It is June 2016, and a report by the state government of Queensland, Australia, declares that a species of rat, Melomys rubicola, or the Bramble Cay melomys, is in all likelihood now extinct (Watson 2016). Its decline and eventual extinction had been precipitated by repeated inundations of its small island habitat in Torres Strait. The increased frequency of the inundations is in turn thought to be due to climate change, exacerbated by human activity, making this mammalian extinction the first to be attributable to this particular cause. For this reason, this most âuncharismaticâ of animals has, post mortem, achieved a level of prominence in the public eye that it consistently failed to gain over the course of its acquaintance with Homo sapiens. Had this small rat, a relative of that most familiar of species Rattus rattus that has for the longest time been labelled a pest, lived somewhere more directly accessible to humans, and looked more appealing, the signs of its rapid decline over the previous decades might have excited greater concern amongst those agencies responsible for the preservation and promotion of biodiversity and amongst the general populace (Fulton 2017).
Around three years later, in April 2019, The Astrophysical Journal Letters publishes results from the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration to view the âshadowâ of a supermassive black hole (one that is millions of times the size of our Sun) theorized to occupy the centre of a galaxy named âM87â. The unveiling of the images is broadcast worldwide, and the collaboration itself is international in scope, gleaning data from an array of telescopes, and research teams, scattered across the globe. The images, once processed, indicate the presence of a black hole spinning in a clockwise direction, roughly as envisaged in line with the predictions of General Relativity.1 What looks like a âcoronaâ of light around a black circle is in fact an accretion ring, and the ringâs skewed orientation indicates the phenomenonâs direction of spin. This movement biases the accumulation of debris towards its âsouthâ due to a combination of gravitational lensing and relativistic beaming (Collaborat, Event Horizon Telescope 2019, p. 6). The âholeâ in the centre of this image is merely the shadow of a black hole, the elusive object itself, the singularity hidden behind the event horizon, possessing such mass that even light cannot escape its gravitational pull.
In short, in the time it has taken to write this book, we have been confronted with the first mammalian extinction caused by anthropogenic climate change. Behind this event, and advancing even more imperceptibly, our deliberate and incidental effects on our environment are accelerating natural extinctions to anything from 100 to 1000 times their normal âbackground rateâ (Woinarski et al. 2017, p. 14). Yet we have also witnessed the first images of a region of space surrounding a black hole, an awe-inspiring and thus equally humbling event. Both examples serve as a reminder of our collective power, both to care and to harm, and ultimately of the fragility of all living beings, human or otherwise, compared to the vastness of the universe that encompasses us. The study of endangered species on Earth and black holes in space both seek to make perceptible the most elusive of scientific objects of analysis. The problem of imperceptible processes is indeed one concerning the nature of scientific discovery and the role of metaphysics, but it is fundamentally also one that informs the manner in which we live on a planet under stresses for which we, as a species, are responsible. Much of this book is devoted to the details of philosophical and biological research, but always against the background of our increased awareness of environmental crisis and changing attitudes towards our fellow species on Earth, provoked by new perspectives, and ever-renewing techniques to generate such perspectives, on living processes and their complex interactions.
The structure of this book falls into three parts together providing a survey of key process philosophical approaches that, in conversation with selected concepts across the biological and physical sciences, help us to think about living processes, or âlived time,â at different scales of functioning. The first part is written from an opening perspective on the question of the differing scales of analysis provided by Alfred North Whitehead. In particular, his interest in questions arising from the quantum mechanical reconciliation with classical mechanics informs the first two chapters that address problematic categorizations of life as variously âdespotic,â âinvasive,â or as primitive (in the radically more-than-human case of micro-organisms), whose potential recategorization relies on our willingness to acknowledge changes in value depending on the scale at which we view them. The second part of the book concerns methodologies, in the light of works by Henri Bergson, whose intertwining concerns with epistemology and ontology in his theories of mind and life serve as a model for a process philosophy of biology. The focus there will be on techniques used across philosophy and the sciences to visualize processes that are otherwise unavailable to us due to the limitations of our perceptual faculties, no matter how sophisticated the tools for analysis, from microscopes to telescopes, have become. This book concludes with a consideration of the relations between parts and wholes in process, panpsychist, and ecological terms. It revisits the question of ecological balance and the place of human activities in relation to it, with reference to works of Charles Hartshorne and William James. Before I summarize the aims of each chapter in more detail, I want to provide an overview of some of the historical and philosophical engagements with the sciences that have informed this book.
1 Process and Biology
Bergson opposed images and concepts, the tools of analysis, to an ideal of âintuition,â the latter being both a faculty (in response to Kantâs identification of the faculties that shaped knowledge) and the practice of metaphysics itself. Take as many views of an object from without as one wishes, and one will never attain a complete knowledge of that object. Whatever it is, it is so internally, in such a way that symbols and points of view on it are necessarily locked outside. âDescription, history, and analysisâ are merely ways for us to achieve relative knowledge (Bergson 1992, p. 160). Absolute knowledge, on the other hand, can be gained through an intuition, or âthe sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in itâ (Bergson 1992, p. 161). A distinction between science and metaphysics presents itself here. For what Bergson calls positive science, the analysis of things in terms of symbols is its modus operandi. âEven the most concrete of the sciences of nature, the sciences of life,â he continues, cannot help but reduce the complex living forms it encounters, the complex interactions and processes internal to each organismâs body, and the ecosystems within which they become entangled, to systems of simpler terms, that constitute their âvisual symbolâ (Bergson 1992, p. 162). Yet the remedy to this reliance upon symbolical representation, a metaphysics that is âthe science which claims to dispense with symbolsâ (Bergson 1992, p. 162), is a convergence of efforts from many different areas of study in a kind of kaleidoscopic multiplication of viewpoints on oneâs chosen object. The key to this multiplication of images is their difference from one another. Call on images that are too alike, and one succumbs to the will to reduce everything to a common symbol. Choose reference points that are sufficiently distinct, and the effect of dissimulation is to intensify the sense of oneâs own intellectual effort being exercised in the course of the enquiry. It is less a matter of defining and reducing the object to a familiar concept, than it is of directing oneâs efforts of enquiry in a more fruitful direction (Bergson 1992, p. 166). This summary of Bergsonâs account of metaphysical enquiry is not intended as obfuscation, but rather to accentuate the importance of method as the goal of metaphysics, since the definition of oneâs object of study can only be achieved through agreement upon a set of parameters, concepts, and symbols.
The centrality of method starts with an observation that âdurationâ is most immediately available to our minds, in the deceptively simple experience we have of our own conscious activity. Once we try to analyse that consciousness into its constituent parts, we both alienate ourselves from it and gain some insight into some of its activity. That is, the tendency to break things into immobile units, as we tend to do with conscious states, tells us something about the function of the human intellect. It is directed towards actions that might be useful for this or that purpose. What is most clear and distinct to our minds is simply the set of concepts that we find to be the most useful: âThat is why immobility seems clearer to it than mobility, the halt preceding movementâ (Bergson 1992, p. 182). The difficulty arises in the application of such concepts to all aspects of reality that are better understood as âtendencies.â Again, through inspection of our own conscious processes, we can immediately feel the mindâs ceaseless and seamless transition between intensities of concentration and relaxation. However, it is not that the sciences have somehow altogether missed this processual reality, and certain branches, as Bergson identifies, such as mathematics endeavours
to substitute for the ready-made what is in process of becoming, to follow the growth of magnitudes, to seize movement no longer from outside and its manifest result, but from within and in its tendency towards change, in short, to adopt the mobile continuity of the pattern of things. (Bergson 1992, p. 190)
The problem with the sciences, as Bergsonâs diagnosis continues, echoes the problem of the intellect in general. It tends to seek the clarity and distinctness of things once immobilized, and reifies those immobile concepts into an ideal of expression, forgetting that its concepts are the products of the intellectâs mode of operation and not of a close contact with the object of study (Bergson 1992, pp. 191â192).
What, then, is the alternative? Bergsonâs call to create âfluid conceptsâ is well-known, thanks in large part to the work of Gilles Deleuze. The potential to follow such a project could be most conspicuously explored in the arts and literature, whils...