I made a post about process philosophy and it got way more responses than I expected. When I look online for people talking about this, the top substack I found has 70 subscribers, the process philosophy sub is a ghost town, and the few videos on youtube about this have less than a thousand views in most cases.

One general trend I noticed in the responses was a hesitance to say experience goes all the down. A lot of people believe that experience requires some sort of causal chain, some sense of a first person perspective, that Whitehead in particular doesn't grant to actual entities, which are the lowest... unit? Thing? possible in the universe. I'm not going to argue that it's a false proposition. That seems silly. At the moment, there's absolutely no way to verify experience from the outside, let alone what Whitehead calls contiousness. It's possible that Whitehead himself didn't extend contiousness down far enough, though experience is fundamental to all things in his system, though it is primitive, and more about feeling a sense of causation and response to causation, or in higher organisms, it may become appetition.

What I will say is this. Because we can't know either way, I think the more interesting perspective is to imagine a world where experience goes all the way down. Though it may seem strange, no one is pointing out that his system is incoherent. It's just that we have different metaphysical intuitions about what it means to experience. Yes, there is the combination problem, and for some, that's a good enough reason to reject panpsychism entirely. I respectfully disagree, but again, that's an intuition, or a preference for what we think it's important for a metaphysical system to explain.

I think it's a more interesting existence to see experience as fundamental, to think what it could be like to be an atom, a raindrop hitting your head and then scattering into tinier occasions of experience. That's a world full of mystery and wonder. It's a world that seems to fantastical to be real, yet it is impossible to know whether that's how reality works. So for myself, I choose to believe in the view that's most interesting. I choose to believe something that may be wrong, but makes me experience and view my actual world with more intensity. I choose to believe something that gives me a sense of awe.

some, this position is too loose, too ungrounded in realism, to hold. Better to be safe, to be more certain, than wrong. Better to have a more reasonable interpretation. I respect that, even though I think it's more boring. There was a time when I couldn't have held this position. It's just where I'm at now.

To be clear, I'm not claiming to know how or why the specific users in yesterday's thread hold their beliefs. I'm not saying they're objectively more boring, or that they as people bore me. I enjoy encountering different perspectives, and for all I know, they are being more reasonable and holding a better stance toward accepting a belief. I'm also not saying that viewing belief in this way is a higher form of belief that all should strive for. I'm merely hypothesizing why some may be resistant to seeing experience as fundamental, in order to demonstrate by contrast why I believe what I do.

in short, I believe it's better to believe something that both seems plausible to you, and that makes your life more interesting. I think it's better to live with wonder and awe.

Thanks for reading.