What is applied process thought?

Applied Process Thought is a term we have coined to represent work that moves beyond not only detailed technical renderings of (primarily but not exclusively Alfred North Whitehead's) process philosophy, but also broadsweeping process-oriented commentry, towards the wholehearted attempt to examine scientific and social scientific phenomena through the process philosophical detail. The chapters herein represent something of what is possible when philosophically oriented process scientists and scientifically oriented process philosophers grapple with the complexities of their chosen topics without shying away from either panexperientialism or, in most cases, God. However, just exactly what they understand by these terms reaches far beyond the taken-for-granted, commonplace assumptions of most scientists and philosophers concerning their nature or, indeed, their very existence.

Although process theology is very clearly an example of 'applied process thought', it nevertheless has such an established literature and, indeed, position within theology itself, that we shall here leave the question of God aside. With regards in particular to the question of experience, which lies at the heart of much of the discussion in this volume, it may be prescient to build upon what has been said about the relevance and development of process thinking in both Herman Greene's Foreword and Pete Gunter's Preface, by considering process thinking's understanding of the nature of experience in a little more detail. We shall do this by unpacking the relationship between experience and consciousness. In so doing, we shall rely for the most part on David Griffin's discussion presented in his seminal Unsnarling the World Knot (1998). This, by way of an introduction to the arguments presented in the chapters which follow.