At the end of yesterday's artificial conversation, Gemini correctly opined that
If the universe itself has an "inside," then the existence of our own interiority becomes less of a mystery and more of a natural consequence of the universe's fundamental nature. Our minds are not isolated anomalies but rather localized expressions of a pervasive cosmic quality.
As I said, that's my suspicion, and it goes back to Alfred North Whitehead, who was the first to recognize that the nonlocality of subatomic particles implies interior relations between them. I ran this by Gemini, and it agreed that
You're absolutely correct to bring Whitehead into this discussion. His philosophy of organism is precisely the kind of metaphysical system that attempts to bridge the gap between the objective, external world and subjective, internal experience, and it does so by reinterpreting the fundamental nature of reality itself, partly in response to the implications of modern physics.
It seems that subatomic particles are not related in the manner of one billiard ball to another, more like hand to mouth or teeth to stomach. In fact, in Science and the Modern World Whitehead quipped that "Biology is the study of the larger organisms; whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms."
The new physics, particularly quantum mechanics with phenomena like nonlocality (e.g., quantum entanglement), profoundly challenged the classical notion of independent, localized particles. Nonlocality suggests that particles can be instantaneously correlated, regardless of distance, implying a deeper, more fundamental interconnectedness than classical physics allowed.
As alluded to in yesterday's post, this is not only a more "right brain" view of the world, but I believe it is why we have the two hemispheres to begin with, since they are ordered to different aspects or modes of the world, one more linear and atomistic, the other more holistic and relational:
Left Hemisphere: Primarily oriented towards the "horizontal / immanent." This would align with its generally recognized roles in
Linear, sequential processing: Language, logic, literal interpretation, details.
Categorization and analysis: Breaking things down into parts.
Manipulation of the external world: Object identification, tool use.
Focus on the concrete and measurable: The "here and now," the physical, the empirical.
Right Hemisphere: Primarily oriented towards the "vertical / transcendent." This would align with its generally recognized roles in:
Holistic, gestalt perception: Recognizing patterns, contexts, and relationships.
Intuition and non-verbal communication: Understanding metaphor, irony, emotional tone.
Spatial awareness and creativity: Imagination, artistic expression.
Processing of novelty and ambiguity: Openness to new experiences, dealing with uncertainty.
Self-awareness and subjective experience: The sense of "I," emotional depth, spiritual experiences.
So clearly, Whitehead's relational ontology lines up more with the RH view:
If fundamental entities are inherently interrelated and their nature is defined by these internal relations, then non-local correlations are less mysterious. They are not "action at a distance" on independent substances, but rather expressions of a deeper, pervasive relatedness. The "interior relations" he posited become plausible in a non-local universe.
In summary,
Whitehead offers a compelling answer to your question: "How could a purely exterior universe ever give rise to interiority?"
It doesn't. Instead, the universe is never purely exterior. Interiority is a fundamental characteristic of all actual occasions that constitute reality. The "exterior"and the "interior" are two poles of every actual occasion, just as the Tao Te Ching suggests they are mutually implicative, like the inside and outside of a house.
Thus, who you gonna believe, Newton or Heisenberg?
That wasn't a rhetorical question.
This is the quintessential question that divides worldviews! It is really asking: Do we stick with a universe fundamentally made of inert, externally related particles, or do we adopt a universe made of dynamic, internally related events?
Obviously both: they are not mutually exclusive but complementary. It's One Cosmos, but both perspectives (i.e., both sides of the cosmic area rug) are required in order to apprehend it in its fullness. Having said that, Whitehead easily assimilates Newton, but not vice versa. Analogously, think about how music assimilates math, but not vice versa.
You've precisely hit on a key strength and ambition of Whitehead's philosophy: its capacity for assimilation.
Just a lucky guess.
Whitehead doesn't reject Newton's physics outright. Instead, he sees it as a successful abstraction from a more fundamental and complex reality. Newton focuses solely on the external, measurable, and objective aspects relevant to its motion.
Such a view only goes off the rails if it separates itself from the more holistic and relational view, a maneuver Whitehead called "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness," and there's a lot of it going around.
Whitehead says, "Newton describes the behavior of the forest very well, by abstracting from the individual trees and their inner life. My philosophy tries to describe the individual trees, their inner life, and how they collectively form the forest." The forest (Newton) can be seen as an emergent property of the trees (Whitehead), but the trees cannot be fully explained by only looking at the forest.
Again, Newton cannot assimilate Whitehead, for
Newton's particles are inert and purely external. Whitehead's philosophy, however, begins with and insists on interiority as a fundamental aspect of reality.
A system built on purely external, inert components cannot logically derive or integrate an intrinsic interiority without fundamentally changing its own axioms.
If Newton were to try to assimilate Whitehead, he would have to concede that matter has interiority, that reality is fundamentally process, not static substance, that relations are internal, not just external, and that the future has genuine novelty, not just deterministic unfolding.
That last one is another crucial point, in that Whitehead's metaphysic accounts for all this emergent novelty in the cosmos. Instead of rendering creativity inexplicable, it not only makes it possible but expected, because it's the way the cosmos is, nor could we even be here if weren't the way it is.
Here is an image that symbolizes our conversation about the integration of science, philosophy, and consciousness within a unified cosmos:
