Whitehead, la Négation de l’Instant et la Mécanique Quantique

Abstract

The philosophy of Nature and Time in Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) may not have received enough attention from scientists, particularly in France. We know that this mathematician-philosopher collaborating with Bertrand Russell in writing Principia Mathematica (1910-1913), insisted on the abstract character of space points in the foundation of geometry. From 1911 onwards, he extended this observation to the instants of time, and gradually developed a vision of the ontology of the world as a succession of "concrescences of actual entities", each of which brings with it a piece of time. These concrescences are reminiscent of the collapse of the wave function in measuring processes in quantum mechanics; as a matter of fact, Whitehead has closely followed the development of this theory, just as he has closely followed the development of the relativity theory. Furthermore, his philosophy of Nature, or following his own words his philosophy of organism, foresees a global solidarity of the actual entities which in some ways recalls quantum entanglement. This similarity and its limits are examined in more depth, and the mind-matter relations in Whitehead’s philosophy are broached. Despite its defects, Whitehead's metaphysics, especially the negation of the instant, has brought to light, in my opinion, the complexity of nature's time (with Whitehead the process), far beyond the continuous variable t of physicists. A large part of this article is based on my book Whitehead, Philosophe du Temps (Auteur, 2020).