The Vicarage Iconoclast: Whitehead, Leibniz, Relativity and the Quantum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This manuscript critically examines Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysical system as it relates to quantum mechanics, relativity, and Leibnizian philosophy, presented through an extended philosophical dialogue. It challenges Whitehead’s core assumptions, particularly his interpretations of quantum discontinuity, internal relations, and the structure of spacetime. The author argues that Whitehead’s metaphysics, rooted in subjective experience, prehension, and the primacy of simultaneity, is undermined by its misreading of both modern physics and Leibniz’s metaphysics of substance and relation. Whitehead’s rejection of continuous becoming and motion, his treatment of actual occasions as discrete experiential events, and his notion of “eternal objects” are scrutinized in the context of process philosophy and critiques from contemporary physics. The dialogue also engages with recent reinterpretations, notably those of Carey Carlson, Florian Vermeiren, and Michael Epperson, addressing causal set theory, quantum potentia, and decoherence in light of Whiteheadian metaphysics. The manuscript ultimately questions the coherence of Whitehead’s system under relativistic constraints and critiques the theological and holistic presuppositions underlying his cosmology, and, by implication, any cosmologies assuming a wave function for the whole universe.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".