Mindful Universe (The Frontiers Collection)

Author:Henry P. Stapp [Stapp, Henry P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2009-02-06T13:19:00+00:00

13.6 The Psychophysical Building Blocks of Reality

In the Whiteheadian ontologicalization of quantum theory, each quantum reduction event is identified with a Whiteheadian actual entity/occasion.

Each Whiteheadian actual occasion/entity has a `mental pole' and a `physical pole'.

There are two kinds of actual occasions. Each actual occasion of the first kind is an intentional probing action that partitions a continuum into a collection of discrete experientially different possibilities. Each actual occasion of the second kind selects (actualizes) one of these discrete possibilities, and obliterates the rest.

According to this Whiteheadian quantum ontology, objective and absolute actuality consist of a sequence of psychophysical quantum reduction events, identified as Whiteheadian actual entities/occasions.

These happenings combine to create a growing `past' of fixed and settled `facts'.

Each `fact' is specified by an actual occasion/entity that has both a physical aspect (pole) and a mental aspect (pole), and a region in spacetime from which it views reality. I take the physical pole or aspect of the actual occasion to consist of a physic ally/mathematically described input and a physically/mathematically described output. The physical input (output) is precisely the part of the physically described state of the universe that is localized, just before (after) the jump, on the front boundary of the standpoint region associated with the actual occasion.

The mental pole also consists of an input and an output. The mental inputs and outputs have the ontological character of thoughts, ideas, or feelings. The mental inputs are drawn primarily from the mental outputs of the prior occasions, and the mental output of the current occasion is the bud of experience created by/at this current event or occasion.

The process by which the mental and physical inputs are combined to produce mental and physical outputs involves, according to Whitehead, aspects identified as appetites, evaluations, and satisfactions. Thus idea-like qualities are asserted to enter into the dynamics of the basic process that creates the actual occasions, and hence reality itself.

The paradigmatic example of an actual occasion is an event whose mental output is an addition to a human stream of conscious events, and whose physical output is the actualized neural correlate of that mental output. Such events are `high-grade' actual occasions. But the Whitehead quantum ontology postulates that simpler occasions that have lower-grade outputs also exist. Thus the Whitehead quantum ontology is essentially an ontologicalization of the structure of orthodox relativistic quantum field theory, stripped of any anthropocentric trappings, but supplied with an internal creative process that makes ideas dynamically effective. This approach takes the physically described and psychologically described aspects of contemporary orthodox relativistic quantum field theory to be exemplars of the elements of a general non-anthropocentric ontology.

This putative understanding of the way nature works is only an outline, the details of which can be filled in when new more incisive data that need to be accommodated become available. The theory is not implied by the currently available empirical data, but it gives a rationally coherent way to accommodate:

1. "the element of wholeness [... ] completely foreign to the classical physical principles" noted by Bohr,

2.

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