KEY:
AI = Adventure of Ideas
MT = Modes of Thought
PR = Process and Reality
PRr = Process and Reality, revised edition
SMW = Science and the Modern World
"Music is feeling, then, not sound" Wallace Stevens
"The basis of experience is emotional" Alfred North Whitehead
INTRODUCTION
What is the stuff of which dreams are made? Are they completely mental material, cut
off from the rest of matter by the prison house of sleep? Are dreams the final froth of a
material brain heated by neurotransmissions? Are dreams more imagination, or memory,
and what is the difference? Are dreams part of a third realm of stuff between mind and
matter, like Neoplatonic psyche/anima/imagination? If dreams are just mental, or if
dreams are psyche, how and where do they touch and influence the ideal above or matter
below?
The placement of dreams in mind or matter is part of a great debate in Western culture
that has deeply divided our thinking and is referred to as dualism, or the mind-body split.
Our science has decided to look only at the body, and developed materialism has no place
for the subject, only the object. If there is a subject, it says, it will eventually be explained
as a kind of object. Even in quantum physics where observation becomes a factor, it is
considered a problem and nuisance that we will eventually get past. This goes against the
grain of our most direct experience, which is, experience. There is something or someone
that experiences these objects which seems quite different than the objects experienced.
This intuition is so strong that the opposite view to materialism has also been developed,
that all is mind, and all objects are really object projected by our mind, or a great mind
behind our mind. The third position, the most popular, is a dualism that holds that there is
both experience and experiencer, and the object and subject are two distinctly different
things. But just how they communicate becomes problematic. How does an object leap
over to the subject? How does the subject's will shift from mental to physical?
It is with these problems that Whitehead's process theory becomes so valuable. For
Whitehead, there is no matter, no mind. Not initially, anyway. These are both errors of
abstract concreteness, where we have confused an abstract idea of something as being the
real thing itself. Science, Whitehead says, is quite valuable, and has finally seen that
matter is really a set of processes in motion, of events. But what science fails to see is that
these processes are creative, experiential processes. Rather, science reverts back to its old
notion that processes are just a new container for materials. Whitehead's process theory
proposes a radically different stuff of which the universe is made, creative experience, or
feelings. This doesn't mean that the world is just a projection of our own mind, but
rather that the universe is a process of multitudes of experiencing individuals.
While most take experience to mean clear, distinct perceptions and ideas, Whitehead sees
these, along with object consciousness, as derivative abstractions from our more basic
experience of feeling. Since our bodies are not separate from our feelings, so too the
individuated bodies of the whole world pass on their feelings. These feelings are not
interpretations of the world, but direct nonsensory passages of subjectivity, of interiority,
of what he calls occasions of experience, which can creatively synthesize and pass
themselves on as novel feeling/thought/forms to subjects in the present who experience
them anew. In fact, the experiencing subject will slip into the past and become this very
object-once-subject. What we experience is ourselves that we were a moment ago, along
with a synthesis other selves that were experiencing a moment ago.
Who Was Whitehead?
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), was an amazing, yet humble and reserved man,
who had three separate careers. His first career was in England as a mathematician and
teacher of at Trinity College, Cambridge. His interests were more in applied mathematics
and mechanics, but his theoretical developments were impressive as well. He came up
with a universal algebra, he worked with his student Bertrand Russell on the Principia
Mathematica, which attempted to reduce all math to logic, and he developed an
alternative relativity to Einstein's, which wasn't dependent on the constant speed of light.
In 1911 he moved to the University of London and eventually became an educational
reformer and administrator. Instead of retiring in 1924, he moved his whole family to
America and became a philosopher at Harvard, where he developed his unique Process
Theory. His main biographer was Victor Lowe.
PROCESS THEORY
Whitehead's theory is a process theory. Though its popular now to assume the world is a
process rather than an object, this was really something quite new a century ago. And
Whitehead's view is still considered one of the most complex and advanced of all process
theories. Whitehead lived during a time when science was rapidly revamping its views of
about matter and energy. Einstein's convertibility equation, that matter and energy are
one and the same thing, liquefied the universe. The whole idea of hard matter melted
before us, as mountains became butter flowing out to sea. Yet the notions of matter and
substance persisted. Atoms, molecules, electrons, these all hide in them the older notions
of matter that goes bump. Processes were still seen as inert, dead matter occurring in
space. Personal experience was seen by the sciences seen as an accidental byproduct.
For Whitehead, experience is primary, and precedes matter. Matter and substance, even
forces and energy, are for him Johnny-come-lately products of our imagination that we
have made up for our convenience and we now confuse with reality. However, his
'experience' is something quite unique and separate from human consciousness, though
human consciousness is built up out of his primary experiences. For the moment, its best
to think of experience as primitive feeling, or awareness with subjectivity and value,
which may or may not reach consciousness.
Having experience as the primary unit or process of the world means for Whitehead that
the internal or subjective aspect of life is returned to the world, and not set aside as it
often is in materialism. All individuals, human or not, have experience. This is called
panpsychism (pan = all, psychism = psyche) Whitehead is more often referred to as a
panexperiencialist, as for him not everything has experience, only special units of process
called 'individuals.' An individual can accept influences from the past as a whole, unified
organism. Thus we might see individuals in many forms, as sub-atomic processes, atomic
processes, molecules, and other beings/becomings that can take in the influences of the
past as a unified whole, and give them a unique spin. Just how unique this spin may be
will vary dramatically depending on how long an experience can last for an individual.
Subatomic processes may have durations of billionth of a second, while an animal with
memories may have experiences that last many seconds or longer. The longer one can
maintain an experience, the greater the chance of giving it a unique spin. Obviously this
kind of experience that an electron has is not the same as what we could call everyday
object consciousness, where we can consciously identify tables, chairs, and people. Still,
all individuals are composed of experience and receive previous experiences and
creatively produce other novel experiences. I will consider the case of dream entities
later, but for now, one might imagine a dream character as an entity being able to have
feelings and therefore being able to synthesize unique experiences.
Whitehead calls these individual experiences 'actual entities'. They are "the final real
things of which the world is made up. . . drops of experience, complex and interdependent"
(PRr 27, 28). They are also called actual occasions, and occasions of
experience, feelings, and prehensions, terms which will be explained below. A table
would not be an individual actual entity, but rather is an aggregate of actual entities. So
the table is swarming with a multitude of experience, but not as a whole. You or I have
full body responses to the world and so have a dominate actual entity (think mind, but not
as ghostly as a mind) as well as micro swarms of cellular and atomic and subatomic
actual entities.
The next thing to know about actual entities is that they are subjects while in the
present, and become objects after they move into the past. An atom (that is, a small actual
entity at that level) in the table, for example, is in its present an experiencing individual,
but then passes into being experienced. These actual entities pass their subjective
feelings, their own unifications, directly into the next actual entity. In this way,
subjectivity as well as objectivity is inherited by the present actual entity. We don't just
get interpretable data, but we get the subjective feeling itself, primitive feelings that are
the stuff of which the whole universe is made. Since all things are made of these feelings,
we might say that we get objects directly as well, even if they are built up derivatives of
actual entities. Only present time actual entities can experience, only past actual entities
can be experienced. What they experience is other actual entities. In other words, we
experience the world here in the present, though the world experienced is just past, and
we feel it directly, its aim to continue in some particular way, and we also have some
degree of freedom in passing on something novel as we are connected to the realm of
alternatives and possibilities.
Prehension
The term prehension was first used by Whitehead in relation with causality. (SMW,
Chap 4). He was very unhappy with the notion that causality is seen as the bumping of
external objects in space. Rather, Whitehead envisioned each event directly including
within itself aspects of the events to which it responds temporally as well as spatially, and
that it will react selectively towards these events. This process of response through
creative incorporation is prehension. One might say it's the connecting of the actual with
the possible in an individual evaluation, and individual event, an actual occasion.
Though actual entities are the fundamental stuff of which the universe is made, and can't
be further divided ontologically, (can't really be divided) we can discuss conceptually the
various parts of the process in terms of prehension. Prehending comes from apprehending,
without the ape, or conscious animal mind, [Riker 1976] and refers to the
grasping/receiving/synthesizing process of actual entities or actual occasions. What is
prehended are other actual occasions, which have moved into the past and become
objects (objects for other subjects, never material objects in a void). Note the temporal
rather than spatial spin. What is at risk here in using such a word as 'object' is a fall back
into external relations, of things going bump into one another. Rather, prehension is a
process first, one that first takes an objective datum, which it subjectively unifies with
other objective datum, and finally passes a unique datum back into objectivity.
As a quick model, we might say that here in the present, we experience a whole universe
that influences us, and feel this whole thing as one unified thing. It is a multitude or
multiplicity of influence that we synthesize into one new experience. And then when our
present passes, we will pass this feeling-now-object on to all (individuals) who are
experiencing us.
The Three Factors of Prehension.
Category of Explanation XI: "That every prehension [feeling] consists of three factors:
(a) the 'subject' which is prehending, namely, the actual entity in which that prehension is
a concrete element; (b) the 'datum' which is prehended; (c) the 'subjective form' which is
*how* the subject prehends that datum." (PR pg.28)
Note that each prehension is three feelings in one. There is the feeler, the feeling being
felt and the feeling of the feelers reaction to what is felt. As Nobo notes, prehension
involves a process "in which the occasion unconsciously grasp the objective reality of
earlier occasions as efficient causes of its own existence and as determinants of it own
initial ingredient subjectivity. " (Nobo 229)
Further, a prehension may be divided into its physical and conceptual sides.
In its physical form, the prehension is a datum from a previous actual entity. It is a
"feeling of a feeling as felt elsewhere" (Leue, chap2). In this subjective form, the
physical feeling is said to be conformal, meaning the subjective feeling is passed to the
new actual entity. However, this passage or conformation is never complete. This
subjective form of physical feeling/prehension is not a sensation nor developed human
emotion, but rather more a direct feeling of a something, along with a sense of attraction
or aversion.
In its conceptual form, the prehension selects from the many alternatives of the universe
to individuate or define itself. There is no pure conceptual prehension. These alternatives,
called eternal objects, are prehended as hybrids of physical/conceptual datum. That is, the
eternal objects are not floating in space, but always come with each physical prehension.
Some interpretations of these eternal objects see them like Archetypes or Platonic forms,
but more recent interpretations point out that Whitehead did not see them this way at all
and they always need to be discussed in relation to physical feelings. Eternal objects are
not part of an ideal realm to which physical feelings conform, but rather are part of the
pure world of becoming which is never actual nor complete. I think they are better seen
as the time-space folds that alter and mutate in alternatives. That is, alternatives are
falsely seen as objects of choice, rather than forces of alteration. The process allows the
concressing of conceptual feeling to experiment with relevant alterations before
actualizing. The process intuits into and experiments with the realm of possibility and
selects the most relevant through valuing up or down. Dreamers often notice this in
semi-lucid dreams where they are following their own story along in a dream narrative
(I'm headed down to the river with a fishing pole to get some fish.) but notice side
alternatives cropping up along the way (No, I'm not really going fishing, I'm going to get
the boots I left. No, not the boots, the car I parked.). The final recalled dream will have a
particular actual narrative, but these alternatives surround it at every turn. One gets the
sense in these dreams that while it seems like we are revising the storyline, the more
accurate description of what is happening is that the actual final storyline depends and
rests on these alternatives or alternating forces.
Finally, the completed actual occasion has an aim. These aims are experienced by the
next actual occasion as causes, or as Whitehead calls them, efficient causes. These aims
must be addressed, but don't completely determine the actual occasion. Since this aim is
the final cause of an actual entity, we might say that the feeling process is one of taking
account of the universe and synthesizing a subjective purpose that is passed on.
And so the stuff of which the universe is made is a creaturely process, multiplicities of
entities prehending the universe and carrying the universe forward in creative droplets of
experience. There may be groups of actual occasions within larger actual occasions, as
with the subatomic particles in an atom, the atoms in a molecule the molecules within a
human being, a human within a society and societies within worlds.
How Does This Make Any Difference?
Sensory and Nonsensory Perception
Sensory perception is derivative from two earlier modes of experience, 1. perception in
the mode of causal efficacy (physical prehension in the language of perception) , and 2.
perception in the mode of presentational immediacy (sense-like data).
Perception in the mode of causal efficacy is nonsensory, primitive feeling directly of the
world. Whitehead interpreter, David Ray Griffin, suggests that we, as experiencing actual
entities, get this directly from our brain, almost in a psychokinetic way, and thus from the
nervous system of our whole body. However it is, it is direct, thus a subjective
perception, pre-sensory, a feeling. "In prehending my body, for example, I prehend some
of its parts as causally efficacious for my own experience. " [Griffin, World Knot,
Pg.133] That is, we directly get the world as being important in the flow of causal
influence. This includes pleasures and pains, but also a priori categories and external
sensory perception. Extrasensory perception takes on a new meaning as well, as direct
nonsensory perception needed be limited by traditional views of causality being the
bumping up of material objects and their wave patterns. (see Griffin, Archetypal Process
and essays by Dave Pleasants). Whitehead cites immediate memory as an example of
nonsensual perception. Not long term memory, which is filled in with abstractions, but
something more like the memory that allows me to not forget the point as I complete this
sentence. It is the immediate visceral grasp of the world.
Perception in the mode of presentational immediacy is similar to sense data and more
derivative than casual efficacy. Visually it would include space, shape and colors. We
know we see yellow, but not why or from whence it came. Yet it defines an area that
separates it from the rest of our visual field.
Sensory perception combines casual efficacy and presentational immediacy, and might be
termed presentation in the mode of symbolic reference. If we say, "Oh, that's the yellow
sun." then we may or may not be correct. It might be something else, and it might be we
are imagining it rather than seeing it. I can't be wrong that I saw or imagined yellow, and
that I had direct primitive feelings about it, but the symbolic mode introduces interpretive
possibilities and errors.
Thus, while only more complex creatures may have presentational immediacy and
symbolic reference, all individuals, down to subatomic particles, perceive in the mode of
causal efficiency. That is, from the most complex to the simplest organism, there is
emotional, appetitive, purposive experience.
There is no reason not to extend this to imaginal creatures as well. In dreams, the debate
as to whether our dream characters are really projections of our selves or autonomous
creatures often arises. The question in process theory then becomes somewhat different.
Its doesn't matter whether our dream entities are projections or independent residents, but
rather what actual entities are operative and dominate. That is, the question becomes
whether these entities can feel and experience. If they can, then they are as 'real' as any
other actual entity in the universe. How long they exist, whether or not they disappear
when we wake up or go on living in their own dimensions is irrelevant. Experiences of
subatomic particles may be counted in billionths of a second. The relevant question is
just as with other societies, how to best help people fulfill their destinies and actualize
their potentials.
Panpsychism, Again
There is a radical difference in the way we treat objects vs. subject in dreamwork, but
these differences all shift when we see the dream as the carrier and unique synthesizer of
experience.
Of course, one wonders what evidence might exist for experience existing in non-living
individuals in nature. The basic argument goes as follows; we never encounter in life a
element or piece of life that is just hanging around in the void, separate from experience.
Even a dream of a void with nothing, if reported, was experienced. Speculations of
objects located spatially beyond experience must all be speculated about from experience.
We cannot think about relations without experience. We can deny this aspect of the
relation (I'm imagining a void without anyone imagining it) but it remains in every
equation of relation. For Whitehead, it follows that instead of assuming that the rest of
the world besides ourselves *don't* experience, that it is a more sane assumption to
understand that all individuals *do* have experience, no matter how primitive, and that
the world is their relation to one another.
What is What
The fallacy of misplaced concreteness, which was discussed above as when one confuses
the processes of the world with more derivative objects, is essential to Whitehead's
argument. Or more accurately, this view surrounds the issues that process theory
addresses. The only truly fundamental items of the universe are experiences, actual
occasions. Notions of force, atoms, photons, electrons and the like are abstract entities
that we have created to understand the world, and not parts of the fundamental structure
of the world. And for Whitehead, problematic units as well, since they describe realty
without reference to experience. It may serve us to not confuse actual entities and the
societies they produce with the multitude of objects void of experience with which we
have inhabited our world. In dreamwork, this is somewhat more difficult on one side and
yet simple on the other. Tables, windows and other aggregate objects in waking life,
unable as wholes to respond with any creative unity, may be actual entities in our
dreams, capable of very create feelings. On the other hand, dreamworkers are very aware
that dreams are already experience.
Mind-Body Dualism
Because actual entities are subjects in the present, objects in the past, the mind-body issue
is dramatically shifted. Instead of wondering how mind stuff over here gets connected
with body stuff over there, in process theory, everything is mind in present, and body in
the past. The division is not here and there, but now and then. Again, dreamworkers are
acutely aware of how the present feeling manifests as a reality in the next moment that
can be experienced. Also, dreamworkers are not surprised by dreams enduring beyond
sleep in the form of complex images, thoughts and feelings. By focusing on these dreams,
the relevancy of their actual occasions allows them to connect directly with life, other
dreamers, and the universe.
GLOSSARY
Actual occasion: an enduring moment of experience, a unifying process, a feeling. Also
called an actual entity, and sometimes just called feeling, where something is felt, and felt
with affective tone.
Concrescence: the process by which actual entities prehend other actual entities and then
form new occasions. Kline suggests 'concrescence' to mean the internal adventure of
becoming of the final real things, and 'concretum' to refer to the objectified actual
occasion, the past product of a present concrescent process.
Causal Efficacy: The direct, nonsensual prehension of the past. "Sympathy, that is,
feeling the feeling in another and feeling conformally with another"
(PRr 246). Perception in the mode of causal efficacy is a vague but powerful emotion.
" . . . in the silence, the irresistible causal efficacy of nature presses itself upon us . . . the
inflow into ourselves of feelings from enveloping nature overwhelms us" (PRr 267). It is
"our general sense of existence, as one item among others, in an efficacious actual world"
(PRr 271).
Eternal Objects: Conceptual objects (rather than subjects) in a state of potentiality. They
enter into the actual entity becoming concrete without themselves being actual. Eternal
objects (alternative non-actuals) enter into the concrescence of an actual entity through
valuation, as a hierarchy. Alternatives are selected, some as more relevant than others,
but to become actual, the occasion must become definite. "Potentiality becomes reality;
and yet retains its message of alternatives which the actual entity has avoided" (PRr 226).
Prehension: The way a feeling or actual occasion grasps the world, at the same time, as
an object and a subjective feeling. "The word perceive is, in our common usage, shot
through and through with the notion of cognitive apprehension. So is the word
apprehension, even with the adjective cognitive omitted. I will use the word prehension
for uncognitive apprehension: by this I mean apprehension which may or may not be
cognitive."SMW., p. l0l.
REFERENCES
- Easton, T and Keeton, H. (2004). Physics and Whitehead: Quantum, Process, and Experience. State University of New York Press: Albany, NY.
- Griffin, David Ray (1998). Unsnarling the World-Knot: consciousness, Freedom and the Mind-Body problem. University of California Press: Berkeley.
- Griffin, David Ray (1989). Archetypal Process: Self and Divine In Whitehead, Jung and Hillman. Northwestern University Press: Evanston, IL.
- Lowe, Victor, (1990). Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work : Volume I & II. Johns Hopkins University: Princeton, NJ.
- Leue, William Hendrichs (2004). Metaphysical Foundations for a Theory of Value in the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Available online at: http://www.thoughtsnmemories.net/whitehead2c.htm
- Nobo, Jorge Luis (2004). Whitehead and the Quantum Experience. In Easton, T and Keeton, H. (2004). Physics and Whitehead: Quantum, Process, and Experience. State University of New York Press: Albany, NY.
- Pleasants, David (2002). Panpsychism, Intersubjectivity and the Nature of Time. Available online at:
http://www.geocities.com/dave_pleasants/
Panpsychism_and_Intersubjectivity.html
- Pleasants, David (2003). Transtemporal dreaming: intersubjectivity, precognition, and the physics of time. Presentation at the 2003 Berkeley Conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams. Available online at:
http://www.asdreams.org/2003/abstracts/pleasants.htm
- Pleasants, David (2003). Precognitive Dreaming and the Physics of Time. Presentation at the 2003 IASD PsiberDreaming Conference. Online, passwords needed.
http://www.asdreams.org/psi2003/psiboard/
papers/david_pleasants001.htm
- Riker, John (1976). Non-Deistic Process Theory of Alfred North Whitehead. Class notes from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, CO.
- Whitehead, Alfred North (1978). Process and Reality ,Revised Edition. [Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne], The Free Press: New York, New York.
- Whitehead, Alfred North (1933/67) Adventures of Ideas. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, MA. Free Press edition, 1967.
- Whitehead, Alfred North (1938/1968). Modes of Thought. The Macmillan Co., New York. Free-Press edition, 1968.
- Whitehead, Alfred North (1929). Process and Reality. The Macmillan Co., New York
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