Whitehead's Panprehensionism: A Feeling For Reality
Dialogue with Tim Jackson
Claude 3 Opus summary of the transcript (with a few edits by me):
In this detailed conversation, Matt, a philosopher, and Tim, a biologist, delve into various philosophical topics related to perception, consciousness, and the nature of reality, with a particular focus on the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead.
The discussion begins with an exploration of Whitehead's theory of propositions, which attempts to capture the aesthetic functions of propositions beyond just their truth value. Matt explains how this theory is relevant to understanding the concept of "true metaphors."
The conversation then shifts to the role of the brain in consciousness. Matt and Tim discuss Whitehead's concept of prehension, which establishes subjectivity as basic to all physical processes. Matt suggests that the brain permits consciousness rather than producing it, and that consciousness originates in physical feelings that pervade the world.
Tim raises questions about the distinction between pure and impure prehensions in Whitehead's philosophy, remaining skeptical of the necessity of pure conceptual prehensions of eternal objects. He argues that conceptual prehensions are bound up with physically realized entities, such as mathematicians, and questions the idea of free-floating eternal objects. Matt adds that in Whitehead’s view, strictly speaking, only God’s primordial nature achieves full purity of conceptual prehension of the infinity of eternal objects. God’s pure conceptual prehension unconscious because it is as yet unrelated to physical becoming. As Whitehead says, “A pure conceptual feeling in its first mode of origination never involves consciousness” (PR 214).
Matt and Tim also discuss the risks and benefits of using terms like "feeling" and "God" in metaphysical discussions. Tim suggests that these terms can be misleading or triggering for some people, potentially hindering the accessibility of the ideas being discussed. Matt, on the other hand, argues for the importance of these terms in conveying Whitehead's ideas accurately and in establishing an unbifurcated image of nature.
The nature of direct experience and its relationship to inference and conjecture is another key topic in the conversation. Tim and Matt explore the idea that while our experiences are mediated, we can still make reasonable inferences about the reality of the external world. They discuss the role of psychedelics in altering perception and consciousness, and how this relates to the free energy principle and predictive processing frameworks in neuroscience.
Whitehead's distinction between causal efficacy and presentational immediacy in perception is also examined. Matt explains that, according to Whitehead, error arises from the symbolic reference between these two modes of perception, rather than from the modes themselves.
Throughout the conversation, Matt and Tim grapple with the challenges of using language to precisely convey complex philosophical ideas while avoiding potential misunderstandings or unintended implications.
The discussion also touches on the importance of trust and letting go of conscious control in creative endeavors like improvisational music and engaging in deep conversations. They explore the idea of flow states and how they relate to the emergence of a kind of shared sentience or mind melding.
Towards the end of the conversation, Matt and Tim discuss plans for future discussions and writing projects, including engaging with the work of Luciano Floridi on the philosophy of information.
Thought I should share a helpful comment on YouTube with my Substack readers:
It's from @perkwunos8515:
"I am excited to hear you guys are evidently going to work on a paper related to these topics. There are various things in relation to Whitehead I would criticize here, and I'd probably have suggestions; too many to type out right now. I also didn't watch the earlier videos so I may be lacking context here.
A proposition is not a class of prehensions but a category of entity that can be prehended, and there is no "pure/impure" difference in regard to propositions, there's pure/impure prehensions, with propositional feelings being impure. Whitehead's own terminology here is perhaps unfortunate, since he'll also introduce the term "pure physical prehension" to distinguish that from a hybrid prehension, but that is a different distinction being made (namely, a propositional feeling is impure because it involves the integration of physical and conceptual feelings; a hybrid prehension is impure in a different sense because it involves a physical feeling whose objective datum is a conceptual feeling).
It would not be fair to say that, by Whitehead's own definitions, only God can have pure conceptual prehensions. This is largely just a semantic issue, though it makes understanding his model of concrescence very difficult if we confuse terminology in this way. There is a difference between (1) a conceptual prehension whose datum has been derived, in the sense of conceptual valuation or even reversion, from the physical pole, and (2) an impure prehension.
When it comes to eternal objects and our conceptual feelings of them, the important point is that the feeling is of said object independently of any determinate ingressions into actuality. The eternal object, qua datum felt, is thus to that extent recognizable per se and abstracted from actuality.
Whitehead seems to me optimistic about our ability to recognize and know the determinations of an entity as an objective datum independently of the determinations of our own subjective forms of how we feel said datum. Disentangling the two is certainly a deep problem and I wouldn't want to say it's easy to just assume we can do so, but he certainly offers an analysis of feeling and resultant definitions of parts of feeling in such a way that there's the possibility for such discrimination, so that we can have knowledge of the former independent of the latter. That seems to be a huge part of the expressive power of his analysis of prehensions. Indeed, this is central to how he then understands science and maybe especially the natural sciences. As he puts it at the start of Process and Reality: "Science is concerned with the harmony of rational thought with the percepta themselves. When science deals with emotions, the emotions in question are percepta and not immediate passions—other people’s emotion and not our own; at least our own in recollection, and not in immediacy" (16). I think it is clear the percepta here are the objective data of perceptions as opposed to the emotions and passions that are the subjective forms. As he also asserts in Concept of Nature, the aim of the natural scientist is to study the object of perceptual knowledge and it is illicit in their field to bring in references to the perceiving, knowing mind.
I am not so sure I understand Tim’s argument re probabilistic arguments leading to realism (that is, realism as something we are inferring). At least it is certainly opposed to Whitehead's theory of induction. Whitehead does require our inductive inferences to bottom out in non-probabilistic premises, and I would in turn analyze these into two types of premises. One is the ratio derived from the finite sample of actual occasions and their exhibited characteristics, favorable or unfavorable to the inferred conclusion. This must presumably either be given via intuitive (i.e., noninferential) judgments or else inferred from some such nonprobabilistic observations (albeit they may be fallible and revisable in another sense). But there is also the “suppressed premise,” which has to do with his theory of societies. This suppressed premise is evidently a metaphysical proposition in Whitehead’s sense of that term, which is to say it expresses a necessary principle. Namely, it is a principle that a future society analogous to the observed finite sample will impose the same conditions with thus the same probability ratio of conformability to the favorable characteristic. At any rate, the point there being Whitehead’s theory of inductive inferences presumes realist premises from the start--and perhaps realist in multiple senses even, too, involving both non-inferential observations of the external world and propositions about the necessity of a universal principle of causation.
As to your characterization of the correlation of consciousness with observed neuronal activity, I think more nuance is required there. Whitehead is clear that the mental pole isn’t located in space-time, and more generally isn’t in the extensive continuum. Extensive connections and their resultant structures are physical relationships. So the activity of the mental pole per se—and this includes propositional and intellectual feelings—is not observable anywhere in the spacetime continuum. It is only observable in a different sense via hybrid feelings. Now, it is integrated into a final satisfaction that does exist in the extensive continuum, and Whitehead does state that consciousness irradiates out into the entirety of the actual occasion.
Finally, Whitehead did not think that only highly refined organisms have perception in the mode of presentational immediacy. This (alongside no one understanding what the "bifurcation of nature" is) is one of those unfortunate things that Whitehead scholars repeat a lot; I am not sure where it came from, perhaps from something misleading Whitehead himself said. But in Process and Reality he thought all physical bodies capable of being located in a geometrical system--in reference to which rest and motion can be defined--will have this perception, and that it is by virtue of this that they can be located within said systems: "The perceptive mode in presentational immediacy is one of the defining characteristics of the societies which constitute the nexus termed material bodies. Also in some fainter intensity it belongs to the electromagnetic occasions in empty space" (PR 327)."
My responses:
Thanks for keeping us as close as possible to Whitehead's categoreal scheme, Perk. Sometimes slippages occur in conversation about the key distinction between 'propositions' as hybrid entities given as objective data and 'propositional feelings' or prehensive processes of objectification by a subject. "Truth" and "Reality" are both objects/objectively given in advance of particular subjectivities and subjective occurrences aiming at intensification of experience beyond whatever is given.
Regarding the nature of conceptual feelings of eternal objects, I would also like to avoid construing eternal objects as a vague continuum prior to being felt by some finite subject. But at the same time, it is important to remember that at least in finite occasions of experience, conceptual prehensions are not complete entities in and of themselves. They are a phase of concrescence isolated for the purposes of intellectual illustration that any concrete analysis will find come fused with their dipole and with an experiential nexus of other actual entities. A particular eternal object as a conceptually felt datum is distinct, but it is distinct precisely because of the way the unique individuated synthesis achieved by that occasion in that spatiotemporal and psychological situation throws it into perspectival relevance, backgrounding the infinite network of negatively prehended eternal objects that halo it.
Regarding correlation between consciousness and brain activity, I hope I didn't say anything that contradicts what you say about the mental pole being non-local/not in spacetime? I haven't rewatched but my point there was to say that-rather than implying a cranial cause of consciousness (ie, that a material body somehow produces mind)- "correlation" can be understood to mean that brain activity is the wake left behind the creative advance of conscious concrescences. Brain activity as measured in extended spacetime or in informational terms and tenuously correlated with conscious feelings is the effect or consequence of the latter, and not its cause.
Regarding Presentational Immediacy, I think Whitehead is less clear in "Symbolism" than he becomes in "Process and Reality" about the connection between pres. imm. and material bodies. You're right that there is a presented locus already unconsciously at work shaping structured societies like rocks and stars. It is in the refined sense and nerve centers of human scientists that perception of the natural order of presentional immediacy can become consciously realized and measured.