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Whitehead and the emergence of consciousness


... what does Whitehead have to say about the emergence of consciousness and its place in a largely hostile cosmos? Still working my way through his masterpiece, Process and Reality. I'm looking especially at Part III (The Theory of Prehensions), Chapter III, "The Transmission of Feelings,' Section IV, where our man seems to be working this through in real time himself. 

"It is evident," he says, "that adversion and aversion ... only have importance in the case of high-grade organisms. They constitute the first step toward intellectual mentality, though in themselves they do not amount to consciousness." 

He uses the phrase "adversion and aversion" and sometimes "adversion or aversion" repeatedly, with "adversion" apparently meaning attraction and "aversion" meaning repulsion. The two words suggest reaction to lures, positive or negative.  These "high-grade organisms" approach food and they avoid predators. They ignore objects that have no significance for their lives. They have adversions and aversions, and in this there is the germ -- although only the germ -- of full mentality. 

Later -- near the end of the book -- Whitehead comes at the same theme from a different point of view. He writes of the "eternal objects" we have discussed in earlier posts, and he explains why he doesn't just call them "universals." That term, he says, refers to their public pole.  Other terms, such as "quality," refer to their private pole.  This is part of a subject/object duality that Whitehead wants us to transcend. An eternal object, he says, "refers itself publicly, but it is enjoyed privately." It is one fact, with private and public poles, not a public fact that has to be absorbed by a private substance, nor a private fact that has to be extrapolated into the world. 

I gather what he is trying to say is that IF we understand our reality as consisting of processes out of which public and private emerge as poles, then the emergence of mind from pre-conscious life forms will no longer seems to be a defiantly paradoxical development. It can be almost as straightforward as a biological beings aversion to any smell that indicates a predator is in the vicinity.    

I'll have some final words about Whitehead's cosmology next week. 

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