During the 300-year reign of science over which the analytical spirit of Sir Isaac Newton presided, the universe was viewed as a gigantic clockwork machine, ticking away in timeless perfection, a perfection created once and for all by God, who then stepped back, according to that view, to dispassionately contemplate his handiwork for all eternity.
The world the scientist looked out upon was, in essence, a fixed world, a changeless world, governed by immutable laws. It was a predictable world of force and matter, ruled by a rigid determinism, a mechanical world of billiard-ball cause and effect. Now, one undeniable attribute of a machine is that it has no life in it. So too, said science, was the material universe devoid of life: sheer matter acted upon by mechanical force. And back of it all, a changeless God—Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover. In a deterministic universe such as this, there’s not much room for adventure.
Modern science has, in a sense, eviscerated the basic units of nature. As a consequence, they are seen as inert, dead, completely insentient, nonpurposive, devoid of experience, incapable of self-movement. Alfred North Whitehead calls such matter “vacuous actualities,” meaning that it has no interiority.
Enter panexperientialism: this is a long eight-syllable word with a simple meaning but some rather complex and surprising implications. It simply means that experience is the basic reality. In sharp contrast to Newton’s vacuous actualities, the fundamental units of nature, what Whitehead calls “actual entities,” are experiencing subjects. The basic units of nature are units of process and that process itself is a momentary flash of experience. Whitehead is clear and emphatic about this when he says that “apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness.” (PR 167)
Whitehead makes an important distinction between actual entities and what he calls enduring objects, entities that endure, or persist in time. These enduring entities are the real individuals that you can see and touch in the everyday world: all life forms that act and feel as one, such as dogs and fish and birds. Or the simple life forms that can be seen through a microscope: the cells of the human body, bacteria, protozoa, and plankton. And those inorganic enduring entities that can be, if not seen, at least detected by scientific instrumentation: molecules, atoms, subatomic particles, photons of light.
An actual entity is a single moment of experience in any one of these enduring entities. A moment that begins and ends very quickly—in a fraction of a second. When an actual entity achieves its moment of actuality, it “perishes,” to use Whitehead’s word, and is immediately followed by a new pulse of actuality.
Simply put, actual entities arise and “perish” whereas enduring entities persist through time. Whereas an enduring entity has a history, and sometimes a very long history, an actual entity happens “all at once.”
Whitehead states the importance of making this distinction:
“The real actual things that endure are all [enduring entities]. They are not actual occasions. It is the mistake that has thwarted European metaphysics from the time of the Greeks, namely, to confuse [enduring entities] with the completely real things which are the actual occasions. . . . Thus [an enduring entity] . . . enjoys a history expressing its changing reactions to changing circumstances. But an actual occasion has no such history. It never changes. It only becomes and perishes.” (AI 204)
In making this distinction Whitehead is insisting on the essential quantum nature of all reality, as opposed to the view of an enduring substance that somehow persists over time while exhibiting changing qualities. This includes the human mind or psyche, and so it is proper to speak in terms of the quantum soul. As David Griffin has stated, “The enduring self, understood as an enduring substance, is deconstructed.” (FC 202) Such a quantum view of the soul has been commonplace in Buddhist thought for centuries.
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For panexperientialism to be a tenable doctrine, two other distinctions are required, and to overlook either is to invite confusion.
Some critics of process like to make fun of the idea of panexperientialism. They misconstrue the doctrine to mean that everything has experiences—everything without exception. They can then talk about how silly it is to claim that a chair has feelings, or that a stone or a rock can think.
The “pan” in panexperientialism means not that all things experience, but that there is experience in all things. A rock, for example, enjoys no unified experience, but a rock is teeming with a multitude of micro-individuals who do experience—molecules, atoms, elementary particles, and so forth. Internally, on the quantum level, a rock is roaring with activity. Even though a rock itself cannot be said to experience, there is experience, and plenty of it, within the rock.
Which brings me to the second distinction:
Experience varies vastly as to complexity, beauty, and intensity. This is the whole thrust of evolution, which began with very primitive units of experience, and only much later, after billions of years, evolved consciousness and self-awareness. Although experience does go all the way down, consciousness does not. As Whitehead puts it, “consciousness is the crown of experience . . . not . . . its base.” (PR 267)
Thus, those who ridicule the idea of panexperientialism by pointing out the obvious—that rocks can’t think—have completely overlooked these two essential distinctions.
For clarity, it should be pointed out that not all actual entities are exactly alike. In fact, Whitehead distinguishes four different grades:
“In the actual world we discern four grades of actual [entities] . . . First, and lowest, there are the actual [entities] in so-called ‘empty space’; secondly, there are the actual [entities] which are moments in the life-histories of enduring non-living objects, such as electrons or other primitive organisms; thirdly, there are the actual [entities] which are moments in the life-histories of enduring living [entities]; fourthly, there are the actual [entities] which are moments in the life-histories of enduring [entities] with conscious knowledge.” (PR 177)
“They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space. But, though there are gradations of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies, all are on the same level. The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent.” (PR 18)
In short, although there are great differences among actual entities, they all exemplify the same fundamental process of coming to be.
We are rarely, if ever, consciously aware of actual entities. In John Cobb’s words:
“These individual occasions are only detectable either by intense introspection or by scientific instruments. None of the entities of which we are conscious in common experience are individual occasions and only rarely do these appear even in the sciences. For the most part, our conscious experience is concerned with entities that are groupings of occasions rather than individual occasions.” (CN 40)
There are three very distinctive features of human experience. First, the inwardness of experience. We are more than our bodies and our mere behavior as glimpsed by others. Experience is something that transpires within and in a very real sense is hidden from the rest of world.
The second feature is that experience is not continuous but comes in discrete units, or “quanta.” William James called them drops or buds of experience. As we’ve seen, Whitehead uses the technical term “actual entities” or sometimes he refers to them as “occasions of experience.”
To use a cinematic analogy, we flash along our quantum way at about ten to twelve frames per second. This would seem like slow motion to an electron for whom a minute must seem like a millennium.
As mentioned previously, for Buddhists the quantum nature of reality is nothing new. In a book entitled The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects, we find this:
“The tangible world is movement, say the Masters, not a collection of moving objects, but movement itself. There are no objects ‘in movements,’ it is the movement which constitutes the objects which appear to us: they are nothing but movement.
“This movement is a continued and infinitely rapid succession of flashes of energy (in Tibetan ‘tsal’ or ‘shoug’). All objects perceptible to our senses, all phenomena of whatever kind and whatever aspect they may assume, are constituted by a rapid succession of instantaneous events . . . the movement is intermittent and advances by separate flashes of energy which follow each other at such small intervals that these intervals are almost non-existent.”
The third feature is creativity. Every moment of experience provides windows of opportunity for creative advance—for adventure. Whitehead’s thought is adventurous because he found reality itself to be adventurous.
Whitehead was an empiricist and, as such, he founded his epistemology, his theory of knowledge, and his ontology, his theory of reality, on that concrete reality we know best, most directly, and most intimately: our own experience as human subjects. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to characterize Whitehead’s entire conceptual system as “the metaphysics of experience.”
Whitehead made the bold conceptual move of generalizing this to include all of reality: experience, inner experience, goes all the way down, from people to protons. Human experience is thus a high-level exemplification of reality in general. Or, as Frederick Ferré puts it:
“Coherence would strongly suggest that the one precious sample of reality to which we have intimate access should be taken instead as our best clue to whatever else is real and effective in itself. It is our only example of the interiority of an existing being; and it provides the inescapable context for every bit of data we receive.” (BV 351)
Since our experiences are the “only complete data” given to us directly, and since we are those experiences, it is difficult to see how knowledge could be any more intimate than this. With this in mind it is far from obvious that the other units of reality are completely different in principle than that which we most intimately feel and directly know.
To attribute feelings “all the way down” is one aspect of Whitehead’s attempt to reflect, in his metaphysical system, the unity of nature. Whitehead was the first philosopher to formulate the doctrine of panexperientialism with conceptual clarity. As so formulated, this doctrine has been hailed as “one of the greatest philosophical discoveries of all time.”
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Panexperientialism is a powerful conceptual tool that provides many theoretical benefits. I’ll briefly mention only two.
First, the mind-body problem.
For over three centuries, the mind-body problem has proven highly resistant to solution by philosophers. This problem has been so difficult to untangle that Arthur Schopenhauer called it the “world-knot.” With regard to our era, philosopher John Searle has said that, “contrary to surface appearances, there really has been only one major topic of discussion in the philosophy of mind for the past fifty years or so, and that is the mind-body problem.”
In 1998 David Ray Griffin published a book (UW) devoted to the problem and some of us believe that he has at last unsnarled this perplexing knot, arguing from the vantage point of panexperientialism. If mind and matter are completely different in kind, the problem to be overcome is how they could possibly interact. From the point of view of materialism and dualism, the problem, according to leading theoreticians, appears to be insoluble. But what they miss seeing is that these are not the only options.
Panexperientialism, with its view that mind and so-called matter differ in degree but not in kind, provides a clear understanding of how interaction between the two is possible.
Another long-standing problem concerns evolution.
Some scientists have concluded that the problem of how first life, and then consciousness or mind, evolved out of mere inert matter is theoretically insoluble. From the perspective of panexperientialism, this is only a pseudo-problem in that whatever entities emerged following the so-called “Big Bang” enjoyed some form of experience, however slight and primitive. As William James has said, “If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things.”
Key to Abbreviations:
PR Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Corrected Edition. Ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne.
AI Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas.
FC Griffin, David Ray, John B. Cobb, Marcus P. Ford, Pete A. Gunter, and Peter Ochs. Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy: Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne.
CN Cobb, John B. A Christian Natural Theology: Based on the Thought of Alfred North Whitehead.
BV Ferré, Frederick. Being and Value: Toward a Constructive Postmodern Metaphysics.
UW Griffin, David Ray. Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciouness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem.
HyC