“…this planet, or this nebula in which our sun is placed, may be gradually advancing towards a change in the general character of its spatial relations. Perhaps in the dim future humankind, if it then exists, will look back to the queer, contracted three-dimensional universe from which the nobler, wider existence has emerged.”

–Whitehead, Modes of Thought

:::

“The “laws” of nature, and the structure of space-time, are not eternal, nor necessarily universal. They are the result of widespread, habitual forms of organization achieved by the mutual prehension of the most encompassing society of actual occasions which communicate with our experience…The cosmic habits called “laws of nature” by contemporary physicists are extremely stable relative to the individual novelty achievable by high-grade, conscious occasions, (like multicellular animals) because they are derived from the statistically aggregated decision of very simple, low-grade actual occasion (like electrons). The “mental pole” of these occasions is negligible: they are statistically dominated by the habitual “physical feelings” of their environment, an so almost always reproduce the systematic order of the eternal objets characterizing that environment with little in the way of autonomous flashes of creativity.”

–Matthew Segall, Physics of  the World-Soul: The Relevance of  Alfred North Whitehead’s Philosophy of  Organism to Contemporary Scientific Cosmology

…

Painting above by Ted Wallace

Tags:laws of natureMatt Segallphysicsprocess philosophywhitehead