Eight
Matter, Consciousness, and the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness

The crux of the mind-body problem is that, given what is assumed to be the scientific conception of nature and therefore the human body, including the brain, it is impossible to understand how our conscious experience, which we know exists, could arise out of the body, and also how this experience could have the dual capacity for self-determining freedom and for employing this freedom in directing the body, which we all presuppose in practice. We are confronted by a paradox: What we in one sense know to be the case seemingly cannot be. The solution to be suggested here is based on Whitehead's proposal that "the paradox only arises because we have mistaken our abstraction for concrete realities" (SMW, 55).

Whitehead's statement occurs in the midst of his historical-philosophical examination of the effects on modern Western thought of its "acceptance of the [seventeenth-century] scientific cosmology at its face value" (SMW, 17). What was accepted at "face value" was "scientific materialism," which "presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread throughout space in a flux of configurations," material that is "senseless, valueless, purposeless . . . following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being" (SMW, 17). The view of nature articulated by this "scientific materialism," which is still widely presupposed, lies at the root of the mind-body problem—a fact illustrated by Searle's statement of the problem: "We think of ourselves as conscious, free, mindful, rational agents in a world that science tells us consists entirely of mindless, meaningless physical particles" (MBS, 13). This view of nature, Whitehead suggests, results from "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness."

Whitehead connects his own philosophical reconstruction, which is de-

voted to explaining and overcoming this fallacy, directly to the mind-body problem:

The living organ of experience is the living body as a whole. . . . In the course of [its] physical activities human experience has its origin. The plausible interpretation of such experience is that it is one of the natural activities involved in the functioning of such a high-grade organism. The actualities of nature must be so interpreted as to be explanatory of this fact. (AI, 225)

We need, in other words, a philosophical cosmology that explains the fact that our minds seem to be fully natural. The reason a cosmology based on scientific materialism cannot provide such an explanation is that the abstraction on which this materialism is based involves precisely the removal of mind from nature. The science that has provided the most help toward a reinterpretation of the actualities of nature, Whitehead suggests, is physiology, because "the effect of physiology was to put mind back into nature" (SMW, 148). Whitehead is not naive: He knows that physiologists "are apt to see more body than soul in human beings" (AI, 189). What he means is that physiology has had the effect of overcoming the dualism of mind and body formulated by Descartes and Locke and that overcoming this dualism will require us to reconceive the nature of the body as well as the mind.

In this chapter I lay out the various kinds of evidence and argument employed by Whitehead in justifying his reconstrual of both mind and body. Because it contains my answer to the question of the relation of "matter" and "consciousness," and because this answer will be presupposed in the following chapter (on freedom), this is the key chapter in the book. Unfortunately, however, it is also the most difficult one. There are three reasons for this difficulty. First, the mind-body problem is inherently a difficult one, as more than three centuries of discussion have demonstrated. Second, this chapter is where the radical conceptual innovation called for by several thinkers, and promised in the introduction, is encountered. Now, it is one thing to call formally for radical reconceptualization; it is something quite else to encounter an example of it in which deeply ingrained ways of thinking are challenged, new words (such as prehension ) are employed, and old words (such as feeling, physical, and mental ) are given new meanings. One will probably find it difficult to keep the meanings straight, and the new way of looking at things may seem so odd that one will wonder if it is worth the effort. Third, this chapter's argument is developed in the form of an exposition of Whitehead's thought, and I quote rather extensively from Whitehead's own statements, which sometimes, especially when containing technical terms and taken out of context, are not as clear as one might like. I use this method, in spite of the added difficulty it creates, because one of my purposes is to show that, although this fact has not been widely appreciated (even among Whitehead scholars), Whitehead's phi-

losophy can best be read as an extended solution to the mind-body problem. Also, exactly what the various elements in his solution are, and how they fit together, have not been widely understood (again, even among Whitehead scholars), so it is necessary to show, by means of extensive quotation, that the points I make really are Whitehead's points. I hope thereby to contribute not only to a viable solution to the mind-body problem but also to a much wider appreciation of the power and relevance of Whitehead's thought, now that philosophy is emerging from its antimetaphysical slumbers.

Before moving to the heart of this chapter, which is an exposition of Whitehead's new understanding of both mind and body, I need to discuss the fallacy that he sees as lying at the root of modernity's mind-body problem.

I. The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness

What is common to all forms of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is the "error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete" (SMW, 51)—of assuming an abstraction from a concrete reality to be the totality. The version of this error most germane to our topic is that of assuming nature as it actually is to be composed of matter understood as having "simple location." For a bit of matter to be "simply located" would mean that it could properly be said to be right here in space and time in a way that required no essential reference to other regions of space-time (SMW, 49). In other words, the concrete units of nature would have no essential reference either to the past or to the future.

This notion of nature creates obvious difficulties. As Hume pointed out, it makes the justification for scientific induction difficult.

For [Whitehead says], if in the location of configurations of matter throughout a stretch of time there is no inherent reference to any other times, past or future, it immediately follows that nature within any period does not refer to nature at any other period. Accordingly, induction is not based on anything which can be observed as inherent in nature. (SMW, 51)

Thinkers in the early modern period were not bothered by this fact, because they held that matter obeyed rigorous laws imposed by its creator; even Darwin retained a deistic form of that belief. But what is the justification for induction in a naturalistic framework? It is freeloading to keep the imposition while rejecting the Imposer. It seems that we are again presupposing something in practice for which orthodox theory provides no basis. Also, if nature's units have no reference to the past, our own memory, given the assumption that we are fully natural, would be difficult to explain (SMW, 51).

A second feature of the materialistic view of the concrete units of nature, besides simple location, is the notion that they can exist at an instant, in the technical sense of an idealized slice in time completely devoid of duration. According to this view, "if material has existed during any period, it has equally been in existence during any portion of that period. In other words, dividing the time does not divide the material" (SMW, 49), which means that "the lapse of time is an accident, rather than of the essence, of the material. . . . The material is equally itself at an instant of time" (SMW, 50). There is, accordingly, no inner motion, no internal becoming; the only kind of motion ascribable to the units of nature is locomotion, motion through space. Combining this second feature with the first, we get the notion of the "simple location of instantaneous material configurations" (SMW, 50).

A third feature of this view of matter is that because the concrete units of nature are assumed to have no inner duration, they are assumed to have no intrinsic reality whatsoever, which means that they are assumed not to have any intrinsic value, not to be things that exist for their own sakes. They are "vacuous actualities" (PR, 167), meaning actualities totally devoid of experience. "Nature is thus described as made up of vacuous bits of matter with no internal values, and merely hurrying through space" (MT, 158).

According to this view, the units of nature, being completely timeless, are totally different from our conscious experience as we know it immediately. We have memory, whereas natural units are said to have no reference to the past. We experience a present duration, in which we enjoy intrinsic value and make choices among possible values, whereas the reality of the units of nature is said to be exhausted by their outer features. Finally, our present experience, with its purposes, includes an anticipation of the future, whereas nothing analogous is said to occur in the units of nature. Our experience is temporal through and through; the units of nature are purely spatial.

The idea that our experience could arise out of natural units thus conceived is indeed paradoxical. But this paradox only arises, Whitehead says, because we have committed the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Employing Bergson's term to express the nature of the error involved, he says that we tend to "spatialize" the objects of sensory perception (SMW, 50; PR, 209). This tendency is so strong because it arises from the conjunction of at least three factors: (1) We cannot perceive contemporary events while they are becoming; we can perceive events only when they are past, after their internal becoming is finished. (2) Objects of sensory perception are aggregational societies of large numbers of individuals and, as such, are predominantly spatial entities. (3) Conscious sensory perception itself spatializes its data, removing in the process any inherited affective tone. The meaning of these three points will be filled out in the ensuing discussion;

for now, the point is the old one of being suspicious of appearances. Modern philosophy, in stressing the illusory nature of sensory appearances, has congratulated itself on having fulfilled its duty to be suspicious by distinguishing between primary and secondary qualities while accepting unquestioningly the deeper illusion: the notion of instantaneous bits of matter simply located in space (which lay behind the distinction between primary and secondary qualities). Whitehead is much more suspicious than McGinn of the conception of matter based on spatializing sensory perceptions.

Philosophy's task, Whitehead suggests, is to be "the critic of abstractions." By playing this role, it can be helpful to society, including society's science (SMW, 59, 87). For a period, of course, society in general and science in particular were not interested in this help, thanks to the "narrow efficiency" of the scheme of ideas based on scientific materialism. That is, this scheme of ideas was extremely successful in directing attention to, and getting relevant knowledge about, "just those groups of facts which, in the state of knowledge then existing, required investigation" (SMW, 17). This scheme of ideas was efficient precisely because it was narrow, suitable only for a particular range of facts that needed to be considered first, namely, the "simplest things" (MT, 154). The great success of this method made it impervious to philosophical criticism, such as that of Berkeley and Hume (SMW, 59, 66). Because of "its expulsion by science from the objectivist sphere of matter," philosophy "retreated into the subjectivist sphere of mind," thereby losing "its proper role as a constant critic of partial formulations" (SMW, 142).

Now, however, Whitehead says, this scientific materialism, with its abstractions, has become too narrow for science itself, "too narrow for the concrete facts which are before it for analysis. This is true even in physics, and is more especially urgent in the biological sciences" (SMW, 66).

Whitehead's attempt to provide a "wider basis for scientific thought" (SMW, 67) has, of course, been largely ignored. Like previous philosophical critics of the abstractions that the scientific community has inherited from the dualists of the seventeenth century, Whitehead has until now been left crying in the wilderness. However, the present attempt to develop a science of mind or consciousness, which requires putting mind back into nature, provides the context in which Whitehead's analysis of misplaced concreteness may get a hearing. The attempt to produce a fully naturalistic science of mind makes abundantly obvious—even more so than does biology, including physiology—that the received ideas are "too narrow for the concrete facts which are before [science] for analysis." This is the recognition behind the dissatisfaction of Madell, the perplexity of Nagel, the agnosticism of Strawson, and the pessimism of McGinn, Robinson, and Campbell. The basic reason for the problem, as these thinkers more or less clearly recognize, is the one Whitehead gave—that this scheme of ideas "provides

none of the elements which compose the immediate psychological experiences of mankind. Nor does it provide any elementary trace of the organic unity of a whole" (SMW, 73).

Whitehead bases his criticism of these abstractions, as well as his own proffered replacements, on the conviction that although the tendency to spatialize the objects of sensory perception is a very general tendency, it is not, as McGinn's analysis seems to suppose, an inherent necessity of the intellect (SMW, 51; PR, 209). He rejects the idea that "the abstractions of science are irreformable," offering his own program of reform "in the interest of science itself" (SMW, 83).

Besides hindering the progress of science, Whitehead says, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, resulting in the idea of instantaneous matter with simple location, has been "the occasion of great confusion in philosophy" (SMW, 51). This confusion has not been limited, however, to the abstract view of matter. The usual notion of the mind, as consisting essentially of consciousness and distinctively mental operations, is also a high abstraction (SMW, 58). This twofold abstraction lies behind the reason that neither the top-down strategy nor the bottom-up strategy, as described by McGinn, could go very far toward overcoming the gap between matter and mind. Closing the apparent gap requires overcoming both parts of the twofold abstraction. That is, although my Whiteheadian approach agrees with Strawson that the primary reason for the intractability of the mind-body problem has been the received view of the physical body, not, as the majority view holds, the received notion of conscious experience, my approach holds that this notion of consciousness shares some of the blame—partly because it contributes significantly to the false view of the body.

The mind-body problem has been generated, Whitehead suggests, because the bits of matter that enter into scientific description, as well as the conscious minds thought to be doing the observing and describing, are entities "of a high degree of abstraction" resulting from "a process of constructive abstraction" (SMW, 52, 58). Unlike extremists on this point, Whitehead does not say that the very notion of matter is a complete fiction, created out of whole cloth, with no correspondence to reality. Nor does he, unlike other extremists, say this about consciousness. Rather, he says, "'matter' and 'consciousness' both express something so evident in ordinary experience that any philosophy must provide some things which answer to their respective meanings" (SMW, 143). To speak of them as abstractions is to say that, rather than being simply fictions, they are "simplified editions of immediate matters of fact" (SMW, 52). Overcoming the twofold abstractness of vacuous bits of matter and consciousness as the stuff of mind can be described as the central purpose of Whitehead's philosophy.

The fallacious view of matter resulting from misplaced concreteness, Whitehead believes, can be overcome by starting from the bottom, with

physics, or at the top, with human psychology, supplemented by physiology. The "organic realism" toward which he is heading (PR, 309) could also be reached, he says, by beginning in the middle, with biology, which most readily suggests the concept of organism in place of mechanism (SMW, 41, 103) and which, with its doctrine of evolution, demands a doctrine of elementary units that are capable of evolution (which the aboriginal stuff of the materialistic philosophy is not [SMW, 107]). But he devotes most of his attention to psychological and physiological studies of human beings and to physics, reporting that he in fact arrived at his own convictions by means of an analysis of fundamental notions in physics (SMW, 152). Part of what he means can be learned from chapters 1 through 10 of Science and the Modern World or, more briefly, from chapter 7 of Modes of Thought .

Developments in modern physics, he argues in these chapters, have undermined all the elements on which the materialistic view of nature was based. In the new view, in particular, "there is no nature at an instant" (MT, 146), and the notion of passive, enduring matter has been undermined: "Matter has been identified with energy, and energy is sheer activity" (MT, 137). Physics as such, to be sure, does not completely overcome the dualism between experience and matter, because of the limited interests of physics: "In physics there is an abstraction. The science ignores what anything is in itself," that is, its intrinsic reality, considering its entities only with regard to their extrinsic reality, and only certain aspects of this, namely, the modifications of spatiotemporal specifications of other things (SMW, 153).^[*] Also, although the notion of energy as fundamental is an advance on the older idea of matter, "the physicists' energy is obviously an abstraction" (SMW, 36). But, in sweeping away the Cartesian-Newtonian "essential distinction between matter at an instant and the agitations of experience," the new

[*] I quoted earlier Strawson's statement that physics provides "what we think of as our best account of the nature of the physical" (MR, 47). Although Strawson's statement can be accepted as a sociological statement about the dominant view today in scientific and philosophical circles, from Whitehead's analysis it follows that we emphatically should not think of (present-day) physics as performing this role. To do so involves doubly misplaced concreteness, given the double abstraction involved in the conceptions provided by (present-day) physics. Of course, Strawson's statement does not mean that he himself is guilty of this fallacy, given his assertion that the account of the physical provided by present-day physics must, at a general level, be radically incomplete. It does seem, however, that by and large scientists and philosophers reinforce each other in this fallacy of misplaced concreteness: Most philosophers seem to think that the materialistic view of nature's ultimate units is vouchsafed by physics, whereas most physicists, generally being aware that, because they deal only with abstractions, they are not in a position to settle philosophical questions about the nature of nature, seem to assume that the materialistic view of their realm is based on good philosophical reasoning (whether of professional philosophers or of tellow physicists functioning as their own philosophers). If philosophy would, as Whitehead proposes, recover its role as the critic of abstractions, this vicious cycle might be broken.

physics now at least allows "bodily activities and forms of experience [to] be construed in terms of each other" (MT, 115). That is, we can add content to the notion of "bare activity" by fusing experience and nature (MT, 166).

The bottom-up approach from physics, however, can only take us part of the way. Bridging the apparent gap requires supplementation from the top-down approach. That approach, however, faces great obstacles, especially given inherited modes of thought. I turn now to this approach.

II. Overcoming Misplaced Concreteness with Regard to Both Matter and Mind

The abstract understandings of matter and mind are mutually supportive. Overcoming misplaced concreteness with regard to one will, therefore, require overcoming it with regard to the other. While this is true, it is also the case that the most important direction is from mind to matter. While overcoming the fallacious view of matter will help overcome the fallacious view of the mind, getting a correct understanding of the human mind, especially the status of its sensory perception and consciousness, is essential for overcoming the erroneous view of matter .

Whitehead's argument, especially how the various elements in it are related, is not always as clear as one might wish. A careful reading, however, reveals that there are six major dimensions of his contention that we can generalize from our own experience to understand what matter is in itself . I have organized this section in terms of these six dimensions.

A. The Status of Human Experience in Nature

The first dimension of Whitehead's argument is that we know our own experience, which we normally refer to as our "mind," as a fully natural actuality. Accordingly, what we know about it from within can be generalized to other actualities, which we know only from without.

Regarding the idea of the mind as fully natural: As we saw earlier, Whitehead accepts what he calls the "plausible interpretation" of human experience, according to which it is "one of the natural activities involved in the functioning of . . . a high-grade organism" (AI, 225). He even refers to it as the "total bodily event" (SMW, 73). By this he means not that it is simply the numerical sum of the bodily happenings but that it is the experiential unification of those happenings: "It has its own unity as an event" and exists as "an entity for its own sake" (SMW, 148). This fact, however, does not make it different in kind from other things: Whitehead takes it to be, except for its unusual complexity, "on the same level as all other events" (SMW, 73). He bases this conclusion not only on general philosophical and scientific considerations, such as the evolutionary origin of humans, but also on

direct experience: "We seem to be ourselves elements of this world in the same sense as are the other things which we perceive" (SMW, 89).

Included in that statement is the notion that we are not only natural but also actual. To be an actual entity is to be able both to receive and to exert causation, and we directly experience both sides of the causal relation. On the one hand, a large portion of our experience is of the overwhelming degree to which our experiences, such as our pains, pleasures, and sensory perceptions, are caused by our bodies. On the other hand, as discussed in chapter 5 and more fully in chapter 9, we are also directly conscious of, and constantly presuppose, the efficacy of our experience for our bodily actions.

Taking, then, my own experience to be simply one of the many actualities in nature, a unique feature of it is that it is the one that I know from the inside, by identity. Referring to our experience, which unifies various bodily activities into a totality, Whitehead says that its knowledge is simply "the reflective experience of a totality, reporting for itself what it is in itself as one unit occurrence" (SMW, 148). Because I perceive myself in this unique way, I may tend to think of myself as different in kind from the other things I perceive, but this conclusion need not follow: "The private psychological field is merely the event considered from its own standpoint" (SMW, 150). Whitehead here expresses the point made by Kant in the passage discussed by McGinn.

On the assumption that my own experience is one natural actuality among others, no different in kind from others, my self-knowledge gives me an inside viewpoint on the nature of nature. I can then generalize what I thereby know about the nature of natural units to other such units (SMW, 73), taking due account, of course, of the fact that most of them (all except other human experiences, as far as we know) are evidently less complex.

This first dimension of Whitehead's argument will be met by two immediate objections. In the first place, our experience is constituted by consciousness and sensory perception. How can one possibly generalize our experience to amoebas, let alone to electrons? In the second place, even if the most primitive dimensions of human experience could be understood so as to make this suggestion not seem completely absurd, what empirical foothold do we have for making such a generalization? That is, what is there about our experience of physical things that could provide the slightest excuse for attributing even the lowliest type of experience to them? These are formidable questions. The remaining five points will be devoted to Whitehead's answers to them.

B. The Status of Consciousness in Human Experience

The first precondition for Whitehead's generalization from our own experience to the intrinsic reality of other things is his repudiation of the "im-

plicit assumption of the philosophical tradition . . . that the basic elements of experience are to be described in terms of one, or all, of the three ingredients, consciousness, thought, sense-perception." In Whitehead's philosophy, "these three components are unessential elements in experience," belonging to a derivative phase of experience "if in any effective sense they enter at all" (PR, 36). I will deal with consciousness and thought in this point, saving sense perception for the next.

Whitehead specifically connects the derivative nature of consciousness with the program to generalize. Just after saying that, because of analogies, "bodily activities and forms of experience can be construed in terms of each other," he adds:

This conclusion must not be distorted . . . [by] a distorted account of human experience. Human nature has been described in terms of its vivid accidents, and not of its existential essence. The description of its essence must apply to the unborn child, to the baby in its cradle, to the state of sleep, and to that vast background of feeling hardly touched by consciousness. Clear, conscious discrimination is an accident of human existence. It makes us human. But it does not make us exist. It is of the essence of our humanity. But it is an accident of our existence. (MT, 116)

This notion means that the unity of a moment of experience—the unity of reception, enjoyment, and action—is not dependent on conscious operations. With regard to a moment of experience's reception of causal influences from its body, Whitehead uses the term "prehension," which means a taking account that may or may not be conscious, or cognitive (SMW, 69). Whitehead is here pointing to the most basic form of the operation that lies behind what philosophers, following Franz Brentano, have called "intentionality," meaning "aboutness." By using the term "prehension," however, Whitehead means no merely external reference but the way an experience "can include, as part of its own essence, any other entity" (AI, 234). Accordingly, in speaking of a moment of our experience as a "unit occurrence," he says: "This total unity, considered as an entity for its own sake, is the prehension into unity of the patterned aspects of . . . the various parts of its body" (SMW, 148f.). One point of this description is "to edge cognitive mentality away from being the necessary substratum of the unity of experience" (SMW, 92), because that unity occurs prior to, and perhaps without the accompaniment of, consciousness or cognition.

Cognition discloses an event as being an activity, organizing a real togetherness of alien things. But this psychological field does not depend on its cognition; so that this field is still a unit event as abstracted from its self-cognition. Accordingly, consciousness will be the function of knowing. But what is known is already a prehension of aspects of the one real universe. (SMW, 151)

As Whitehead put the point more concisely later, "consciousness presupposes experience, and not experience consciousness" (PR, 53). Whenever I speak of the mind, accordingly, the reader should understand this "process of unification," which Whitehead puts in place of "mind" as usually understood in philosophy (SMW, 69).

If consciousness is not the substratum of experience, what status does it have? In discussing this question, Whitehead refers to James's essay "Does 'Consciousness' Exist?" Whitehead accepts James's rejection of consciousness in the sense of an "aboriginal stuff . . ., contrasted with that of which material objects are made, out of which our thoughts of them are made" (SMW, 144; quoting James). He also accepts James's view that consciousness is a particular function of experience. (Note that consciousness is said to be a function of experience [which is an "aboriginal stuff," although not one "contrasted with that of which material objects are made"] rather than a function of the brain.) This function (as indicated in the extract above) is the function of knowing or (as indicated in the previous extract) the function of clear discrimination of the prehended objects.^[*] Whitehead later works out this view more technically, defining consciousness as the "subjective form" of an "intellectual prehension." To clarify this definition will require a discussion of Whitehead's account of the phases of a moment of experience.

Whitehead also accepts James's idea (although he had evidently come to it independently) that one's experience, although it may seem like a "stream," consists literally of "buds or drops of perception," which "come totally or not at all" and in that sense are not divisible (PR, 68). Such a "drop" has the internal duration stressed by Bergson. Whitehead's technical term for these "drops" is "occasions of experience." This term involves a further specification of his other technical term for an actual entity, "actual occasion," which is used to indicate the temporal and spatial extensiveness of an actual entity (PR, 77). He thereby overcomes the dualism between physical entities as having spatial but not temporal extension and minds as having temporal but not spatial extension. His view is that all actual entities are actual occasions, thereby having both spatial and tempo-

[*] Given this distinction between distinctively conscious experience and experience itself (which essentially involves prehensions, which may not clearly discriminate among any of the prehended objects), it would be implansible in the extreme to attribute consciousness to amoebas, let alone atoms and electrons. Those philosophers who insist that all experience is conscious experience, such as McGinn, Seager, and Strawson, must be presupposing some very different notion of consciousness. Of course, there is no "right" way to define consciousness. However, it is puzzling that, so many decades after Freud, Jung, and others have provided extensive evidence of unconscious experience in human beings, many philosophers still define their terms in such a way that, as Strawson puts it, "the expression 'conscious experience' is, strictly speaking, pleonastic" (MR, 3).

ral extension, and that all actual occasions are occasions of experience . But that is to anticipate. For now the focus is on a human occasion of experience.

An occasion of experience consists entirely of prehensions. A prehension always involves—besides the occasion of experience that is the subject of the prehension—two aspects: (1) the object that is prehended and (2) the subjective form with which it is prehended. The most basic kind of subjective form is emotion, but there are other subjective forms as well. Every prehension has both an objective datum and a subjective form. There can be no "bare" grasping of an object, devoid of subjective feeling. (This position, incidentally, agrees with McGinn's view that "the subjective and the semantic are chained to each other" [PC, 30] so that there cannot be content without subjective experience.) Given this twofold meaning of prehension, Whitehead uses as a virtual synonym^[*] the term "feeling," which suggests both that something is felt and that it is felt with affective tone (AI, 233). The term "feeling" suggests the operation of "passing from the objectivity of the data to the subjectivity of the actual entity in question" (PR, 40). Prehensions or feelings can be simple or they can be more or less complex, involving integrations of simpler feelings.^[1]

An occasion of experience, although not divided or divisible in fact, can be divided intellectually into phases. Each phase has different types of prehensions. The first phase consists of physical prehensions, which are prehensions whose objects are other actualities, that is, other occasions of experience or groups thereof. To speak of a "physical feeling," accordingly, does not necessarily mean that the object is some portion of one's body. The only requirement is that the object be an actuality, not a mere possibility. Feelings of one's body are, however, of overwhelming importance in one's physical experience. (To speak of "physical experience," of course, is to challenge the dualistic use of these two words, which put them in opposition: To be "physical" was to be devoid of experience, whereas to have "experience" was to be mental.) In any case, all higher forms of experience presuppose physical experience.

Physical prehensions stand in contrast with mental (or conceptual ) prehensions, in which the object is a possibility, an ideal or abstract entity (what is often called a "mental object," meaning an object of mental apprehension). These conceptual feelings occur in the second phase of an occasion of experience, being derivative from physical feelings. For example, out of a particular set of physical feelings originating from a red object, I may lift out redness as such, in abstraction from its exemplification in this particular object. The feeling of redness itself is a conceptual feeling; it is mentality.

[*] There is a technical difference, in that there are both positive prehensions, which are termed feelings, and negative prehensions, which exclude their data from feeling (PR, 23). For our purposes, however, the terms "prchension" and "feeling" can be used interchangeably.

Mentality, however, does not necessarily involve consciousness and, in fact, in this second phase cannot . (As we will see, consciousness cannot arise prior to the fourth phase.) Mentality is essentially appetition, either for or against some possible form of experience. It can be a blind urge to realize, or avoid, some form of feeling. In any case, conceptual feeling is derivative from physical feeling, with which experience originates.

This account of the relation between the physical and mental types of experience agrees, then, with Hume's claim that experience originates with "impressions," not "reflections"; but it disagrees with Hume's opinion that the data of these "impressions" are mere universals, such as sense data, rather than actual entities (PR, 160). For Whitehead, perceptual experience begins with the direct perception of other actualities, such as those comprising our bodies. This is the ground of our realism, our knowledge that we exist in a world of other actual things. This Whiteheadian view agrees, therefore, with McGinn's view that "physical facts [rather than "mental items" in the sense of abstract objects] are the basic kind of intentional object" (PC, 48n), except that what McGinn refers to as "mental states" would be included among the "physical facts," that is, among the actual entities that can be the objects of physical prehensions. For example, in "remembering" what I meant to say when I started this sentence a few seconds ago, my present occasion of experience is prehending some earlier occasions of experience. This perception of those prior "mental facts" is an example of a physical prehension, because the data are prior actualities, not mere possibilities. In any case, the basic point is that mental experience, which in its most sophisticated forms may seem to be completely detached from the actual world, always in fact arises out of physical experience,^[*] with the body being the most powerful source of physical experience.

In the third phase of experience, there is an integration of prehensions from the first two phases, resulting in propositional feelings, which are prehensions whose objects are propositions. A proposition is a union of an actuality (from a physical feeling) and a possibility (from a conceptual feeling). An example is "this stone is grey." Of course, the conscious judgment that "this stone is grey" would belong to the fourth phase, in which intellectual feelings arise. But the proposition involving the stone could constitute part of the content of such a feeling. Other examples would be "my body is tired" and "my back is painful," both of which happen at the moment to be true. More important in a sense are untrue propositions, such as one in which I imagine my back as not painful. Such a counterfactual proposition, which may lead me to take remedial action, best illustrates the basic role of propositions in experience, which is to serve as lures for feel-

[*] This point is the basis for calling panexperientialism of this sort a species of "physicalism," which I do in chapter 10.

ing. (To serve as objects of "judgment" is simply a highly intellectualized version of this role.) This description of their role depends on the previous point that mentality is basically appetition: A proposition serves to lure its experiencer either toward or away from the conjoining of some particular possibility with some particular fact(s). Propositional feelings, then, are feelings in which such propositions are entertained.

This description of propositions as basically "lures for feeling," rather than as essentially objects of intellectual judgment, allows their functioning to be generalizable to nonhuman occasions of experience, by virtue of minimizing the sophistication of the mentality needed to entertain them. Even with this definition, however, propositional feelings in their full-fledged form could not be generalizable to the lowest types of occasions of experience. In a propositional feeling, the possibility, such as redness, is lifted up as such, that is, as a possibility, in abstraction from its presence in the immediate feeling. That operation takes considerable sophistication. Whitehead, accordingly, distinguishes propositional feelings in this full-fledged sense from "physical purposes," in which this abstraction from the present feeling is only latent.^[*] In a physical purpose, the possibility embodied in the physical feeling is felt with blind appetition, either positive or negative. Even in human experience, most of the feelings in the third phase would seem to be mere physical purposes rather than full-fledged propositional feelings. In any case, "propositional feelings" should here be understood to include "physical purposes."

In the fourth phase, if it occurs, there is an integration of a propositional feeling (from the third phase) with primitive physical feelings (from the first phase). The result is an intellectual feeling . A peculiarity of intellectual feelings is that their subjective forms involve consciousness. One species of intellectual feelings, in fact, is that of "conscious perceptions" (PR, 266f.). But intellectual feelings also include judgments, which would cover most of what is usually meant by "thought," including that kind of thought that we are inclined to call knowing or cognition.

Whitehead's point is that consciousness, as a subjective form of a feeling, can occur only in a feeling that has an adequate datum or content (PR, 241f.). His notion that this datum must involve a synthesis of a proposition and a fact connects his position with the widespread agreement that consciousness is always associated with negation . Whereas experience always in-

[*] Another difference between a "physical purpose" and a "propositional feeling" is that, in the latter, the actual entity that was physically felt in the first phase is reduced to a bare "it" in becoming the logical subject of the proposition (PR, 261). This twofold difference between physical purposes and propositional feelings is especially important in indicating (as I do below) how organisms as simple as neurons, which presumably cannot entertain propositions, can nevertheless experience an incipient intentionality, in the sense of aboutness.

volves some minimal awareness of what is, we should not speak of consciousness unless there is also awareness of what is not: "Consciousness is the feeling of negation: in the perception of 'the stone as grey,' such feeling is in barest germ; in the perception of 'the stone as not grey,' such feeling is in full development. Thus the negative perception is the triumph of consciousness" (PR, 161). More precisely, consciousness involves the contrast between what is and what might be, between fact and theory. It involves awareness both of something definite and of potentialities "which illustrate either what it is and might not be, or what it is not and might be. In other words, there is no consciousness without reference to definiteness, affirmation, and negation. . . . Consciousness is how we feel the affirmation-negation contrast" (PR, 243). This is the kind of datum that consciousness presupposes, without which it cannot be provoked into existence.

This account of the phases of a moment of experience, culminating in the conscious entertainment of an intellectual feeling, constitutes an explanation of the rise of what has come to be called conscious intentionality, in the sense of "aboutness." Whitehead's account, describing consciousness as the way in which an intellectual feeling (the contrast of a proposition and an alternative possibility) is entertained, agrees with the widespread doctrine that consciousness is always consciousness of something . One virtue of the account by Whitehead is that, rather than implying that conscious intentionality somehow emerged in full-blown form out of wholly nonintentional objects (such as neurons as conventionally understood), he portrays it as emerging out of experience that involves intentionality but not consciousness. That is, in the third phase of a moment of experience, there are numerous propositional feelings, only a few of which, if any, will become full-fledged intellectual feelings and thereby be entertained consciously. To be sure, this point by itself would not be relevant to the mind-brain relation if neurons are too simple even to entertain propositional feelings. However, propositional feelings, as I have indicated, can be regarded as simply more sophisticated versions of "physical purposes," which neurons (by hypothesis) do have. So, neurons, while (presumably) being devoid of conscious intentionality, are not devoid of intentionality, or at least an incipient intentionality, altogether. This is one way of explaining how this kind of panexperientialism, in portraying minds and neurons as different only in degree, avoids (ontological) dualism while affirming interactionism.

This summarizes Whitehead's technical account of his view that thought, consciousness, and cognition are "unessential elements in experience." Far from being foundational, they are not even necessary. When they do occur, they are surface elements, being derivative from the basic operations of an occasion of experience. In most occasions of experience, the fourth phase does not occur, or is latent at best. Without the integration of integra-

tions that can occur only in that phase—that is, without intellectual prehensions—consciousness, which is the subjective form of an intellectual prehension, cannot arise. It is provoked into existence only by the right kind of experiential content. In a sense, then, Whitehead would agree with Dennett's functionalist claim that content is "more fundamental than consciousness" (CE, 455). However, Dennett here seems by "consciousness" to mean any subjective experience whatsoever, not simply consciousness as a very high-level form of experience. Whitehead would, as I indicated earlier, support McGinn's antifunctionalist point that subjective experience and content are inseparable.

In any case, one of the implications of Whitehead's view of consciousness as a "function" is that consciousness is not a preexistent stuff lying in waiting, as it were, to be filled by this content or that . That assumption, which Whitehead rejects, has led to the related assumption that those elements that are most clearly lit up by consciousness must be the elements that actually arise first in experience . The opposite is, Whitehead insists, more nearly the case. That is, because "consciousness only arises in a late derivative phase of complex integrations," it tends to illuminate the data of that late phase, not the data that were in the first phase, except for those relatively few elements that are carried into the late phase (PR, 162). From this point follows Whitehead's criticism of what he considers the basic error of modern epistemologies:

Thus those elements in our experience which stand out clearly and distinctly in our consciousness are not its basic facts; they are the derivative modifications which arise in the process. . . . [T]he order of dawning, clearly and distinctly, in consciousness is not the order of metaphysical priority. (PR, 162)

It should be recalled that we are exploring Whitehead's claim that the ordinary (especially in modern times) notions of "mind" and "matter" as stark opposites arise from mistaking the abstract for the concrete. I have just reviewed much of his explanation as to why the common understanding of the "mind" as consisting essentially of "consciousness" and "thinking" involves such a mistake. I will now, building on this account of consciousness, do the same for the notion that perception is essentially sense perception. That will provide the basis, in turn, for explaining his related idea that the ordinary notion of matter is derived from a process of constructive abstraction rather than from any truly primary elements in our experience.

C. The Status of Sensory Perception in Human Experience

The assumption that sensory perception is a primary element in our experience follows from the equation, false from Whitehead's perspective, of primacy in consciousness with genetic primacy in experience . Sensory perception is a derivative form of perception, resulting from an integration that occurs

in a late phase of experience. It thus tends to get clearly illuminated by consciousness. That sensory perception gets lit up clearly follows not from the fact that our perceptual experience begins with sensory perception but from the fact that it does not .

Sensory perception, in Whitehead's analysis, is derivative from two simpler modes of perception. The first of these is called "perception in the mode of causal efficacy." Perception in this mode has already been discussed, because it is simply physical prehension described in the language of perception.

It is through perception in the mode of causal efficacy that we know most of those things that we inevitably presuppose in practice, which I have called hard-core commonsense notions . Modern philosophy has had difficulty explaining how we knew them, thereby relegating them to the category of "practice," "faith," "a priori forms of intuition," or even "dispensable common sense," because it has not recognized this more primal mode of perception underlying sense perception. It is through this more basic mode of perception, for example, that I have the category "other actualities besides myself" and know that there is an external world beyond my own experience, because I directly prehend other things, such as my bodily actualities. This is the basic reason why we are all realists in practice: "Common sense is inflexibly objectivist. We perceive other things which are in the world of actualities in the same sense as we are. Also our emotions are directed towards other things, including of course our bodily organs" (PR, 158).

This same mode of perception is, likewise, the basis for our knowledge of the reality of causation as real influence; this point is implicit in calling it "perception in the mode of causal efficacy." In prehending my body, for example, I prehend some of its parts as causally efficacious for my own experience. This applies not only to various pleasures and pains but also to external sensory perception itself. In opposition to Hume's claim that "impressions" arise in the soul "from unknown causes," Whitehead points out that Hume reveals elsewhere "his real conviction—everybody's real conviction—that visual sensations arise 'by the eyes.' The causes are not a bit 'unknown,' and among them there is usually to be found the efficacy of the eyes [although sometimes it may be alcohol]. . . . The reason for the existence of oculists and prohibitionists is that various causes are known" (PR, 171). "The notion of causation arose," Whitehead adds, "because mankind lives amid experiences in the mode of causal efficacy" (PR, 175).

It is through this mode of perception that we also know about the past and therefore the reality of time . I mentioned earlier that memory is an example of a physical prehension, because the present occasion of experience prehends prior experiences. This explains why we are not in practice afflicted by Santayana's "solipsism of the present moment." This prehension of our own past occasions of experience also provides an explanation for

our sense of self-identity through time—which needs an explanation in any philosophy such as that of Buddhism, Hume, and Whitehead in which the notion of a soul or mind as a numerically self-identical substance through time is denied (AI, 184, 186, 220f.; MT, 117f., 160ff.).

Perception in the mode of causal efficacy, which is a nonsensory mode of perception more basic than sensory, also serves to explain another assumption presupposed in the mind-body problem: our close sense of identification with our bodies . In a statement expressing a fact so obvious as to be seldom noticed, Whitehead says,

Nothing is more astonishing in the history of philosophic thought than the naive way in which our association with our human bodies is assumed. . . . [The body] is in fact merely one among other natural objects. And yet, the unity of "body and mind" is the obvious complex which constitutes the one human being. . . . [O]ur feeling of bodily unity is a primary experience. It is an experience so habitual and so completely a matter of course that we rarely mention it. No one ever says, Here am I, and I have brought my body with me. (MT, 114)

Whitehead's explanation: "There is . . . every reason to believe that our sense of unity with the body has the same original as our sense of unity with our immediate past of personal experience. It is another case of nonsensuous perception" (MT, 189). This sense of unity arises from what I in the previous chapter called "basic perception," in which one prehends one's own brain and through it the remainder of one's body.

I might add here that although Whitehead's method is certainly based on what can be called "introspection" in a broad sense, he is critical of introspection as it has typically been practiced by philosophers.

The attitude of introspection . . . lifts the clear-cut data of sensation into primacy, and cloaks the vague compulsions and derivations which form the main stuff of experience. In particular it rules out that intimate sense of derivation from the body, which is the reason for our instinctive identification of our bodies with ourselves. (AI, 226)

The reason the top-down approach has not gotten very far in overcoming the gap between mind and body is that it has usually started too far up, with the superficialities of human experience rather than with its essential ingredients. It has started with what makes our minds human, not with what makes them actual. I move now toward that higher level of superficialities.

The second mode of perception, derivative from the first, is called "perception in the mode of presentational immediacy." It is thus named because in this mode the data are immediately present, in themselves telling no tales of their origin. Taken by themselves, sense data, such as those constituting the yellow round shape before me, arise, in Hume's words, from "unknown

causes." In fact, when they are considered in isolation, we should not even call them sense data, because this term implies that we do know that they are derived from the senses. If this kind of perception were our only mode of perception, as Hume's theory held, then we would not even have the idea of causal influence: "Hume's polemic respecting causation is," Whitehead says, "one prolonged, convincing argument that pure presentational immediacy does not disclose any causal influence" (PR, 123). Pure presentational immediacy also does not disclose other actualities, a past, time, or much of anything else. Insofar as it gets reduced to visual data, as it often does (MT, 168), it gives us nothing but space, shapes, and colors. Given the modern tendency to equate perception with perception in this mode of presentational immediacy, it is no wonder that modern philosophy has had epistemological problems (such problems, in fact, that many philosophers Want to give up the whole epistemological enterprise).

These problems have arisen because of the false assumption, discussed earlier, that those elements that are primary in consciousness must be primary in the perceptual process . After the passage in which Whitehead argues that "those elements of our experience which stand out clearly and distinctly in our consciousness are not its basic facts; they are the derivative modifications which arise in the process," he writes:

For example, consciousness only dimly illuminates the prehensions in the mode of causal efficacy, because these prehensions are primitive elements in our experience. But prehensions in the mode of presentational immediacy are among those prehensions which we enjoy with the most vivid consciousness. These prehensions are late derivatives in the concrescence of an experient subject. (PR, 162)

"Most of the difficulties of philosophy," Whitehead continues, are due to assuming the opposite: "Experience has been explained in a thoroughly topsy-turvy fashion, the wrong end first" (PR, 162).

What, then, is sensory perception? It is a synthesis of these two more primitive forms. It is thus a form of "perception in the mode of symbolic reference," because data from one of the two former modes (usually presentational immediacy) are used to interpret data arising from the other mode (usually causal efficacy). To continue the example begun above, I use the yellow round patch that is immediately present to my mind to interpret the feeling of causal efficacy from my body, particularly my eyes. I say, accordingly, that I am seeing the sun. I may be wrong about that. I cannot be wrong about experiencing the yellow shape; and I cannot be wrong about feeling the causal efficacy (although I may be wrong in thinking that it originated from the eyes). In those two pure modes of perception, there is simple givenness. But perception in the mode of symbolic reference introduces interpretation and thereby the possibility of error (PR, 168, 172).

The fact that sensory perception includes perception in the mode of causal efficacy explains why we are all realists about sensory perception. We do not, as Whitehead says, begin dancing with sense data and then infer a partner (PR, 315f.). However, the fact that presentational immediacy generally far outweighs causal efficacy in consciousness, especially when one is involved in philosophical introspection, has led most philosophers simply to equate sensory perception with presentational immediacy. Some of the problems of this equation have already been mentioned. Another problem—which I touched on in the previous chapter—is the resulting assumption that entities without sensory organs can have no perceptual experience at all . This assumption lies behind the fact that most philosophers and scientists, even if they will allow some form of experience to most animals, draw the line at the point where there seem to be no sensory organs. However, if presentational immediacy and therefore sensory perception are derivative forms of perception even in us, then it is not impossible in principle to generalize some kind of perceptual experience to all individuals, however primitive . This point is the basis for Whitehead's generalization:

The perceptive mode of presentational immediacy arises in the later, originative, integrative phases of the process of concrescence. The perceptive mode of causal efficacy is to be traced to the constitution of the datum by reason of which there is a concrete percipient entity. Thus we must assign the mode of causal efficacy to the fundamental constitution of an occasion so that in germ this mode belongs even to organisms of the lowest grade; while the mode of presentational immediacy requires the more sophistical activity of the later stages of process, so as to belong only to organisms of a relatively high grade. (PR, 172)

Besides taking as primary a mode of perception that could not possibly be generalized to all levels of the actual world, the "topsy-turvy" interpretation of our experience also ignores, or takes as secondary, those dimensions of our experience that in principle could be generalized. The fallacious assumption that the notion of causation depends on vivid sense data, I have just argued, rules out the generalizability of perception in the mode of causal efficacy. Other relevant dimensions of experience are our emotions and purposes. In fact, just after the "topsy-turvy" sentence quoted above, Whitehead says: "In particular, emotional and purposeful experience have been made to follow upon Hume's impressions of sensation" (PR, 162). If we think, instead, of our experience as consisting most fundamentally of emotional, appetitive, and purposive (recall the discussion of "physical purposes") responses to physical feelings of other things, most basically our body and our own past of a split second ago, then we have elements some faint analogy to which can less implausibly be ascribed all the way down.

This completes my formulation of Whitehead's response to the first question, raised at the end of the first point in this section, regarding the plausibility of generalizing any aspect of human experience to the simplest actualities. Because much skepticism will surely remain, let me recall Whitehead's challenge:

Any doctrine which refuses to place human experience outside nature, must find in descriptions of human experience factors which also enter into the descriptions of less specialized natural occurrences. If there be no such factors, then the doctrine of human experience as a fact within nature is mere bluff. . . . We should either admit dualism,. . . or we should point out the identical elements connecting human experience with physical science. (AI, 185)

Assuming that the threat of (ontological) dualism is sufficient to prod even the most skeptical of my antidualist readers into continuing, I will proceed to the second question, which asks what basis there is in experience for thinking of the units of nature as the kind of entities to which primitive emotions, appetites, and purposes could be ascribed.

D. The Spatializing Nature of Sensory Perception's Presentational Immediacy^[*]

The general thesis of the remainder of this section is that "among the primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experience" there is no element that is experienced as simply located or vacuous, with "vacuous" understood to mean void of all experience (SMW, 58; PR, 29, 167). The points below (E and F) treat the positive side of this thesis, which is that the truly given elements of experience are all given so as to suggest just the opposite—that the units of nature contain experience and references to the past and the future. The present point treats the negative side of the thesis, which is that the conception of matter as having the twin characteristics of vacuity and simple location is based on constructed, not given, elements in experience.

In this discussion, I will, as the above head indicates, be thinking of sensory perception in terms of its dimension of presentational immediacy (which is overwhelmingly dominant in it and with which it is usually simply equated). The main point is that the view of nature on which scientific materialism is based, in which matter is seen as having none but spatial properties, is a result of the spatializing nature of presentational immediacy. Because of the prominence of presentational immediacy in sensory

[*] I distinguished, in the final section of chapter 7, between two kinds of sensory perception: perception of things external to one's body and "proprioception" of parts of one's own body. In this section, I distinguish between sensory perception as such, but especially of external things, and perception in the mode of causal efficacy.

perception, the perceptual mode of causal efficacy, which suggests a quite different view of nature, is virtually if not totally ignored. By misunderstanding the status of presentational immediacy within sensory perception, we are led to construct a false view of nature.

The point that presentational immediacy is a derivative, not a direct, mode of perception has already been made. Whereas nonsensory prehension of our own body is perception of nature as directly given to experience, in sensory perception that provides information of things beyond the body we have nature as constructed, not simply given. This is a point on which our usual epistemological assumptions should be partly corrected by our science: "Unless the physical and physiological sciences are fables, the qualitative experiences which are the sensations, such as sight, hearing, etc., are involved in an intricate flux of reactions within and without the animal body" (MT, 121). Sense data, in other words, are produced by an amazingly complex, indirect process. Philosophers tend to give lip service to this fact and then continue to think of nature in terms of the purely spatial matter that is a product of (external) sensory perception.

One respect in which sensory perception is illusory—we now know, thanks to modern physics, chemistry, and biology, with their atomic, molecular, and cell theories—is that sensory perception hides the true individuals composing material things. A stone, for example, is composed of billions of individuals engaged in energetic activity. Sensory perception, however, gives us a single, passive, enduring substance, numerically one both temporally and spatially (MT, 154; PR, 77). Even when we know better, we may continue, with Popper, to take "solid material bodies" as the paradigms of reality.^[*] Historically, what happened was that the characteristics originally attributed to the stone were reassigned to the molecule and the atom. In Whitehead's words, "The metaphysical concepts, which had their origin in a mistake about the stone, were now applied to the individual molecules. Each atom was still a stuff which retained its self-identity and its essential attributes in any portion of time—however short, and however long" (PR, 78). When it became clear that the concept of passive, enduring matter did not apply to the atom, its application was shifted to the (revealingly named) "elementary particles." Even though quantum physics suggests that the whole concept is a mistake, it continues to be assumed. This

[*] Even Strawson seems to continue this practice. Although he says that experience must be taken to be fully natural and to be as real as any other properties or phenomena of physical things, emphasizing that the reality of experience is "the thing of which we can be most certain" (MR, 57), he nevertheless, when naming "paradigm cases of physical phenomena," names "rocks, seas, neurons, and so on" (MR, 110). The logic of his argument would seem to require him, instead, to take human beings, especially himself as known from within, as paradigmatic.

is the power of the perception-based conceptions suggested by perception in the mode of presentational immediacy.

Whereas the former point is well known (even if its implications are usually ignored), Whitehead's further point about the constructed nature of sensory data is among his most original and, to conventional ways of thinking, most challenging ideas. It is also one of his most important ideas, lying behind his greater suspicion (compared with McGinn) about the adequacy of our conceptions based on sensory perception with its tendency to "spatialize" its objects. The idea in question is that the transition from the perceptual mode of causal efficacy to that of presentational immediacy involves an inversion of emphasis, so that the features that were prominent in the data as received in physical prehension are radically played down by presentational immediacy, whereas other features, which were only faintly present in the primal perceptual mode, are greatly emphasized in the derivative mode. Let us deal with a case of visual perception, in which I perceive the early morning sky as red. I, as the prehensive unification of the relevant activities in my brain at that moment, receive, in the perceptual mode of causal efficacy, both a sensum and certain geometrical relationships to the environment (PR, 171, 312). In that mode of perception, the sensum is strongly felt in terms of its primary status in the nature of things, which is as a qualification of affective tone (AI, 245). Whitehead knows that this is not the conventional view about sensa: "Unfortunately the learned tradition of philosophy has missed their main characteristic, which is their enormous emotional significance" (AI, 215). In a physical prehension, it is this aspect of the sensum, in this case red, that is primarily felt.

In their most primitive form of functioning, a sensum is felt physically with emotional enjoyment of its sheer individual essence. For example, red is felt with emotional enjoyment of its sheer redness. In this primitive prehension we have aboriginal physical feeling in which the subject feels itself as enjoying redness. (PR, 314f.)

The geometrical relationships that I inherit from the feelings transmitted through the brain from the optic nerve, however, are only vaguely felt in this mode of perception; they are ill-defined, having only faint relevance to any particular region. The sensum is felt with strong emotion, accordingly, but is "unspatialized" (PR, 114, 172).

In the perceptual mode of presentational immediacy, by contrast, this relationship is inverted. The geometrical relationships are lifted into prominence, with the result that the sensum is projected onto a contemporary region of space (which may or may not be the locus from which the red originated). In this process, the sensum is transmuted from being primarily a qualification of affective tone into being primarily a qualification of an

external region (PR, 172; AI, 215, 245). The sensum has, accordingly, been "spatialized." Here is a summary statement:

The more primitive types of experience are concerned with sense-reception, and not with sense-perception. . . . [S]ense-reception is 'unspatialized,' and sense-perception is 'spatialized.' In sense-reception the sensa are the definiteness of emotion: they are emotional forms transmitted from occasion to occasion. Finally in some occasion of adequate complexity, [a transmutation] endows them with the new function of characterizing nexus^[*] .^[*] (PR, 114)

This spatializing nature of presentational immediacy is of its essence: "presentational immediacy is the mode in which vivid feelings of contemporary geometrical relations, with special emphasis on certain 'focal' regions, enter into experience" (PR, 324).

We have now arrived at Whitehead's explanation as to how sensory perception tends to lead us astray in ontology, once more because of our tendency to mistake an abstraction for the real thing. "The separation of the emotional experience from the presentational intuition," he says, "is a high abstraction of thought" (PR, 162f.). We are so accustomed to thinking about the world in terms of high abstractions, such as "the tree as green," furthermore, that "we have difficulty in eliciting into consciousness the notion of 'green' as the qualifying character of an emotion" (PR, 162). Although more than one reader is probably having that difficulty right now, we do have some reasons from ordinary experience to think that colors are, down deep, emotional in nature. If sensa had no tendency to evoke affective, aesthetic responses, it would be difficult to explain how art is possible (PR, 162; AI, 216). Also, many people experience irritation in the presence of red (PR, 315). There is further support for Whitehead's view, I might add, in recent studies demonstrating the differing emotional and behavioral responses of people depending on whether they are in red rooms or green rooms.

Whitehead's position on sensa does agree with the orthodox view that, for example, colors as we see them are "secondary qualities," which as such do not inhere in the objects onto which we project them. But Whitehead's view has quite different consequences. The orthodox view is that these secondary qualities have arisen, mysteriously, out of so-called primary qualities, which are, in fact, purely quantitative factors. It is generally held, for example, that colors are "really" nothing but wavelengths, which are said to be turned into colors by one's mind (often in spite of its being assigned purely epiphenomenal status, so that a miracle is performed by an illusion). Whitehead's view is that secondary qualities are produced by the mind out of values, or emotions. Recalling that such things are sometimes spoken of

[*] "Nexus" is the plural of "nexus."

as "tertiary" qualities, we could say that secondary qualities are produced in the mind out of tertiary qualities that are in the body and even nature in general. From Whitehead's standpoint, however, these terms need to be reapplied, because what was tertiary in the dualistic view is primary in the panexperientialist view: "Value" is the term Whitehead applies to the intrinsic reality of every actual entity (SMW, 93). The qualities called primary in the dualistic and materialistic views are for him simply features of things as viewed from without. For example, in the transmission of light, the events intrinsically are "pulses of emotions," while from the outside these appear as "wave-lengths and vibrations" (PR, 163). Lest this seem an idea that could not be reconciled with "real physics," it should be recalled that before turning to metaphysics Whitehead produced an alternative interpretation of relativity physics.^[2]

In any case, the central point of the foregoing discussion is that the idea of matter as devoid of any inherent values, and as instead consisting of purely spatial features, is a result of misinterpreting the status of presentational immediacy within sensory perception, especially the fact that it "spatializes" the data as received in the more primal mode of perception, thereby submerging their emotional significance by turning them into qualifications of geometrical regions. The perception of matter that leads to the notion of vacuous actuality, accordingly, does not arise from nature as immediately given to human experience but from nature as constructed by a derivative mode of perception. The building of a worldview (with an insoluble mind-body problem) on the basis of this type of perception is the result of failing to see that the prominent side of sensory perception, the perceptual mode of presentational immediacy, gives us an artificial, constructed view of the world. We have failed to see the deeper significance of the fact that our sensory perception in respect to its "prominent side of external reference is very superficial in its disclosure of the universe" (MT, 153). It is implicit in that statement, however, that there is another side to our sensory perception: its "bodily reference." The next points will deal with that other side, in which nature is perceived more concretely. These points involve overcoming philosophy's tendency to concentrate on visual feelings to the neglect of visceral feelings (PR, 121).

E. Implications of the Bodily Origin of Sensory Perception

"How do we observe nature?" Whitehead asks. "The conventional answer to this question," he says, "is that we perceive nature through our senses" (MT, 158). We are likely, he adds, to narrow this down to sight. However, he points out, we should be suspicious of this answer. (For all their talk about suspicion, most philosophers who think of themselves as "postmodern" have remained true believers in this respect.) This suspicion should

follow from what Whitehead has called the "physiological attitude" (SMW, 148). Besides the fact that we are directly (if only vaguely) aware of the intervention of the body even in visual perception,

every type of crucial experiment proves that what we see, and where we see it, depend entirely upon the physiological functioning of our body. . . . All sense perception is merely one outcome of the dependence of our experience upon bodily functionings. Thus if we wish to understand the relation of our personal experience to the activities of nature, the proper procedure is to examine the dependence of our personal experiences upon our personal bodies. (MT, 158f.)

The most direct way to observe nature, in other words, is to observe it working in ourselves, as it influences our own experience (which is, we recall, as much a part of nature as anything else). If we are empiricists, we should draw our conclusions about the nature of nature from our best vantage point: "The human body provides our closest experience of the interplay of actualities in nature" (MT, 115). Of course, many today have adopted a "physiological attitude" with respect to the mind-body relation. The dominant approach, however, interprets the physiological and psychological evidence in externalist categories derived from sensory perception. Whitehead means something quite different: an approach that interprets what we know from physiology in terms of what we know about the body from within . This approach, while including an introspective element, is not a return to introspective psychology in the old sense. First, as pointed out earlier, the introspective element here does not focus on the high-level, superficial aspects of our experience, even its medium-level mentality, but on the truly fundamental, originating, physical dimension of our experience, in which it takes its rise largely from bodily activities. Second, it involves a coordination of this internal observation of nature in action with the information acquired from the external physiological approach.

The moral of Point D must not be forgotten. The purely external, purely physiological approach to the study of the body is an approach in which "all direct observation has been identified with sense-perception" (AI, 217). But the central lesson of physiology itself is that sense perception is not direct observation of its objects . The physiologist looking at my brain is not directly observing my brain cells. As Whitehead repeatedly stresses, "unless the physicist and physiologist are talking nonsense, there is a terrific tale of complex activity" that occurs between my brain cells and the brain cells and conscious experiences of the observing physiologist (MT, 121). It is simply credulous to accept the results of sense perception (even if magnified by instruments), accordingly, as giving us direct information, and indeed the only kind of relevant information, about the nature of brain cell activity. Sensory perception gives very indirect information, mediated through bil-

lions of events and then modified by the constructive and abstractive processes of one's own unconscious and conscious experience. Although I from within am not consciously aware of my individual brain cells and their "firings" (all this kind of knowledge must come from physiology) and am not even directly aware of the existence of a brain in my head (except perhaps when I have a headache), I do in effect observe the brain insofar as I am directly aware of the kinds of influences that flow into my own experience from it . And I am conscious of receiving influences from various other portions of my body, such as my eyes, my hands, my skin in general. The purpose of the present point and the next is to see what can be learned from this direct observation that can be used to interpret the more indirect findings of physiology.

In speaking of (external) sensory perception thus far, I have for the most part been assuming the equation of it with its dimension of presentational immediacy, which conveys information about the world external to the body. This information, albeit highly abstract, is still information (when all goes well) about that external world. As I took pains to stress in Point D, however, sensory perception involves an integration of the perceptual mode of presentational immediacy with that of causal efficacy. If we attend to that other mode, then even (external) sensory perception tells us something about the body. The remainder of the present point explores implications of the fact that sensory perception does arise out of our perception in the mode of causal efficacy of our own bodies. Points F and G will then explore the information directly learned from that mode.

One thing that an examination of our own sensory perception tells us is based on the recognition that the human body is the "self-sufficient organ of human sense-perception" (AI, 214). Although generally, to be sure, the body in producing sensory perceptions in us does convey information transmitted through the body from the outside world, this need not be the case: By doing various things with the body, such as with drugs or electrodes, the same kinds of sensory impressions can be generated; and our dreaming activity shows most clearly that the body can be quite self-sufficient in producing sensory imagery. The pertinent question from this realization is: What does this fact, plus the fact that waking sensory perception normally does convey information about the world external to the body, tell us about the bodily parts themselves? Whitehead's answer: It tells us that our bodily units must incorporate within themselves aspects of the world beyond themselves .

Your perception takes place where you are, and is entirely dependent on how your body is functioning. But this functioning of the body in one place, exhibits for your cognisance an aspect of the distant environment. . . . If this cognisance conveys knowledge of a transcendent world, it must be because the event which is the bodily life unifies in itself aspects of the universe. (SMW, 91–92)

For example, if my sensory perception of the sun arises completely from my prehension of my brain cells and yet my sensory data in some sense correspond to the sun itself (and who really doubts that? ), then my brain cells must in some sense incorporate aspects of the sun into themselves. This recognition implies that the notion of these cells as "simply located" is false. The functioning of the brain cells in conveying this information suggests that each cellular event contains a reference to the past world, in this case the events that occurred on the surface of the sun eight minutes ago, and to the future, in this case to my experience that comes immediately after the neuronal events. (If you doubt that a temporal distinction can be made here, simply think about the cellular events in the eye: They certainly occur prior to the mind's sensory perception based on data received from them, so in this case the temporal relation is clear.) Each event seems essentially to prehend aspects of past events and to pass on aspects to future events, which prehend it . What we know from sensory perception by combining inner and outer knowledge, accordingly, is that bodily cells are analogous to our own experiences, at least in respect to being prehenders . And if they are prehenders, they cannot be purely spatial entities: They must have an inside, into which the prehended material is taken before it is passed along to subsequent prehenders. Having an inside would mean that they have an inner duration, which is the time it takes each event to occur—the time between its reception of information and its transmission of this information to subsequent events. Looking at sensory perception from this perspective, accordingly, gives us a much different idea of the nature of nature than we get simply from the sense data of presentational immediacy alone.

In light of this idea, I will pause to look at a particularly interesting part of McGinn's argument, which I passed over before. In discussing intentionality, he says that the most fundamental question is not the nature of its content but "what this directedness, grasping, apprehension, encompassing, reaching out ultimately consists in" (PC, 37). It is this feature of our own experience that leads McGinn, given his assumption that the mind is ontologically reducible to the brain, to despair of ever solving the mind-body problem in physicalist terms (which would require an epistemic reduction). "Phenomenologically, we feel that the mind 'lays hold' of things out there, mentally 'grasps' them, but we have no physical model of what this might consist in." To make the point vivid, he says: "If I may put it so: how on earth could my brain make that possible? No ethereal prehensile organ protrudes from my skull!" (PC, 40).

In light of Whitehead's analysis, we can give a twofold answer. First, we need not think of the brain as somehow having the ontological unity to prehend other things into the unity of experience that we know directly ("phenomenologically"). By distinguishing between the brain as a multiplicity and the mind-event as a unification of aspects of brain events into

an experiential unity, we can attribute that unifying capacity to the mind. Second, we can, however, think of each brain cell event as indeed having a grasping or prehensive capacity, by which it unifies aspects of what it has received from beyond itself into an (albeit much less complex and sophisticated) experiential unity. This means, of course, that we must think of the remainder of the bodily cells in a similar way; for example, those constituting the remainder of the central nervous system must be able to prehend and be prehended so that the information from the surface of the body can be transmitted to the brain cells.

In any case, besides learning from this dual mode of observation that our bodily units must be prehensive events, we learn that they must embody, to use the current jargon, "qualia." This conclusion follows from the same kind of reasoning, being already implicit in the analysis of "secondary qualities" in the previous point. Sensory qualities such as red as we see it, it is agreed on virtually all sides, do not exist in external nature; for example, the molecules in a red ball are not red as we see it apart from someone's seeing it, and they certainly do not see red. But we do see red, and this sensory quality surely arises out of our bodily activities. It is impossible to understand how, apart from supernatural intervention, this could be so if these bodily activities were purely quantitative in nature, devoid of all qualia. A naturalistic perspective leads to the inference that our bodily cells must embody qualia of some sort, even if they do not experience them in the same way that we experience them in conscious sensory perception. That is, cells surely do not enjoy red as we see it . But perhaps red for them is an emotion. Perhaps red as it exists throughout most of nature is a subjective form of immediate feeling, whereas it is only in the conscious presentational immediacy of animals with sensory organs that that subjective form is turned into an objective datum projected onto outer things. "Red as seen," then, would be a transmutation effected by more or less high-level experiences out of "red as felt." This is a kind of transmutation that requires no supernatural assistance.

This suggestion, of course, will be widely repudiated out of hand. Many philosophers will respond angrily, or at least smile knowingly, muttering, "This suggestion violates common sense." That is true: It violates soft-core common sense based on an uncritical acceptance of the deliverances of sensory perception reinforced by several centuries of dualistic thinking and language. Most philosophers (including scientists qua philosophers) have become so strongly enculturated with this soft-core commonsense perspective that they are willing to carry out its implications, to violate several of our hard-core commonsense convictions, even though this leaves them with a violent contradiction between their theories and the presuppositions of their practice, including the practice of formulating theories. Alternatively, they are willing to countenance an unintelligible dualism, to accept a magi-

cal emergentism, or to proclaim the mind-body problem permanently insoluble. Is Whitehead's suggestion, in spite of its violation of long-standing soft-core prejudices, not both more rational and more empirical? Do we not indeed have good reason to be suspicious of the conceptions of matter based on (sensory) perception-based categories alone? Has Whitehead not provided good reason to reject the notion that entities in nature in themselves have only the spatial properties that we assign them on the basis of perception in the mode of presentational immediacy? Has he not provided good reason to think, instead, that bodily events involve prehension and therefore an inside? And does that not remove one of the basic reasons for assuming that cells could not experience subjective forms such as emotions of a lowly sort? This is a defensive paragraph, but I do know from experience what kind of response to expect from the suggestion that colors are emotions and that cells could experience them. My response is an appeal to Searle's regulative principle that we constantly remind ourselves of what we know for sure. This carries with it the negative principle that we keep reminding ourselves of what we do not know. We do not know directly that cells do not feel emotions, and we do not know anything from which this could be deduced. However, we do know a lot of things that this idea helps us make sense of.

The present point is based on inference: We derive such and such from our brain, therefore the brain's units must embody such and such. The next point appeals to direct experience.

F. Information about Nature Derived from Direct Prehension of Our Bodies

The recognition that our bodily members are not simply located objects can be based not simply on inference, as above, but also on our experience of being causally influenced by them in our physical experience. To provide the basis for this argument, we can begin with the relation between my present experience and previous occasions of my own experience. In illustrating physical prehension (nonsensory perception of other actualities), Whitehead, in an argument against the Humean view that our experiences are completely separable one from the other, uses the example of a speaker saying "United States."

When the third syllable is reached, probably the first is in the immediate past; and certainly during the word 'States' the first syllable of the phrase lies beyond the immediacy of the present. . . . As mere sensuous perception, Hume is right in saying that the sound 'United' as a mere sensum has nothing in its nature referent to the sound 'States', yet the speaker is carried from 'United' to 'States', and the two conjointly live in the present, by the energizing of the past occasion as it claims its self-identical existence as a living is-

sue in the present. The immediate past as surviving to be again lived through in the present is the primary instance of non-sensuous perception. (AI, 182)

The point here is that our own experience certainly does not have the property of simple location. The present moment is essentially constituted by its prehension of the previous moment. And that previous moment has (at least) a twofold existence: It existed in the past, and yet it is here in the present occasion. One might argue that this example provides no example of one actuality's being present in another, because our mind as enduring through time is a single entity. Whitehead's response:

[The former experience] is gone, and yet it is here. It is our indubitable self, the foundation of our present existence. Yet the present occasion while claiming self-identity, while sharing the very nature of the bygone occasion in all its living activities, nevertheless is engaged in modifying it, in adjusting it to other influences, in completing it with other values, in adjusting it to other purposes. The present moment is constituted by the influx of the other into that self-identity. (AI, 181)

In other words, although in one sense my present experience and that earlier experience are parts of one (enduring) individual, the unity over time is not that of an individual in the strictest sense, because the present occasion incorporates not only that prior experience but also many other influences. One of those influences, for example, might lead the speaker to reject the earlier occasion's intention to follow "United" with "States of America" by saying instead "States of Europe." With such different purposes, we could hardly say that the two or more experiences constituted a single individual in the strictest sense. This example, accordingly, presents an instance of our direct awareness of former actualities existing and energizing in a present actuality, thereby showing that simple location does not, at least, characterize all actualities. And it provides a model for inferring that the same is true for our bodily members.

Whitehead argues, in a passage partly quoted earlier, that our sense of identity-with-difference in relation to the body is similar:

Our dominant inheritance from our immediately past occasion is broken into by innumerable inheritances through other avenues. Sensitive nerves, the functionings of our viscera, disturbances in the composition of our blood, break in upon the dominant line of inheritance. In this way, emotions, hopes, fears, inhibitions, sense-perceptions arise, which physiologists confidently ascribe to the bodily functioning. So intimately obvious is this bodily inheritance that common speech does not discriminate the human body from the human person. Soul and body are fused together. . . . But the human body is indubitably a complex of occasions which are part of spatial nature. It is a set of occasions miraculously coordinated so as to pour its inheritance into various regions within the brain. There is thus every reason to believe that

our sense of unity with the body has the same original as our sense of unity with our immediate past of personal experience. It is another case of nonsensuous perception. (AI, 189)

This unity with our body, however, is no more strict identity than is our unity with our own past experience. Rather: "The body is that portion of nature with which each moment of human experience intimately cooperates. There is an inflow and outflow of factors between the bodily actuality and the human experience, so that each shares in the existence of the other" (MT, 115). In other words, because there is mutual efficient causation between the body and our experience, they cannot be understood as strictly (numerically) identical. The body is in this sense composed of others —that is, of entities that are distinct from our experience or mind as such: "Actuality is the self-enjoyment of importance. But this self-enjoyment has the character of the self-enjoyment of others melting into the enjoyment of the one self" (MT, 117f.). Precisely because self and body are not one in the strictest sense, the intimate relationship between them provides us with direct observational evidence against the idea that "spatial nature" is purely spatial, being capable of only external relations. My bodily experiences are internally related to my experience, being partly constitutive of what it is. The activities constituting my body must therefore have a twofold existence: an existence in themselves (which is perhaps an existence for themselves) and then another kind of existence in my experience.

Furthermore, once we have fully accepted the idea that our own experience is fully natural, therefore an (especially high-grade) example of natural events generally, we can generalize, saying that this twofold mode of existence must be true of the interactions within the body generally. Furthermore, realizing that the body is simply one more part of nature, we can generalize even further, saying that this twofold mode of existence must apply universally. Just as my present experience prehends previous experiences of mine and bodily events into itself and then is in turn taken up by later experiences, all events in nature must prehend past events into themselves and then get prehended into later events. Simple location, in other words, must not characterize any of the units comprising the universe. All unitary events must include the past in themselves and then get included in future events. This generalization suggests the correlative one, that all unitary events must have an inside with a duration (even if less than a billionth of a second in the most primitive types of events). And this generalization suggests the final one: All unitary events must have experience (however trivial).

The inference that at least bodily cells have experience is supported by our direct experience of the body . The main point is contained in the statement quoted two paragraphs above, that our direct experience includes "the self-

enjoyment of others melting into the enjoyment of the one self" (MT, 117f.). Whitehead seems to be saying that we directly experience the fact that the body has its own experiences . That indeed is his claim. "Among our fundamental experiences," he says, is the "direct feeling of the derivation of emotion from the body" (MT, 159f.). This is our primal relationship to our body:

The primitive form of physical experience is emotional—blind emotion—received as felt elsewhere in another occasion and conformally appropriated as a subjective passion. In the language appropriate to the higher stages of experience, the primitive element is sympathy, that is, feeling the feeling in another and feeling conformally with another. (PR, 162)

This primal experience can also be discussed in terms of experiences of worth and value:

At the base of our existence is the sense of "worth." Now worth essentially presupposes that which is worthy. Here the notion of worth is . . . to be construed in . . . the sense of existence for its own sake. . . . [O]ur experience is a value experience, expressing a vague sense of maintenance or discard; and . . . this value experience differentiates itself in the sense of many existences with value experiences . . . and the egoistic value experience. (MT, 110)

It should be stressed here that Whitehead is engaged in phenomenology, trying to state what is directly given to experience. But his analysis of the given is radically different from that of Edmund Husserl, who spoke of "essences"—which for Whitehead are abstract products of construction and simplification. Husserl's essences are the objects of perception in the mode of presentational immediacy. What is really given to our primordial mode of perception, according to Whitehead's phenomenological analysis, are other actualities, rather than abstract essences, and these as laden with their own feelings. The contrast is brought out by Hartshorne, who had read Wordsworth and then studied with Husserl before coming under Whitehead's influence. In commenting on the fact that both he and Whitehead had independently been influenced by Wordsworth, Hartshorne says,

[Wordsworth] was describing nature so far as given to our direct intuitions. . . . The 'ocean of feelings' that Whitehead ascribes to physical reality is not only thought; so far as our bodies are made of this reality, it is intuited. What is not intuited but only thought is nature as consisting of absolutely insentient stuff or process. No such nature is directly given to us. . . . Wordsworth was doing a phenomenology of direct experience far better than Husserl ever did. . . . Wordsworth seems to have influenced Whitehead much as he did me. He saved us from materialism and even dualism. Both result from an inadequate phenomenology and now an antiquated physics.^[3]

Saying that his own "chief quarrel with Husserl . . . was over his [Husserl's] dualism of sensation and feeling," Hartshorne adds that after Whitehead heard Hartshorne's talk on Husserl for the philosophy department at Harvard in 1925, he "expressed surprise concerning Husserl's stress on essences. . . . Clearly, he felt as I did that Husserl never understood the fully concrete phenomena."^[4]

In any case, from Whitehead's analysis of one's direct experience as arising from one's body (along, of course, with the other considerations mentioned earlier), he concludes that "the body is composed of various centres of experience imposing the expression of themselves on each other. . . . [T]he animal body is composed of entities, which are mutually expressing and feeling" (MT, 23).

Having reached this conclusion, he then applies his double-edged axiom that just as "a living body is to be interpreted according to what is known of other sections of the physical universe," so "other sections of the universe are to be interpreted in accordance with what we know of the human body" (PR, 119). We must assume, by the principle of continuity, that the same kinds of causal interactions that occur within the body occur without, especially in light of the twofold fact that the body interacts with the rest of the universe and that we cannot precisely say where the body begins and "external nature" ends (AI, 189; MT, 21, 161). We must conclude, accordingly, that the universe in general is comprised of actualities that experientially prehend prior actualities, thereby including aspects of those former actualities within themselves and doing so with subjective form .

To summarize: Whitehead's overall thesis on this issue is that the notion of mere bits of matter understood as vacuous actualities with simple location is not supported by any truly concrete, direct observations of nature but results instead from misinterpreting the status of high abstractions. I have distinguished six points within this overall argument. The first is that our own experience, taken as an instance of a natural fact, suggests that the units of nature are characterized by prehensive experience. The second and third points support the generalizability of our experience to other individuals by arguing that both consciousness and sensory perception should be regarded as derivative, not foundational, aspects of human experience. The fourth point argues that the materialistic idea of matter is rooted in an aspect of conscious sensory perception that spatializes the data received from the body while stripping it of most of its emotional nature. The fifth point is that the information that we do receive from sense perception can be most naturally interpreted as implying that our bodily activities are, analogously to our own experience, activities of feeling (prehending) other things with emotional form. The sixth point argues that in our primal communion with our body we directly experience it as com-

posed of centers of feeling. In all of these ways, Whitehead argues that our most concrete observations, far from suggesting a materialistic view of the body and thereby the world beyond, suggest just the opposite.

III. From Inner Physics to Human Psychology: Subjective Universals

Nagel argues that we need to be able to think objectively about subjectivity, which requires having "an objective concept of mind" (VN, 18). This would allow us to "think of mind as a phenomenon to which the human case is not necessarily central" (VN, 18). An objective concept of mind, however, "cannot abandon the essential factor of a point of view" (VN, 20). Rather, this factor must be generalized. Doing so would involve characterizing experience "in terms of certain general features of subjective experience—subjective universals" (VN, 21).

It is implicit in my foregoing exposition that Whitehead's philosophy is built around just such a concept of subjective universals. This concept is implied by his statement that unless we can "find in descriptions of human experience factors which also enter into the descriptions of less specialized natural occurrences," then "the doctrine of human experience as a fact within nature is mere bluff." Either we must "admit dualism," he adds, or else indicate "the identical elements connecting human experience with physical science" (AI, 184f.). What he means here by "physical science," of course, is the entities studied by physical science. The result would be what we could call "inner physics," because it would involve thinking imaginatively about what such entities are in themselves, as we do when we imagine what other people must be going through, or when we engage in cognitive ethology. Although Whitehead himself did not use the term "inner physics," he did suggest the need to complement the "physical physiology" practiced thus far with a "psychological physiology" (PR, 103). This notion of an inner physics answers to Strawson's call for "a qualitative-character-of-experience physics" (MR, 89).

The subjective universals are meant to apply to all subjects, understood as momentary occasions of experience, from the human level to the actualities studied by physics. This does not include all identifiable entities in the world, of course, because many of these, such as rocks, lakes, and computers, have a merely aggregational, not a subjective or experiential, unity. The subjective universals apply only to all genuine individuals, whether simple or compound individuals (to be discussed in the following chapter). Which things are to be considered true individuals is an empirical question, to be decided in terms of whether the behavior suggests a unity of responsive action that involves an element of spontaneity (meaning that the response does not seem fully explainable in terms of efficient causation from

prior events). Whitehead himself evidently supposed humans, most other animals, eukaryotic cells, molecules, and atoms to be compound individuals, with subatomic (elementary) particles thought of as primary individuals. My supposition is that today the list of likely candidates for compound individuals should also include prokaryotic cells, organelles, macromolecules, and perhaps the previously designated "elementary particles," with that status perhaps now assigned to quarks. But nothing of metaphysical import hinges on the correctness of all these suppositions. If the empirical study of atoms and molecules, for example, suggests that they are best understood as mere aggregational societies, with no overall spontaneity, that would not affect the validity of the philosophical position as such. All it requires is that some degree of partially spontaneous experience be present in human beings and other animals, in the ultimate units of nature, and in some individuals at an intermediary level. In any case, the question is: What features exemplified in our own experience can we think to be subjective universals, exemplified in all experience and therefore (by hypothesis) all individuals?

Lying behind Whitehead's list of subjective universals is his conception that creative experience is the ultimate reality, the "universal of universals" (PR, 21). Creative experience as such is not an actuality but that which is exemplified in all actualities. This conception of the "category of the ultimate" replaces Aristotle's category of "primary substance" or "matter," eliminating "the notion of passive receptivity" (PR, 21, 31). Whitehead's own term for it is simply "creativity," but I, following Hartshorne (PCH, 690, 720), have added the term "experience" to emphasize this aspect of the ultimate. The ensuing list of subjective universals is simply an explication of what is implicit in the idea that all individuals embody creative experience. I will list nine such universals, indicating very briefly the meaning of each.

1. Feeling in the sense of physical prehension . All experiences begin with feelings or prehensions of other actual things, in which they grasp aspects of those things. This prehension of actualities lies at the root of what philosophers call "intentionality" (aboutness) in our experience.^[*] This physical prehension, which is an experience's orientation to the past, provides (among other things) the basis for memory, which in low-grade entities may extend back no farther than a fraction of a second.

[*] See Nicholas F. Gier, "Intentionality and Prehension," Process Studies 6, no. 3 (Fall 1976): 197–213. In saying that the (physical) prehension of prior actualities, with which an occasion of experience begins, lies at the root of intentionality (rather than simply being equatable with it), I am presupposing my discussion above, in which I equated "intellectual feelings" with conscious intentionality, "propositional feelings" with intentionality as such, and "physical purposes" with incipient intentionality.

2. Causal feeling . Each experience begins with the experience of the efficacy of other things (for good or ill) for itself. This is simply an aspect of physical prehension but is listed as a separate universal because it is a distinguishable and overwhelming aspect of physical experience.

3. Feeling in the sense of conceptual prehension . Conscious human experience is "conscious of its experient essence as constituted by its internal relatedness to the world of realities, and to the world of ideas" (SMW, 152). This statement, which summarizes both types of "intentionality," states in terms of human experience the inclusion by all experiences of ideality as well as actuality. In the most elementary experiences, this conceptual experience, or mentality, is no more than a slight appetition to repeat or attenuate forms (in-formation) transmitted from prior experiences. This initiation of the "mental pole" of an experience is the beginning of whatever self-creativity it exercises. The idea that electrons and other subatomic entities have a "mental pole" may, incidentally, seem a purely speculative idea, posited to avoid an unintelligible emergence of freedom out of entities lacking any degree of spontaneity. This is, indeed, an important reason for the affirmation. Beyond this, however, David Bohm and B. J. Hiley's ontological interpretation of quantum theory depends crucially on the notion that "even an electron has at least a rudimentary mental pole, represented mathematically by the quantum potential" (UU, 387).

4. Feeling in the sense of emotion . Both physical and mental prehensions are felt in a certain way, with particular "subjective forms" (which is Whitehead's technical term for the subjective universal in question). In the highest experiences the subjective forms may include consciousness, but emotional forms are included in experiences of all levels.

5. Final causation or self-determination . This feature is the integrative exercise of the experience's power for self-creation, in which it reconciles any tensions that may have existed between various appetitions at the outset of the mental pole. In being partly causa sui, the experience does not create itself out of nothing, of course, but out of the physical experiences imposed on it by its past. This element of self-determination may be trivial, as it is in the most elementary experiences, extremely important, as in conscious purposes, or anywhere in between. Whitehead's technical term for this universal is "subjective aim."

6. Anticipation . This dimension is the future orientation of an experience, its anticipation of exerting creative influence on future events. The anticipation may be directed toward events a thousandth of a second or thousands of years in the future. (This anticipation, which is the necessity that the experience lays on the future by its very existence, is the ground for induction [AI, 193].) An experience's subjective aim, accordingly, involves an aim at the future (however limited) as well as at creating itself for its

own sake. (The altruism that can occur in high-level experience, accordingly, is an extreme exemplification of a subjective universal.)

7. Value experience . This universal is best described in Whitehead's own words: "The element of value, of being valuable, of having value, of being an end in itself, of being something which is for its own sake, must not be omitted in any account of an event as the most concrete actual something. 'Value' is the word I use for the intrinsic reality of an event" (SMW, 93).

8. Duration . This dimension is the time, the epoch, the arrest between an experience's two transitions: its arising from past influences and the perishing of its own subjectivity in the transition to future experiences. The duration, which from the outside might constitute less than a billionth of a second in the lowest-grade experiences, is the event's experienced time to be, its time of "enjoyment."

9. Perspectival location . Every experience is from some perspective in relation to other things, both spatially and temporally: Experience is always here and now . This point and the previous one together reflect the fact that all actual occasions are both temporally and spatially extensive.

These subjective universals flesh out the notion that creative experience is, in Whitehead's phrase, the "universal of universals" (PR, 21), in the sense of "the ultimate behind all forms" (PR, 20), the dynamic "stuff" in which all abstract forms are embedded in actual things. The meaning of the idea that creative experience is the ultimate reality, and what this implies in terms of revising the materialistic view of nature (which materialism and dualism share), can be made clearer by comparing "creative experience" with "energy" as understood in physics.

I referred earlier to Whitehead's assertion that the physicists' energy is an abstraction (SMW, 36). Such an assertion by itself, he recognizes, is all too easy to make: "The mere phrase that 'physical science is an abstraction', is a confession of philosophical failure. It is the business of rational thought to describe the more concrete fact from which that abstraction is derivable" (AI, 186). So, what is the energy as described in physics an abstraction from? Whitehead's answer: "The notion of physical energy, which is at the base of physics, must . . . be conceived as an abstraction from the complex energy, emotional and purposeful, inherent in the subjective form of the final synthesis in which each occasion completes itself" (AI, 186). In other words, the widespread idea that energy (as conceived in physics) is the ultimate reality embodied in all actual things is an example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This concept of energy points to something real, but it has the reality of an abstraction from full-fledged creative experience, which is always emotional and purposeful. In this regard, we can recall Whitehead's assertion (based on his own days as a mathematical physicist) that physics abstracts from "what anything is in itself"—that is, its intrinsic reality. Furthermore, even in dealing with the extrinsic reality of things—

meaning their aspects in other things—it abstracts still further, paying attention to these external aspects only "as modifying the spatio-temporal specifications of the life histories of those other things" (SMW, 153). In saying this he is not criticizing physics. He is only saying that insofar as human beings (including physicists) try to think about how the world really is, we should not assume that physics, given the abstractions it makes for its limited purposes, describes the full reality of the most elementary types of actual events at the base of nature. To get a fuller account of what these actual events are in themselves, we need to engage in imaginative generalization, through which we can develop what I call an "inner physics." The development of the subjective universals is part and parcel of that imaginative generalization.

From this perspective, one of the problems often raised against any form of interactionism, the charge that it would violate the principle of the conservation of energy, is not a problem. I had referred in chapter 6 to W. D. Hart's suggestion that we could think in terms of a form of "psychic energy" that would be embodied in minds. Such an enlargement of the concept of energy would be simply the latest in a long string of enlargements that have been necessary to preserve the principle of conservation. Psychic energy would be added to the forms of energy, such as mechanical, electrodynamic, chemical, and thermodynamic, into which energy as such is inter-convertible. I pointed out that this suggestion, although proposed by Hart as a solution to a problem of dualistic interaction, actually moves toward a nondualistic interactionism. The Whiteheadian position developed here completes that movement, thereby making Hart's proposal even more viable.

In enlarging the notion of energy, it is a purely terminological matter whether we come to speak of "creativity" (as Whitehead usually does), of "creative experience" (as I have), or of a more "complex energy" (as Whitehead does in the passage quoted above). The substantive point is that there are two phases to the embodiment of energy in any event: the subjective phase and the objective phase. The idea of "psychic energy" has seemed purely metaphorical, referring to something that could not conceivably be interconvertible with the forms of energy thus far acknowledged by science, because all those forms involve energy in its objective or extrinsic phase, whereas the psychic energy known in our own experience is energy in its subjective or intrinsic phase. (This point will be explained more fully in the next section.) The development of an inner biology of cells (what Whitehead called a "psychological physiology"), as well as an inner physics, will involve positing a subjective as well as an objective phase of the embodiment of energy in all unified events. This means that the transition from intrinsic or psychic energy to extrinsic energy will be assumed to be going on all the time. The conversions occurring in the interaction of mind and brain will

be exceptional with regard to the level at which they occur, but they will have multiple analogies with interconversions of energy at lower levels, such as that going on within the cell between the molecules and the cell as a whole. (This point will be explained more fully in the discussion of "compound individuals" in chapter 9.)

This enlargement of the notion of energy is at the heart of Whitehead's construction of a cosmology in which the mind-body relation will no longer automatically be thought of as the mind-body problem . "The key notion from which such construction should start," he says, "is that the energetic activity considered in physics is the emotional intensity entertained in life" (MT, 168).

The difference between Whitehead's "organic realism" and the materialistic realism presupposed by most science and philosophy in the modern period, at least with respect to the "physical world," can be clarified still further by reflecting on the meaning of the idea that physics studies the "simplest things" in nature. The usual assumption is that the so-called elementary particles, such as photons, protons, neutrons, and neutrinos, or now perhaps quarks, as described by physics, are the simplest actual things, of which more complex things are composed. Whitehead disagrees, saying that the simplest actual things are the simplest occasions of experience, of which the "elementary particles" as described by physicists are abstractions. Whitehead does say, it may be recalled, that the Cartesian separation of body and mind allowed "the simplest things to be studied first," which might seem to imply that the simplest actual things are physical things wholly devoid of experience. But Whitehead immediately corrects that possible misapprehension, saying that "these simplest things" are the most "widespread habits of nature," by which he means what have been called "laws of nature" (MT, 154f.). The term "laws" reflects the assumption that the regularities at issue resulted from supernatural imposition. The term "habits," which Whitehead shares with Peirce and James,^[5] reflects a naturalistic interpretation of these regularities. In any case, to describe a thing's habits, especially in externalist terms, is clearly to describe not the thing in its concreteness, as it is in itself, but a gross abstraction therefrom. Not even the crudest behaviorist would make that mistake with regard to a rat, let alone a human being. An analogous mistake, even if on a lesser scale, has been made, Whitehead suggests, with regard to the entities studied by that level of behaviorism that we call modern physics.

This switch from thinking of laws as imposed (at least in effect) to thinking of them as habits is important not only for overcoming the fallacy of misplaced concreteness but also for understanding how freedom is possible—the central concern of the next chapter, which centers around the concept of the compound individual. Before turning to compound individuals, however, I need to offer a brief explanation of the nature of simple

enduring individuals, which will include an explanation of an issue just mentioned, the relation between the subjective and objective embodiments of creative energy.

IV. Subjects, Objects, and Enduring Individuals: from Photons to Psyches

We saw above one of the fruits of Whitehead's reversal of late modern methodology: Rather than try to understand mind in terms of objective features assumed to be universal, we enlarge our understanding of matter by conceiving it in terms of subjective universals as well as in terms of objective features. However, as I have indicated now and then, given a pluralistic monism, the generalization from mind to matter can be complemented by the reverse generalization. What can be learned from physics that can be applied, by analogy, to our minds?

By far the most important generalization Whitehead makes from physics is the notion, derivable from both relativity and quantum physics, that the world studied by physics is composed of spatial-temporal events . We have already seen one implication he draws therefrom: the notion that each unit of nature has a certain minimal duration, which means that there are no actual infinitesimals and therefore no "nature at an instant." A second implication is that the apparently enduring things, such as electrons and photons, are in reality temporally ordered societies of events, in which events with essentially the same form follow on one another rapidly (sometimes a billion or more per second): "The real actual things that endure are all societies. They are not actual occasions" (AI, 204). Although this notion can be derived from reflection on one's own experience—both Buddhists and William James, with his notion of "drops of perception," seem to have done so—Whitehead evidently derived it primarily from twentieth-century physics, then generalized it to our own stream of experience, concluding that the apparently continuous stream actually comes in drops, or occasions, of experience. The generalization of this notion lies at the root of that aspect of his philosophy that is, along with his inversion of the sensationist doctrine of perception, his most original contribution to our understanding of both mind and matter and their interconnection.

The idea that our own experience is in reality a series of discrete drops of experience provides the basis for answering the primary philosophical question about causality: How are efficient and final causation (in the sense of self-determination in terms of an ideal end or finis ) related? "One task of a sound metaphysics," Whitehead comments, "is to exhibit final and efficient causes in their proper relation to each other" (PR, 84). A solution has been impossible as long as the ultimate units—the "substances" in the sense of the most fully actual entities—were assumed to be enduring indi-

viduals. As such, they could seem to be capable of only one of the two kinds of causation—material bodies could exert and be affected only by efficient causation, whereas minds, as illustrated most clearly by Leibniz's windowless monads, could exemplify only final causation—or else efficient and final causation could, mysteriously enough, run parallel to each other. There was no way to conceptualize what our experience seems to suggest, that efficient causation conditions final causation, which then becomes the basis for another act of efficient causation. For example, my present experience is conditioned by causation both from my body and from past states of my own mind. These efficient causes, however, do not totally determine my present experience: I still can, and in fact must, decide precisely how to respond to those conditioning causes—those bodily cravings, those promises made, those plans, those sensory percepts. When I do make my decisions, they seem to exert causal efficacy on my bodily states and my own subsequent experiences, and so on. The idea that our stream of experience is really composed of momentary occasions of experience, each of which begins with physical experience and ends with a mental reaction thereto, explains how efficient and final causation can be interwoven.

Whitehead provides a conceptuality for this interweaving of efficient and final causation by retrofitting Leibnizian monads with windows. Each such monad begins as an open window to the past world, into which aspects of previous events stream. This is the physical side of the monad, its physical prehensions. This is the efficient causation of the past world on it. Then it has its mental side, in which it responds not just to actuality but also to ideality, drawing possibilities out of what was received and then deciding just how to respond thereto. This is the monad's self-determination, its exercise of final causation. When this decision has been made, the subjective phase of that monad is completed: Its subjectivity perishes. But it does not perish. The end of its existence as a subject of experience means the beginning of its existence as a cause on, and thereby an object in, the experience of subsequent subjects. This is why it is not simply located in one place. It exerts efficient causation on subsequent subjects, hurling aspects of itself into their open windows (AI, 177). In this way Whitehead's monads are subject to and exert efficient causation and thereby have the physicality that Leibniz's monads did not (PR, 19). This is made possible by making the monads momentary events, rather than enduring substances. With that switch, of course, it is better to give up the term "monads," precisely because of its association with enduring units that cannot really prehend other actual things.

Enduring individuals had traditionally been conceived as numerically self-identical substances enduring through time, for which relations to other things were "metaphysical nuisances," being at best construed as "accidents" (PR, 79, 137). Enduring individuals are reconceived by Whitehead

to be temporally ordered societies of momentary occasions of experience, in which there is a perpetual oscillation between subjectivity and objectivity, final causation and efficient causation. Each occasion's "activity in self -formation passes into its activity of other -formation" (AI, 193).

Having generalized the idea of momentary events from physics to the psyche, Whitehead can then generalize this notion of the perpetual oscillation between subjectivity and objectivity to all enduring individuals, including those of physics. Each event is a subject for itself before it is an object for others. All things other than our own experience appear to be mere objects, rather than subjects, because by the time they can be prehended they are objects; their subjectivity has perished. This is the very precondition for their being objects for our perception, or for their exerting any efficient causation whatsoever. This is one of the several interrelated explanations as to why, if the universe is really composed exhaustively of active subjects, it seems to be composed primarily of passive objects. It is not composed exhaustively of things that are simply subjects (as was the Leibnizian universe); it is composed of subjects-that-become-objects. So, we are right to think that everything that we perceive is an object—in the ontological as well as the epistemic sense of the term. We are only wrong to think of them as mere objects. Some of them, the true individuals (as distinct from the aggregational societies), are objects-that-were-first-subjects. They are, accordingly, the kinds of objects that can pass on values to us, because in their phase of subjectivity they had themselves experienced values. Furthermore, they are usually objects that are parts of enduring individuals with subjects who are now contemporaneous with us, subjects with their own intrinsic value.

It is through this idea that Whitehead's philosophy provides the basis for what Strawson calls a "qualitative-character-of-experience physics" through which the "theoretical heterogeneity" of the predicates of physics and those of experience can be overcome (MR, 88f.). The physical predicates refer to actualities (and aggregational clusters thereof) in their objective or superjective mode of existence, in which they exist for others, and in which their esse is percipi . The experiential predicates apply to actualities in their subjective mode of existence, in which their esse is percepere . This gives us theoretical homogeneity for all individuals, from photons to cells to human beings. It does not do this as idealists have traditionally tried, by making the physical predicates less real than the experiential. And it does not do it as materialists have tried, by making the experiential predicates less real than the physical. It does so by saying that every actual entity has two modes of existence, a subjective mode, in which it has none but experiential properties, and an objective or superjective mode, in which it has none but objective properties (which can be equated with publicly observable properties if the notion of "public observability" is not limited to

properties observable through sensory perception). Because both modes of existence belong equally to the essence of what it is to be an actual entity, both types of predicates are equally necessary to describe it.

This position involves a modified acceptance of Strawson's sense that an integrated position would need to say that experiential phenomena "are just one more variety of physical phenomenon," so that, for example, "the experiential is as much of a physical phenomenon as electric charge" (MR, 41, 58). Indeed, Strawson himself suggests that panpsychism, at least of one type, says that "being experience-involving is a fundamental property of existing things on a par with extension, rest mass, or electric charge" (MR, 77). My Whiteheadian panexperientialism does say that experiential features belong to all actual entities as fully as do those objective features that are usually called "physical." In this sense they are "on a par" with them. But it can be misleading to suggest that experiential phenomena are 'just one more variety" of physical phenomena, as this could suggest that they belong to the actualities in the same mode of existence . Trying to think of experiential qualities as "on a par" with properties such as mass, charge, and spatial extension in this sense, however, is precisely what is impossible. To make the idea of their equal reality intelligible, we must say that the experiential predicates apply only to the actual entity in its subjective mode of existence, when it exists in and for itself, whereas the other predicates apply to it only in its objective or superjective mode of existence, when it exists for others (as an efficient cause on them). One comes closer to this idea by saying (as do panpsychists in the Spinozistic tradition) that the experiential and the objective properties are identical, in the sense that the former simply represent the inside (first-person) view of the latter. The idea that the experiential and the objective features of an actual entity exist simultaneously, however, is problematic, perhaps impossible to conceive consistently. It would, for example, make the relation between final causation (self-determination) and efficient causation unintelligible: How could an actual entity already be exerting efficient causation on others while it was still determining exactly what it is to be? (And, indeed, Spinozistic panpsychists are generally determinists, as they cannot attribute any degree of self-determining power to any individuals.) The Whiteheadian view espoused here, in any case, is that the objective mode of an actual entity, with its objective properties, exists only after the subjective mode has come to completion.

This view includes that idea, already intimated, that the type of causality we experience in relation to our own past experiences and our bodily members can also be generalized to other things. The way in which our present experience prehends immediately previous occasions of our own experience, incorporating their basic character and continuing their projects and subjective forms, can be used to understand the continuity of enduring

individuals in the worlds of biology and physics. At the same time, my present experience is not simply a continuation of my past experiences, with their emotions and purposes, but is constantly broken into by multiple routes of causation from my bodily members, some of which carry causal influence from things beyond the body. This fact can be generalized to understand many-termed causal relations in nature in general, the relations that generate space as well as time (AI, 184–89, 221; MT, 160–63).

Furthermore, on the principle that our own experience is part of nature as much as anything else, we can generalize from our own distinctively mental experience, in which we grasp possibilities as such with appetition, to the notion that all unitary events have a mental dimension to their experience, hence at least some slight degree of final causation. Whitehead's justification for this inference is again his genuine nondualism. Materialists provide reductionistic explanations of the later products of evolution in terms of the earlier ones. But this is a one-sided application of the implications of nondualism. In a discussion limited to living things (he elsewhere extends the point to the inorganic realm), Whitehead asks: "But why construe the later forms by analogy to the earlier forms? Why not reverse the process? It would seem to be more sensible, more truly empirical, to allow each living species to make its own contribution to the demonstration of factors inherent in living things" (FOR, 15). Besides being more sensible and empirical, understanding the earlier in terms of the later (as well as vice versa) is also pragmatic: It helps us avoid an essential dualism somewhere in the process, whether explicit or camouflaged.

One final dimension of Whitehead's overcoming of dualism between the human mind and the enduring individuals comprising even the most elementary levels of nature needs to be brought out explicitly. This is, in fact, one of the basic dualisms with which we began—that between minds as temporal but nonspatial and physical things as spatial but not essentially temporal. Whitehead overcomes the vicious dualism between these two types of actual things by putting a duality within each actual entity. I mentioned earlier that he uses the term "actual occasion" to connote the fact that all actual entities are both spatially and temporally extended. But he explains that general statement more precisely. The distinction between the actualities with and those without duration can be understood as the distinction between the subjective and objective modes of existence of each actual occasion. Qua subject, an actual occasion enjoys duration; qua object for later subjects, it is purely spatial, with no duration left. We know ourselves from within, hence as having duration, and other things from without, hence as devoid of duration. To translate this epistemic duality into an ontological dualism between two different kinds of actualities—those that are always subjects and those that are always objects—is to commit a category mistake (as Kant recognized in the passage discussed in the previous

chapter): The mistake is to contrast things as known from within with things as known from without and to conclude from this epistemic contrast that they are ontologically disparate.

The other side of the traditional dualism was that between physicality as spatial and mentality as nonspatial. Whitehead turns this dualism into a duality within each actual occasion as subject: "Each actuality is essentially bipolar, physical and mental, and the physical inheritance is essentially accompanied by a conceptual reaction. . . . So though mentality is non-spatial, mentality is always a reaction from, and integration with, physical experience which is spatial" (PR, 108). (The physical pole is spatial in that it is composed of prehensions of things in the spatiotemporal world; the mental pole is not spatial because its distinctive objects belong to the realm of possibility, not actuality. Whitehead likewise says that whereas the physical pole is "in time," the mental pole is "out of time" [PR, 248], because its objects are eternal. These points refer, however, to the objects of the mental pole. The prehensions of those objects are fully parts of the spatiotemporal occasion.) Accordingly, although Whitehead agrees that the physical is spatial and the mental nonspatial, he avoids a vicious dualism between two different types of actual things. That "vicious dualism," he says, results from "mistaking an abstraction for a final concrete fact" (AI, 190). His doctrine of momentary occasions of experience, each of which is both subject and object and thereby both with and without duration, and each of which as subject is both physical and mental and thereby both spatial and nonspatial, is his way of overcoming the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and its resuiting vicious dualism between mind and matter, soul and body.

The next chapter builds on this understanding of enduring individuals to show how compound individuals with varying degrees of freedom can arise. This discussion of compound individuals also deals with the major question about panexperientialism and consciousness raised in chapter 7 but not addressed in the present chapter, which Seager calls "the combination problem": How can a unified experience emerge out of a multiplicity of neurons, even assuming that each of them has some experience of its own? In other words, can Whiteheadian panexperientialism provide an intelligible understanding of a whole that is more than the sum of its parts and, in particular, a whole with the kind of unity we know our own conscious experience to have?