Notes on Whitehead's "The Concept of Nature"
About Theory of objects
You can't recognize an event because each event is different. Comment: Seems to divide everything in these two categories: event and object. For instance people are objects I guess, in his view. I wonder then: what about the subject? Could there be other categories as well?
Recognition = relation (of the mind to nature) -> material for intellectual activity. Comment: recognition is strongly tied to language
Objects = comparable elements in events:
"We are comparing objects in events whenever we can say: 'There it is again'. Objects are the elements in nature which can 'be again'.
Ingression (of an object into an event) = the relation between both, the way the object shapes the event.
Two subcategories of ingression: situation (body position) and influence (???).
Comment: at some point I understand that he intentionaly chooses to leave the "subject" because it does not consider it (the "mind") as part of nature.
Three types of object:
- sense-object (e.g. a sort of colour, of smell, of sound) (*)
- perceptual object (e.g. a coat) Comment: I don't really get the difference with sense-objects. Seems to be about perceiving/recognizing a shape, but how and why is it different from, say, recognizing the blue color?
- scientific object (e.g. an electron)
(*) Again, the object would be "blue" and NOT a particular patch of blue seen at some point in time (since this would be an EVENT). Comment: So an event would be a set of objects and their relation at a specific point in time?
Two kind of perceptual objects: (1) delusive perceptual objects and (2) physical objects. ???
Comment: I'm lost. I think those notions are a bit far-fetched. He tries to create categorizations that are not so interesting IMHO.
However I find the beginning very interesting with this notion of objects as recognizable structures seen in events. It is reminiscent of how neural networks and other biological adaptive structures work: by extracting invariants from the flow of events. Neurons (objects) interconnected with synapses (relation) that make them fire according to various events (e.g. looking at the face of a friend).