Part V: Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence

Part V: Whitehead's Function of Reason and Humanity's Cosmic Calling

Part I: The Pope Interrupts the Talking Machine

Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence

Part II: Philosophy as Emergency Response & Part III: Resisting Cognitive Enclosure

Parts II & III: Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence

Part IV: Hegel’s Loom and the Difference Reason Makes

Part IV: Remembering the Human Microcosm in the Age of Mechanized Intelligence

---

Part V: Whitehead’s Function of Reason and Humanity’s Cosmic Calling

Whitehead delivered the lectures later published as The Function of Reason at Princeton University in March 1929. The book emerged as part of the same burst of ripened speculation that produced his magnum opus, Process and Reality, delivered as the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University the year prior. In The Function of Reason, Whitehead focuses his philosophical imagination on evolutionary theory as the then dominant explanation of life. At the time, logical positivism, behaviorism, and reductionist physiology were ascendent, each in related ways making it difficult to comprehend how human minds interested in scientific truth could ever have evolved. Where does Reason fit in the mechanical world-picture? Might a more thoroughgoing evolutionary cosmology show the way to reunite Reason with the world? Whitehead realized that if conscious human beings are to be understood as expressions of the evolutionary process, then the whole mechanical world-picture needed to be re-imagined.

As we have seen, the speculative labor of philosophy becomes necessary whenever a mutation in the dominant media technology furnishes the age with a novel analogy linking thought and world. Plato philosophized amid the alphabet’s disruption of oral memory. Descartes philosophized amid print, diagram, and the technical refinement of geometrical representation. Whitehead’s speculative philosophizing can be understood as a response to the dominant technological and scientific revolution of his day: electromagnetism. Trained at Cambridge in the mathematical physics of Maxwell’s field theory, Whitehead came of age just as the old Newtonian image of matter in motion was being displaced by a world of waves, fields, and energy vectors. Radio represented not just a new technology but a new image of nature, what Marshall McLuhan called “the metaphysical organicism of our electronic milieu.”^[1] Energy was no longer confined to the local impact of bodies, as in the old corpuscular mechanics. It radiated and communicated itself through a now dynamized space-time.

Whitehead’s metaphysical metaphor of “prehensions” as rhythmic vectors generalizes the new physics of transmission into a cosmology of feeling. The world is not composed of inert substances externally related, but of energetic events inheriting, transmitting, and transforming one another. This goes against the grain of classical physics. According to Whitehead, “the dominance of the scalar physical quantity, inertia, in the Newtonian physics obscured the recognition of the truth that all fundamental physical quantities are vector and not scalar.”^[2] A scalar registers only magnitude, how much?, while a vector carries direction, which way? Feeling, for Whitehead, is irreducibly vectorial, a felt inheritance that comes from there and reaches toward here. Feelings are meaningful because they express whence and whither, that is, they not only inherit a past but are oriented toward future satisfaction.

“The function of Reason,” according to Whitehead, “is to promote the art of life.”^[3] His target is not Darwin so much as Darwinism, and the scientific habit of allowing a successful method to gradually harden into an unthought metaphysics. He argues that life cannot be explained merely by the principle of survival of the fittest. After all, the art of persistence is to be dead. Rocks long outlast living organisms. If survival were the main or only factor, the evolution of more complex organisms comparatively deficient in survival power would be an inexplicable extravagance. The evident theme of life’s evolution is not bare endurance but the desire for intensity, adventure, and the search for richer forms of experiential satisfaction. The art of life is threefold: to live, to live well, and to live better. Reason is the factor in life that directs this threefold urge.

Purpose is then not some optional theological extravagance imposed upon an otherwise clock-work world from without, but a hardcore common sense fact about our experience, evident across all kingdoms of life from protists to possums, and not least in the conduct of scientists themselves. “Scientists animated by the purpose of proving they are purposeless,” he quips, “constitute an interesting subject for study.”^[4]

Evolution, for Whitehead, is not merely an optimization algorithm for persistence, nor is life a statistical engine for minimizing error. The evolution of life is an adventure in valuation, driven not solely by the elimination of error so much as the experience of eros. Organisms do not simply adapt to an already given environment, but adapt the environment to themselves. The biosphere as a whole has transformed planetary conditions to make Earth more amenable to life. The primary unit of evolution is not the gene, nor the individual organism, nor the species, but the whole organism-environment field. Life emerges and evolves at interfaces, across edges and gradients, through reciprocal transformations. It internalizes cosmic and terrestrial rhythms and alters the conditions it inherits. Living organisms are not machines imposing order upon dead matter, but patterned loci of energetic communion, cycling process in which inherited rhythms are variably repeated and intensified into new forms of satisfaction.^[5]

Whitehead’s account of the function of Reason not only extends beyond the skulls of Homo sapiens but ultimately transcends the biosphere and so must be understood cosmologically. Reason is woven into the texture of cosmogenesis from the get-go. “The material universe has contained in itself, and perhaps still contains, some mysterious impulse for its energy to run upwards.”^[6] Reason is nascently seeded in the self-organizing dynamics of atoms, stars, and galaxies, flowers in the first cellular organisms as a selective emphasis upon flashes of novel possibility that become effective appetites for the realization of adaptive behaviors, and fruits in the self-reflective artistic, religious, and scientific consciousness of human beings. This upward run of energy should not be understood as a violation of physical law, but as a sign that physical law itself had been too narrowly imagined when modeled only on impact, inertia, and entropy alone. Electromagnetic theory, radio transmission, and later quantum nonlocality all helped disclose a universe in which relational co-creativity is not an accidental afterthought added to isolated bodies but constitutive of actuality.

Wherever there is appetition—wherever an entity reaches toward a possibility relevant to its situation but not yet realized, wherever there is the faintest valuation to select this over that—Reason is already dimly at work. “Reason,” Whitehead writes, “is the organ of emphasis upon novelty.”^[7] Every actual occasion of experience, down to the humblest throb of energy, includes a “mental pole” that, freed from dependence on the past, dips into adjacent possibilities to grasp, however minimally, how the occasion might become other than its inheritance dictates. An electron settling into its orbital, a cell repairing its membrane, a predator leaping toward its prey, in radically different degrees, enacts the same cosmic power by taking account of an alluring possibility and expressing an originative urge to satisfy it. Reason is the name for this power wherever it occurs.

This is the metaphysical source of an idea far more ancient than Whitehead, an idea I want now to rehabilitate: the image of the human being as microcosmos, a little world that mirrors and gathers the great one. For the better part of two millennia, from the Hermetic writers through the Renaissance Neoplatonists, the human being was understood not as an anomaly shipwrecked in an alien universe but as a concentration of the whole in whom the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms were integrated into a reflective sphere. “As above, so below” names not just a magical correspondence but an ontological participation. Modern scientific materialism led many to dismiss all this as the mystical babbling of humanity’s childhood. But Whitehead’s cosmology lets us recover the mature truth the image still conveys. If Reason is a cosmic power exemplified in every layer of nature, then the human being—in whom that power flares into art, science, religion, and the speculative flight after the unattainable—is precisely the place where the cosmos’ originative urge finally begins, at least, to become aware of itself. We are microcosmoi not because we contain little copies of the planets but because the power that quickens electron, leaf, and beast intensifies, in us, to the point of asking Who am I? and What is all this?

To call the human a microcosm, or even an imago Dei—as the Biblical tradition does—is not to install us atop a hierarchy of being, lording over a nature reduced to raw material for our use. It names a vocation rather than a privilege, calling us to mediate the mumbling striving of the world into articulate meaning. There is a universal dignity in this role, but it is priestly, not proprietary. The human stands at the altar of cosmic communion. In this light, the cognitive enclosure attempted by the owners and enforcers of today’s technologies of automated computation is not merely a political and economic injustice but a kind of sacrilege, an attempt to commodify the miracle by which the world learns to speak the Word.

The difference between the practical intelligence of organic nature and the speculative wonder of the human spirit is one of intensity, with no ontological ruptures. Human Reason is not inserted into an otherwise mindless cosmos. It is the cosmos, in one of its late, precarious, precious achievements, beginning to awaken to the character of its own adventure. But there is a double aspect to Reason, which Whitehead condenses into the figures of Ulysses and Plato. Ulysses represents cunning practical Reason, shared “with the foxes.”^[8] It seeks an immediate method of action and procures effective means of survival. Plato represents speculative Reason, which seeks insight into reality for its own sake. Plato is less concerned with the particulars of building a house than with how to be at home in the universe. The challenge Whitehead sets himself is thinking this double aspect in an integrated fashion. Reason becomes dangerous if it remains at odds with itself. Practical without speculative Reason degrades into a dogmatic methodology, barbaric in its narrow efficiency, clever but ignorant of consequence, unable to ask after the good or ill it may be serving. Speculative without practical Reason floats off into abstraction, losing touch with embodied life. The greatness of the human being is found in the reconciliation of these powers: technique wisely guided, wisdom become effective, Ulysses and Plato teaching one another to navigate the ship of soul by the stars.

Technē need not alienate us from life. Art is natural. Bird nests, beaver dams, spider webs, stone axes, alphabets, print, radio, and the computer are all examples of life’s active transformation of its conditions of existence. Whitehead located the origin of consciousness in this same artistic activity:

“Consciousness itself is the product of art in its lowliest form. For it results from the influx of ideality into its contrast with reality, with the purpose of reshaping the latter into a finite, select appearance. But consciousness having emerged from Art at once produces the new specialized art of the conscious animals—in particular human art. In a sense art is a morbid overgrowth of functions which lie deep in nature. It is the essence of art to be artificial. But it is its perfection to return to nature, remaining art. In short art is the education of nature. Thus, in its broadest sense, art is civilization. For civilization is nothing other than the unremitting aim at the major perfections of harmony.”^[9]

Human intelligence has always been artificial, transformed by the tools it forms with. Since it is the very essence of art to be artificial, the danger of automated computation is not that it is artificial. The human being is the technological animal par excellence because we are the microcosmic animal, the creature in whom nature’s artistic power becomes fully conscious. The danger is rather that technologies of automated computation remain a “morbid overgrowth” that strangles its creators, representing a hypertrophy of Ulyssean intelligence severed from Platonic insight: method without wisdom, calculation detached from the living appetite for truth, beauty, and goodness. Civilizing these technologies, in Whitehead’s sense, would mean returning art to nature as a technē that learns alongside rather than encloses her.

Whitehead saw, too, that probability itself is not finally reducible to statistical frequency. Alongside the statistical probability that counts how often like cases have turned out likewise, he insists on a non-statistical form of judgment, that is, an intuition of the relevance of a possibility to a singular, unprecedented situation, for which no reference class of comparable instances exists.^[10] Such judgment is not calculated based on a tally of past cases but arises from an occasion’s own grasp of the intensive relevance of a possibility to a particular moment. Here is the deepest measure of the distance between a mechanical loom and a living occasion, an LLM and a mind. The unitive activity of creative experience rests finally on the non-statistical appraisal of relevant novelty, of the appropriateness of a possibility for a situation never before encountered. That is what the creative advance of nature and the philosopher’s speculative flight after the unattainable both require, and it is precisely what no statistical measure of the already encountered past can provide.

Inspired by the waveform of electromagnetic energy, Whitehead affirms that the way of life is the way of rhythm, and that rhythm pervades all physical existence.^[11] Living organisms emerge by internalizing the rhythms of the more or less stable layers of their cosmic and terrestrial environments—diurnal, tidal, and seasonal cycles, thermodynamic gradients—and transforming them into organized metabolic and developmental pathways. Organisms are not closed off from their environs, but miniaturizations of it, cosmic rhythm cycled and recycled, folded in upon itself, recapitulating universal becoming into a unique center of valuation.

According to David Chalmers, panexperientialism provides “a very easy rode to large language models being conscious.”^[12] If every actual occasion feels its past and includes a mental pole, then even the electrons coursing through transistors in data centers are drops of experience. In some sense, machines, too, are pulsing with prehensions. But the road to conscious machines is not nearly so easy, since not every historical route of occasions is capable of sheltering individual consciousness. A mere aggregate—like a stone, or a server farm—is a crowd of feelings with no presiding member, a heap whose unity is conferred from without with no one home inside for whom the whole might come to matter. A conscious living soul is the culmination of the rightly organized animal body, which pours the treasures of the past environment into the presiding occasion, where novel valuations can be contributed in the present, aimed at the future.^[13] Whitehead borrows language from the technology of electromagnetism to describe the human body as “a complex ‘amplifier’”:

“the various actual entities, which compose the body, are so coordinated that the experiences of any part of the body are transmitted to one or more central occasions to be inherited with enhancements accruing upon the way, or finally added by reason of the final integration. The enduring personality is the historic route of living occasions which are severally dominant in the body at successive instants. The human body is thus achieving on a scale of concentrated efficiency a type of social organization, which with every gradation of efficiency constitutes the orderliness whereby a cosmic epoch shelters in itself intensity of satisfaction.”^[14]

The highly repetitive feelings vibrating through electromagnetic societies run along a continuum with, but are not simply the same as, the reasons and emotions permeating our bodily organism and organizing our human societies. Panexperientialism affirms that feeling pervades cosmic process at every scale. But process philosophy is a metaphysics of non-identity that refuses to flatten important organizational differences. Creativity, Whitehead’s ultimate category, means the many become one and are increased by one. That increase means novel contrasts producing more intensely valuing occasions of experience become possible. There is no necessity in nature requiring the intensification of value in this or that occasion, though there may be a lucky lure. “Chance,” as it is called, is where the angels—the Whiteheadian God’s “initial aims”—can slip into the quantum foam at the spaceless base of spacetime to dance the world toward better becomings. Law is not the foundation of nature, for nature is a groundless fountain. And the fountain naturally forms itself into drops of experience that develop, envelop themselves, inherit and innovate into ever more complex shapes of consciousness, morphologies of mind that include but transcend their sociohistorical environments. The drops remain always part of the ocean of cosmic feeling. They are indissociable, never separate and always interpenetrating one another. And yet “life is a bid for freedom.”^[15] No two occasions are the same; no thinker thinks twice. The ocean is recapitulated, and added to, within each drop. All experience is valuable, but some experiences achieve more intense contrasts and realize higher harmonies. Nature expresses itself in a nested series of societies—regimes of statistical order, in Whitehead’s sense—whose chaotic edges are continual sources of heterogeneity and variation. It evolves ever more elaborate shelters for the electromagnetic feelings that pervade it, some of them—cells and cortexes—housing drops of experience that kindle the germ of attention and amplify consciousness, up to and including the imaginative freedom of human souls. My claim is that the sort of consciousness sheltered by concrete embodiment is a difference that makes a difference that is not reducible to abstract, substrate-neutral digital information. The large language model is an aggregate and not an individual. Its electromagnetic societies feel, in the dim way all nature feels, but there is no dominant occasion presiding over the server racks for whom its outputs would cohere into an integrated conscious experiencer.

The electronic occasions coursing through transistors are not quite living in Whitehead’s sense, meaning their mental poles are highly attenuated, such that each occasion is merely what the causal past allows it to be. The inorganic occasion is a vehicle “for receiving, for storing in a napkin, and for restoring without loss or gain”^[16]—which is to say, for conserving and relaying what it is given without adding anything of its own. This is a Whiteheadian portrait of Hegel’s loom. An LLM is governed almost entirely by its causal past, by its training and its frozen weights. The directional vector of meaningful feelings show up in its outputs, received and restored. It receives and restores without gain. It does not originate.

Automated computation is an extraordinary technical achievement, a triumph of Ulyssean cunning. It clarifies and accelerates procedures, searches vast spaces of association, recombines inherited patterns, and amplifies certain forms of practical power. But it is precisely its frictionless facility that threatens to convert the creative advance of nature, the living adventure of life, and the evolution of consciousness into a slowly degrading cycle of plausible recombination.

LLMs do not originate meaning but mobilize the statistical sediment of meaning generated elsewhere by human beings. Machine models of intelligence know nothing of metabolic precarity, felt relevance, sympathetic resonance, or being-toward-death. LLMs do not get tired. They don’t know the smell of sage or the taste of sweat. They cannot intuit the riverine flow of time or marvel at the growth and decay of their own flesh. We are at risk of entombing ourselves within walls of text produced by systems that have never seen the night sky, or heard the wind through the grass, or felt the warmth of sunlight on bare skin. They do not experience grief, or the preciousness of place. They have never felt the nervous shock that comes with losing one’s balance on a slippery rock. They are not moved by an appetite for novelty, truth, beauty, or goodness. They do not become fatigued and they feel no joy. They are never bored and experience no eros. They are never disappointed because they cannot risk falling in love. Lacking the vulnerability required for worldly coexistence, they are not and cannot become conscious.

The fantasy of machine consciousness is therefore not an empirical discovery but a metaphysical confusion induced by a successful methodology, the fixed identity into which a once-living analogy has congealed. Whitehead’s response to the electromagnetic revolution was not to say that the world is a radio. It was to generalize from vector transmission toward a relational ontology of prehensive feeling. Our response to automated computation should be just as imaginatively disciplined. Machine intelligence can help Ulysses chart a course, but it cannot make him care about returning to Ithaca. “Artificial intelligence” may prove to be the ultimate means, but it cannot supply us with our ends. It can imitate Plato, but it does not suffer the erotic wound of striving to embody the Good.

---

^[1] McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 248.

^[2] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 177.

^[3] Whitehead, Function of Reason, 4.

^[4] Whitehead, Function of Reason, 16.

^[5] For a more detailed look on how Whitehead’s philosophy of organism bears on the study of life’s origins and evolution, see Matthew David Segall and Bruce Damer, “The Cosmological Context of the Origin of Life: Process Philosophy and the Hot Spring Hypothesis,” inAstrophilosophy, Exotheology, and Cosmic Religion: Extraterrestrial Life in a Process Universe, ed. Andrew M. Davis and Roland Faber (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2024), 63–134, https://footnotes2plato.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/segall-damer-the-cosmological-context-of-the-origin-of-life.pdf.

^[6] Whitehead, Function of Reason, 24.

^[7] Whitehead, Function of Reason, 20.

^[8] Whitehead, Function of Reason, 10.

^[9] Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 271.

^[10] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 206ff.

^[11] Whitehead, Function of Reason, 20-21.

^[12] Chalmers, “Could a Large Language Model Be Conscious?,” Boston Review, August 9, 2023. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/could-a-large-language-model-be-conscious/.

^[13] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 339.

^[14] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 119.

^[15] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 104.

^[16] Whitehead, Process and Reality, 177.