Last Tuesday, doing philosophy over rounds of tea and cookies, we considered K's suggestion that Whitehead's elaboration of the nature of an actual entity may primarily be a theory of causation, albeit not in the standard vocabulary of cause and effect. There was however a general discomfort over the use of anthropomorphic language such as 'feeling' to explain an ontology (of things, not all of which are human). I think Whitehead makes it sufficiently clear what he means by 'feeling', and the definition is by no means merely psychological (i.e., restricted to human psychology) even if it seems to carry that baggage. Feeling is the term used for the basic generic operation of passing from the objectivity of the data to the subjectivity of the actual entity in question (PR 83, 65). Whitehead may be a vitalist, but he is also a realist, celebrating the dynamic character of a plurality of things: apples, cinema, genomes, gnomes! For him, therefore, vitalism is not restricted to human beings or even living organisms; everything in the universe is living. Perhaps this is what Thales meant when/if he said 'all things are full of gods' and thought that magnets have soul. Even the seemingly static and lifeless have a life of their own, and are affected by their own histories, their environment and the inherent potentiality to become.
It remains to be seen how this position holds through subsequent readings.
However, to go back to the question of cause—effect, the hypothesis of the faster-than-light flight of Neutrino (ghostly subatomic particles) is both destabilizing and thrilling because: particles that move faster than light are essentially moving backwards in time, which could make the phrase cause and effect obsolete. How will actual entities moving faster than the speed of light affect other actual entities, their slower comrades?
The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali, 1931, Oil on canvas, 24 × 33 cm
It remains to be seen how this position holds through subsequent readings.
The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali, 1931, Oil on canvas, 24 × 33 cm
At the end of the piece that SM had written, she asked a very engaging question, the answer to which is by no means easy. Since I am no adept at navigating the perilous waters of particle physics, I will not comment on what really happens to a neutrino when it travels faster than light. But hidden within SM’s question is the more general one, which is: “If time is indifferent to direction, what happens to the law of cause and effect?”
ReplyDeleteSM’s question, if it poses itself in its naked generality, does daunt one’s confidence in attempting an answer. Anyway, I would like to share some of my thoughts on this issue, however worthy or unworthy they may be.
It seems that if time is indifferent as to direction, it would mean there is no temporal change because to say time is indifferent as to its direction is the same things as saying there is no direction (If it is indifferent to direction, why would Time care whether we say it has a direction or not!) For there to be time, something that comes before should be identifiable as something that does not come after something else. But if something is both before and after something else, the whole notion of time becomes self-contradictory.
If there is no time, then obviously there can’t be any change. And if change is the movement from being to becoming and we find out there is no change then there is no becoming which means there is neither being. For if there is no becoming, there is either only being or nothing. But there is no reason for there to be being instead of nothing. Therefore, there is nothing. Thus we are led, if we believe that time is indifferent to its direction to a Parmenidean world where there is no change.
But there is also another conclusion that we can derive, which can take those souls unhappy with such a changeless and sombre world to an eternally vibrant world. Then, the only eventuality when something can be both before and after itself (but not at the same time)is when time is circular. If time is circular, then causes can be prior to effects and the same causes can be after the effects. But there is one implication that is forced upon us, if we accept the circularity of time, which is that time is finite. The same events can be both cause and effect only when there is no possibility of new causes emerging. That way, a sequence of events can alternate in its office of cause and effect.
But I don’t quite know what our earnest brethren of the scientific persuasion would say to such a conclusion as I have drawn. But one thing is clear. His findings concerning the speed of neutrino seems to have started a murmur of disquieting voices, which might rise soon to a pitch of clamor demanding that the grounds of scientific knowledge be shifted to surer grounds.
KS