Whitehead's Harvard Legacy: Its Possible Implications for Artificial Intelligence

Abstract Almost one hundred years ago, on September 25, 1924, Whitehead gave his first lecture as a professional philosopher in Emerson Hall at Harvard University. In his first Harvard lecture, Whitehead emphasized the claim that all things are interconnected (HL1 44) and that reality is a process that brings about the fluent togetherness of things (HL1 50–51). It was the germ of what would become a vast philosophical oeuvre. Also, nearly one hundred years ago, on February 9, 1925, John Cobb was born, and Cobb's intellectual career makes him Whitehead's most prominent heir. He epitomizes the current relevance of Whitehead's process philosophy in a wide variety of contexts—process theology, religious pluralism and interfaith dialogue, sustainable economics and a fair monetary system, general nonprofit education, nonreductionist biology and evolutionary theory, ecological civilization, and so on. It is difficult to choose just one concept from Whitehead's vast Harvard legacy and to hint at its relevance in a new context. I will highlight the key concept of “prehension,” of which Cobb wrote: “Prehension may be the single most important and original concept in Whitehead's philosophy” (31). I will hint at the relevance of this concept in the context of the much-discussed claim that artificial intelligence will equal or surpass human intelligence. According to Whitehead, speculative philosophers imaginatively generalize from particular topics (PR 16) and test the success of their imaginative experiment by the applicability of its results beyond the restricted locus from which it originated (PR 5). Whitehead's speculative concept of prehension is a major illustration. It originated from field physics, was imaginatively generalized by Whitehead in Process and Reality, and can be applied beyond physics, for example, when comparing artificial with human intelligence.