Process philosophy

Process philosophy, by AI – The world does not consist of permanent ‘things’, rather, it is comprised of constant interactive process, flux, and change. An organism is like ‘. . . an almost unimaginably complex eddy in a sea of interacting processes that stabilize the structure of the organism (homeostasis) and also its developmental trajectory through time (homeorhesis)’.^[2]

Introduction to process philosophy

From the earliest days of philosophy, there has been a bewitching binary opposition of ideas concerning the fundamental nature of reality (metaphysics). Does the world consist of objects (things) or does it consist of processes?

If you take sides in this debate then you must be prepared for powerful contrary arguments. If your answer to this question is that both exist, then you must explain how we can reconcile these two properties of existence – or the way we experience them – how do we account for their co-existence?

This debate is sometimes framed in terms of continuants representing enduring entities that exist over time, maintaining identity despite changes, while occurrents represent transient events or occurrences that unfold within time, involving change or activity. This distinction is used in philosophical discussions about identity, persistence, and the nature of events.

The tantalizing intellectual challenge of this dilemma – what makes it more than just a silly puzzle – is that processes and objects seem to be separated in our minds but somehow united in their material manifestation. This paradox or antinomy is treated by philosophy as a contrast between being and becoming, permanence and change with, in the Western philosophical tradition, Parmenides the champion of substance^[3] and being, and Heraclitus the champion of process and change. One aspect of substance philosophy is the desire for fundamental entities, like the smallest possible indivisible particles of matter. In Eastern philosophy this contrast is expressed in a more general way as the seemingly contrary dual forces of Yin and Yang.

Ideas like these, obscure as they might seem, find a focus in science where similar mental contrasts and contradictions arise in the distinctions we make between particle and wave, space and time, substances and properties or relationship.

Plato and Aristotle (the former through his eternal unchanging world of forms or ideas and the latter through his philosophy of substance) have given Western science its emphasis on substance and permanence. But they acknowledged the challenge from presocratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus who described the world as being in constant change and flux.

Science has always had its Heracliteans and today they are known as ‘process philosophers’, one of the best-known being Bertrand Russell’s colleague Alfred North Whitehead. Their approach to science is gaining support.

For background reading on process philosophy see Wikipedia and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The following account draws heavily on the papers of Dupré and Nicholson in Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology (2018) which claims that ‘a process ontology is the right ontology for the living world’ to replace existing ‘substance ontology which provides a serviceable characterization of biological entities, especially as considered over short temporal intervals, despite being a fundamentally inappropriate description of the living world’ and later works flowing from this research.

Background

Whether we like it or not, and whether we admit it or not, we are committed to particular metaphysical views . . . even if we are not aware of them. These are intuitions we have about the world which are not a consequence of deliberation. Our intuitive understanding of the world is that it consists of ‘things’ or substances, notably physical objects like organisms and particles. This intuition assumes the ontological primacy of objects . . . we have matter first and motion second . . . the world consists of matter in motion.

This is an Early Modern extension to the earlier scholastic principle operari sequitur esse, activity is subordinate to being. Science then becomes the study of the structure and function of the world’s substances.^[1] Though this general approach might seem appropriate for the world of biology, our inclination to regard organisms as things rather than processes diminishes rapidly when we put them in a temporal context because, expressed simply, biological agency generates constant and obvious change while the changes that occur to rocks and inanimate substances are much more subtle.

Process ontology claims that the world can be more advantageously considered as consisting of processes rather than objects.

History

Process philosophy finds its first Western voice in the Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus and the doctrine of universal flux (the Greek form stated as panta rhei or ‘everything flows’) and the idea of permanence in change, that ‘we cannot step into the same river twice’.

In contrast, atomist (indivisible persisting particles) Democritus considered permanence as prior to change as did Plato in his transcendental changeless world of eternal Forms, and Aristotle whose Forms situated in this world also demonstrated persistence of kind due to an unchanging essence.

Scientific Revolution

The Scientific Revolution marks a time when the secure world of Parmenidian permanence and essence became embedded in Western scientific thinking. What ultimately captured the reality of the physical world was the ‘size, shape, motion, and texture of unchanging and eternal particles of matter‘ (Robert Boyle).

The modern treatment of  ‘fundamental’, ‘foundational’, or ‘elementary’ particles as grounding physical reality signifies the triumph of this metaphysics. Everything consists of indivisible ‘atoms’ in various combinations. Both Plato and Aristotle were substance philosophers regarding ‘things’ as autonomous, bounded, and stable objects with properties and relations, notably the essential properties that defined what kind of thing it was. This was a metaphysics in which stasis was the assumed ‘given’ or ‘default’ state of affairs in the world. The most urgent need for explanation lay in accounting for change.

Thinkers of the Scientific Revolution like Newton an Boyle were substance philosophers, the atoms of early modern science being permanent in their intrinsic properties though through motion their relations to the world changed. There are hints of process philosophy in Liebniz and more so in Hegel and the American pragmatists James and Dewey. But the most obvious precursor to this modern movement was Alfred North Whitehead in his work Process and reality (1929) which conceived the world as a ‘unified, dynamic, and interconnected whole’ though overall the book is both obscure, controversial, and of doubtful relevance to contemporary process philosophy.

Mechanism
Critical to the Scientific Revolution’s understanding of the universe as matter in motion was the perception of everything, including life, as being machine-like.

Life as living organisms, Aristotle had pointed out, demonstrated properties that did not exist in its parts: the organism, as a functionally integrated whole, brought to the world a new set of emergent properties. This was what is sometimes called a holistic metaphysic. In contrast, mechanistic philosophy describes the whole purely in terms of the interaction of parts, without recourse to emergent novelty.

Organicists

Apart from classical thinkers, many biologists and thinkers were process sympathizers including Joseph Woodger, Thomas Huxley, Georges Cuvier. Modern process philosophy finds its roots in early 20th century thinkers known as the organicists (including the Brits John Haldane, Edward Russel, Charles Sherrington, Conrad Waddington and on the continent Ludwig Bertalanffy and Paul Weiss) who rallied against reductionism, mechanistic biology, and vitalism and the accentuation of the idea of the organism as a self-regulating whole existing in time.

In a world of flux the most basic metaphysical question asks how anything can retain autonomy or stay the same.

Process

Process (processual) philosophy emphasizes change, flux, and development as fundamental features of reality. It is criticized for ignoring the need for stability in any meaningful account of existence or explanation of reality and the need for a coherent account of stability as a means of evaluating the accuracy of assertions. Traditional philosophical frameworks often depend on stable entities, essences, or fixed principles to make sense of the world. Process philosophy challenges these by emphasizing flux and change as fundamental. Critics argue that this undermines our ability to make sense of the world coherently and consistently. Without stable entities or principles, they argue, it becomes difficult to establish any firm ground for knowledge or understanding leading to skepticism, the impossibility of knowing anything with certainty. Critics argue that without stable foundations or fixed points of reference, any attempt to understand reality becomes futile. This skepticism can be seen as problematic for fields such as science and ethics, which rely on stable principles and laws.

Objects are (usually) extended in space and it is a moot point whether they have temporal parts: processes are extended in time and have temporal parts. Processes entail change (traditionally objects as durable units not dependent on external relations are the subjects of change while process merely track their modification). Subjectless processes thus become problematic (osmosis, fermentation, digestion). Their existence is not, however, compromised by their lack of determinate boundaries (concrete particulars) or spatiotemporal location.

For contemporary process philosopher of biology John Dupre a process is ‘ ‘something’ for which change, or activity, is necessary for it to be the kind of entity it is‘ (see video below).

Biological thermodynamics

All activity is the processing of energy. Organisms are constantly processing flows of energy and matter but in a unique way because they are dynamically stable replicating open systems. That is, they maintain a steady internal environment (homeostasis) in the face of wide-ranging external conditions . Thermodynamically metabolism is the integration of the energy-releasing process of catabolism (organic molecules broken down during respiration) and the energy accumulating process of anabolism (the energy-accumulating process of constructing macromolecules). This is what ensures homeostatic self-maintenance in the face of a variable environment and entropy. It is metabolism that is the single most important characteristic of life (N p. 6) Food as fuel-energy is incorporated in a changing organic structure since organisms ‘autonomously modify their constitution’ … ‘… adaptively’ (p. 7) (not so in machines).

Max Rubner demonstrated that organisms observe the first law of thermodynamics (in a closed system energy is neither created nor destroyed only transformed from one form to another) such that the amount of energy returned to the environment (as, say, excretory products and heat) is equivalent to the energy taken in (assuming no change in weight).

The second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time, that there can be no completely efficient transformation of heat into work – the amount of free energy (that available for work) is constantly decreasing while entropy is increasing. There is thus a net running down of the universe as an increase in disorder, sometimes called ‘the arrow of time’. This is all in stark contrast to what occurs in nature where organisms have tended towards greater organization and complexity over time. While the net entropy of the universe is increasing local pockets of order as negative entropy or ‘negentropy’ can be maintained. Organisms do this by importing free-energy-rich matter (food) from the environment and degrading it internally to maintain structure (until death) while increasing external entropy through the export of heat and waste products.

In 1977 a Nobel Prize was awarded to Ilya Prigogine for his foundational work in non-equilibrium thermodynamics (which studies steady states, irreversible processes, and non-linear reactions). The subject matter extends beyond organisms to open systems like tornadoes, whirlpools and flames – referred to as dissipative structures.

Machine metaphor

For process biologists it is time for the metaphor of organisms as finely tuned machines to be replaced with the metaphor of life as a flowing stream because organisms are more like processes than objects. For an organism activity is a necessary condition for existence and the self-maintenance of form. So, for example, each organism’s development proceeds according to a program encoded in the genes.

It helps to list the more obvious ways that organisms differ from machines – this is close to formulating a definition of ‘life’:

Organisms are intrinsically purposive, their ‘ends’ are (short-term) generated from within while machines get their purpose from external agents (extrinsic vs intrinsic teleology). Organisms exhibit (to use consciousness-talk) ‘self-interest’ (the preservation of its organization) while machines serve the interests of their designers. Although organisms totally dependent on their environment they are nevertheless semi-autonomous matter thus exhibit pre-conscious (non-intentional) agency with norms related to their own existence.
Organisms are open systems that constantly exchange energy/matter with the surroundings to maintain themselves against an entropy gradient. Machines may be open or closed systems and exist in equilibrium with the surroundings: they do not need free energy to persist
The ‘self-interest’ of organisms means that they exist in, as it were, in thermodynamic opposition to their environment maintaining independent existence by the constant expenditure of free energy. They are matter with a special kind of autonomy very different from the autonomy of non-living objects, this being a crucial distinction between the animate and inanimate. Organisms do not have an ‘off’ switch: once these metabolic energy flows cease the organisms dies and its physical components join those of the inanimate world. Machines can be studied when they are ‘off’, organisms can’t. Metabolic activity is a necessary condition for biological existence
The history of an organisms (preserved in its heredity) shapes its present condition
Machines are usually identifiable by an invariable material constitution: organisms are in constant flux. They are fixed structure rather than continuous flow. There is an inversion here because in machines matter determines form (form reflects the contingent spatial arrangement of matter) while in organisms form determines matter by specifying a causally-efficacious whole? That is, organisms (form) persists precisely because of constant material change
Persistence is grounded in the self-maintenance of form, not matter
Machines have static organization: organisms have dynamic organization

The genetic blueprint does not contribute all of what results from replication. The genome doesn’t contain all the information needed to specify an adult that is the product of complex collective dynamics.

Organisms maintain their form (permanence) through a flow of energy and matter (change). Biological normativity is ‘self-interest’ as the preservation of living organization through survival and reproduction. What preserves life is pre-consciously ‘good’ and what threatens it is pre-consciously ‘bad’.
The philosophy of biology (William Whewell 1840: 46)

We cannot identify an organism with the materials that compose it (though they are similar in kind).

Organisms are patterns in a flow of energy – they are more about what something does than what it is – not appearance but causal connection.

Reductionism

We are accustomed to explaining wholes in terms of their component parts. And yet parts must be part of something, so we cannot understand what a part is without reference to the whole of which it is a part. But how can any whole be more than the constituent parts and their relations? The less inclusive (like atoms) must supervene (define the grounding conditions) for the more inclusive (molecules). This is usually represented as a substance ontology of hierarchical levels: the properties and relations at one level determine the properties and relations at another.

This is discussed elsewhere with the conclusion that there are no ontological ‘levels’ in the biological world, just different aspects or scales of life, with each is equally valid with no privileged grounding at the smallest or largest scales. However, there is an epistemological distinction that can be made between biological objects.

Contemporary processural philosophy

Organisms are best thought of scientifically as processes rather than things, as ‘. . . an almost unimaginably complex eddy in a sea of interacting processes that stabilize the structure of the organism (homeostasis) and also its developmental trajectory through time (homeorhesis)’. ^[2]

Organisms resist entropy by being open systems extracting and organizing energy from their surroundings; they exist through phases of constant change including growth, maturation, senescence, and death. The stages are connected by causal links rather than constant properties. It is dependent for its existence on other organisms and its surroundings. Organisms and biological objects owe their thing-like stability – being a persisting entity such as an organism, heart, or chloroplast – to countless stabilizing processes. This objectification has been referred to as ‘reification’ coming in two forms, means-reification as a convenient way of making sense of and investigating the world, and target-reification that identifies empirical aspects (stabilized processes) of the world.

Contemporary process philosopher Sophie Ann Meincke states that:

‘A process, as I technically define it, is an entity for whose identity change is essential (‘entity’ here to be understood in a most neutral way as a placeholder for whatever satisfies the definition): a process must change – and move – to exist, as opposed to a thing (in the technical sense defined earlier), which may but need not change, or which, actually (as we have found in our discussion of both historical and contemporary versions of thing ontology), must not change (at least not in certain ways) if it is to continue existing. Identity, accordingly, is to be understood not as a given but as a product: a product of processes and their interactions. It is itself genuinely processual and never static. This is not to say that processes cannot be stable over time – indeed, their stability is what facilitates tracking them, as self-identical entities, through time and space. We must not confuse stability and stasis, the latter being an (alleged) absence of movement and change, the former being a dynamic equilibrium of movements and changes. Process identity is stability over certain periods of time and relative to certain time scales. In each case it is stability, not change, what requires explanation.’^[3]

‘Things’, as concepts, make up the basic constituents of thought. The physical ‘things’ (objects) of the physical world are related to the objects of thought by being physically permanent within the timescale of human perception.