Whitehead’s Process Theory (Panpsychism)

Although Whitehead's Process Theory is already classified comprehensively under Neutral Monism, it is also discussed here under Panpsychism—even though most (but not all Whiteheadian) scholars conclude he is not a panpsychist—motivated by process philosopher Matthew Segall's bringing Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism “into conversation with the recent panpsychist turn in analytic philosophy of mind.” According to Segall, “Whitehead's unabashedly metaphysical project broadly aligns with recent critiques of reductive physicalism and the turn toward a conception of experience as basic to Nature.” Whitehead's panexperientialism, he says, attempts to take consciousness at face value, resisting inflationary accounts toward absolute idealism and deflationary accounts toward eliminative materialism (Segall, 2020).

Panexperientialism and Consciousness

Whitehead’s theory of consciousness is not panpsychism in the usual sense, but in rejecting the materialist idea that matter is inert, it is closely related, a distinctive variant often called panexperientialism. Whereas in classical panpsychism, every physical entity has conscious experience, in Whitehead’s Process Theory, every actual entity (or actual occasion) has experiential subjectivity, wherein experience and consciousness are not the same thing. Moreover, consciousness is rare, late, and derivative. “Consciousness presupposes experience, and not experience consciousness” (Whitehead, 1949). This means experience is universal, but consciousness is exceptional—emerging in complex organisms and in special situations involving novelty, contrast, or decision.

In panexperientialism, all actual occasions have an interior experiential aspect (prehension), but this not mean all occasions are self-aware or ‘conscious’ in the animal sense. Even subatomic events have some ‘sense’ or ‘feeling’ of the rest of the reality—but it is extremely primitive and decidedly non-conscious.

Here's how Whitehead describes these basic units of reality. “Actual entities—also termed actual occasions—are the final real things of which the world is made up. … They are drops of experience, complex and interdependent” (Whitehead, 1949). But in themselves, these ‘drops’ are not conscious.

Segall’s Process-Relational Interpretation

Segall distinguishes Whitehead's process-relational panexperientialism from the dominant substance-property variants of panpsychism, arguing that Whitehead's version avoids many of panpsychism's conceptual difficulties. To begin, “Whitehead's process-relational rendering doesn't claim that experience is a ‘primary attribute’ or ‘intrinsic property’ of matter. This is because in Whitehead's view, physics has moved beyond the substantialist view of matter, and talk of essential or accidental properties only made sense given such an [archaic] ontology … While there was an ‘essential distinction between [substantial] matter at an instant and the agitations of experience,’ with this conception of matter having been swept away, a door is opened to analogies between energetic activity and concrete experience.” Thus, “Experiences, like energy vectors, are intrinsically process-relational in that they always involve transition beyond themselves: They manifest in a ‘specious present’ [Whitehead] as a tension between the actualized facts of an inherited past and the potential forms of an anticipated future” (Segall, 2020).

While Segall has “the philosophical payoff of panpsychism” dissolving the hard problem of consciousness by “giving experience its proper place in Nature without undermining the scientific image of the universe.” Regarding substance-property panpsychism's combination problem, Segall says that Whitehead's process-relational approach “doesn't so much solve this problem as it does reframe the problem's presuppositions.” Whitehead does this not by “struggling to understand how abstract little bits of extended matter with mental intrinsic properties might combine to form bigger bits of minded matter,” but rather by starting “with a more concrete conception of energetic activity that is more easily analogized to agitations of experience. Neither ‘matter’ nor ‘mind’ is composed of simply located bits or states.”

Thus, “the ongoing composition of the cosmos is achieved not through the summation of tiny parts, nor through subtraction from some larger whole (as cosmopsychists would have it), but by a dipolar relational process with both a stability providing material pole and a novelty inducing mental pole.”

Concrescence and Emergent Panpsychism

According to Segall, “Whitehead is neither a micropsychist nor a cosmopsychist exclusively. He tries to have it both ways. There is a universal soul, a psyche of the cosmos, a primordial actuality or God of this world, and there are countless creatures creating in concert with it. Creativity transcends both God and finite actualities; it is the source of all co-evolving parts, wholes, bodies, and souls. Whitehead's account of process includes moments of combination and decombination, conjunction and disjunction. For Whitehead the combination problem becomes a logic of concrescence [i.e., ‘the production of novel togetherness’], a feature and not a bug, a way of thinking change as more than just the rearrangement of pre-existing parts or the fragmentation of a pre-existing whole but as genuine becoming, as an ‘emergent evolution’ or ‘creative advance’ where neither wholes nor parts pre-exist their relations … and in each act of creation the past is not destroyed but re-incarnated in the novel occasion … Concrescence is thus a cumulative process and not a merely additive one” (Segall, 2020).

Some call Whitehead's defense of a panpsychist philosophy the theory's most significant development in the 20th century. Whitehead radically reforms “our conception of the fundamental nature of the world, placing events (or items that are more event-like than thing-like) and the ongoing processes of their creation and extinction as the core feature of the world, rather than the traditional triad of matter, space and time. His panpsychism arises from the idea that the elementary events that make up the world (which he called occasions) partake of mentality in some—often extremely attenuated—sense, metaphorically expressed in terms of the mentalistic notions of creativity, spontaneity and perception” (Goff et al., 2022).

This makes Whitehead an emergentist rather than a constitutive panpsychist. “A given moment of conscious experience is not reducible to nor simply identical with its constituent parts.” It is “a creative repetition of the past rather than a combination of parts” (Segall, 2020).

Panpsychist or Not?

It is a legitimate claim that Whitehead is not a panpsychist, because he neither reduces experience to matter nor identifies universal experience with universal consciousness. However, Whitehead does not seem to straightforwardly reject panpsychism. Yet, he also never called himself a panpsychist, and Victor Lowe reported that when asked directly, he gave an evasive “Yes” and “No”; Griffin’s term “panexperientialism” was designed precisely to avoid the implication that psyche or consciousness exists ubiquitously (McHenry, 1995; Griffin, 1998). What is universal for Whitehead is experience or prehension; consciousness, in his technical sense, is not universal at all.

References

Griffin, D. R. (1998). Unsnarling the World Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem. University of California Press.

McHenry, L. B. (1995). Whitehead’s panpsychism as the subjectivity of prehension. Process Studies, 24, 1–14.