What is this invisible entity we call the human self, or soul? How does it endure over time? Is it always there, day and night, underlying all our activities? The process answer is No.
As one of the emergent natural unities in the universe, the human self is no exception, but is quantum in nature. It is made up of actual entities: discrete drops or buds of experience. There is no self that is first somehow already there and then has these experiences. The experiences themselves are all there is. Whitehead puts it in a way to make you stop and think—he says, “No thinker thinks twice.”1
The concrete life of the psyche is in discrete moments of experience, one after the other, each sharing elements of a common character, but with no two exactly alike. The human self, in process terms, is a temporally ordered “society” of momentary occasions of experience.
A temporal society is unique in that, rather than having many coexisting members, only one member exists at a time. As a temporal society, each member enjoys close relations with the preceding member, reenacting the common form that characterizes members of the society, and passing on this pattern to the succeeding member. Continuity is thereby established but a discontinuous continuity, thus satisfying the quantum requirement while also supporting social solidarity between discrete events.
If there are about 12 such experiences per second, then each 24-hour day adds more than a million new actualities to this society. Walt Whitman’s poetic intuitions were right on the mark when, in Song of Myself, he said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Nota bene: This is a continuation and fulfillment of the promise of my first post, published April 3, 2023.
Note
1. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, Ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, p. 29.
HyC