CONCEPT
Society of Occasions
Whitehead's term for the enduring patterns — tables, brains, institutions, persons — that classical metaphysics treats as substances: a pattern of actual occasions maintaining a defining character across time.
A society, in Whitehead's technical sense, is a nexus of actual occasions that exhibit a shared defining characteristic inherited from occasion to occasion. The table persists not because some substance-table endures unchanged but because successive occasions of the table (at the atomic level) maintain a stable configuration. The person persists not because a soul-substance persists but because the occasions of her experience inherit a defining pattern from their predecessors, generating the continuity we call personhood.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept has direct application to institutions and teams undergoing AI-augmented transformation. A workplace is a society in Whitehead's sense. It persists because its constituent occasions — working days, tasks, interactions — exhibit a shared pattern inherited across time. When a new kind of occasion is introduced — AI-assisted work with its different tempo, different reach, different relationship between effort and output — the defining character of the society shifts. The society is re-constituted around the new occasions.
This is why, as the book argues
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