CONCEPT
Philosophy of Organism
Whitehead's own name for his metaphysical system — the framework in which reality is modeled on the organism rather than the mechanism, and every entity is constituted by its participation in the larger patterns it composes.
Whitehead called his metaphysics the philosophy of organism to distinguish it from the mechanistic framework that had dominated Western thought since the seventeenth century. In a mechanism, parts are pre-formed; they retain their character regardless of the whole they compose. In an organism, parts are constituted by their participation in the whole. A heart is a heart only in the context of the body; extracted, it ceases to be functionally a heart. The parts and the whole come into being together, each constituting the other.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The framework has direct implications for how human-AI collaboration should be understood. The dominant intuition treats the human and the machine as pre-formed parts with their own properties — the human has intelligence, creativity, judgment; the machine has speed, breadth, accuracy — that are combined in collaboration the way components are assembled into a device. On this picture, the whole is the sum of