Embodied Human Consciousness, Abrupt Global Climate Change, and Freedom - S. David Stoney, Ph.D.

V. WHITEHEAD, PREHENSIONS, ACTUAL OCCASIONS, AND EMBODIED HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS - If, as these considerations imply, embodied consciousness arises from the prehension of the world and its subject-objects by our body/brain, and if all the lower level occasions of experience that go to make up the mind (i.e., the dominant occasion of experience) have their own feelings, then no special features of nerve cells (except their capacity to form prehensions) are needed. Compound individuals have compounded feelings, i.e., conscious awareness, and the mind-body problem is solved.
     Meanwhile the notion of prehensions is not familiar to very many people and the following discourses may be of some help in coming to a better understanding of the term. See also "Some aspects of the nature of things" in Section VIII.

"The century which produced some terrible things produced a scientist scarcely second in genius and character to any that ever lived, Einstein, and a philosopher who, I incline to say, is similarly second to none, unless it be Plato. To make no use of genius of this order is hardly wise; for it is indeed a rarity. A mathematician sensitive to so many of the values in our culture, so imaginative and inventive in his thinking, so eager to learn from the great minds of the past and the present, so free from any narrow partisanship, religious or irreligious, is one person in hundreds of millions. He can be mistaken, but even his mistakes may be more instructive than most other writers' truths."
(Charles Hartshorne, Whitehead in historical context, In: Whitehead's View of Reality , Charles Hartshorne and Creighton Peden, New York: Pilgrim Press, pg. 24, 1981.)

"A. N. Whitehead... took 'sympathy' as basic in his concept of prehension, or what memory and perception have in common, the feeling by one subject of the feelings of other subjects, as theirs.
Charles Hartshorne, Darwin and some philosophers, Process Studies 30.2: 276-88, 2001.

"The entity of which we become aware in sense perception is the terminus of our act of perception...Perception is simply the cognition of prehensive unification; or more shortly, perception is cognition of prehension."
(Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, New York: The Free Press, pgs. 70, 71, 1925.)

"...those elements of our experience which stand out clearly and distinctly in our consciousness are not its basic facts; they are the derivative modifications which arise in the process. For example, consciousness only dimly illuminates the prehensions in the mode of causal efficacy because these prehensions are primitive elements in our experience. But prehensions in the mode of presentational immediacy are among those which we enjoy with the most vivid consciousness. These prehensions are late derivatives in the conscresence of an experient subject. The consequences of the neglect of this law, that the late derivative elements are more clearly illuminated by consciousness than the primitive elements, have been fatal to the analysis of the experient occasion. In fact, most of the difficulties of philosophy are produced by it. Experience has been explained in a thoroughly topsy-turvy fashion, the wrong end first. In particular, emotional and purposeful experience have been made to follow upon Hume's impressions of sensations."
(Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, New York: The Free Press, pg. 188, 1929)

"There is one reality, at least, which we all seize from within, by intuition and not by simple analysis. It is our own personality in its flowing through time - our self which endures"
(Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, NY: G.P. Putnam's Sons, pg. 9, 1912 [1903].)

"I am I and my circumstances"
(Ortega y Gassett, cited in Alicia Juarrero, Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pg. 255, 1999)

Prehension I: A Visual Representation and Excerpts. This discussion may be of some help with the notion of prehension. It took me many years of patient (and not so patient!) attention, study, and reflection before an understanding of this concept blossomed for me. It is closely related, I believe, to the concept of participation and to the notion of quantum wholeness. The excerpts are from a chapter from an David Ray Griffin's excellent book on the most important constructive postmodern philosophers of the 20th century: Pierce, Bergson, James, Whitehead, and Hartshorne. See also the links below.