---
slug: thinker-alfred-north-whitehead
title: Alfred North Whitehead — Process and Reality
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/thinker-alfred-north-whitehead
---

<!-- hierarchy:nav -->
> **Path:** [OIP](https://miscsubjects.com/a/oip) › [Thinker Reference](https://miscsubjects.com/a/oip-thinker-reference) › [Thinkers](https://miscsubjects.com/a/oip-thinkers) › **Alfred North Whitehead — Process and Reality**
>
> **Shelf:** Thinkers · **Traversal:** self-explaining · hierarchical · voxel-ready
> **Machine root:** [OIP tree](https://miscsubjects.com/api/dispatch?map=1&format=markdown) · [Registry](https://miscsubjects.com/api/dispatch?registry=1)

# Alfred North Whitehead — Process and Reality

## §SELF — thinker-alfred-north-whitehead

**What this page is:** A summary of Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy and its core concepts.
**What it explains:** That reality is made of processes (becomings), not static things (substances), and what this means for how we understand objects, time, and existence.
**Why read it:** To understand why treating things as ongoing processes rather than fixed objects leads to a more accurate description of reality.

### What Alfred North Whitehead Is

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was a British mathematician and philosopher. He co-authored "Principia Mathematica" (1910–1913) with Bertrand Russell, a foundational work in formal logic. He later developed process philosophy, presented in his major work "Process and Reality" (1929).

### Why It Matters

Before Whitehead, Western philosophy treated reality as made of substances — static, unchanging things that have properties. A table was a table because it had the essence of "tableness." Whitehead showed this model fails when you examine change, time, and experience. A table maintains its shape through ongoing processes: molecular bonds holding, wood resisting decay, human use preserving its function. Remove the processes and you have no table. This shift from substance to process changes how we understand everything that exists — including digital objects, protocols, and systems.

### The Key Idea

The basic unit of reality is not a thing. It is an event.

Whitehead calls this event an "actual occasion" — a moment of experience that happens at a specific place and time. A rock, a person, a table: these are not solid objects. They are series of actual occasions, each one a process that grasps the past and becomes something new.

An actual occasion "prehends" (grasps, includes) previous occasions. Prehension is how reality connects across time. When you look at a table, your moment of seeing prehends the light reflecting off the table, which prehended the table's surface, which prehended the wood's molecular structure, and so on. Every moment contains the past within itself and adds something new.

A table is therefore not a static object. It is a process of maintaining tableness through time — a chain of actual occasions, each prehending the last, each keeping the pattern alive.

### What He Got Right

**Reality is temporal.** Things exist in time. They change. The substance model ignores this. The process model makes time fundamental.

**Change is not an illusion.** Some philosophers (Parmenides, Zeno) argued change is unreal because a thing cannot become what it is not. Whitehead showed that becoming is the primary mode of existence. A thing is what it is becoming.

**Relations are primary, not secondary.** In the substance model, a thing exists first and then enters into relations. In Whitehead's model, a thing is its relations. An actual occasion is defined by what it prehends.

**Experience is not limited to minds.** Whitehead argued that every actual occasion has some form of experience — not consciousness, but a process of taking in the past and responding to it. This is called "panexperientialism" (the view that experience-like processes occur at all levels of reality, not just in brains).

### What He Got Wrong or Left Unfinished

**The writing is nearly unreadable.** "Process and Reality" is famous for its difficulty. Whitehead coined new terms without always defining them clearly. This has limited the spread of his ideas.

**No experimental method.** Whitehead's philosophy is speculative. He built a system from first principles rather than from empirical observation. This means many of his claims cannot be tested.

**Panexperientialism remains unproven.** The claim that all actual occasions involve some form of experience is metaphysical (about the nature of reality) rather than scientific. There is no evidence that electrons have experiences.

**The system is incomplete.** Whitehead acknowledged that his scheme was a starting point, not a finished system. Many details about how actual occasions interact at physical scales remain unspecified.

### How It Connects to Other Ideas

**Object-Oriented Programming (OOP):** OOP treats objects as static instances with properties and methods. A process philosophy suggests objects should be modeled as ongoing processes — streams, actors, or event-sourced systems — rather than fixed data structures.

**Process Philosophy and OIP:** An OIP (Open Invocation Protocol) object is not a static endpoint. It is a process: resolve → read contract → authorize → invoke → execute → receipt. The receipt is a prehension — it grasps the invocation and includes it in the ledger. The ledger is the "becoming" of the system — its process made visible. The lesson: a protocol is not a set of endpoints; it is a set of possible processes. The receipt captures the process, not just the result.

**Relational Databases vs. Event Sourcing:** A relational database stores the current state — a snapshot, as if reality were a set of fixed things. Event sourcing stores the stream of events — the process of becoming. Whitehead's philosophy aligns with event sourcing: reality is the stream, not the snapshot.

### Sources

Whitehead, Alfred North. "Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology." 1929. (Corrected edition edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, 1978.)

Whitehead, Alfred North, and Bertrand Russell. "Principia Mathematica." 3 vols. 1910–1913.

Whitehead, Alfred North. "Science and the Modern World." 1925.

Whitehead, Alfred North. "Adventures of Ideas." 1933.

---

## Up the tree

- [OIP root](https://miscsubjects.com/a/oip) — protocol root, zero-context entry
- [Thinker Reference hub](https://miscsubjects.com/a/oip-thinker-reference) — full hierarchy map
- [Thinkers shelf](https://miscsubjects.com/a/oip-thinkers) — siblings on this shelf
- [Voxel graph article](https://miscsubjects.com/a/what-is-voxel-graph) — how pages link as voxels
- [Self-describing protocol](https://miscsubjects.com/a/what-is-self-describing-protocol)

## Related on this shelf

- [Alan Kay — The Big Idea Is Messaging](https://miscsubjects.com/a/thinker-alan-kay)
- [J.L. Austin and John Searle — Speech Acts](https://miscsubjects.com/a/thinker-austin-searle)
- [Barbara Liskov — Abstract Data Types and Distributed Consensus](https://miscsubjects.com/a/thinker-barbara-liskov)
- [Bram Cohen — BitTorrent and Content-Addressed Protocol Design](https://miscsubjects.com/a/thinker-bram-cohen)
- [Butler Lampson — Protection and Access Control](https://miscsubjects.com/a/thinker-butler-lampson)
- [Carl Hewitt — The Actor Model](https://miscsubjects.com/a/thinker-carl-hewitt)
- [Charles Sanders Peirce — Signs, Abduction, and Pragmatism](https://miscsubjects.com/a/thinker-charles-peirce)
- [Doug Engelbart — Augmenting Human Intellect](https://miscsubjects.com/a/thinker-doug-engelbart)

## Machine surfaces

- Public page: `https://miscsubjects.com/a/thinker-alfred-north-whitehead`
- JSON article: `https://miscsubjects.com/api/articles/thinker-alfred-north-whitehead`
- OIP ask: `https://miscsubjects.com/api/dispatch?ask=Alfred%20North%20Whitehead%20%E2%80%94%20Process%20and%20Reality`

