Alfred North Whitehead and Unitary Experience

by Bill Meacham, Ph.D. © 2024

Alfred North Whitehead and Unitary Experience

Many people who have undergone psychedelic experiences, whether induced by substances such as LSD or by practices such as Holotropic Breathwork, report feeling connected with everything around them, having a sense of oneness with the entire cosmos. The process metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, a philosopher of the early 20th century, provides a conceptual framework within which to understand such experiences and to attest to their veracity.

Panpsychism

Although he did not use the term himself, Whitehead’s metaphysics is a form of panpsychism, the idea that everything material has also an aspect of psyche, or mind. He says that the aim of metaphysics is to frame a system of general ideas that can be used to interpret every element of our experience. By “interpret” he means that “everything of which we are conscious, as enjoyed, perceived, willed or thought, shall have the character of a particular instance of the general scheme.”[1] It is undeniable that things in our experience are material. And it is undeniable that we experience them. Hence a metaphysical scheme must have a place for both. Panpsychism asserts that both matter and experience are equally fundamental. Everything, in addition to its material aspect, has an aspect of psyche or mind to it. That is not to say that mind is somehow more fundamental than matter; it’s called “panpsychism” only because we already assume everything is physical. I suppose it should really be called “panphysicopsychism,” because it asserts everything is composed of both matter and mind, that everything has both an objective (physical) and subjective (psychical), or mental, aspect.

Process

Panpsychism has a long history going back to the ancient Greeks.[2] Whitehead’s novel elaboration of it is to ground it in the notion of process. He says that reality is best understood as composed of events rather than things. The essential character of all that exists is change, and enduring objects are persisting patterns amid change, much like the flame of a candle. This view has also been present in European thought from the time of the Greeks. The Greek word physis, from which we get our words “physics” and “physical,” comes from a root that means “to grow”, “to develop” or “to become.”[3] Heraclitus used the metaphor of a river, which remains what it is by changing what it contains.[4] Change is a necessary condition for constancy; without it we would have only lifeless uniformity and would not even know it, because knowing itself is a temporal process.

Process Panpsychism

Whitehead postulates that reality is made up of atomic or momentary events, not inert particles, each of which has two aspects, mental and physical. We could call Whitehead’s metaphysics a process panpsychism. In a primordial way each event experiences its surroundings and is experienced by other events. This is not an intuitive idea, and Whitehead’s major work, Process and Reality, is dense and highly-technical, over 500 pages long. I’ll try to summarize it briefly. These events, which Whitehead calls “actual occasions” and “actual entities”[5] are a bit like subatomic particles, with some important differences:

Each is momentary, coming into being, going through various phases and then passing away.
The final phase of an actual occasion is not fully determined by the beginning. There is room for novelty, for the possibility of something new coming into being.
Each actual occasion experiences, in a primordial way, its past and its present surroundings. Whitehead calls it an “occasion of experience.”[6] Metaphorically, it has an inside, an aspect experienceable only by itself.
Each actual occasion is experienced by other actual occasions. Metaphorically, it has an outside, an aspect experienceable by others.
What we think of as a particle is actually a series of these occasions. A single electron is a series of momentary electron-occasions that form an enduring object much like the momentary frames of a movie form a continuous picture.
Nonliving things are composed of streams of actual occasions whose primordial experiences randomly cancel each other out. A rock as a whole does not have a mind.
The primordial experiences of the actual occasions composing living things, such as plants, animals and human beings, bind together and reinforce each other, giving birth to a higher-level experience. The richest and most intricate example we know of is our own consciousness.

This version of Panpsychism does not assert that rocks have psyches in the same way that humans do. That would be ridiculous, as rocks exhibit none of the complex behavior of humans. Instead, the most plausible version of the theory, which philosopher Galen Strawson calls “micropsychism,”[7] is that the elementary building blocks of the world take their world into account in a way analogous to but much simpler than the way we humans experience our world. Sequences of such events form what we know as quantum entities such as muons, quarks and the like, which combine to form the everyday objects, living and non-living, that we are familiar with. Some combinations, like stones, have no subjectivity of their own. Others, living beings, do.[8] But all are composed of entities that, like us, have both aspects.

This theory is rather obviously anthropomorphic, but that’s a feature, not a bug. To construct a coherent metaphysics Whitehead starts with what we know most intimately, our own experience. Instead of assuming that the world is fundamentally full of unliving particles and then trying to figure out how our ability to be conscious arises from them, he starts with the undeniable fact that we are conscious and figures out how unliving stuff fits into the picture. Rather than assuming that consciousness mysteriously emerges when brute matter becomes organized in sufficient complexity, we can assume that a primitive form of experience is present at every level of reality. Then we need make no unverifiable suppositions about which animals are conscious and which are not, nor do we have to puzzle over how mere complexity of matter gives rise to consciousness. Reality is a continuum, all aspects of which have some degree of mentality as well as physicality.

Prehension

The key to understanding extraordinary experiences of cosmic unity lies in what Whitehead calls prehension, a technical term in his system.[9] In zoology and biology that term means the ability to grasp or seize something. Think of getting a drink of water; you reach out and pick up the glass in order to bring it to your mouth. It’s an active process. Similarly with vision. Most of the time we don’t just passively absorb what is before our eyes. Instead, we pay attention to certain features of what surrounds us and let the rest recede into the background. We can think of paying attention as a visual form of reaching out and grasping.

Whitehead extends the term to encompass actual occasions, which do something similar. Each one comes into being by prehending the qualities of its predecessors and its surroundings and binding them together into a new occasion of experience.[10] It’s not a passive process. It’s not a matter of an entity coming into being and then merely absorbing impressions of its surroundings. The impressions—the prehensions, as Whitehead says—actually constitute the new occasion.[11] There’s nothing to the new occasion other than what is prehended.

And what is prehended is both physical and mental. Each actual occasion prehends all the aspects, both interior and exterior, of its prior actual occasion and of the actual occasions and enduring objects in its surroundings. Not only does it prehend the physical aspects of what surrounds it, it prehends the mental aspects as well. Whitehead speaks of “the transmission of mental feeling.”[12] The actual occasion does more than detect and incorporate the outward appearance of its neighbors. It also, as the hippies used to say, picks up their vibes.

To the best of my knowledge, Whitehead does not spell out the situation in precisely these terms, but the upshot is that actual occasions and the enduring objects that they make up are not shut in their own windowless skins. Individuals are not as separate mentally as we think. Panpsychism says that mentality suffuses and pervades all beings. It can “leak,” as it were, from mind to mind.

Many of us have had mild psychic or telepathic experiences. A wife asks where her glasses are; her husband has a mental image of their location but does not say it out loud; and then she says “I bet they’re over here,” and so they are. One thinks of a friend, and then the friend calls or emails. Those who are talented with animals know that visualizing a desired scenario—that the animal be docile when approached, for instance—tends to make it happen. A comprehensive metaphysics needs to incorporate that aspect of full-blown human experience as well. The ability to prehend mentality is the micro-level basis of such phenomena.

Unitary Experience

According to Whitehead, each actual occasion prehends not only its immediate predecessor and those around it, but ultimately all of reality. He says,

An actual entity has a perfectly definite bond with each item in the universe. … All actual entities in the actual world, relatively to a given actual entity as ‘subject’ are necessarily ‘felt’ by that subject, though in general vaguely.[13]

“Felt” here means the same as “prehended.” As it comes into being by constituting itself, each actual occasion feels the entire universe and incorporates it into itself via prehension. Obviously, the elements closest to it in time and space are most prominent, but it feels everything. The feelings of entities far from the arising actual occasion tend to merge into a kind of background atmosphere or mood. To use an auditory metaphor, they are like a background hum. For conscious entities such as ourselves they are most often overlooked as the focal object dominates. But whether noted or not, they are present.

Anyone who has ingested so-called “mind-expanding” substances knows that one of their prominent effects is that the world appears different. Things become more vivid, more vibrant and intense. They are, as it were, amplified. Small details become vivid enough that you notice them. They become, from a first-person point of view, focal rather than peripheral. What was in the mostly-overlooked background of your experience comes to occupy the foreground. To use a metaphor from photography, you zoom in on what is before you.

In extreme cases, the background becomes overwhelmingly intense. Everyone’s experience is unique, of course, but certain similarities and themes appear in post-experience reports. In some cases. the zoomed-in details may be memories, previously occluded, of things that happened to you when you were young or even, seemingly, from a prior life. In others, the quality of the present world becomes so intense that it drowns out your thoughts and even your sense of self. The cognitive and emotional filters through which you normally perceive your world are obliterated. What remains is sheer suchness; sheer presentational immediacy as Whitehead calls it.[14] You have no verbal categories with which to understand it. The experience is ineffable. Having no words, you have no concept of self and, looking back on it later, you feel that you were merged with everything, that you and the world were continuous, even identical.

If Whitehead is correct, such experiences are not illusory. Whitehead himself, never having experienced either psychedelic substances or holotropic therapy, says nothing about them, but researcher Leonard Gibson surmises that,

The deepening of experience under psychedelic influence brings a person experientially into the timelessness of the actual event that is the single, present occasion in the society [the series of actual occasions] that exhibits the person’s thread of identity.[15]

Whether you become conscious of the internals of a single actual occasion or of an enduring entity, the one that you are, composed of multiple strands of occasions is a matter for scholarly debate. In either case it is clear that such experiences should not be dismissed as mere illusion or hallucination. Apart from the pragmatic conclusion that they should be considered veridical because they can have great therapeutic value, Whitehead’s metaphysics offers a coherent and comprehensive account that makes sense of such peak experiences and lends credence to the conclusion that, yes, you are connected intimately with the whole of reality.

Whitehead calls his scheme a philosophy of organism.[16] If the whole of reality is to be understood on the model of organism, then we ourselves are not only organisms in our own right but elements in a larger organic whole. We interpenetrate each other psychically; none of us is an island; what happens to one of us affects us all. Hence, it behooves us to try to alleviate suffering and promote health and well-being for everyone. Each of us bears within him- or herself the imprint of the whole of which he or she is a part. Thus, it behooves us to learn about the nature of that whole so that we can more consciously embody and enact it. We need, in other words, what the wisdom traditions of the world have long taught: compassion and insight.

References

Cobb, John B. Jr. Whitehead Word Book, Claremont, CA: P&F Press, 2008. Online publication https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/whitehead/WordBookWeb.pdf as of 8 August 2021.

Gibson, Leonard. “A Whiteheadian Perspective on Psychedelic Experience and Research, An Update.” Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium: Chromatikon IX, Yearbook of Philosophy in Process, 2013.

Goff, Philip, William Seager, and Sean Allen-Hermanson, “Panpsychism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Online publication https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/panpsychism/ as of 20 April 2024.

Meacham, Bill. “A Whiteheadian Solution to the Combination Problem.” Online publication https://www.bmeacham.com/blog/?p=1997.

Strawson, Galen. “Realistic Monism” in Consciousness and its Place in Nature, ed. Freeman, Anthony. Charlottesville VA: Imprint Academic, 2006.

Wikipedia. “Heraclitus.” Online publication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus as of 20 April 2024.

Wikipedia. “Physis.” Online publication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physis as of 19 April 2024.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. 1933. Reprint. New York: The Free Press, 1967.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Harper and Row, 1929. Reprint. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960.

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About the Author

Bill Meacham, Ph.D., is an independent scholar in philosophy and the author of the books How To Be An Excellent Human and How to Exert Free Will, both available on his website, https://bmeacham.com. He has written numerous essays on philosophical topics as applied to everyday life on his blog “Philosophy for Real Life,” https://bmeacham.com/blog/. After earning a Ph.D. in Philosophy, he spent many years in computers and data processing. He brings the precision required for good software development to the analysis of philosophical concepts and to the deep questions posed by philosophy: What’s real? How do we know what’s real? And what shall we do about what’s real?

[1] Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 4.

[2] Goff, et. al., “Panpsychism.”

[3] Wikipedia, “Physis.”

[4] Wikipedia, “Heraclitus.”

[5] Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 32

[6] Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, p. 221.

[7] Strawson, “Realistic Monism,” p. 25.

[8] For a fuller discussion see Meacham, “A Whiteheadian Solution to the Combination Problem.”

[9] Whitehead, Process and Reality, pp. 28-29, 32, 35.

[10] That’s a simplification. Actual occasions also incorporate into themselves what Whitehead calls “eternal objects”, but they are beyond the scope of this essay. See Process and Reality, pp. 35 and 37.

[11] Cobb, Whitehead Word Book, p. 32.

[12] Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 469.

[13] Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 66.

[14] Whitehead, Process and Reality, pp. 185ff.

[15] Gibson, “A Whiteheadian Perspective.”

[16] Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 75.

Alfred North Whitehead and Unitary Experience