually exclusive and exhaustive alternative, probability-valuated integrations or potential system states. Of these, one will become actual fact in satisfaction of these valuations as revealed retrodictively by future measurements in its role as datum for these measurements.

The final phase in the process of concrescence … is termed the “satisfaction.” It is fully determinate (a) as to its genesis, (b) as to its objective character for the transcendent creativity [i.e., as datum for subsequent actualizations], and (c) as to its prehension, positive or negative, of every item in its universe.…50

The satisfaction is merely the culmination marking the evaporation of all indetermination.51

Furthermore, the evolution from phase to phase in a concrescence does not occur in asymmetrically modal “physical time,” and this is exemplified in quantum mechanics by the time-independent Schrödinger equation which most fundamentally describes this evolution. Each phase, rather, presupposes the actualization as a quantum whole—further exemplified in quantum mechanics, for example, by the inability to specify “what happens between” one observation and the next. This principle, an infamously mystifying component of quantum mechanics for many, is entirely intuitive when interpreted according to the Whiteheadian scheme: For apart from facts, there is nothing to specify.

This genetic passage from phase to phase is not in physical time: the exactly converse point of view expresses the relationship of concrescence to physical time. The actual entity is the enjoyment of a certain quantum of physical time. But the genetic process is not the temporal succession: such a view is exactly what is denied by the epochal theory of time. Each phase in the genetic process presupposes the entire quantum, and so does each feeling in each phase.… It can be put shortly by saying, that physical time expresses some features of the growth, but not the growth of the features.52

Whitehead divides the process of concrescence into three “stages”;53 the first two stages, Stage I, the responsive stage or “physical pole,” and Stage II, the

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