Depends, IMO.
If the *process* involves explaining state transitions by a
rearrangement from moment to moment of an enduring fundamental, with
these elemental alterations producing the various properties of things,
then a need for substance persists (IOW, something is always conserved
regardless of what new form it assumes).
But if the *process* involves explaining a state transition or the
circumstance of each moment by having such *change* appear brutely
(eradicating and replacing the prior situation without being a
rearrangement of it), then the steps of the process suffer from isolated
discontinuity. Indeed, if *now* is the extent of being, then there's
nothing regulating or ensuring that the "past" which memory exhibits
even happened (abrupt, randomly modified memories in addition to a
different *life circumstance* could have evolved over a sequence,
similar to what happens eventually during dreaming). It's like a
Boltzman Brain that doesn't know whether it's a short-lived fluctuation
with a false history or an actual step in a long-lived, coherent series.
Perhaps Whitehead's *process philosophy* found a middle ground between
the two. Although it's much touted as an option to the *block universe*,
it looks like a *growing past* scenario that lacks a determined future
(the *growing block-universe* game in philosophy of time). Whitehead's
conservation of the past steps can thus provide the regulation of the
yet-to-exist, evolving future steps via their influence. According to
Geoffrey Klempner (GK):
"Whitehead's philosophy provides the most potent repudiation of the
picture of a block universe, where the flow of time -- the endless
succession of nows -- is rejected as mere illusion. Here is Tony Flood's
take on this:
"'On this alternative view [to the vision of a block universe],
subjectivity equates with the present and becoming: momentary and partly
indeterminate. Objectivity equates with the past and being: permanent
and wholly determinate. Being is, as it were, *matter* that becoming
ingests, assimilates, and creates with. Each entity plays a decisive
role in determining its successor after having felt and then integrated,
with varying degrees of relevance, its entire past world. Each resulting
being is a new denizen of the past, a complete, objective fact,
available for integration by later subjects.'
"Like Bergson before him, Whitehead's core vision is of a process of
creative advance, the reality of the now-perspective. It would be
interesting to see if an analogous construction could be used to express
the reality of the I-perspective. Could it be done? I don't know. What I
am sure of is that Whitehead's philosophy, as expressed in Process and
Reality falls squarely into the category of what I describe in Naive
Metaphysics as a 'nonegocentrist' metaphysic, a theory of reality which
views the perspective of every subject with the same philosophical
detachment, ignoring or obliterating the brute metaphysical given that
one of these subjects is myself. It follows, in the same way as before,
that what an omniscient deity knows, in knowing the actual subject GK
that exists now, is what GK has in common with any GK that has appeared
or will appear in the endless creative advance of the universe."
http://www.philosophypathways.com/newsletter/issue78.html
