…that you cannot you know it's that the future these worlds are stranger than we can suppose to quote well you know Whitehead Whitehead which is a quotation from quotation from Terence I mean these these worlds are so fantastic and you think how could…

…that you cannot you know it's that the future these worlds are stranger than we can suppose to quote well you know Whitehead Whitehead which is a quotation from quotation from Terence I mean these these worlds are so fantastic and you think how could I…

…an exploration process. Yes it seems to be an amplifier for resonance, something like putting helium in a violin. Well Whitehead defined understanding as the apperception of patterns as such, and that means then that what you're saying, that mathematics is…

…names for the same Program of mental activity. That's one way I guess you could say that. Then of course that's Whitehead who would see understanding as primarily a mathematical function, who was both a platonist and a mathematician. The word apperception,…

…of modern philosophy to realize that there are certain naive aspects of it that haunt it. That's why I try to follow Whitehead, because I think he was a platonist, he was a superb mathematician and he also was haunted by the difficulties inherent in…

…of the ongoing process of the world but I haven't quite figured out how to get these ducks all in a row. Well Whitehead preceded the computer revolution, and at that time there might have been some question as to the pre existence of all mathematical…

…been identified by various travelers who came back and gave their reports. The mathematical equivalent of Terence McKenna is maybe Whitehead I don't know. We have then a process of discovery of the already existing landscape and also the modification and…

…laws of gene segregation come into being a billion years before biology existed anywhere in the universe? That seems naive and preposterous. Whitehead had this idea of what he called the aboriginal god. What we call natural laws are simply habits of a very…

…seriously the contention that it predicts the part of history that has not yet undergone the formality of actually occurring, as Whitehead would say and under different circumstances I would demonstrate this wave because it gets down to a very, very finely…

…experimenter that we know from studying quantum mechanics that things are not simply located in space and time. This is what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. And it seems, I've always felt that what biology is is a strategy, a…

…it turns, Paul very interesting. I had a lot to say about the earlier part but I'll work backwards through it. I think Whitehead had a phrase called appetition for completion, which is, I take to be what this attractor notion is seeking to concretize. If…

…that Rupert and I were chatting last night in our room about the aboriginal nature of god, this idea which is built into Whitehead, that somehow time is the theater of god's becoming, but it's also from the point of view of a higher dimensional manifold,…

…and the way you do it is: you say that the universe is not determined in what will happen, what will undergo what Whitehead calls the normality of occurring but rather the universe is determined in the way I mentioned last night. Time is a topological…

…am the adamic human being made of light. And you leave the realm of matter and return to some previously hidden dimension. Whitehead called these things epochs, these long periods of time, and he called transitions from one to the other a shift of epochs.…

…the other is David Abrams book, the spell of the Sensuous. And both of these books are about feelings, essentially. And Whitehead, who I take as my mentor, you know, created a very mathematically formal metaphysic in which the primary datum of experience…

…created a very mathematically formal metaphysic in which the primary datum of experience is feelings. I mean, that's a direct quote from Whitehead. The only thing you can trust at this point, and some of you heard me say this before, is the felt presence…

…novel domains, and it spends less time in each domain of novelty until it moves on to the next one. This is what Whitehead called concrescence. It's what it means that in 100 years, we've gone from a world where most people didn't possess telephones to…

…And, you know, we try to make a respectable list that makes us seem profound. So, you know, Moby Dick, Finnegan's wake Whitehead. Yeah. Say, okay, that's the public list. What are the real books? Well, Bartholomew Cubbins and the 500 hats, that was a…

…shaman space with the a priori categories of Kant, with the edetic reduction of Wittgenstein, with the ideas of Merleau, Ponty and Whitehead. All the intellectual equipage of our culture must be carried with us into that space to attempt to map it in a…

…means is finally, finally, finally, when it's all the debris is cleared away, all you have is intuition, aesthetics. The final appeal, Whitehead says, is to elegance of design and intuition, and that hands the whole thing back to the artist and opens a…

…through the act of a good act of contrition. That won't be sufficient. We have to understand. And I recall, you know, Whitehead said, understanding is the apperception of pattern as such, because to fear death is to not understand what's going on. And to…

…then electronic information movement and this kind of thing. What is happening is there is an ingression of novelty toward what Whitehead and I took his term called concrescence. And this is a tightening gyre. Everything is flowing together. And in fact,…

…concrescent implosion. And the appearance of human beings and language and society is an indication that we have come into what Whitehead called the short epochs. In other words, we are very close now to the culmination of the universe's raison d'tre, its…

…people who are very heavy pot users. You see it with alcohol, you see it with tobacco. Life is not user safe. You know, Whitehead said, it's the business of the future to be dangerous. On the other hand, it's good to get an education. It's good to…

…in self reflection, intelligence, material downloading of ideas into matter. If there is an appetition for completion, as Alfred north Whitehead thought, then we have turned a corner in the high stakes game of nature's unfoldment. Well, I mean, certainly they…

…Concrescence is a word that I cribbed from the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead. And in fact, much of what I say Whitehead provides the foundation for. He, like myself, had the idea that he, history, grows toward what he called a nexus of completion.…

…and so on. You know, if you want to expand the circle larger and talk about influences on my thought generally, Whitehead, you know, I'm basically a kind of platonist in the tradition of modified neoplatonic idealism. So is Whitehead. All process philosophy…

…thought generally, Whitehead, you know, I'm basically a kind of platonist in the tradition of modified neoplatonic idealism. So is Whitehead. All process philosophy falls under that. I was influenced by people like ll White and Ch. Waddington. These are…

…year, millennium, kilocasm of time, habit and novelty are locked in some kind of dynamic struggle. Yeah, you mentioned this is a Whitehead thing. I've never read Whitehead's book. But did he use it in a composition or the similar kind of a. Context that…

…his influence on modern society, on modern philosophy, is certainly minimal. Alfred North Whitehead is my great favorite. I mean, I think Whitehead is just the cat's pajamas. And he has this idea of a living cosmos, that life and vitality extend right down…

…the electron. And yet, in spite of his mathematical contributions, the fact that he wrote principia mathematica with Bertrand Russell, Whitehead is not taught. I mean, there's some, I guess, one university in this country where they take him seriously. The…

…that is, in my definition, a delusion, a point of view purchased at the expense of the facts. Of the matter. You know, Whitehead said, there are stubborn facts. You can reduce and reduce all you want, but there are certain stubborn facts. Well, one of…

…Ahmet has gotten at in this conference, that consciousness collapses the state vector and causes the stuff to undergo. What Whitehead called the formality of actually occurring, is the beginning of the understanding of the centrality of man. We have been…

…That's really the difference. The fundamental difference between science and magic is that science believes there is something, what Whitehead called stubborn facts, which need to be illuminated, and the magician knows that the world is being created by…

…through the act of a good act of contrition. That won't be sufficient. We have to understand. And I recall, you know, Whitehead said, understanding is the apperception of pattern as such, because to fear death is to not understand what's going on. And to…

…happen and what cannot happen, we have no theory that explains why, out of everything that could happen, certain things undergo what Whitehead called the formality of actually occurring. And this was what the logos sought to explain to me, why, out of all…

…a electronic information movement, and this kind of thing. What is happening is there is an aggression of novelty toward what Whitehead and I took his term called concrescence. And this is a tightening gyre. Everything is flowing together. And in fact, the…

…was there before you got here and will be there after you depart. And this is essentially the view of science. You know, Whitehead said, there are certain stubborn facts, and the world is one of them, or if you are the other, philosophical flavor has…

…book of that title? I think what is meaning? And then what does it mean that there is meaning? Is it simply, as Whitehead suggests, the apperception of pattern as such? Or is there eventually some kind of a metaphysic, some kind of a discernible mega…

…society is almost a pure novelty production process. And what all this novelty, one way of thinking of novelty, and Whitehead suggested this is density of connectedness. Well, then, if you define novelty as density of connectedness, then you can predict…

…shaman space with the a priori categories of Kant, with the edetic reduction of Wittgenstein, with the ideas of Merleau Ponte and Whitehead. All the intellectual equipage of our culture must be carried with us into that space to attempt to map it in a…

…that point will be data points in the future. So, this is not only a theory of history time, which has undergone what Whitehead calls the formality of actually occurring, but it is also a theory of the future time, which has not yet undergone the…

…those places. I respect astrology because I know nothing about it. But this is, seems quite strange to me that this works. Whitehead said a wonderful thing. He said, understanding is the apperception of pattern as such. And I think this illuminates a lot…

…meaning in the unspeakable, and then return with this sense of meaning. But meaning is very provisional. It is basically, as Whitehead, brilliantly understood, a feeling. Meaning is a feeling. No matter how abstract the meaning may be, it ultimately is a…

…down to saying what appears to be going on is that there is what I call borrowing the term from Whitehead, concrescence, that everything is being pushed toward a state of greater and greater density, compactedness, connectedness, integration into itself. You…

…in this crisis is consciousness, whatever that means. The ability to integrate data about the situation that we are in. You know, Whitehead said, understanding is the apperception of pattern as such. I mean, if you see a pattern in how people are seated…

…which I call understanding. And I don't mean this in an intellectual sense. I mean it in the sense that Alfred north Whitehead intended when he defined understanding as the apperception of pattern as such. As such. There's nothing more to it than that.…

…any of these, that is the internal horizon of its own transcendence. Now, this kind of talk is whiteheadian talk. Whitehead in the twenties and thirties, actually created a philosophy, a rigorous metaphysic, entirely capable of, of working in a psychedelic…

…the coming together of actual events in a real world, and the dissolution of those events into a world of potentiality. This is all Whitehead type stuff. Some of you may know the notion of memes. A meme is the smallest unit of an idea. It's to ideas…

…It simply means that your calendar spins off its axis and you have to reset your clock. Maybe it may mean something else. Whitehead, who I'm a great follower of, had the idea of what he called epochs, and he pointed out that a constant, for instance,…

…have we looked at? We have sampled 80 years in one spot in the universe. And yet from that, our physics is extrapolated. Whitehead had the idea of what he called epochs, which were like bubbles in the universe of possible time. And within these bubbles,…

…and then if need be, I'll harangue. So anybody have anything they want to? Yeah, I like understanding. I think, you know, Whitehead said that understanding is the apperception of pattern. As such. That's all. As such. And so you can look at any situation…

…times in these talks is I can, it's easy to sketch out dilemmas it's almost impossible to bring, to offer reassuring closure. Whitehead said it's the business of the future to be dangerous. Of course, he said that in 1920, when it wasn't nearly as…

…coordinating eye, there is still, though, for how much longer? Who can say? A kind of nexus of coordination in the body. And Whitehead made this point presciently clear back in the thirties, in process and reality. Is this the answer to a question, or am…

…I'm a provisional platonist. I think, you know, if you want to get this nailed down philosophically, then Alfred north Whitehead is your guy, because Whitehead is a platonist, but he understands the danger of pure idealism. Pure idealism contains paradoxes…

…I think, you know, if you want to get this nailed down philosophically, then Alfred north Whitehead is your guy, because Whitehead is a platonist, but he understands the danger of pure idealism. Pure idealism contains paradoxes and problems that are almost…

…by the world of phenomena, I think, won't withstand modern logical laundering. And that what we have to see is, as Whitehead understood, that the universe is an organism. It's changing, it's evolving. It has an internal dynamic of unfoldment. But final…

…none of our reality is based on inexorable physical law. But I only want that to be true. I'm not sure it is true. Whitehead used to, he had this thing about what he called stubborn facts, and he said, there are some stubborn facts, and you can cut…