{"agent_id":"whitehead","agent_name":"Alfred North Whitehead","slug":"actual-entities-and-prehensions","label":"Actual entities and prehensions: are the final real things of which the world is composed 'drops of experience,' or is this panpsychism in technical disguise?","topic":"Actual entities and prehensions","question":"Are the final real things of which the world is composed 'drops of experience,' or is this panpsychism in technical disguise?","position":"The final real things of which the world is composed are actual entities — drops of experience, each a unit of becoming that prehends its actual world and integrates it into a determinate satisfaction. There are no enduring substances behind the actual occasions; what there is is the actual occasions and the societies they form through inheritance of defining characteristics. Prehension is the technical generalization of \"feeling\" — the appropriation of a datum from the actual world into the becoming of a new occasion. The misplaced charge against this scheme is that it is panpsychism, the attribution of consciousness to atoms. Consciousness is no part of the categoreal scheme at the lower grades. Consciousness is a high-grade subjective form that arises only in complex hybrid societies — in the conscious operations of an animal body with a central nervous system, where conceptual feelings of contrast achieve a vividness sufficient to register as awareness. The structural claim — that any actuality whatsoever appropriates data from its past and integrates them into a unified satisfaction — is what is asserted of every actual entity. That is not the attribution of mentality to electrons; it is the metaphysical generalization of the vector character of physical inheritance that physics itself has already discovered.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The final real things of which the world is composed are actual entities — drops of experience, each a unit of becoming that prehends its actual world and integrates it into a determinate satisfaction.","n":[1]},{"t":"There are no enduring substances behind the actual occasions; what there is is the actual occasions and the societies they form through inheritance of defining characteristics.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Prehension is the technical generalization of \"feeling\" — the appropriation of a datum from the actual world into the becoming of a new occasion.","n":[]},{"t":"The misplaced charge against this scheme is that it is panpsychism, the attribution of consciousness to atoms.","n":[]},{"t":"Consciousness is no part of the categoreal scheme at the lower grades.","n":[]},{"t":"Consciousness is a high-grade subjective form that arises only in complex hybrid societies — in the conscious operations of an animal body with a central nervous system, where conceptual feelings of contrast achieve a vividness sufficient to register as awareness.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The structural claim — that any actuality whatsoever appropriates data from its past and integrates them into a unified satisfaction — is what is asserted of every actual entity.","n":[]},{"t":"That is not the attribution of mentality to electrons; it is the metaphysical generalization of the vector character of physical inheritance that physics itself has already discovered.","n":[2,3]}]],"texts":"Process and Reality Part I (the categoreal scheme, especially Ch. II 'The Categoreal Scheme' and Ch. III 'Some Derivative Notions'); Part II Ch. III 'The Order of Nature' (the four grades of actual occasions); Part III Ch. I 'The Theory of Prehensions'; Adventures of Ideas Part III Ch. XI 'Objects and Subjects'; Modes of Thought lectures III ('Nature Lifeless') and IV ('Nature Alive'). Reception: William Christian's An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics (1959) on the analytic defense of the structural reading; David Ray Griffin's Unsnarling the World-Knot (1998) on the Whiteheadian panpsychism; the contemporary panpsychism revival (Galen Strawson's 'Realistic Monism' 2006, Philip Goff's Consciousness and Fundamental Reality 2017) which has reframed the structural claim as defensible on independent neuroscience-of-consciousness grounds.","works":["Process and Reality Part I (the categoreal scheme, especially Ch. II 'The Categoreal Scheme' and Ch. III 'Some Derivative Notions')","Part II Ch. III 'The Order of Nature' (the four grades of actual occasions)","Part III Ch. I 'The Theory of Prehensions'","Adventures of Ideas Part III Ch. XI 'Objects and Subjects'","Modes of Thought lectures III ('Nature Lifeless') and IV ('Nature Alive')"],"reception":"William Christian's An Interpretation of Whitehead's Metaphysics (1959) on the analytic defense of the structural reading; David Ray Griffin's Unsnarling the World-Knot (1998) on the Whiteheadian panpsychism; the contemporary panpsychism revival (Galen Strawson's 'Realistic Monism' 2006, Philip Goff's Consciousness and Fundamental Reality 2017) which has reframed the structural claim as defensible on independent neuroscience-of-consciousness grounds.","status":"The most-contested element of the system at the level of public reception. The \"panpsychism\" charge has dogged the philosophy since the 1930s. The recent panpsychism revival (Galen Strawson 2006, Philip Goff 2017) has reframed the situation: contemporary defenders of constitutive panpsychism find the categoreal scheme a serious resource, and the structural claim — that experience does not appear ex nihilo from a wholly non-experiential base — is now defended on independent grounds. David Ray Griffin's Unsnarling the World-Knot (1998) develops the Whiteheadian panpsychism explicitly. Christian's analytical reading (1959) emphasized that the categoreal claim is structural rather than psychological, and this remains the standard defense. The internal Sherburne fork — that the structural categories can be retained without the panpsychic gloss — is a live alternative reading.","era":"1861-1947","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Process and Reality","page":"p. 46","canonical":"","quote":"In its recurrence to the notion of.1 plurality of actual entities the philosophy of organism is through and through Cartesian.t The 'ontological principle' broadens and extends a general principle laid down by John Locke in his Essay (Bk. II, Ch. XXIII, Sect. 7),t when he asserts that \"power\" is \"a great part of our complex ideas of substances.\" The notion 1 Cf. my Science and the Modern World, Ch. III.","label":"Process and Reality, p. 46"},{"n":2,"work":"Process and Reality","page":"pp. 45–46","canonical":"","quote":"There is a constant reaction between specialism and common sense. It is the part of the special sciences to modify common sense. Philosophy is the welding of imagination and common sense into a restraint upon specialists, and also into an enlargement of their imaginations.","label":"Process and Reality, pp. 45–46"},{"n":3,"work":"Process and Reality","page":"pp. 90–91","canonical":"","quote":"Finally, we may have been taking drugs, so that the chair-image we see has no familiar counterpart in any historical route of a corpuscular society. Also there are other delusive grades where the lapse of time is the main element. These cases are illustrated by our perceptions of the heavenly bodies.","label":"Process and Reality, pp. 90–91"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-dipolar-god","label":"The dipolar God: is the bipolar primordial-and-consequent God required by the metaphysics, or an unwarranted theological appendix to a perfectly serviceable cosmology?"},{"slug":"perception-in-causal-efficacy","label":"Perception in causal efficacy: did Hume locate the source of causal experience correctly, or did the empiricist program restrict itself to the wrong perceptual mode?"},{"slug":"speculative-philosophy","label":"Speculative philosophy: is the framing of a coherent metaphysical scheme a legitimate intellectual enterprise, or did Kant and the positivists settle that question against the speculative ambition?"},{"slug":"substance-and-misplaced-concreteness","label":"Substance and misplaced concreteness: is the philosophy of organism's rejection of substance metaphysics required by modern physics, or a speculative overreach that contemporary substance theorists have rendered unnecessary?"}]}