Actual Occasions Research Articles

The Concept of Creatures’ Freedom in Process Theology: A Study on David Ray Griffin's Contributions

This document delves into the realms of Process Theology, especially emphasizing David Ray Griffin's pivotal role in reshaping our understanding of the divine. Rejecting the classical depiction of God as an omnipotent and omniscient entity, it advocates for a portrayal of God as deeply involved in the evolutionary process of the universe. This approach marks a significant shift from traditional theism, proposing instead a reciprocal relationship between God and creation, where influence is mutual rather than one-directional. Process theology is notable for its application of process philosophy, which views the universe as a series of ephemeral 'actual occasions'. These instances embody the interplay between being shaped by past events and navigating towards future self-determination. Griffin’s introduction of panexperientialism further extends this narrative, suggesting that all entities, however simple, engage in a form of experiential existence, thereby challenging the traditional binaries of consciousness and volition. The relationship between the characteristics of the divine and the freedom afforded to creatures is carefully examined. Griffin posits a God whose modus operandi is relational and evolutionary, promoting a model of divine interaction that favors persuasion over coercion. This innovative perspective sheds light on the nature of theodicy, portraying a God who empathizes with the plight of creatures, thus affirming the significance of free will and the capacity for goodness amidst challenges. Griffin's rendition of Process Theology offers a refreshing narrative that reconciles the presence of evil with a benevolent divine essence, presenting God as an integral part of creation's fabric. It paints a universe where divine love, creaturely autonomy, and the complexities of existence are closely knit, offering a hopeful and empathetic view on the divine's role in the cosmic saga.

Agency, Temporalities, and the Mediation of COVID within Global Production Networks

While the global production networks (GPNs) approach produces important conceptual insights into the causal factors influencing GPNs, studies have been less concerned with the temporal intricacies of decision-making by actors. This article extends the GPN approach by examining why and how firms in the Welsh automotive sector have constructed and performed particular temporalities in response to the upheavals of COVID. A process philosophy perspective is utilized for examining how temporalities are socially constructed by human actors through actual occasions. Actors weave the past, present, and future together in socially constructed temporalities, which are imbricated with the space-times of actual occasions. The article finds that the temporalities and space-times of actions to mediate COVID have been configured around reducing and maintaining costs, and increasing risk management.

Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context

Untying the Gordian Knot: Process, Reality, and Context

Whitehead and the Immanence of Extension

Abstract The Extensive Continuum is most often seen as an empty form that awaits the accommodation of actuality. Contrary to this popular interpretation, I argue that extension is completely immanent to actual occasions and their prehensive relations. Whitehead’s doctrine of internal relations entails that extension cannot be separated from actual occasions, just as actual occasions cannot be separated from extension. To prehend is to extend. Furthermore, any strict separation of form and actuality is shown to bifurcate nature into publicity and privacy. Only with the immanence of extension is nature truly one.

Whitehead and the Immanence of Extension

The Extensive Continuum is most often seen as an empty form that awaits the accommodation of actuality. Contrary to this popular interpretation, I argue that extension is completely immanent to actual occasions and their prehensive relations. Whitehead's doctrine of internal relations entails that extension cannot be separated from actual occasions, just as actual occasions cannot be separated from extension. To prehend is to extend. Furthermore, any strict separation of form and actuality is shown to bifurcate nature into publicity and privacy. Only with the immanence of extension is nature truly one.

Cross cultural analysis of purchasers' intention to wear a counterfeit luxury product in varying social situations

Recent research regarding counterfeit luxury products has focused primarily on the motivations for consumption. However, there is little research regarding consumers' actual occasions of use of counterfeit luxury goods. We conducted a cross-cultural exploratory study among 432 millennial women in the US and Europe to examine 12 social contexts where millennial women wear a counterfeit fashion purse. The findings provide new insights toward: 1) understanding the consumption of counterfeit luxury fashion wear; 2) understanding the incidence of product usage as social importance increases; 3) exploring cross-cultural differences; 4) outlining the implications for luxury brands.

An Axiomatic Reconstruction of the Basic Categories in Process Philosophy

Although the ideas in Process and Reality are well-recognized by many scientists in various disciplines beyond philosophy, these investigations are focused on the formal interpretation of the notion of space in the context of mereotopology. Indeed, the notion of time is either neglected completely or understood as an abstraction from the four-dimensional existence of enduring objects. However, there is no elucidation of the notion of time beyond this existence. We introduce a monadic second order language to formalize the ultimate principles presupposed to Whitehead’s investigation, i.e., creativity, novelty and advance have been analyzed and reformulated as axioms. The models of the formulated theory are linear process structures, which are a special type of occurrence structures. The model-theoretic aspects of their theory are discussed in the present paper. Our fundamental theorem indicates that the worlds, which ground the knowledge of actual occasions, are ordered linearly and are equal for contemporaneous actual occasions, which implies a condition essential to the being of time.

Demonstration and study of Ga-droplet migrating propelled by <italic>in-situ</italic> laser based on MBE

In droplet epitaxy, as is well known that the metallic droplets would closely determine the density, size and site of the following quantum structures such as quantum dot/ring, nano wire and son on because they usually act as the precursors. Recently, to search for the method of effectively manipulating the droplets shows great significance. In this paper, we have conducted a pioneering study of in-situ laser manipulating droplets in the droplet epitaxy basing MBE. A layer of Ga-droplets (density: 5.7×1010 cm−2) on GaAs (001) was first prepared by MBE deposition of 6ML Ga at the temperature of 150°C with a growth rate of 0.18 ML/s and an interrupt of as flux. Then a single pulse of mono-beamed laser (355 nm/10 ns) was in-situ introduced to shoot on it and the morphology evolution was carefully studied by AFM and the mechanism was also discussed simply. It is observed: As (laser) energy density reached above 10 mJ cm−2, the Ga droplet was able to escape from the surface potential trap in all-direction and began to migrate randomly and even in a very small area of several hundred nanometers various migrations (along different surface orientations) could been seen. This was explained as: since the Ga droplets are disorderly locating on the GaAs surface, even for two closest neighbor droplets within a typical distance of hundred nanometers, the surrounding situations for them might be distinctly non-equivalent in the terms of the droplet size (height/diameter), density and the inter-droplet relative position. So when the laser pulse heated the surface, such disorder will cause a chaotic fluctuation in surface local thermal field. Then as a consequence, the droplets will move around with the diffusion force under the gradient of temperature. Accompanying with the migration, coalescence (among different droplets) might take places during the collision which could remarkably modify the Ga-droplet morphology. And this kind of modifying strongly depended on laser energy density. Statistically, as the energy density increased from 10 mJ cm−2 to 30 mJ cm−2, the density of droplet would reduce 1/3 from 5.22×1010 cm−2 to 2.23×1010 cm−2 and rapidly the dominant size was enlarged with corresponding increasement of diameter from (35–65 nm) to (65–95 nm) and height from (1–7 nm) to (7–16 nm) respectively. And meanwhile, the overall size linewidth broadened a lot resulting in an extreme “wide-band” distribution and it was hardly observed in the normal droplet growth. Such wide character of droplet size distribution would find huge use in the photoelectric detection or conversion with the special need of “broad-spectrum absorption” in many actual occasions. Herein, we have demonstrated a novel finding of “photo-induced diffusion” on droplets and moreover it seems that the diffusion has less relation with the surface orientation and the size of droplets but the energy density of laser straightly. So, it is promising to realize a highly controlled-droplet epitaxy by taking use of laser interference patterning in the future which will must make significant developments for the whole fabrication area of quantum semiconductor.

The story of ‘Oh’, Part 2: Animating transcript

In conversation analysis (CA), through Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, and others, the conceptual architecture is joined at the hip to a technical architecture of transcripts, sequence, and turn productions. That the conceptual was to be found and demonstrated in the material detail of temporal productions was central to CA’s extraordinary innovations. As with CA, an Epistemic CA has the task of giving evidence of its conceptual order in actual materials, and thus animating the materials to show them. The task and relationship are emblematically reflexive: we shall find the expression ‘Oh’ indexing ‘changes of state’ or ‘inapposite inquiries’, for example, as of the account-able animations of turns and sequences of turns. Our shared attachments to sequential analysis deliver the expectation that we shall see how Epistemic order is achieved on actual occasions, through actual materials, rendered as transcript. The discussion turns to how the Epistemic Program (EP) engages and acquits this analytic expectation.

Local Division of Labor in Rehabilitation Team Conferences

This study investigates rehabilitation team members’ interactive accomplishments of their domains of work and responsibility in rehabilitation team conferences in Japan. A combination of membership categorization analysis and sequential analysis is adopted to systematically illustrate the situated productions of professional sense-making practices. Analysis focuses on the segment in which a physician asks a series of questions regarding a patient’s functional status and disability coded in the functional assessment record (FAR). A close examination of data shows that a physician does not always choose a respondent with his or her gaze when asking a question because s/he is continuously reading the FAR displayed on a computer screen. Despite this, a physician’s mention of a topic generates a professional’s domain of work and responsibility in a local division of labor which is used by members to assume who the relevant categorial respondent is. Further, members demonstrate these assumptions by shifting their gazes toward the computer screen, back to the document on the desk, and turning toward co-participants, thus embodying professional roles and responsibilities in situ. This study utilizes the analyst’s ethnographic understanding of the routines and division of labor at the rehabilitation ward as a resource to explicate professional sense-making practices, thus utilizing Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological studies of work. Together with sequential and categorial resources offered by Sacks, this study elucidates inferences and normative expectations which rehabilitation team members bring together to reproduce the endogenous logic of rehabilitation culture in actual occasions of the institutional life.

God as a Single Processing Actual Entity

This article defends Marjorie Suchocki’s position against two main objections raised by David E. Conner. Conner objects that God as a single actual entity (affirmed by Suchocki) must be temporal because there is succession in God’s experience ofthe world. The reply is that time involves at least two successive occasions separated by perishing, but in God nothing ever perishes. Conner also objects that Suchocki’s personalistic process theism is not experiential but is instead theoretical (based on what Whitehead says in Part VofPR) and not definitive. The reply is that his dismissal ofPart V ofPR is arbitrary, the interpretation ofall experience is theoretical, and no metaphysical interpretations are absolutely definitive, including PR as a whole. Also, Conner ignores religious experience. In “The Plight of a Theoretical Deity: A Response to Suchocki’s ‘The Dynamic God’ ,” David E. Conner perceptively called attention to a significant, but as yet unresolved, dispute in process theology. How can God, understood as a single everlasting actual entity, be in process or even be involved with process? As I explain in my What Caused the Big Bang? , process thinkers may need to go back to square one and totally rethink the very nature of time itself (What 242-74), but for present purposes I will answer this question within the framework of orthodox Whiteheadianism. “Suchocki employs the term ‘dynamic’ to disguise an unresolved incompatibility between temporal and non-temporal process in God,” Conner complains (Conner 11 2). This seeming “incompatibility” is indeed unresolved, and it dates back to Whitehead’s own distinction between two kinds of process, the succession of actual occasions, which he variously called “time,” “change,” or “transition,” and the internal processing or development of a single actual occasion or entity, which he variously called “becoming,” “genetic process,” or “concrescence” (PR 21 0-1 5). Just what these involve will be explained as we go along, but process PROCESS STUDIES 42.1 (201 3) 78 theologians have been sharply divided over whether to conceive of God’s own processing as analogous to “time” or to “concrescence.” According to the “time” view, God is an everlasting society of temporally successive actual occasions. According to the “concrescence” view, God is not a society at all but is a single actual entity whose processing must be understood atemporally. Both Suchocki and Conner take their stand with the “concrescence” crowd and against the “time” crowd, best represented by Hartshorne and Cobb (until recently). Suchocki identifies William Christian, Lewis S. Ford, Jorge Nobo, Palmyre M. F. Oomen, Denis Hurtubise, and herself as subscribing to the single actual entity view (Suchocki 39). Bowman Clarke and others should doubtless be added to this list. In several publications, I have also explained my preference for the single actual entity everlasting continuous concrescence view, but I acknowledge the apparent paradox of making sense of “process” or “becoming” without “time.” Conner finds Suchocki’s position to be problematic for basically two reasons that invite further analysis and clarification. A God Who is Not Temporal, and Yet is Temporal Suchocki’s first and primary difficulty is, says Conner (Conner 11 5), that her “dynamic” God seems to be both “not temporal, and yet. . . temporal.” Conner does not deny the validity of the distinction, but he argues that Suchocki wants to have it both ways when it comes to understanding what God is like. As Conner sees it, the main problem is that time involves succession, whereas concrescence does not, being instead an “all-at-onceness,” the subordinate phases of which do not involve succession or what Conner calls “actual serial order” (Conner 11 6). Suchocki apparently thinks that there is an actual serial order in God’s experience of and interaction with the created world, though this does not involve a succession of Divine temporal actual occasions, and God is only a single actual entity. Can we make good sense of this? I believe that we can. We must begin with the very nature of time itself, as understood by Whitehead. He defined “time” in Science and the Modern World as the “sheer succession of epochal durations,” (SMW 1 24, 1 26, also PR 68), “epochs” being “actual occasions,” which have “duration,” “temporal extensiveness,” or “temporal thickness” (PR 77, 1 58, 1 69). Single actual occasions or entities are in one sense not “in time” because by definition time requires at least two actual occasions in succession. Strangely, each

Experience and the Ultimacy of God: In Memoriam John Edwin Smith

Experience and the Ultimacy of God: In Memoriam John Edwin Smith

Toward a Process Philosophy for Digital Aesthetics

Digital media seem to be marked by process. The digital image itself is produced by software processes and the constant flux of code. Further this, interaction with digital systems involves a constant process by which a so-called 'user' comes into contact with various machinic occasions. It seems that in light of these processes it is impossible to maintain an aesthetic or media theory that pictures a self-contained and psychologised subject interacting with a static and inert object. How then can we begin to think about digital aesthetics through a process philosophy rather than the traditional and reductive subject/object distinction found in so much aesthetic theory? This paper seeks to address this problem by enacting Alfred Whitehead's process philosophy, informed by Gilles Deleuze, Isabelle Stengers and Steve Shaviro and work it through several examples of recent manifestations of interactive media art, including work by Martin Wattenberg, Dennis Del Favero, Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel. I work Whitehead's process philosophy through these artworks to illustrate the performative nature of software processes and the manner in which these processes affect the aesthetics of interaction. I also use these works to illustrate a concept of interaction that privileges process and events rather than a concept that focuses upon an individual human user. In this paper I propose to view the 'user' as a set of occasions – as a particular condition that is produced by various user-initiated actions – rather than an enduring subject that is able to distance herself from the object of aesthetic contemplation. By doing this I move toward a theory in which user-occasions, machine-occasions and their interpenetration actualise the aesthetics of media art. Whitehead allows me to think outside of the binary oppositions that divide the world into knower/known or subject/object relationships. Throughout the argument I unpack Whiteheadian concepts such as actual entities, the unison of immediate becoming and, in general, the primacy of the event, bringing these concepts to bear on individual case studies of interactive media art. Whitehead's general thesis is that materiality and permanence are created by a continual process. Viewing the digital encounter through this theoretical framework I position the aesthetic experience of interaction as that which emerges from the fluctuations of process. The event of interaction is a necessarily hybrid process in which human occasions become supplemented by technology and the aesthetic event becomes innately coupled to the processes of the machine. In this paper I am not interested in any notion of consciousness or a psychologised human 'user', rather I am interested in a particular condition that takes place as user-initiated processes work with machine-initiated processes. This is because, for Whitehead, process comes before consciousness; it is the process of actual entities that prompt the consciousness into being. In this paper I thus propose interaction with digital systems as the commingling of contemporary actual occasions, shifting emphasis from a conscious human user and instead focusing on the process of the encounter that precedes this conscious experience.

Occasioned Semantics: A Systematic Approach to Meaning in Talk

This paper puts forward an argument for a systematic, technical approach to formulation in verbal interaction. I see this as a kind of expansion of Sacks’ membership categorization analysis, and as something that is not offered (at least not in a fully developed form) by sequential analysis, the currently dominant form of conversation analysis. In particular, I suggest a technique for the study of “occasioned semantics,” that is, the study of structures of meaningful expressions in actual occasions of conversation. I propose that meaning and rhetoric be approached through consideration of various dimensions or operations or properties, including, but not limited to, contrast and co-categorization, generalization and specification, scaling, and marking. As illustration, I consider a variety of cases, focused on generalization and specification. The paper can be seen as a return to some classical concerns with meaning, as illuminated by more recent insights into indexicality, social action, and interaction in recorded talk.

Quantum Collapse and the Emergence of Actuality from Potentiality

Abstract Orthodox quantum mechanics is built upon psychophysical collapse events that are the close anahgs, within contemporary physical theory, of the the Whiteheadian actual occasions, with their mental and physical poles. This article describes the way in which these events enter into quantum theory, and mediate the emergence of actuality from potentiality.

Temporal and Nontemporal Becoming

Abstract Whitehead’s initial decision to treat actual occasions as unqualifiedly indivisible rendered the notion of succession in becoming highly problematic. Temporal phases would divide the indivisible. Thus Whitehead had originally recourse to genetic analysis. Many have interpreted this as nontemporal becoming, which is not clearly distinguished from the eternity of eternal objects. Besides, Whitehead reserved the term ’nontemporal’ for the primordial nature. Finally Whitehead came to see that the indivisibility of occasions meant only that they could not be divided into smaller actual occasions (PR 69), which allowed for genetic division.

The Objective Reality of the Past: Some Further Reflections

Abstract Some Whiteheadians argue that past actual entities only exist and are available for prehension by later actual entities within the divine consequent nature. Others insist that past actual entities are objectively immortal and avaiUble for prehension within the extensive continuum. Based on an interpretation of Whiteheadian societies as structured fields of activity for their constituent actual occasions, this article proposes that the world has an objective reality even apart from the existence of God, and that past actual entities are reflected in the current structure of the cosmic process. Yet the world still needs God as its ultimate source of creativity.

Temporal and Nontemporal Becoming

Whitehead’s initial decision to treat actual occasions as unqualifiedly indivisible rendered the notion of succession in becoming highly problematic. Temporal phases would divide the indivisible. Thus Whitehead had originally recourse to genetic analysis. Many have interpreted this as nontemporal becoming, which is not clearly distinguished from the eternity of eternal objects. Besides, Whitehead reserved the term ‘nontemporal’ for the primordial nature. Finally Whitehead came to see that the indivisibility of occasions meant only that they could not be divided into smaller actual occasions (PR 69), which allowed for genetic division.

The Objective Reality of the Past

Some Whiteheadians argue that past actual entities only exist and are available for prehension by later actual entities within the divine consequent nature. Others insist that past actual entities are objectively immortal and available for prehension within the extensive continuum. Based on an interpretation of Whiteheadian societies as structured fields of activity for their constituent actual occasions, this article proposes that the world has an objective reality even apart from the existence of God, and that past actual entities are reflected in the current structure of the cosmic process. Yet the world still needs God as its ultimate source of creativity.

Quantum Collapse and the Emergence of Actuality from Potentiality

Orthodox quantum mechanics is built upon psychophysical collapse events that are the close analogs, within contemporary physical theory, of the the Whiteheadian actual occasions, with their mental and physical poles. This article describes the way in which these events enter into quantum theory, and mediate the emergence of actuality from potentiality.