Process Physics: An organismic neo-Whiteheadian physics (International Whitehead Conference 2017)

This is a 2020 update of a 2017 talk about Process Physics, given at the 11th International Whitehead Conference in Ponta Delgada, The Azores. Introductory abstract: Process Physics is a new way of doing physics that has been developed by Australian professor of physics Reg Cahill and his co-workers. It very much agrees with Lee Smolin’s line of reasoning (2019) that our modeling of nature should be a relational monadology, just as envisioned by Newton’s main opponent Gottfried Leibniz. Smolin holds that a lot of our problems in contemporary physics come from our Newtonian way of ‘doing physics in a box’. This is a way of doing physics which isolates our target of observation from the rest of the universe (including the observer) and then problematically extrapolates its findings to nature-as-a-whole. In contrast, Process Physics can be characterized as a neo-Whiteheadian, habit-centered, biocentric way of doing physics without a box. It starts out with an initially undifferentiated hom