Process and reality

What Hacker News says

1. pseufauxDec 2025
   Process and Reality by Alfred North Whitehead
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2. morelispOct 2022
   (Someone already posted How to Solve It which would be my first recommendation on this forum.)

   The Zhuangzi, probably at least two translations.

   The Elements (that is, Euclid's).

   Process and Reality has had the most impact on my thinking but it's one of the most unapproachable things I've ever read. Get there eventually.

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3. morelispMar 2022
   It's horribly inaccessible but while we're throwing out truly nonstandard recommendations, and apropos to the connection made elsewhere in this thread between the theory of forms and object-oriented programming, Whitehead's Process and Reality is good for the same reasons OOP sucks.
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4. kenOfYugenAug 2015
   Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology by Alfred North Whitehead
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5. edemMay 2025
   he said somewhere that he was inspired by Whiteheas's book "Process and Reality"
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6. voidhorseFeb 2025
   Always nice to see Whitehead show up.

   That is true, and that makes a lot of sense for supplying the outputs for our vital needs, like shelter, food, etc. But I would argue that creative work is different. Creative work is typically more about the process, not the immediate output, and in fact, it is usually only during the process itself that we figure out what we really want to express in a creative work. Art: "purposefullness without purpose". So, unless you are producing creative works as mere entertainment to fill laborers' time while they recover for the next day of work, and not as a mode of expression, I don't believe a productive optimization argument makes much sense here. We'll see, I could be wrong, the LLM might become a new paintbrush, but I think the inherent stochasticity might prevent that. Regardless, there's a reason all of our analog tools have stuck around for art making in spite of the existence of their highly efficient digital counterparts.

   And I think the author of Process and Reality might agree with me.

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