 Welcome back To beyond networks the evolution of living systems and to the second lecture in the third module Which is about process the process perspective on science and on reality and this particular lecture we're going to talk a little bit about process philosophy what it is What its history is it's going to be a very very quick and superficial overview. I'm trying to give you sort of to Impressions one is why is it useful to? think about processes and The other is what what what do I mean by this? What what do I mean by saying? How do we take a process perspective versus what? so let's dive right in and Oops, I'm gonna quote Start with this quote by Nicholas Resher again that I showed you at the end of the last lecture Which is about the processional nature of knowledge? How it reflects the fact that our thought about the real things in the world presses outward beyond the limit of any restricted boundaries so this idea that Science the quest for scientific knowledge is an endless journey. I call this open inquiry in my creativity and in my philosophy courses and It'll never end we established that much it'll go on and on and on so what does that mean if Even our knowledge of the world is constantly changing. Let's have a look At the kind of theories we have about the world what we think the world is like and Try to examine them and here I want to start with a quote from the most famous Process philosopher of all times Alfred North Whitehead Who was also a brilliant mathematician? And he says something interesting which is going to motivate our journey here. He says When you are criticizing the philosophy of an epoch or the science at the time as well Do not chiefly direct your attention To those intellectual positions which it's its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend Those are recognized problem There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know that they are assuming Because no other way of putting things have ever occurred to them. I think this is a great quote. So if you have a Truly new way of Thinking about something It'll probably come From somewhere unexpected Because people are not yet talking about it and often it comes It's unexpected because it's right under your nose and this is what actually is a personal. This is why I'm excited about Process thinking this is a personal Story and a personal experience for me I think the fact that everything in the world is a process and not a thing is something very fundamental And I've always thought in these categories, but other people around me didn't and it took me a very long time to realize that Actually an until I was already doing my PhD and and I was trying to publish papers and The reviewers rejected them but not because they thought the argument was sloppy or wrong The evidence was bad, but mostly because they didn't understand question This is what drove me into philosophy as a scientist It was it was trying to understand why don't they understand even what I'm asking This was the topic of our last lecture the unknown. Let's focus on the unknown and With with the process perspective, it's quite amazing because it's it's really right there. Okay? Everything changes. Nothing ever stays the same in our life This is just a fact you can look at these two beautiful pictures of the Eiffel Tower and see Between 1900 and 2017 how much has changed, but we immediately focus on the constant Factors in this image the river and of course the tower itself So change is universal. It's all around us if we open our eyes We see it everywhere, but we generally tend to explain the world in terms of static entities things in normal language and So a philosophy that is based on things as the fundamental ingredients of the world That's called a substance based philosophy and These sort of substance based explanations that come from substance-based philosophy. They are deeply entrenched in our thinking in fact Everybody starts out as a common sense substantivist and paraphrasing Geary's quote about how everyone starts out as a common sense realist also we're realists We're also substances very early in our development. We start to recognize things my toy not your toy Okay, it's very important To recognize Things because you can possess them. Okay, you can define them. You can grab them All right, and this is how our cognitive development is is going on Very fundamental and it's very hard to get out of this mode I'll give you a very very concrete example of that about language in just a minute And there is some really beautiful work by cognitive psychologist George Lack of About this lack of and Johnson metaphors we live by another book I highly recommend They talk about How as you grow up as a child The world appears as a kind of container to you. It has it's full of objects. They change location and They change properties over time These objects cause things to happen By interacting directly with one another and prototypically they move each other about by banging into each other This is a common sense view of the world In a child, okay, so everybody starts out like this across culture and especially traditions of thinking that are not Substance-based like in Eastern Asia Buddhism Hinduism they train This sort of substance thinking away for example by meditation. It's a very experiential sort of thing in their case But we can also handle this transition intellectually if we want to so The whole world looks like a Russian doll basically objects or containers in turn Whose properties are explained by the objects they come contain So this is the the old view of physics and of course you will recognize this is the view of the clockwork universe the mechanic Mechanicist mechanistic way of looking at the world is firmly substance-based You want to figure out the parts that make up the world because it is natural for us to do this our language and the relational logic that underlie all our Reasoning logical reasoning are shaped by this doctrine set theories at the bottom of it all and Set theories nothing. It's just like, you know containers within containers And our language and our logic primes us to ask what is the world made of? Not how it flows. So this is intuitively what we're going to ask first so it is Obvious if we look if we care to look it's obvious that everything always changes even the most stable things are Only processes that are happening at timescales that we can sometimes not even fathom, you know Some some particles in a standard model Of particle physics have very long lifetimes. So they are not changing And probably the whole lifetime of our species and our planet, but they are ultimately so Whoops Alfred North Whitehead Calls this the fallacy of misplaced concreteness That is a great concept and I want you to to sort of think about it for a second It is he says the error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete what we're doing When we look at something I'm looking at this laptop on which I'm recording my lecture and it is a thing I can see where it is. I can see it's not changing much as I record the lecture But this fact that I've distinguished a laptop from its environment. I've given it purpose I've given it boundaries is an act of Idealization it is an act of abstraction and in reality what's underlying the laptop as I'm recording this are lots of flows of electrons inside that are driving the software that is recording this talk and Also, the laptop will die Sooner rather than I hope probably and and so on and so forth So at a different timescale the laptop is clearly doesn't have such clearly defined boundaries anymore so what what Whitehead is saying if we treat the world as Based on things objects substances What we are doing is we are mistaking the abstract for the concrete When in fact the concrete is change All the time everywhere everything is changing and This is a brilliant brilliant sort of concept. We're gonna come back to it in a second so The solution to this is process philosophy Nicholas Russia is also a famous process philosopher He has written a book called process metaphysics, which gives you a very dry, but very compact Introduction to the topic and he says Process metaphysics as a general line of approach holds that physical existence is at bottom processual That processes rather than things best represent the phenomena that we encounter in the natural world Now The thing is you have to count how many times I say thing in this talk We'll come back to the problem of process language in a minute. It's impossible to avoid thing object-oriented language, but interesting question here is or aspect of this quote is That you don't even have to buy into this sort of metaphysical claim that the world is like that Everything that actually exists is a process and not a thing You just have to agree for the rest of this lecture at least that it may be interesting To adopt this perspective. So basically You have to appreciate the epistemological and Methodological value of the approach for knowledge generation so that we could find something new by changing our perspective So you don't have to buy into my entire Metaphysics the world everything is a process and everything flows and it's a very sort of dude like, you know, it's very cool This philosophy but you don't have to buy into that You only have to sort of be interested in the fact that we could find new Interesting insights by adopting this perspective Very very briefly and overview over the history of this philosophy and I repeat this is a minority position in Western philosophy There are some very famous philosophers that have Propagated it, but it's it's very few and it starts with Heraclitus It's called the obscure the weeping philosopher probably because nobody understood what he was talking about and he has this famous quote Panta ray everything flows, which is in this title of this module So for him the entire world was made of strife. He called it a struggle between different Influences you have to think about it just like a dialectic process thesis and antithesis and Synthesis he didn't say that but but not war often. It's translated as reality is a constant war We have already encountered Leibniz and his monads and and these monads are not only sort of little holograms that contain the whole rest of the universe but they're also processional and they have a sort of even a basis basic cognition Appetition calls it's a very weird view of the world, but it's very sort of process-based and he of course Leibniz also is one of the inventors of Calculus Differential calculus which will become important for dynamic modeling later on Berkson Henri Berkson has a very bad reputation among biologists because he was a creationist he believed that there is some sort of Elan vital Vital force that distinguishes living organisms from non-living organisms at the same time. He had some really interesting and very highly relevant ideas about the creative power of evolutionary processes and we should Drop our prejudices and read him again The American pragmatists nobody not many people know them nowadays. We encountered William James as a sort of when it was about Pragmatist truth already Purse and Dewey are two other very interesting philosophers in that school And their worldview is was also process-based and then as I said the most famous process Philosopher of all is probably Alfred North whitehead around a turn In the early 20th century And Suzanne Langer will encounter when we talk about process thinking in biology She was one of the first to apply process thinking to organisms and there is a modern school Of a very active modern school of process thinkers. We're gonna talk about your Hannah site I don't know if I'm gonna explicitly talk about John Dupre And Mark Bickert, but what I'm gonna tell you about is implicitly based on their philosophy And I've replaced whitehead by these three modern process philosophers there because They are a little embarrassed by his obscure writing and all that so they tried to distance themselves So what you should know is that this is not a school of philosophy There are different sort of ideas, but they're all based on this basic idea that everything is in the end Fundamentally a process. Let me explain that So your Hannah site has a great argument in an article that I really like Which is called the myth of substance and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness So the fallacy of misplaced concreteness we have already encountered and I've told you that Whitehead was saying that The things that we perceive in reality are a myth Okay, so she calls that the myth of substance substances aren't really real only processes are real and Reason for that her argument that I'm gonna massively oversimplify here is basically that Processes are more fundamental than things because there are a lot of processes that are not things But there is no thing that isn't also a process You have to think about even perceiving the world. That's an interaction. That's a process if something hasn't got any Influence on the rest of the universe. It's not even Perceivable it's impossible to see it doesn't exist. It's not important while there are processes for example, what's happening in this picture, it's snowing and Johanna site calls this Subject less processes. So there is no one doing the snowing The objection that I usually get is okay, the snowflakes are doing the snowing But is one snowflake falling from the sky snowing? No to know No There have to be it's a collective of activity. So the snowflakes are involved in the activity of snowing and It's interesting. We can identify snowing. It's not a thing. It's an activity, but we can identify it. It is distinct from raining and It may happen here, but not 50 kilometers further So we can localize it somewhat, but it's it's got fuzzy boundaries We don't we can't quite say when it starts when it ends and also This is important. There is nobody no subject that's behind the snowing the weather you could say but the weather is just another system made out of collective phenomena Where there is no sort of central directing agency behind it So her argument is if you have you sort of subject list processes. She has many more, you know hurricanes thoughts in your brain, whatever, okay, so Unconscious thoughts right or who's directing them? We don't know so basically Based on that argument. She says, okay It's you by by thinking about process as being fundamental You can cover more phenomena in the world than by thinking about things and therefore This is more fundamental As I said, you can buy into it or not, but there's a there's a problem I said that, you know, substance thinking is so deeply ingrained in us. It's really hard to get out of it Even if we wanted to do it There's an argument that was started by Willard Van Orman Quine that says it would be absurd It's absurd. We just can't think like that. There's a beautiful beautiful beautiful short story one of my favorite by My favorite short story writer Jorge Luis Borges Argentinian writer and it's called learn hook bar or bis tertius is a crazy story about Fictional universe that sort of seeps into the real world and starts to control it and in that fictional universe there is a planet Called learn and it has a northern hemisphere and a southern hemisphere and they have different languages in the southern hemisphere If I remember properly They don't in neither of the hemispheres do they use nouns in the language? So in the southern hemisphere, they use only adjectives different. So they describe every Thing only by its properties because the properties can constantly change. So they have no notion of a thing While in the northern hemisphere, they only talk about processes. Okay, so if You would say the moon rose above the river here above the River Thames in London They would say upward behind the on-streaming it moved Okay, and Borges has a beautiful Sort of way of describing this and of course this being Borges He also has the language of that planet in the story. So I'm not gonna read this to you But this is this here is how it sounds in colonial language, okay, so This is not what we have to do It's absurd to think we have to change our entire language. It would be very clumsy to do this It's indeed the case that our psychological cognitive structures are not adapted to this But once again, it's about giving you a perspective here And that is to think if you you can continue Thinking in object terms and substance terms as long as you remember That this is not the real thing Underneath there are processes and then if you hit the wall with your with your thing based thinking you know that Switching to this process view that's much harder to do Maybe worth your while. Okay, I'm not saying it's worth your while all the time But I'm gonna show you many many examples of problems in science where it's worth your while in my opinion It's one of the main points of this lecture. So the biggest problem We've just found out is is to talk about process is much harder to to grasp them and so One of the main fundamental problems of process philosophy and why it's never really caught on with anyone is that it's really really Hard even to define what a process is. Here's Nicholas Rescher With his attempt at a definition and this is one of the clear and more concise And concrete definitions that I found in the literature So I'm gonna read this out to you a process is a coordinated group of changes in the complexion of reality an Organized family of occurrences that are systematically linked to one another either causally or functional. I don't even know where to begin What is a coordinated group of changes? What is the complexion of reality? What do you mean by an organized family of occurrences aren't occurrences things? How do you systematically link these together? What what do you mean by causality? We'll actually have to talk about this quite a bit. So what is function etc. etc. etc. So this is a very heavily loaded definition with a lot of Ingredients that need to be clarified But it's hard to do that. So instead of sort of getting lost in definitions right now. I'm gonna end this talk just by giving you a feeling of how the process perspective Changes your view of the world compared to a substance-based Perspective so I'm doing this here in form of a table On the left is the process perspective on on the right is the thing perspective and and so the difference one difference is that in a process Perspective you focus on Relations interconnections in a system And how that system that you're studying actually connects to other the rest of the world everything is connected while if you have this thing perspective a lot of your focus is on the boundaries of the thing the nice Thing about things is that you You can define them pretty precisely in space and time But that also takes them out of their context. So you lose context much more easily in an object based perspective than a process based perspective. The process perspective is continues. It's flowing while the thing perspective is discrete. The focus is on boundaries. There's one thing then there's another thing while processes flow into another Interact with each other. They become each other. It's it's sort of this really cool sort of flowing paradigm of the world. Very continues and therefore also harder to talk and think about a process perspective sees processes is open to the world while things are bounded. We've been over this Processes are in this way infinite. Right. They don't really start or end. They just go flowing to each other while things are of course finite. They start and they end the practical things, the real things in the world at least And because of all this, of course, a process perspective is much more holistic focused on the process perspective. than reductionist. Okay, so the reductionist perspectives, genetic reductionism, mechanistic reductionism, all of that falls very firmly into a thing based view of the world to wrap up just one more food for thought. And that's So if we want to deal with with processes we need to be able to identify them. It's not as easy as for things I told you because the boundaries are not clear and they flow into each other and so on and so forth. So how do we identify in character. So that's the other thing we need to I said it again thing we need to be able to classify, you know, we need to be able to distinguish processes. It's snowing. It's raining. We can do that. But if we want to deal with with processes, we need to be able to identify them. It's not as easy as for things I told you because the boundaries are not clear and they flow into each other and so on and so forth. We need to be able to distinguish processes. It's snowing. It's raining. We can do that, but you will see in biology. It's much harder to do that. So, okay, for think about development. This is one type of developmental process. This is another type of developmental process much more difficult to do while you can say, Okay, this organ is an I this organ is an year. The organs are things in our heads. So you can see the problem. So we need to find criteria to to individuate and characterize processes. There's some beautiful work that my philosophical collaborator James Frisco is doing on this right now. So one problem is it is the problem comes from the fact that it's impossible to delimit exact spatial and temporal boundaries for processes. So we need to consider different criteria like timescale. You can distinguish metabolic developmental and evolutionary processes and biology based on the timescale at which they are happening. Continuity, the life cycle of an organism an organism is really defined by you at this time being a consequence of you 10 years ago but I would bet that if you look back 10 years ago you barely recognize the person you were back then. And cohesion of course you've never even when you sleep you don't fall apart and come together again so there's a sort of a cohesive dynamic to your person. Of course that keeps you together. So these are candidate criteria to identify processes processes of the same kind share a common structure. What do I mean by structure of a process isn't that a thing. So structure are not structures in this sense are not things their rules to govern how one occurrence one event follows from another during a process and how this leads to organized change over time and this was in the definition. In Russia's definition remember so we will spend a lot of time during this lecture to try and make these sort of words that I'm using here clear. Don't worry if you don't understand this part quite yet. And this all renders processes identifiable reproducible. You can always recognize when it's knowing as compared when it's raining and classifiable same. Okay, so this helps us and allows us to work with processes. There is no excuse, but there is also no need to completely abandon all the sort of categories that we had, as I said so you can still use Newtonian mechanics to shoot a space probe to Saturn. You don't need relativity Einstein's relativity theory for that you only need relativity theory when you get close to the speed of light. And this is the same here. You rarely need process thinking but when you hit the wall with your thing based thinking. That's when you want to switch gears. When you want to, you know, disrupt your frame and jump into this different perspective. This is what we're trying to do. Next lecture. I want to look at science as a process inquiry as a process and then we move into biology, a little introduction into how you could use this sort of thinking for biology, which will then allow us to move on into the next module, which is about system. Sorry for going a bit longer this time, but I think this is a very sort of central aspect of what we're going to think and talk about the next two months. So I hope you enjoyed this. As usual, commands questions are very welcome. And I hope to see you the next time again for a lecture on inquiry scientific inquiry as process by now.