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The various attempts to reconcile quantum physics with a classical, mechanistic and materialist ontology have failed to resolve those famous paradoxes, such as wave/particle duality, superposition and entanglement, that contribute to its continued perception as strange and counterintuitive.
In the 1920s, around the same time as the ‘new’ quantum physics was being developed, Alfred North Whitehead proposed a comprehensive metaphysical scheme centred on becoming instead of being. He stresses the importance of flux and interrelatedness, and rejects the physicalist notions of “irreducible brute matter” and fixed laws of nature. In his ‘organic realism’ the fundamental building blocks of reality are ‘actual occasions of experience’, not static substances. All ‘enduring objects’ in nature, in an abstract sense, ’feel’ the environment and ‘decide’ which potentialities will be realised in the ‘concrescence’ of their own becoming, guided by a ‘subjective aim’. For Whitehead, creativity is the most fundamental aspect of existence.
“The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalisation; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.”
Although Whitehead was a mathematician who witnessed major developments in quantum theory, he did not explicitly map his metaphysical scheme to it. However, his work does offer a view of reality that provides a strong ontological basis for the interpretation of quantum phenomena.
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