Monism
Whitehead's Experience is Fundamental, Consciousness is Not
Consciousness as the Rare Crown of Universal Experience
Alfred North Whitehead held that reality is made of momentary ‘actual occasions’ of experience, each formed by feeling (prehending) the occasions before it, so experience is everywhere actuality is. Consciousness is rare, late and derivative: it is the way a high-grade occasion feels the contrast between what is the case and what might have been. The hard problem changes shape, since nothing has to produce experience from wholly non-experiential matter; the question becomes why awareness is so rare.
Alfred North Whitehead, David Ray Griffin, Charles Hartshorne
What consciousness is
Consciousness is the subjective form of an intellectual feeling, the way an occasion feels the ‘affirmation-negation contrast’ between a given fact and an alternative possibility. Experience in general is prehension, the taking account of data, and most of it is nonconscious.
Mind and body
Mental and physical are two poles of every occasion within one process, not two substances. A human mind is a stream of high-grade occasions closely integrated with the living body, so mind-body interaction needs no special bridge, prehension being the one relation throughout nature.
Mechanism
Intellectual feeling integrates a physical feeling of an actual state of affairs with a propositional feeling of how it might be otherwise; consciousness is how that contrast is felt.
Core claims
- ‘Consciousness presupposes experience, and not experience consciousness’: most experience is nonconscious.
- Nothing actual is wholly devoid of experience; Whitehead rejects ‘vacuous actuality’ and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
- Consciousness occupies only a narrow focal region of a much larger experience, so the simplicity of what we notice is no measure of the whole.
- God supplies each occasion's initial aim, the relevant possibility that gives its becoming direction, and later retains completed occasions as data.
Criticisms
Basile argues that integration by a dominant occasion restates the combination problem rather than solving it. Critics also say that attributing experience to an electron names the problem without solving it, and that Whitehead's technical use of ‘feeling’ lets metaphor carry the explanation.
Implications
- AI consciousness: Unlikely
- On this view a whole is conscious only if it has a presiding occasion; a machine that is a mere aggregate would have experiencing parts but no consciousness of its own.
- Survival beyond death: Unlikely
- Since the mind is a stream of occasions bound to the living body and each perishes as a subject, personal survival does not follow; Whitehead offers instead ‘objective immortality,’ in which God retains completed occasions as data.
- Meaning and purpose: Cosmic/Ultimate
- God gives every occasion its initial aim toward novelty and preserves achieved value, and Whitehead calls God the great companion, the fellow-sufferer who understands.
Related theories
- Whitehead's Process Theory (Overlap)
- Strawson's Realistic Monism and Real Materialism (Compatible)
- Descartes’s Substance Dualism (Critique)
Sources
- Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Alfred North Whitehead (1929)
- Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead (1925)
- The Concept of Nature, Alfred North Whitehead (1920)
- Adventures of Ideas, Alfred North Whitehead (1933)
- Modes of Thought, Alfred North Whitehead (1938)
- Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem, David Ray Griffin (1998)
- Consciousness as a subjective form: Whitehead's nonreductionist naturalism, David Ray Griffin (2009)
- Whitehead's panpsychism as the subjectivity of prehension, L. B. McHenry (1995)
- Mind-body problem and panpsychism, P. Basile (2008)
- Whitehead’s unique approach to the topic of consciousness, A. Weekes (2009)