Envisioning Whiteheadian Metaphysics

Envisioning Whiteheadian Metaphysics, Part 1: Applications to Conscious and Subconscious Perception, and Quantum Mechanics

by Julia A. Yusupova, Department of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness, California Institute of Integral Studies

Author Note

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Julia A. Yusupova, Department of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness, California Institute of Integral Studies, 1453 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94103. Email: jyusupova@mymail.ciis.edu

Abstract

This paper applies the wisdom of Alfred North Whitehead’s panexperiential metaphysics in light of studies in human consciousness and perception. The cognitive base for the spatial and temporal binding properties of perception is established and correlated to Whitehead’s process of concrescence. The contrast between consciousness and the unconscious is explained. Quantum principles of coherence, entanglement, and superposition are elucidated in terms of their relevance to electromagnetic theory of consciousness and Bergsonian qualitative multiplicity. Overall, it is established how as in Whitehead’s view, the electromagnetic epoch functions as one of the most ingrained conditioning habits of our universe.

Keywords: metaphysics, quantum physics, consciousness, neuroscience, psychophysics, spacetime, perception, unconscious, subconscious, vision, cognitive science, brain, electromagnetism, field, qualitative multiplicity, particle physics, superposition, coherence, entanglement, philosophy, mind-body problem, hard problem of consciousness, subliminal, attention, experience, process, form.

Envisioning Whiteheadian Metaphysics
Part 1: Applications to Conscious and Subconscious Perception, and Quantum Mechanics
Abstraction and Process

The metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead are notoriously perplexing. This is partially because he created a large novel vocabulary, but also on account of the complexity of the topic. Focusing on the limitless interrelatedness of nature, permeated by gradations between subjects and objects, he outlined a vast philosophical scheme, aiming to bridge the traditional ontological divide between mind and matter. To the newcomer student, this Whiteheadian code may appear overwhelming and indecipherable.

Interestingly, the very principle of vagueness, which is embodied in Whitehead’s explanations, is elevated by him as the salient half of a major ground for division of reality. It is our faculty of attentive consciousness that picks out and focuses with the contrasting clarity on only a mere portion of our overall experience, discarding the rest as irrelevant (Whitehead, 1938). Take an example from visual perception. Bring your attention to an object in your visual field. Notice that through focus, you are able to distinguish more fine details in the appearance of this object. Now bring your attention to the very periphery of your visual field and notice how a moment ago while you were focusing on the prior object, whatever was in the periphery did not even exist in your experience. Although, you may suddenly realize that indeed it was always there, just not consciously registered. A portion of the perception occurred subconsciously, yet still hovered within the total field of experience, described by Whitehead as a background tone of feeling (Whitehead, 1938).

According to Whitehead, the majority of subjective experience in nature, especially below the level of higher animals, takes place via this less-than-conscious (or even less-than-sensory perception), which he termed a more general prehension. Inversely, he believed that visual perception was the final product of evolution, exemplifying the triumph of selective emphasis and specialization in animal experience. He called this shining of a spotlight on a portion of totality, procured by the senses, abstraction (Whitehead, 1938). However, subliminal visual perception, such as the kind exhibited at the periphery of the visual field, proves that the more primitive prehensive information processing still persists within us, even visually. Notice also that switching one’s focus to the periphery had receded the object priorly attended to at the center back into the subconscious. The boundaries of the contrast between the vague subconscious and the clear attentive consciousness may alter fluidly moment to moment, yet the presence of the polarity itself persists.

Figure 1
Attentive and subliminal visual perception, as examples of positive and negative prehensions, and the contrast of clarity and vagueness

Whitehead also defined this contrast as positive and negative prehensions. Positive prehensions are data which are accepted into the clear unified percept, while negative prehensions are the ones excluded (Stenner, 2011). The metaphor of a virtual reality video game comes to mind. As the player turns every which way, the dust-like pixels on the edges flicker to catch up to the player’s movement and merge together into the appearance of one solid spatiotemporal playing field at the center. The center is where clear form emerges, while the periphery is steeped with the yet unactualized potentials.

Figure 2
Pixelation of the video game playing field, as an analogy for actual and potential portions of prehended experience

Outside of the sensa, Whitehead identifies the body as a major source of non-sensory prehension producing a vague mass of obscure primary feelings, such as the passing of the past into the future (Whitehead, 1938). As a panexperientialist, he believed that even microscopic actualities like atoms and molecules are small organisms, though unlike larger organisms, they possess only a negligeable level of mentality, and are instead immersed in similar unabstracted prehension and unanalyzable feelings of their environment (Segall, 2023, 2018).

It is fair to ask then why and how abstraction from prehension would evolve in the first place? Or is it possible that some discernment of subjective form exists even for lower organisms? Take instincts for example. These too are inherited forms of implicit knowledge. Although, for animals they operate in what we would call unconscious manner, and unlike intellectual knowledge under the conscious fix of attention, they are still finite forms amidst larger environmental and bodily processes. Take also the non-conscious responses of plants to sunlight, or cells to DNA and other molecules. From attentive consciousness down to the workings of subatomic particles, nature exhibits a gradient of spatiotemporal complexity of prehended forms, yet never fully loses the utility for form, even at the lower scales. Perhaps then, what evolved was not the contrast between abstraction and process itself, but only its subjective intensity.

We may never know what a subatomic particle’s subjective experience is like, and whether it feels any abstracted forms or not. The only direct knowledge of any experience we may have is our own. However, we can still draw interesting analogies between the details of our phenomenological experience and the studied facts of certain sciences. Aided by Whiteheadian metaphysics, this essay focuses on the resonance between phenomenology, cognitive science, and quantum physics.

Concrescence in Sensory Perception and Consciousness via Cognitive Science

The crux of Whitehead’s philosophy rests in the interconnectedness of all things, and each thing understandable only in relation to everything else. However, instead of abstracted things, objects, or particles with a simple location at an instant, the units of reality that Whitehead utilizes are events. He calls these units actual occasions. Unlike subjectively empty, delineated 3D bodies connected in Newtonian space through forces, actual occasions are better pictured as processes, each one expressing its own specific measure of spatiotemporal extension. Whereas the block theory in cosmology imagines the whole universe as a static 4D block, a bundle of many such metaphorical blocks of various dimensions can be pictured as tied together into an extensive continuum. Spacetime as we know it then emerges out of the network of relations, rather than being foundational for the events to occur in (Segall, 2022, 2018; Whitehead, 1938).

Figure 3
A symbolic depiction of the extensive continuum, composed of units of actual occasions of varying dimensions

Additionally, each actual occasion possesses an internal component which makes it also a process of subjective experience (Whitehead, 1967). Externally an expression of an event, internally a moment or a feeling of experience–this is the dual essence of an actual occasion (Stenner, 2011). Therefore, the connections between actual occasions do not involve only the so-called fundamental forces imposed on them externally, but primarily consist of their own internal appropriations of each other. Each occasion absorbs the many others into itself through prehension. The very actuality of each occasion then consists of a composition of data it appropriates from various others, whether they be ones surrounding it spatially or antecedent to it temporally. (Whitehead, 1938)

Again, an example in visual perception may be useful. Imagine yourself as one such actual occasion, both a physical body (event) and a conscious observer (experience) in your living room. You visually perceive various objects via separate prehensions. The couch, the bookcase, the carpet, the window, and the curtains are all appropriated into the unified field of your visual perception. Whitehead calls this blending of the many separate prehensions concrescence. Through this process of concrescence, an actual occasion achieves an experiential moment of subjective unity. Whitehead also calls this a satisfaction, for in constructing this experiential unity, the occasion accomplishes a momentary feeling of subjecthood or a sense of self. The last stage of concrescence is then the perishing of the subjecthood of the actual occasion into objective immortality (Segall, 2018; Whitehead, 1967).

Figure 4
Phases of concrescence in an actual occasion

In the diagram above, the actual occasion is artistically pictured as a neuron. Although, this is only a symbolic representation, the ability of the various dendritic branches of a neuron to extend out and receive signals from various other neurons around it resonates with the essence of prehension. Likewise, concrescence continues the fusion process of the many into one on a larger scale when individual actual occasions mutually constrain each other due to their mass of resonant internal relations and form a grouping based around a common function. Whitehead calls such an assemblage a nexus. (Whitehead, 1967)

In neuroscience, the unification of many separate elements into one is observed (i) at the level of perception, spatially through neural binding and (ii) at the level of consciousness, temporally through neural synchrony. Neural binding is explained as the perceptual process behind the creation of qualitative wholes of objects. For example, when we look at the couch in the room, the various firing neurons or neuronal groups which correlate to the separate prehensions of color, texture, shape, and spatial location of the couch are themselves located in separate locations in the brain. One brain area processes the color brown, another the shape of the couch, yet another its texture, and yet another its location in the room. However, unlike the separate positions in the brain, we do not see all of these elemental forms in different locations within our visual field itself. The separate qualitative forms are bound into a whole unified object (Schmidt, 2009).

Figure 5
Perceptual binding with emphasis on spatial coherence

Whitehead called these qualitative forms eternal objects, recognizable by their recurrences in nature and experience. However, it was Hume who first pointed out that these separate forms were integrated in the same space (Segall, 2023; Whitehead, 1938).

The neuroscientific reason for this is that the separately located processing centers of the brain fire around the same pivotal time. That is, they synchronize, and thereby create a unified electric field (Schmidt, 2009). In Whiteheadian language, this neural synchrony is an example of a nexus of actual occasions–firing neurons, concrescent around a mutual function. In this particular case, that mutual function happens to be the visual perception of the couch, but neural synchrony at a certain frequency of 40 Hz is also a marker for the presence of consciousness in general (Welch, 2020).

In electroencephalograms, electrical firing patterns of neurons are recorded by placing electrodes in various locations on the scalp. Each peak in the streaming line of the signal signifies the intensity of cooperation or synchronization between the most number of neurons. Considering that the exact nature of this self-organizing synchronization is the million-dollar question in neuroscience (Buzsáki, 2006), Whitehead’s concrescence presents a fitting answer.

Figure 6
Electroencephalographic (EEG) signals of different types of brain wave

Depending on the type of wave, peaks can vary in height (number of synchronized neurons) and width (lasting time of synchronization). Waves are thus classified by their frequencies in Hertz, that is by the number of peaks per second. The brain’s organization is extremely complex on both the temporal and spatial levels, hence determining the regions of synchrony with high resolution presents a serious challenge (Buzsáki, 2006). This must mean that concrescence proceeds along both spatial and temporal dimensions, but to ever varying and intermingling extents. Think back to Figure 3, and the unity of the various blocks. In such a textured moving process, exactness is always out of reach.

The identifiable frequencies of the waves are classed into the variety of states of human awareness, such as deep sleep, dream sleep, attentive wakefulness, meditative consciousness, etc. (Welch, 2020). The general pattern here seems to be that the intensity of focused consciousness as opposed to the unconscious, rises along with the increase in frequency of these momentary global synchronizations or concrescences. As the frequency gets faster, the wave becomes more and more jagged, or contrasted. This confirms Whitehead’s statement that a rise in consciousness accompanies an increase in the affirmation-negation contrast (Edwards, 2013). With the rise in attentive consciousness, the polarity between concrescence and unsynchronization is intensified.

The synchronous peaks in the EEG may correlate to the binding of perceptual properties. However, concrescence through synchrony is more dominant in the temporal dimension, whereas concrescence through binding is more so in space, so there must be an extra factor that connects the two. This additional factor is the presence of the magnetic field, which arises from the electrical action of neurons, but unlike the electricity confined to within the brain, this field emanates outside of the skull (Buzsáki, 2006). Whitehead likewise noted that each concrescence is itself a field (Whitehead, 1938). Magnetic fields are detected using magnetoencephalography (MEG) and depicted as these kaleidoscopic persistently switching global patterns in the brain.

Figure 7
Arising and perishing global patterns of the magnetic field of the brain

Concrescence in Sensory Perception and Consciousness via Psychophysics

At least on the external and biophysical side of things, moments of human conscious experience were here shown to consist of serial concrescences of many separate actual occasions, in this case neurons. But what about the internal subjective aspect of such concrescent pulses of human experience? What do they feel like from within? Whitehead stated that the magnitude of our experienced present moment lasts somewhere between a second to a fraction of a second (Whitehead, 1967). A temporal window is a corresponding concept from psychophysics. Consider the following set of experiments. A metronome timer is a device that is mechanically programmed to tick at a regular rate, like every few seconds. At set intervals between ticks of 30-300 ms, human perception perceives only 1 tick, not 2. Only when the time interval between the ticks is increased, can the mind distinguish the two percepts as separate without blending them into one. Here, the concrescence of two percepts which actually follow each other in linear time, are nevertheless perceived as one. (Wittman, 2018).

Figure 8
Patterns of metronome ticks in mechanical and perceived timelines

We see that two actual occasions or ticks are present, one succeeding another, but phenomenologically only one subjective unity of the temporal field is perceived. Arguably, this temporal field of 30-300 ms is the very actual occasion of human subjective experience, which on its physical side is marked by the momentary unit of synchronization of firing neurons in the brain. An electromagnetic field on the outside is an instantaneous moment of subjective conscious experience on the inside.

Furthermore, there exist larger temporal fields. With a slightly longer regular interval of 300 ms-3s between ticks, human perception begins to distinguish the two, yet still bundles each pair together somewhat in linear time. In this way, the percept is proven to be altered in appearance from the pre-determined physical reality (Wittman, 2018). Whitehead noted that appearance and reality are the two characters of the actual occasion, and that indeed they can significantly diverge from each other (Whitehead, 1967).

Even longer temporal fields lasting from seconds to minutes have been studied, implicating the uses of higher cognitive functions like short-term and working memories, and the narrative self (Wittman, 2018). It appears then that instantaneous actualities transpire as temporal fields of experience occupying varying lengths of linear time. Whitehead’s extensive continuum is not smooth like Newtonian spacetime but is textured in numerous ways by different time systems (Segall, 2018). The span of existence of each particular actual occasion is relative to the habits of its organismal form. A second is too vast a period for an elementary particle, for example. Spatio-temporal fields are present in multitudes of sizes proportional to the various scales of the universe (Whitehead, 1938).

Excrescence in Human Sensory Perception

Temporal fields also appear to stack within each other, the larger housing the smaller. As has been shown using the above examples in human perception, the shortest possible functional moments of differentiation of form merge into longer experienced moments, which tie form and action into events, and these then fit into even more inclusive moments of mental presence, which now utilize complex cognitive operations.
If we now ascribe the subjective contents of each temporal or spatially bound field to a particular form, however specific, it becomes easy to observe how forms fit into and intermingle with other forms. Henri Bergson’s idea of multiplicity comes in handy for this depiction. Bergson focused on the contrast between heterogeneity and continuity in perception. His state of quantitative multiplicity externalized forms one from another in space, as objects are both delineated and numbered in this immobile medium. Essentially, there is both heterogeneity and juxtaposition in this and we generally attribute such impressions to our external objective world. On the other hand, the state of qualitative multiplicity is characterized by temporal permeation of forms, rather than their juxtapositions in space. Numbering of objects is inapplicable here. This state is rather correlative to subjectivity. For example, feelings tend to blend and intermingle through time and cannot be expressed statically in space in the same way that symbols like objects can (Moulard-Leonard, 2021). If we were to visualize qualitative multiplicity it might come across as something like what is depicted here.

Figure 9
Hypothetical examples of qualitative multiplicity

There may also be a range to the extent to which forms intermingle, which would precisely be influenced by the specific pattern of the stacking of fields. As Whitehead stated, appearance is determined by the type of social order dominating the environment in question (Whitehead, 1967). The smaller fields enmesh into the larger ones, the latter providing a kind of environmental niche and a conformation to the former. And so, the combination of quantitative and qualitative multiplicities, or the spatial and temporal perceptions, in whatever combinatory balance they happen to occur for a certain subjective unity, is where we observe another Whiteheadian contrast in action: concrescence and excrescence. The latter is equivalent to negative prehensions or exclusion from unity. (Segall, 2023)

Let us consider the following example. In diagram 1, the visual focal point was contrasted to the vague periphery. While we were concentrating on this experience in our eyes, we might have completely disregarded the sounds of some nearby music. A moment later, having brought our attention now to our auditory sense, we might have realized that we did indeed hear the music, but just hadn’t registered it consciously because our visual sense was then dominating our attention. Although in one way, our senses all bind into a coherent multi-sensuous conscious experience that we call our human self, in another more fragmentary moment of our self’s experience, the different senses are still separated and compete with each other for the spotlight of attention. It would take a tremendous amount of perhaps highly trained meditative concentration and will power to hold the contents of all our senses, each with an equal level of intensity within the same span of attention, all in one moment: the sight of the curtains, the sound of the music, the feel of the pen in one’s hand, the smell and the taste of the coffee one is drinking–a feat that appears to be superhuman. But subconsciously, all five are always there present together, even when attention is not granted to any of them, for example when one is completely lost in thought and oblivious to one’s physical surroundings or sensory impressions. The unconscious seems to correlate more to the state of qualitative multiplicity, where numerous potential forms are prehended and held together in a mixed or entangled state. In contrast to the concrescent potencies of spatial binding and temporal synchronization which create attentive perception and consciousness, there is always the presence of a contrasting force of excrescence, which keeps the duality between consciousness and the unconscious, the bound and the unbound, the attentive and the subliminal, the sensuously perceived and the non-sensuously prehended.

Actual Occasions, Enduring Objects, and Habits–The Units and Forms of the Electromagnetic Epoch

Whitehead stated that rather than immutable laws, the universe is subject to housing habits, some of which are engrained enough to take on the appearance of physical laws. One of the widest spanning habits in the universe as we know is electromagnetism (Segall, 2018). Although, he intended to use the term actual occasions as a general metaphysical category applicable beyond this epoch, it seems incomprehensible and impractical to speculate outside of our current confinement to it. The electromagnetic epoch may be temporary in the universal sense, but to all human intents and purposes it is still vast and conditioning. Therefore, it is crucial to understand some of its important properties. In the previous section, it was shown how the temporal synchronization of separate electrical signals in the brain binds into the wholeness of an electromagnetic field. Let us now analyze in depth some of the concrescent properties of these fields, and from those further visualize the propagation of habits and endurance within the universe.

Whitehead noted various types of microscopic occasions like electrons, protons, photons, wave-motions, velocities, hard and soft radiation, chemical elements, matter, empty space, and temperature. The differences between the types depend on the passing of energy that occur between them, inherited from the past and transmitted into the future (Whitehead, 1967). Let us analyze two such occasions prominent in electromagnetism: the electron and the photon. In all atoms, when an excited electron falls from a higher to a lower orbital, a photon gets emitted (Capra, 1975).

Figure 10
Photon absorption and emission depicted as prehension

However, the term subatomic particle does not imply it to be a microscopic object. This is only as a linguistic abstraction to signify what is actually a standing wave, a continual process, a field, or a web of relations and transmutations from other particles (Capra, 1975). As the electron loses its intensity, its shed energy is transformed into an emitted photon. Hence, a photon can be interpreted as a prehended unity of the electron. In turn, the electron losing intensity or energy, which is then prehended by the photon, could be an example of Whitehead’s perishing into objective immortality. In this way, the core subatomic process of electromagnetism becomes an exemplification of concrescence.

In the brain, due to a large, packed mass of firing neurons, a large number of excited electrons settle down and give rise to emitted photons (McFadden, 2020). The concentration allows each type of particle to form a nexus. However, there is a significant difference in the properties of the nexus of each type of particle, which depends on the contrast between fermions and bosons. Electrons fall into the fermion class, which embody the properties of quantitative multiplicity, and each take up their own individual portion of space. Photons on the other hand, are part of the boson class of particles and possess the curious property of being able to stack one on top of another in the same portion of space, comparable to the amalgamation of qualitative multiplicity (Quanta, 2021). This is exactly why light is transparent and possesses that immaterial massless quality (Capra, 1975).

Figure 11
The spatiotemporal filling properties of fermions and bosons

Electrons flowing through neurons form one type of nexus–the electrical current. The current flows down the length of neurons, and correspondingly through space along linear time. As far as modern neuroscience is concerned, mainstream theory correlates mental activity only with the workings of these electric currents, and the specific neurons and brain areas that they happen to pass through. However, a running electric current of each neuron naturally creates a surrounding magnetic field around it, and the salient property of fields is that they are able to merge into the same spatiotemporal unit, evading so-called flow of linear time and instead exemplifying instantaneity and non-locality (McFadden, 2020). Hence, while there are many neurons with individual linear electric flows, there is only one magnetic field that forms holistically around the brain. Same as in Whitehead’s concrescence, the many become one and are increased by one (Segall, 2018). Another way we might look at this is as emitted photons cohering or entangling into a subtle photonic field or an aura. Due to the spatiotemporal blending of bosons, a photonic field then is essentially a photon intensified. Likewise, a photon is itself a mini-field.

When a common form is imposed on a nexus, it becomes a self-sustaining society. The members of a society all share a common character. A prime example of this is the holistic feeling of self in a human being. Whitehead calls this the person or the soul. (Whitehead, 1967). The human body consists of multitudes of centers of experience, such as organs and systems, which all obtain their own feelings, but nevertheless concresce and emerge into the supreme organization of a higher level of feeling of the one experiencing subject. This higher emergent feeling of the self dominates experience for most part. It is only when specific internal organs become sick and begin to hurt that we even start to sense them. Otherwise, the qualities shared by the numerous body organs are fused into the one dominating impression of the soul self (Whitehead, 1938, 1967). Whitehead calls this process of deriving the one conceptual feeling through prehensions of a set of physical feelings transmutation (1978).

The same characteristic of many becoming one is demonstrable with the quantum effects of coherence and entanglement which can be observed with photons. Coherence is when the many bosons form a grouping aligned in the same region of space and time and move and act as one. Think of the way a flock of birds soars through the sky, each bird turning in astounding un-preplanned synchrony with the others. Entanglement implies a similar alignment of properties but can involve vast non-local separations of spacetime in between individual particles, implying that the groupings take place within some additional dimensions outside of our regular point of view (Baggot, 2003). Both coherence and entanglement are quantum effects of what Whitehead would call mutual immanence or mutual conformity (Whitehead, 1967). The difference between coherence and entanglement is that the former aligns the individuals around a local spatiotemporal region, whereas the latter is a deeper pattern of conformation through non-locality.

There are also several phenomenological connections which can be made between the properties of light (photons) and subjective mental experience. For example, ask yourself how do your thoughts and visual sensations feel inside of your head? Are they heavy like external objects or weightless like light? While it is true that some emotions associated with thoughts can exert some relevant heaviness or drag on the mind, which most likely has to do with the fact that emotions affect the body as a whole, and the intensity of photonic emissions in the body is much less concentrated than it is in the brain, purely representational cognitive formations do in fact feel ethereal from within. Also, our visual perceptions have a certain holographic quality to them, exhibiting a gradual decrease in the amount of extension or spatial depth of objects from the external world to the realms of dreams and further to conjured visualizations and imaginations, which appear subtle and transparent.

Whitehead explained the tendency in the universe to form habits by showing how forms pattern nexuses of contemporary occasions, as well as how they are passed on through a successive temporal series or historical routes of actual occasions, each one prehending its past. Such preservation of identity amidst minor changes takes place for all enduring objects like tables, animals, and mountains, as well as cosmic forms of order with vast extensions through spacetime (Segall, 2023; Whitehead, 1938). For simplicity if we now picture an actual occasion as an image, and its internal moment of experience as a photonic field, we can subsequently symbolize a successive series of arising and perishing occasions as a series of stacked images, exemplifying efficient causality or a close transmission of form from one image to the next (Segall, 2018). Although most subjective experiences certainly do not feel like such frozen cinematography and the forms that decohere out of the subconscious flux within them are wholly joined through their extensity, this is still a suitable way to depict the otherwise undepictable process via our limited forms of language and art. After all, Whitehead too could not escape the abstraction of dividing reality into units.

Quantum superposition is the interaction of successive actual states, the initial and the final (Eastman, 2020). Hence, if we now remember that fields have the ability to blend fluidly, and imagine each image in the series as superimposed on the one prior and the one succeeding it, the stacking of these images like translucent membranes becomes a unitary field preserving continuity amidst heterogeneity.

Figure 12
Moments of experience, like particles of a quantum probability wave, pictured in superposition with each other

Enduring objects are fields. Stable non-living nexus like chairs and rocks have a high degree of mutual conformity in their data, which preserves their uniformity in space through to the future. Other fields like societies of living organisms, exhibit more variability in their data. A person’s body, for example, grows and changes quite drastically through the years, while still remaining the same one symbolic personal identity. Emotions too are received, enjoyed, and passed along in between moments through conformation. Hence, they transcend any one present by tying together a process of many successive occasions. Whitehead calls this merging of the past with the future a vector character (Whitehead, 1938). In such a way, an emotion too takes on the characteristics similar to enduring objects and fields.

Finally, various values and meanings can also be compared to enduring fields, overarching the arising and perishing of individual occasions (Smith, 2010). A certain meaningful conformation within a population of occasions is essentially a statistically averaged out pattern obtained from their numerous individual processes (Whitehead, 1938). In the quantum double slit experiment for example, the overall pattern produced from the large number of trials of individual particles is the wave (Baggott, 2003). The wave nature of all particles is thus ascribed by induction. What we characterize as a law of physics is merely a symbol or a form obtained from numerous observations.

Figure 13
Collection of numerous particle trials of the quantum slit experiment

In a similar way, the so-called cosmic laws of the universe are also simply established statistical habits, which propagate through influential conformity (Whitehead, 1938). The form to which nexuses conform may be expressed in various definitions: image, symbol, pattern, memory, habit, or field.

Conclusion

The contrast of continuity and atomicity is historical in philosophy (Whitehead, 1967). This essay attempts to show that a certain polarity of process and form exists within reality at all levels. Every actual occasion is both synthesizing a unity of being out its positive prehensions, and a halo of non-being out of its negative prehensions. Thus, each occasion is a dual fusion of both yes and no (Segall, 2023), comparable to the nature of a qubit, which is a quantum unit able to entertain multiple possibilities at once, rather than the traditional bit, which functions in an either/or manner and expresses only one possibility at a time (Baggott, 2003). The general principle of binding of occasions into enduring objects, nexuses, and societies is then quantum (Whitehead, 1967).

Due to this contrast, with regards to our subjective experience, any perception and knowledge we obtain is only a partial and finite truth of concrescence, which is surrounded by the infinite unbounded and blurred relatedness of the rest of the universe. What is clear is inevitably abrupt and abstracted, for we can never fully trace all relations (Segall, 2023, 2022). The variant interplay of process and abstraction involves different spatiotemporal grades of actual occasions and leads to characteristics of quantitative and qualitative multiplicities in prehension and perception. We experience both the decoherent forms and the coherent and entangled processes, though we are mostly unconscious of the latter. Likewise, our own bodies are both unitary matrices and multitudinous societies of constantly altering elements, though the feeling of the former prevails.

Whitehead states that we live in an electromagnetic epoch. Indeed, the properties of light demonstrate the exemplary characteristics of concrescence and mutual conformity. Photons are described as both a multiplicity and as a unity merged into an electromagnetic field. Not unlike the various grades described by Whitehead, namely the happenings of the infinitesimal physical scale, inorganic aggregates, living cells, plants, animals, and finally human minds (Whitehead, 1938) electromagnetic fields too can manifest in various grades of spatiotemporal extension. Since they permeate matter at all levels, and are able to bind elements not only spatially and temporally, but also non-locally, electromagnetic fields may be perfect candidates for what constitutes experience and subjective unity at any level of organism. The electromagnetic field is a formation, which repeats itself through various spatiotemporal realms of nature. This essay has attempted to show such a propagation from the microcosmic to the level of the human. In a sequel to this essay, the theme will be examined from the human level onwards to cosmic realms.

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