COMMENT’S ON SHA XIN WEI’S

1. COMMENT’S ON SHA XIN WEI’S “WHITEHEAD’S POETICAL MATHEMATICS”

2. Sha Proposes to: • “yield a way out of the static and atomistic aspects of Whitehead’s metaphysics”, • “enrich a plenist and process-oriented concept of unbifurcated nature.” • Replace Whitehead’s topological methods with more modern tools.

3. My Comments Will: • Defend Whitehead’s atomism on the basis of its concordance with, and utility for, contemporary basic physical theory. • Suggest a different modern way to improve Whitehead’s topological method.

4. Whitehead’s Core Idea: “CONTINUITY CONCERNS WHAT IS POTENTIAL, WHEREAS ACTUALITY IS INCURABLYATOMIC”

5. Whitehead’s ontology is built out of atomic (indivisible) actual entities! • “The final facts are, all alike, actual entities, and these actual entities are drops of experience” p.18 • “an actual entity is an act of experience” p.68 • “ ‘Actual entities’---also termed ‘actual occasions’, are the final real things of which the world is made.” p.18

6. Atomism • “The actual entities atomize the extensive continuum. This continuum is in itself merely potentiality for division.” p.67 • “The contemporary world is in fact divided and atomic, being a multiplicity of definite actual entities. These contemporary actual entities are divided from each other, and are not themselves divisible into other actual contemporary actual entities” p. 62

7. Atomism • “in the actual world there are definite atomic actualities determining one coherent system of real divisions throughout the region of actuality. Every actual entity …is…somewhere in the continuum…” (p.67)

8. Atomism • “every actual entity in the temporal world is to be credited with a spatial volume for its perspective standpoint.. These conclusions are required by the consideration of Zeno’s arguments in connection with the presumption that every actual entity is an act of experience.” (p.68)

9. Atoms of Action:Decisions • “Actual entities atomize it [the extensive continuum] and thereby make real what was antecedently merely potential.” (p.72) • “every decision is referred to one or more actual entities…Actuality is decision amid potentiality.” (p. 43). “Actual entities are the only reasons.[causes]. ” (p.24)

10. Continuity, Causation, and Discreteness in Physics • Newton/Classical physics. Continuous process satisfying “causal closure of the physical”: mind/consciousness is left out of the causal structure! • Quantum theory has discrete events: the Geiger counter clicks or does not click. • Bohr: “The element of wholeness symbolized by the action, and completely foreign to classical physical principles.

11. Quantum theory has causal gaps and discrete decisions. • Two kinds of discrete decisions needed! • Process 1 “free choice” by experimenter. • Nature’s choice of outcome. • Like “Twenty Questions” • Each discrete decision is associated with a particular region in space • Drops of experience, active or passive.

12. Actual and Knowledge inQuantum Mechanics • Heisenberg: “The observation itself changes the probability function discontinuously; it selects of all possible events the actual one that has taken place. Since through the observation our knowledge of the system has changed discontinuously, its mathematical representation has also undergone the discontinuous change”

13. Transition from possible to actual in Quantum Mechanics • Heisenberg: “the transition from the ‘possible’ to the ‘actual’ takes place during the act of observation.”

14. Tomonaga-Schwinger and Whitehead • Ψ(t)Ψ(σ) • t~A continuous three-dimensional surface in the four-dimensional space-time continuum, with all spatial point lying at the same time t • σ~A continuous three-dimensional surface in the four-dimensional space-time continuum, with no pair of points light-like separated.

16. Compatible with relativity • Predictions are independent of ordering of space-like separated events. • Newton’s “receptacle” space and time: exists even if nothing is in it, versus • Leibniz’s relational view.