---
slug: paper-whitehead-a-n-1929-process-and-reality-an-essay-in-cosmology
title: Whitehead Process and Reality 1929
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/paper-whitehead-a-n-1929-process-and-reality-an-essay-in-cosmology
---

## What Whitehead Saw

Alfred North Whitehead wrote Process and Reality in 1929. He replaced substance metaphysics with a process ontology. Reality consists of actual occasions. Each occasion arises through prehension of prior data. It reaches satisfaction via concrescence. Then it perishes into objective data for future occasions.

Core result: the universe is a creative advance of discrete events. These events integrate the many into novel ones. The phrase states it directly: “The many become one, and are increased by one.”

## Exact Load-Bearing Passages

Whitehead defines the basic units on page 18: “actual entities—or, equivalently, actual occasions—are the final real things of which the world is made up.”

Prehension and concrescence appear throughout. Category of existence XXVII on page 26 states: “In a process of concrescence, there is a succession of phases in which new prehensions arise by integration of prehensions in antecedent phases.”

Genetic division occurs outside physical time. Page 283 records: “This genetic passage from phase to phase is not in physical time.”

Actual occasions feel their world. They select and integrate data. Satisfaction marks completion. The occasion then contributes to the next wave of becoming.

## Convergence Patterns Evidenced

The work touches energy and process flows that produce structure. Actual occasions form flow networks across scales. They exhibit memory through objective immortality. They display bounded creativity and novelty. Societies of occasions build higher-order patterns, including mind.

This matches the ladder from flux through structure and memory to mind. It matches the grain of reliable structural patterns arising from process.

Sibling article /a/oip-the-ladder carries the full mapping. Sibling article /a/oip-principles records the ethics of value and creativity.

## Distance from the Full Synthesis

Whitehead supplies the ontological base for process-driven patterns and the ladder from difference to mind. He supplies the ethics of creative advance and value. He stops short of the Mirror Layer claim that the reader sits inside the system as an occasion among occasions. He stops short of explicit OIP mechanics such as dispatch, ledger, and receipt.

The synthesis uses Whitehead as foundation. It adds the operational loop of object, invoke, ledger, receipt, replay, repair.

## Honest Limits and Disconfirming Edges

Whitehead’s scheme remains metaphysical. No empirical test falsifies or confirms the atomicity of actual occasions. Reductionist accounts in the style of Weinberg treat the scheme as unnecessary overlay on physical law. The scheme offers no mechanism for the transition from societies of occasions to measurable brain states. Later process thinkers disagree on the role of God and eternal objects. These remain internal disputes within speculative philosophy.

## Claims

The article states its claims in atomic form below.

## Sources
