Reinstating the vague to its proper place in our mental life: on Jamesian phenomenology and some issues in contemporary

neuroscience

by Ralph Pred

1. Jamess psychology: precursor to radical empiricism The stream of consciousness and the characters of thought Psychophysical parallelism 2. Jamess radical empiricism 3. Jamess monism of pure experience 4. Jamess methodical inversions 5. Into the pulse: Jamesian phenomenology Of Jamesian and traditional phenomenology, briefly 'Pulse'-based phenomenology Invariants of experience 6. An emotional meeting of Damasio with James and Whitehead 7. Jamesian and organic challenges to Edelmans emergent materialism

by Ralph Pred

Please do not cite or circulate without the author's permission.

The daring, sensitive, and first psychologist of experience, William James, and the holistic, under-appreciated, and foremost philosopher of process and organism, Alfred North Whitehead, have together provided tools, concepts, styles of sensibility and approaches to philosophy, that enable us to make effective conceptual contact with the actual onflow of experience. In Jamess chapter on the stream of consciousness in his The Principles of Psychology (1890), titled "The Stream of Thought," he draws extensively on an essay published in 1884. Writing as a psychologist, he holds to a psychophysical parallelism involving a dualism of mental states and total brain processes, and admits many dualismssubjectobject, knower-known, mind-world and so on. He takes the "only thing which psychology has a right to postulate at the outset . . . the fact of thinking itself" as his starting point and the present Thought as the ultimate fact for psychology (J1 224, 360). Throughout, James uses thought to "designate all states of consciousness merely as such, and apart from their particular quality or cognitive function" (185186). Once embarked, he promptly introduces the characters of thought, which enable him to treat each moment of thought as personal, unique, conjoined with other moments in the personal stream, concept-dependent (intentional), and interested. Concern with the conjoining of moments in the stream will come to anchor his radical empiricism. By applying his radically empirical approach with rigor to what is revealed in the stream of waking life, he arrives at a monism of pure experience, which amounts to a transform of his earlier provisional psychophysical parallelism and that offers resolution of the mindbody problem. At the same time it provides the equivalent of a phenomenological stance, attitude or methoda way to draw close to the lived immediacy of actual experience. Neuroscientists could benefit from radically empirical ventures, which can: foster philosophical coherence; encourage a useful phenomenological sensitivity that may put 1

them in close conceptual contact with the richness of experience; and enlarge their imaginations, even as they enrich the imaginations of radical empiricists. Jamess radical empiricism and psychology, and Whiteheads philosophy of organism, which in significant measure extends Jamess approach, and the organic or 'pulse'-based, phenomenology that derives from their philosophies, together facilitate the achievement of such close contact.
1. Jamess Psychology: Precursor to Radical Empiricism

The stream of consciousness and the characters of thought In the Principles, Jamess immediately addresses the fact of thinking itself by asking how thinking does go. He identifies five important and readily noticed characters in the thought process (J1: 225): 1) Every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness. 2) Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing. 3) Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous. 4) It always appears to deal with objects independent of itself. 5) It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejectschooses from among them, in a wordall the while. 1) When James says that every thought tends to be part of a personal consciousness, he means it in two principal senses. First, each thought is personal in that it is private: it can be directly experienced only by oneself. I cannot experience your thoughts as you do, from your perspective or within your stream, any more than you can experience my thoughts. In this sense our streams of thought, of experience, are disjoined from one 2

anothers. Second, each thought is felt to belong with ones other thoughts, to be part of an onflowing stream of accumulating personal history: "Experience is remolding us every moment, and our mental reaction on every given thing is really a resultant of our experience of the whole world up tqo that date" (J1 234). James, who accepts David Humes denial of the existence of a substantial self,1 does account for the sense of self in experience"that appearance of never-lapsing ownership [of thoughts in waking experience] for which common-sense contends" (J1 339). He finds that the personality and consciousness of self involve "the incessant presence of two elements, an objective person, known by a passing subjective Thought and recognized as continuing in time" (371, 400). James uses the word "me" to refer to the objective person "continuing in time," and "I" to refer to the passing subjective thought, that which in its momentary activity is a vehicle of choice and cognition that appropriates from all that is given to it but cannot appropriate the act of appropriating without terminating it and initiating a new present moment of thinking (341). The objective person or self is thus being modified continually, and in each moment the modifications and associations available are constrained by immediately and recently preceding, and deeply sedimented, moments. Not only is there no separate self or knowing mental substance here, but "all the experiential facts find their place in this description, unencumbered with any hypothesis save that of the existence of passing thoughts or states of mind . . . and psychology need not look beyond" (J1 401). Nonetheless, "the thoughts which psychology studies do continually tend to appear as parts of personal selves," and a mans self has a "sum total of . . . psychic powers," including a memory, habits, dispositions, and a sense of personal identity (227, 291). Memory, dispositions, and habits may all be treated as habits, which, "from the physiological point of view," consist of "pathway[s] of discharge formed in the brain, by which certain incoming currents . . . tend to escape." Habits include not just the bodily bases facilitating motor behaviors, for, in addition to observable behavior patterns, "such 3

functions as the association of ideas, perception, memory, reasoning, the education of the will, etc. etc., can best be understood as results of the formation de novo of just such pathways of discharge" (JB 1). We may then see the Jamesian self or me as a congeries of habits, each of them subject to development and change (J1 105), and each moment in the history of a self then involves an I arising out of a me and subsequently transforming the me, however slightly. I refer to this ongoing process as Jamess I-me dialectic and regard it as a Jamesian structure of experience essential to the continuity of personality and of an individuals actual capabilities. According to James, the I-me process of selfconstructionthe ongoing enabling and constraining structuring of the I by the me and the ongoing modification of the me by the I, of all that one has been by what one now isis one in which the bodily, and the social as well, are principal constituents of the self (292). "The nucleus of the me is always the bodily existence felt to be present at the time (400). We always have some awareness of bodily position, attitude, and condition, and "as we think we feel our bodily selves as the seat of the thinking" (J1 241242) and indeed "the nucleus of all reality" (J2 iv).2 2) Within each personal consciousness thought is always changing. For James, "it is obvious and palpable that our state of mind is never precisely the same. Every thought . . . is, strictly speaking, unique" (J1 233). Consequently, each personal consciousness, thought, is always changing, from moment to moment and, as well shortly see, the thinking constituting the momentary thought is always in transition, changing. 3) Within each personal consciousness thought is sensibly continuous. Yet each moment of experience, while unique, remolds the me as it is appropriated by and flows into its successor. What is at issue here is the transition from thought to thought. At this juncture in his analysis James introduces the stream of consciousness and 4

his well-known notions of substantive and transitive parts. Regarding the rate at which the mental contents in our psychological processes change, James observes,
When the rate is slow we are aware of the object of our thought in a comparatively restful and stable way. When rapid, we are aware of a passage, a relation, a transition from it, or between it and something else. As we take, in fact, a general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness, what strikes us first is this different pace of its parts. Like a birds life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings. The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated without changing; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest. Let us call the resting-places the "substantive parts," and the places of flight the "transitive parts," of the stream of thought. It then appears that the main end of our thinking is at all times the attainment of some other substantive part than the one from which we have just dislodged. And we may say that the main use of the transitive parts is to lead us from one substantive conclusion to another. (J1 243)

I construe transitive parts broadly to begin with the transition beyond the attainment of a substantive part, with the readying for takeoff from a perch. James later named this transition the "co-conscious transition . . . by which one experience passes into another when both belong to the same self" (ERE 47). For James, each substantive part or thought is a single pulse of indecomposable subjective unity, arising from and appropriating all that its predecessors in the stream contain and own (J1 278, 339):
The unity into which the Thoughtas I shall for a time proceed to call, with a capital T, the present mental statebinds the individual past facts with each other and with itself, does

not exist until the Thought is there. (J1 338)

The pulse is thus the formation of the Thoughtthe recognizing of the object, the recalling of the name, the arriving at the decision, for exampleand the mental state qua substantive part or "stable psychic fact" (J1 253) appears in "a single pulse of subjectivity" (278), "one undivided state of consciousness" (276) not properly to be isolated from the transitive parts, fringe, and feelings contributing to its formation, or from subsequent thoughts. So understood, "the present Thought, or section of the Stream of Consciousness [is] the ultimate fact for psychology" (360) and that Stream is a stream of pulses (PU 283284). Late in his life, in a passage characterizing the process of thought-formation within the stream of experience, James asserted:
Either your experience is of no content, of no change, or it is of a perceptible amount of content or change. Your acquaintance with reality grows literally by buds or drops of perception. Intellectually and on reflection you can divide these into components, but as immediately given, they come totally or not at all. (SPP 155)

Plainly, the notion of a bud or drop can be broadened to include any type of thought, and I will use the term 'bud' frequently in that fashion. Now, once having distinguished the substantive and transitive parts, James fleshes out his account with two other features of the continuous flow of experiencethe fringe, which helps illustrate how the embodied self and habitual association come into play in each passing thought, and feelings of tendency and direction, which figure in moments and link moments together in action. Now, think of the transitive parts as standing in for psychological functions that carry us from bud to bud, e.g., from thought to thought, perception to intention, or intention to perceived satisfaction. The feelings of tendency and direction figure in how we experience the transitive parts (J1 253). They are not merely "descriptions from without, 6

but . . . are among the objects of the stream, which is thus aware of them from within" (254). James (250) gives several examples to indicate the reality of these feelings: consider feelings when trying to recall details of an event, when taking a few steps to retrieve an object, or as your words form when speaking. These feelings of tendency are "often so vague that we are unable to name them at all." But they and their correlate transitive parts play so pivotal a role in Jamess enterprise that he views a substantial portion of his task as "the reinstatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life" (J1 254) and lessening the weight given to the clear and distinct: ". . . the definite images of traditional psychology form but the very smallest part of our minds as they actually live" (J1 255). A psychology or empiricism that recognizes feelings of tendency will be considerably broader in scope than one that does not. But if the feelings of tendency correspond to transitive parts, they are also linked to activities in the brain and can constitute an important part of the fringe, a term introduced "to designate the influence of a faint brain-process upon our thought, as it makes it aware of relations and objects but dimly perceived" (258, 264), the influence being experienced in a variety of expectations, intimations, associations, and other subtle feelings. Of the remaining two of Jamess characters of thought the first holds, in effect that 4) thought is intentional or appears to deal with objects independent of itself; that is, it is cognitive, or possesses the function of knowing." (J1 271)
The reason why we all believe that the objects of our thoughts have a duplicate existence outside, is that there are many human thoughts, each with the same objects, as we cannot help supposing. The judgment that my own past thought and my own present thought are of the same object is what makes me take the object out of either and project it by a sort of triangulation into an independent position, from which it may appear to both. Sameness in a multiplicity of objective appearances is thus the basis of our belief in realities outside of thought. (J1 271-272)

This ability to think of the same matters in different portions of the mental stream turns 7

on the development and application of concepts (J1 459461). Concepts can be the same many times over; no momentary state of mind can be. In each act of conception, attention isolates in thought some matter out of the continuum of felt experience, and "hold[s] fast to it, without confusion" (461, 465). As a result, the same matters can figure, as topics of thought or discourse, in different pulses of thought or states of mind, even though each such repeated conception occurs in a unique mental state (480). For James, this ability to form concepts and act with "constancy in our meanings," constitutes "the most important of all the features of our mental structure" (J1 460). Conception is the mark of the mental, and it is practical: the ability to apprehend in accord with concepts enables one to affix "views taken on reality" (SPP 200), to perceive (recognize or interpret sensory stimuli), think (consider possibilities), and take effective action (bring about conceived states of affairs). Concepts thus are tools that function to connect sensation, perception, and action; thinking essentially involves nothing other than the ability to form and use concepts, which inevitably come to be associated and may be aggregated or integrated into a more or less stable cognitive framework that makes it possible to lay hold of the novel, to test in living the adequacy of conception, and to build up, and act in accord with, and modify a "conceptual scheme, . . . a sort of sieve." This scheme can perform a preeminently cognitive function, "But whenever a physical reality is caught and identified as the same with something already conceived, all the predicates and relations of the conception becomes its predicates and relations; it is subjected to the sieves network" (J1 482). If we can recognize something, we have a concept of it, and we can perceptually categorize factors in experience as exemplifying the concept. To perceive something is to recognize it under the aspect of some concept(s) or another. So understood, the formation of a thought involves translating from the perceptual to the conceptual. As James later noted (SPP 101), "concepts are as real as percepts, for we cannot live a moment without taking account of them," although taking account need hardly involve conceptual 8

analysis or verbalization. However, when verbalized or used analytically, "since the relations of concepts are of static comparison only, it is impossible to substitute them for the dynamic relations with which the perceptual flux is filled" (SPP 81). This, touches on Jamess radically empirical notion of raw, unverbalized experience, treated below. While the fourth character holds that thought is intentional (directed at or about objects or states of affairs), has intentional content, the fifth holds that intentional content is colored by interest, valuing. It is interested in some parts of these objects to the exclusion of others, and welcomes or rejectschooses from among them, in a wordall the while. Valuation is at play in every moment of experience. In an act of consciousness, "what-we-attend-to and what-interests-us are synonymous terms" (J2 559). Whether it arise in the course of action, with incoming data largely preselected by expectant attention, or not, each moment of consciousness, "consists in . . . the selection of some [among simultaneous possibilities], and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention" (J1 288). Emphasis, selection and neglect function in sensation, perception, theoretical reasoning, deliberation, and in fact in all conscious activity, so that objects of thought are always dealt with under selected aspects (284287). As attention focuses on an object it always does so "for the sake of some subjective interest, and . . . the conception with which we handle a bit of sensible experience is really nothing but a teleological instrument" (482). Each moment of thought involves conceptual activity and each exercise of conceptual capability, each application of a conceptual scheme, reflective or not, is for the sake of some interest, lifting the object of cognition into sufficient clarity to serve some useful function, the conceiver invariably being a self-modifying creature with purposes and ends (461, 482). The mentation occurring at the heart of the bud, between sensation (stimuli) and action and the aftermath of associative effects, relies on concepts and distinctions that are retained precisely because they can make practical differences. In the moment, one perceives what is relevant to ones intentions, desires, and interests, and in the course of interested 9

activity neural pathways correlate with habits of attention, perception and action are built up or strengthened, modifying the conceptual sieves network marked in the brain and comprising the Jamesian neural net, so that order and the self is always in the making as the I-me dialectic carries forward. Psychophysical parallelism In Principles, James attempts to provide a psycho-physical parallelism, an "unmediated correspondence, term for term, of the succession of states of consciousness with the succession of total brain-processes" (J1 182) and to give the five characters of thought clear physical correlates. Thus, thought is personal in that it is enabled and constrained by each persons Jamesian neural net; novel thoughts are formed with the summing of stimuli along interacting nerve tracts; thought is sensibly continuous in part because no brain state abruptly dies away; and the neural net carries the associations and values that underlie and propagate the value-laden conceptual scheme. In this account, "the whole neural organism . . . is, physiologically considered, but a machine for converting stimuli into reactions; and the intellectual part of our life is knit up with but the middle or central portion of the machines operations" (J2 372). Although James worked hard to relate psychological and neural processes, he regarded the physiology of his day as too superficial to be very helpful in dealing with "the intimate workings of the brain," a subject he relegated to the "physiology of the future," (J1 8182). A century later, Gerald Edelman offered a now-contemporary way to treat the Jamesian characters of thought in neurobiological dress. That said, I offer a few highlights from Jamess psychophysical parallelism, often with an eye to later discussion. Regarding the first character of thought, Weve already seen that the Jamesian self may be regarded psychologically as a sum total of habits and physiologically as a network of pathways in the brain. With each moment in the history of a self ones habits are 10

transformed, however slightly, in an instance of the I-me dialectic. And the neural network is transformed too, in a process facilitated by plasticity.
Plasticity, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once. Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in such a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits. . . . [T]he phenomena of habit in living beings are due to the plasticity of the organic materials [especially nervous tissue] of which their bodies are composed. . . . the whole plasticity of the brain sums itself up . . . when we call it an organ in which currents pouring in from the sense-organs make with extreme facility paths which do not easily disappear. . . . a simple habit [is] nothing but a reflex discharge; and its anatomical substratum must be a path in the system. The most complex habits . . . are from the same point of view, nothing but concatenated discharges in the nerve-centers, due to the presence there of systems of reflex paths, so organized as to wake each other up successively. . . . The entire nervous system is nothing but a system of paths between a sensory terminus a quo and a muscular, glandular, or other terminus ad quem. (J1 105, 107108)

These systems of paths are built up and modified firing-of-nerves by firing-of-nerves, experience by experience: "A path once traversed by a nerve-current [is] . . . made more permeable than before," so that our plastic nervous system grows pathways according to "the modes in which it has been exercised" (108, 112). This "expresses the philosophy of habit in a nutshell" (112) and also is plainly a precursor of "the Hebb rule," to the effect, in popular form, that when nerve cells repeatedly fire together they wire together. James gives a detailed physiological account of habits, ranging from the laying down of the relevant neural pathways to the exercise of habits as the unfolding of activated capabilities in series of sensory-action loops, modulated to momentary circumstances. These loops involve readinesses to recognize and respond, including anticipated ('preprepared') movements, all of which show up in Jamess feelings of tendency and when acted on call up their successors and, so, arise within a coordinated pattern of action. 11

James understands that what looks like the unfolding of habit on the basis of such loops is, from the inside, made up of buds, momentary formations of thoughts that are fringed and that carry feelings of direction. We may regard transitive parts largely as the operation of enacted habits which serve to structure behavior or, to put it more practically, which serve to structure action. As we so act, we experience an actual world in the midst of purposive action rather than a merely physical world given to our senses. Habits develop because they "simplif[y] the movements required to achieve a given result, . . . . economiz[ing] the expense of nervous and muscular energy" and also reduce "the conscious attention with which our acts are performed, . . . bring[ing] it about that each event calls up its own appropriate successor . . . without any reference to the conscious will. . . . Our lower centers know the order of these movements, and show their knowledge by their surprise if the objects are altered so as to oblige the movement to be made in a different way" (J1, 112, 113, 114115). Mental habits and competences are brain-embodied as well as those that are enacted in observable physical activity: ". . . the machinery of association, as we know, is nothing but the elementary law of habit in the nerve-centers. And this same law of habit is the machinery of retention also . . . [or] liability to recall." (J1 654) Likewise, in perception, "part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the object before us," and another possibly larger part "out of our own head" or alternatively from "the brain [which] reacts by paths which previous experiences have worn" (J2 103), for objects previously attended to remain in memory (J1 427). Experienced objects may thus later figure in "pre-perception" or expectant attention affecting future perception (439). James, as a dualistic psychologist, gives the second character of thought a physiological face too. The I-me dialectic is written in the brain: "whilst we think, our brain changes" (J1 234) and every change "undergone by the brain leaves in it a modification which is one factor in determining what manner of experiences the following ones shall be" (499). 12

For James, "the whole internal equilibrium [of the brain] shifts with every pulse of change." Outside objects certainly influence each particular shifting, but so does "the very special susceptibility in which the organ has been left at that moment by all it has gone through in the past. Every brain-state is partly determined by the nature of this entire past succession. . . . It is out of the question, then, that any total brain-state should identically recur" (234). The richness of the experiential field and the uniqueness of each moment is reflected in physiology. The unceasing change in the world affecting our senses, the correspondence of every sensation to some cerebral action, the changing of brain state and of the "whole internal equilibrium" of the brain while we think and with every pulse of change, and the physiological effects of all changes in the brain, even the "summation of apparently ineffective stimuli" suggesting that "none are bare of psychological result" (J1 232235), all serve to ensure that thinking involves change and each formed thought or state of mind and each corresponding brain state is different from what went before (499). The continuity of the stream of consciousness corresponds to the waxing and waning of nerve tracts. These too are continuous: no brain process or state perishes instantly; each momentary internal equilibrium, which shifts with every pulse of change, has its own inertia and carries on to influence its successors (242). The formation of a bud or pulse of experience is also reflected in physiology. As the brain changes continuously and states of consciousness melt into their successors in an unbroken stream, the law of "the summation of stimuli in the same nerve-tract" hold sway (J1 248, 82). This law, which underpins Jamess mind-body or "psycho-neural" (J2 164) parallelism, saves place for the vague as outwardly ineffective excitations.
. . . a stimulus which would be inadequate by itself to excite a nerve-center to effective discharge may, by acting with one or more other stimuli (equally ineffectual by themselves alone), bring the discharge about. The natural way to consider this is as a

13

summation of tensions which at last overcome a resistance. The first of them produce a "latent excitement" or a "heightened irritability" . . . ; the last is the straw which breaks the camels back. Where the neural process is one that has consciousness for its accompaniment, the final explosion would in all cases seem to involve a vivid state of feeling of a more or less substantive kind. But there is no ground for supposing that the tensions while yet submaximal or outwardly ineffective, may not also have a share in determining the total consciousness present in the individual at the time. In later chapters we shall see abundant reason to suppose that they do have such a share, and that without their contribution the fringe of relations which is at every moment a vital ingredient of the minds object, would not come to consciousness at all. (J1 82)

The "final explosion" is the formation of a pulse, a unique relatively vivid substantive feeling or thought, say a recognition of an object or a decision to act. The explosive resultants of summations are experienced, in conscious mental states, as fringed substantive parts. The processes of "summing" may be viewed as, in effect, the brain processes corresponding to the transitive parts, which are experienced in feelings of tendency, and which are "flights" to the fringed substantive parts. A Jamesian may even say that the flow of attention in the course of activity can be understood in terms of substantive and transitive parts and parallels the canalization of flows in an associative web of paths of arousal and recall (J1 460). Attention then is the concentration of concern on some few things out of the wealth of incoming data, typically so as to deal with them effectively, said concentration involving characteristic "accommodation or adjustment of the sensory organs," readinesses to respond, "anticipatory preparation from within of the ideational centers concerned with the object to which the attention is paid" (434, 439). Attention thus isolates an object of paramount interest at the time (139), an isolation that produces and is marked by a grade of clarity adequate to the occasion, and leads to the formation of a memorable substantive part (marking the formation of the passing thought or I) and corresponding changes in associative neural pathways and the conceptual sieve.
2. Jamess Radical Empiricism

14

James articulated his philosophy of radical empiricism twenty years after he first wrote of the stream of consciousness, defining the enterprise as follows:
To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its constructions any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced. For such a philosophy, the relations that connect experiences must themselves be [and are] experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as real as anything else in the system. Elements may indeed be redistributed, the original placing of things getting corrected, but a real place must be found for every kind of thing experienced, whether term or relation, in the final philosophic arrangement. (ERE 42)

In 1884, he announced (1884 2) his intention to show what immense tracts of our inner life are habitually overlooked and falsified by psychologists. In 1890, beginning his study of the mind from within, he cautioned against abandoning the empirical method of investigation (J1: 224) even as he hammered on traditional empiricists for holding such ridiculous notions, as that, whilst simple objective qualities are revealed to our knowledge in subjective feelings, relations are not (255). James already intended to honor the relations conjoining moments of experience and making for the streaming continuities of experience, and to give overlooked tracts of our inner life their due. His account of the stream of consciousness was au fond radically empirical and his radical empiricism is an outgrowth of his concern with the stream. As radical empiricist, James calls the experienced relations that connect experiences conjunctive relations.
The conjunctive relation that has given most trouble to philosophy is the co-conscious transition, so to call it, by which one experience passes into another when both belong to the same self.... Personal histories are processes of change in time, and the change itself is one of the things immediately experienced. 'Change' in this case mean continuous transition as opposed to discontinuous transition. But continuous transition is one sort of a

15

conjunctive relation; and to be a radical empiricist means to hold fast to this conjunctive relation of all others.... The holding fast to this relation means taking it at its face value... just as we feel it, and not to confuse ourselves with abstract talk about it . (ERE 47-48)

So far as James is concerned, the co-conscious transition is so troublesome because the traditional empiricists self-observational stance results in the focusing on substantive parts and the neglect of the transitive parts including co-conscious transitions. The substantive parts are described using concepts, which enable us to isolate and hold fast in thought factors occurring in the continuum of felt experience, the perceptual flux. But the transitive parts, which are so hard to hold fast and observe (J1 244), escape notice and description and slip through the conceptual sieve, and as they are neglected so are causal relations between what Hume, like other traditional empiricists, took to be disconnected "perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity" (252253). That is,
Conceptual treatment of perceptual reality makes it seem paradoxical and

incomprehensible; and when radically and consistently carried out, it leads to the opinion that perceptual experience is not reality at all, but an appearance or illusion. Briefly, this is a consequence of two facts: First, that when we substitute concepts for percepts, we substitute their relations also. But since the relations of concepts are of static comparison only, it is impossible to substitute them for the dynamic relations with which the perceptual flux is filled. Secondly, the conceptual scheme, consisting as it does of discontinuous terms, can only cover the perceptual flux in spots and incompletely. The one is no full measure of the other, essential features of the flux escaping whenever we put concepts in its place. (SPP 8081)

One hallmark then of radical empiricism is not to exclude from our philosophical analyses any element that is directly experienced, to consult raw, unverbalized (which is not to say uninfluenced by language) experience before accepting any such analysis. This despite our being so subject to the philosophic tradition which treats discursive thought generally as the sole avenue to truth, that to fall back on raw unverbalized life as 16

more of a revealer, and to think of concepts as the merely practical things which Bergson calls them, comes very hard (PU 272-3). To make plain the inadequacies of those conceptual accounts which do not recognize real connections between discrete experiences, the smooth passing of one moment into the next in an ongoing present, and what he earlier termed feelings of direction, James turns to general examples of activity, each necessarily being lived through for him in the generic "dramatic shape of something sustaining a felt purpose against felt obstacles, and overcoming or being overcome" (SPP 212). It is with those "personal activity-situations," which are "continuously developing experiential series" (SPP 210, 211), that James rendered the habitual experiential, and made the co-conscious transition almost palpable, while perhaps over-dramatizing the causal nature of these situations, even though they certainly involve intentional causation, the feeling of something making something happen.3 Co-conscious transition affords the continuity in these experiential series, and to appreciate this form of transition is to achieve further contact with the stream. For James, activity-situations thus provide a radically empirical benchmark for co-conscious transition, and he wraps up his analysis thusly:
Our outcome so far seems therefore to be only this, that the attempt to treat "cause," for conceptual purposes, as a separable link, has failed historically, and has led to the denial of efficient causation, and to the substitution for it of the bare descriptive notion of uniform sequence among events. Thus intellectualist philosophy once more has had to butcher our perceptual life in order to make it "comprehensible." Meanwhile the concrete perceptual flux, taken just as it comes, offers in our own activity-situations perfectly comprehensible instances of causal agency. The transitive causation in them does not, it is true, stick out as a separate piece of fact for conception to fix on. Rather does a whole subsequent field grow continuously out of a whole antecedent field because it seems to yield new being of the nature called for, while the feeling of causality-at-work flavors the entire concrete sequence. (SPP 217-8). 3. Jamess Monism of Pure Experience

17

Jamess radical empiricism affords a way of going from psychology to experience, from conceptual description to perceptual flux and life as lived through. When he gets there he has already become a monist of pure experience, as if his psychophysical parallelism helped him bootstrap down there, revealing that states of consciousness and brainprocesses are moments of non-dual experience taken twice over. As a philosopher, James did not accept the dualisms he abided as a psychologist. Pure experiencethe unmediated flux of life, whose salient or interesting parts are often held fast, identified, named, and associated in conceptual categoriesis more primitive than the dualisms of mind and matter, knower and known, subject and object, thing and thought (ERE 14, 2325, 9394). Those dualisms arise when particular experiences (thoughts) are considered, in retrospect, with focus on the substantive part, in the form of verbalized propositional content and typically separately from the transitive parts, feelings of direction and the fringe. By contrast James, as philosopher of pure experience, as radical empiricist, attempted to get back to raw unverbalized life, virtually conceivable and classifiable as objective and subjective (7475), but not directly so conceived and classified. Raw experience is too rich with sensory content, association, and feeling for any amount of verbalization or conceptualization to fully describe or express, in which one experience passes into another belonging to the same personal consciousness, forming a stream of pure experience, in which each experience, each field of the present, is a place of intersection of processesincluding processes arising in ones personal history and processes arising elsewhere (12 ff.), "knit by different transitions" (80). In The Place of Affectional Facts in a World of Pure Experience (ERE 137-155) James aimed to show what he means by his principal tenet of monism of pure experience: "There is no thought-stuff different from thing-stuff . . . ; but the same identical piece of pure experience (which was the name I gave to the materia prima of everything) can stand alternately for a fact of consciousness or for a physical reality, according as it is 18

taken in one context or another" (ERE 137138; cf. 12). James then specifies that the commonest objection which his monism runs up against is drawn from the existence of our affections. The objectors regard affections as purely mental and unextended but James argues they afford his monism powerful support (138). Let's see how. In one of his influential essays on the emotions, published in 1884 right after his essay concerning the stream of consciousness, James offered this characterization of emotions, reiterated in his Principles (J2 449):
Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions [including surprise, fear, anger, lust, greed, and the like] is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion. (JCE 247)

For those unfamiliar with the tenability of Jamess thesis here, I cite this tempered but affirming assertion from Antonio Damasio:
The mechanisms I have outlined to enact emotion and produce a substrate for feelings are compatible with William James's original formulation on this theme but include many features absent in James's text, namely that James relied on representations arising in the viscera to the exclusion of concern with the sourcing of feelings in the skeletal muscles and internal milieu. None of the features I have added undermines or violates the basic idea that feelings are largely a reflection of body-state changes, which is William James's seminal contribution to the subject. (FWH 288)

Returning to James, first notice that for him to claim here that bodily changes and emotion are identical, and shortly after (JCE 255) that emotion dissociated from all bodily feeling is inconceivable, is later to offer support for Jamess monism of pure experience, in which affections of the mind to a great extent at any rate, are 19

affections of the body (ERE 142). To a great extent possibly because on some occasions, a peripheral feeling of affection of the body may afford, by co-conscious transition, conjunctive relation to the ensuing bud in which emotional feeling flowers centrally. In either event, pulses of affectional experience are unitary yet they may be taken twice over, conceptually, in one context as a state of mind and in another by treating the bodily feelings as objective, the body as an object (ERE 18). For James (cf. ML 226), the duality is not immediate, rather the immediate is non-dual. By our natural way of thinking about emotions James refers to the view that the emotional sequence proceeds from stimulating event to mental affection or emotion, and thence to bodily expression; this leaves room for and presumes an agent acting on the basis of a felt emotion. James holds that the sequence runs from event to bodily changes which are felt as they occur and that that feeling is the emotion. James thus inverts the natural sequence: perception of the stimulating fact issues in bodily changes rather than issuing directly into an emotion which issues in bodily changes. It is as if he subjected his monistic thesis to a radically empirical testmade contact with, consulted, the unverbalized embodied experience, rather than standing off from it, and in description succumbing to prevailing habits of thought. I will discuss these and other aspects of Jamess theory of the emotions below, in relation to Damasios own treatment of the emotions, but with this inversion fresh in mind, I press on to discuss other inversions of Jamess and to indicate how symptomatic they are of his philosophy and his way of doing philosophy.
4. Jamess Methodical Inversions

Notice too that by inverting the sequence James is also inverting our natural way of thinking, where that natural way may be likened to the natural attitude with which we typically live life through and unreflectingly engage in everyday activity and coping. To invert that attitude is kin to another of Jamess inversionary moves published in early 1884, that of redressing emphasis on substantive partshere, affected states of mindby 20

acknowledging the reality and functioning of transitive partshere the feelings of bodily changes (e.g., in breathing, heartbeat) which give rise to, or are, emotions. In mentioning the natural attitude, which may bring Edmund Husserl and capital P Phenomenology to mind, I am taking these Jamesian inversions to point to a Jamesian phenomenological method that can help increase awareness of co-conscious transitions, conjunctive relations, transitive parts, feelings of direction, and so on, in part by overturning habits of thought that militate against any such recognition, and so can help bring us closer conceptually to the stream of consciousness and life as it is lived. Let us quickly review some other principal Jamesian inversions. Subject-formation: from subject as thinking thoughts to thinker as thought For James,

each instance of thinking culminates in the formation of thought and thinker: "The unity into which the Thought . . . binds the individual past facts with each other and with itself, does not exist until the Thought is there," and "that thought is itself the thinker" (J1 338, 401). James attends to the actual composition of the thought under review rather than sticking to the clear images and verbal formulations representing "the halting-places, the substantive conclusions, provisional or final, of the thought" (269). He avoids being misguided by the misleading clarities of language (194 ff.) and regards the object of each thought or bud of perception as "neither more nor less than all that the thought thinks, exactly as the thought thinks it, however complicated the matter, and however symbolic the manner of the thinking may be" (276). But that thought is constituted in "a single pulse of subjectivity" (278), the novel formation of the substantive part and the thinker of the thought, the I, the subject. Each momentary thinker arises through the activity of its meexisting capabilities and associations, which themselves import value and operate in the processing of stimuli and the preparation of response. Here we make contact with the two core dynamic structures of experience: the process of subject-formation and the ongoing I-me dialectic of experience as personal history accumulates.

21

If we come to see what subject-formation involves, and what "subject raising" (understood as pivotal to the formation of a subject-predicate or subject-verb-object sentence) leaves out, we may resist crucial impacts of submission to language-supported habits. We all go through subject-formation as our subjective moments are taking form, but this is beneath the mention of our language. In fact, subject-formation is obscured by subject-verb-object expression (e.g. "I see a boat entering the harbor"), which often expresses the propositional content of the substantive part, grammatically abstracted from its formation, and in which expression the subject (say, the I) is raised out of the flux, as if the subject created the perception. So any radically empirical attempt to indicate subject-formation remains not just incomprehensible but ever inaccessible to one maintaining a detached, self-observational, transition-masking, and ultimately languageconstrained, stance. It seems to me that a phenomenology should be able to enter or engage with the process of subject-formation. The notion of momentary process as subject-formation is the most revolutionary aspect of Jamess and Whiteheads thought. It requires thinking without unquestioning reliance on habits of thought fostered by our active-voice-dominated grammar and its ally, the subject-predicate form of expression.4 It requires thinking outside the long-reigning syntax. Whitehead, extending James, has given us the tools for getting outside of or beneath the subject-predicate form of expression to arrive at an understanding of subjectformation that enables us to become sensitive to the process and be attentive within it. The I of the subject-superject (a functional counterpart in Whitehead of Jamess coconscious transition) is not an agentive I that builds mental scenes out of discrete sensations and associations and sees each concrescence through to its end:
We do not initiate thought by an effort of self-consciousness. We find ourselves thinking, just as we find ourselves breathing and enjoying the sunset. (AI 47; cf. ERE 37)

In this sense, insofar as it encourages belief in a homuncular, agentive I, subject22

predicate-based discourse is thoroughly misleading. In addition, it abstracts from relation (of, say, knower and known); in Jamess words,
We are so befogged by the suggestions of speech that we think a constant thing, known under a constant name, ought to be known by means of a constant mental affection. The ancient languages, with their elaborate declensions, are better guides. In them no substantive appears "pure," but varies its inflection to suit the way it is known. (1884: 11; cf. SMW 24)

And Whitehead believed, as he said in the course of a general criticism of Humean atomism, that
If you once conceive fundamental fact as a multiplicity of subjects qualified by predicates, you must fail to give a coherent account of experience. The disjunction of subjects is the presupposition from which you start, and you can only account for conjunctive relations by some fallacious sleight of hand, such as Leibnizs metaphor of his monads engaging in mirroring. The alternative philosophic position must commence with denouncing the whole idea of "subject qualified by predicate" as a trap set for philosophers by the syntax of language. (R 1314)

From derivative clarity toward the actualities of experience The heart of the move from intentionality-based analyses of experience to more process-sensitive ones, is the shift from treating the relatively clear, distinct, and isolated intentional contents of substantive parts as the object of analyses to treating (typically nonverbal) contents had interior to experience as they take shape and function in pulses and in streams of thought. It is integral to Jamess move or inversion from the static relations of concepts toward the dynamic perceptual flux and raw, unverbalized experience. Traditional empiricism doesnt admit that "the conscious recognition of impressions of sensation is the work of sophisticated elaboration" (PR 315) or as James saw, that "what 23

we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree" (J1 224). Intentionality-based analyses of conscious experiences often encourage the same error, by neglecting the process of thought-formation, and concentrating on late, clarified, elements. As Whitehead put it, "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" (PR 162). What James and Whitehead are both out to accomplish is to correct the inversion of the true constitution of experience (PR 173), whether it be in the analysis of causation, perception, or thinking.5 The task for Whitehead and for experiential analysis then is to grasp the nature of the basic facts of experience and to see the importance of the early stages of pulse-formation, and thereby to reinstate the vagueincluding the unclear and indistinctto its proper place in philosophy. The contrast with the Western philosophical tradition is stark:
When Descartes, Locke, and Hume undertake the analysis of experience, they utilize those elements in their own experience which lie clear and distinct, fit for the exactitude of intellectual discourse. It is tacitly assumed, except by Plato, that the more fundamental factors will ever lend themselves for discrimination with peculiar clarity. (AI 175)

The process of thought-formation may indeed introduce clarity and distinctness, but
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 proper analysis of an experient occasion. In fact, most of the difficulties of philosophy are produced by it. Experience has been explained in a thoroughly topsy-turvy [read inverted] fashion, the wrong end first. In particular, emotional and purposeful experience have been made to follow upon impressions of sensation. (PR 162)

James early recognized that ". . . the definite images of traditional psychology form but the very smallest part of our minds as they actually live" (J1 255), and like Whitehead, 24

devoted much analytic effort to restoring the vague to its proper place in our mental life" (254).
5. Into the pulse: Jamesian Phenomenology

I use the term phenomenological to refer to the lived immediacy of actual experience, as well as to talk about that immediacy. Conjointly, Ill here use phenomenology to refer to that lived immediacy (the phenomenology of living) and to descriptions and analyses of it. Let me quickly propose some conditions of adequacy and additional desiderata for attempts at phenomenology. Among the former, I here include these four: 1. An acceptable phenomenology must meet the radically empirical tests of not admitting into its accounts or constructions any element that is not directly experienced and not excluding from them any element that is directly experienced. 2. The relations that connect experiences must themselves be treated as experienced relations, and any kind of relation experienced must be accounted as real as anything else in the system. Specifically, an adequate phenomenology must recognize coconscious transition and conjunctive relation and elucidate the nature of these phenomena. 3. A phenomenology must provide a method for appreciating or gaining access to the types of experience it alleges to be real, lived through, phenomenological. A Jamesian phenomenological method affords ways to make gentle contact with the easily disrupted and elusive stream of experience by showing how to attend to co-conscious transition in the living through of concrete personal activity-situations, how to invert misleading, 'natural' ways of looking at experience, and by offering routes into the bud of experience. 4. A phenomenology must be able to give a rich account of the formation of any experience, so much so that it can plausibly come at consciousness from inside the 25

momentits process of formationand 'inside' the stream and surround. The explanatory philosophy associated with a phenomenology should be attractive and rely on or stem from or arise interdependently with a coherent metaphysics. Among my explicit desiderata, I here also include four, omitting others concerning, e.g., the facilitation of self-analysis, and the fostering of authenticity and empathy. 1. A phenomenological philosophy ought to be able to situate and appreciate the worth of other phenomenological approaches, while remaining open to criticism as to linguistic, cultural or other biases imported with its own presuppositions. 2. It should address the possibility of differences in phenomenology from culture to culture, and in treating the living through of raw, unverbalized experience (where unverbalized does not mean uninfluenced by language, and where raw suggests uncooked, not processed conceptually or reflected on), it ought to be able to indicate how language may contribute to the structuring of experience. 3. It should be neurobiologically plausible in the sense that a very tight fit may be achieved between its accounts and neurobiological accounts of how experience arises. 4. Its philosophical analysis of lived experience should be so sensitive to matters biological that it is able to put neuroscientists in vivid conceptual contact with the stream of experience and enlarge the imagination they can bring to bear on topics of interest to them. Of Jamesian and traditional phenomenology, briefly By my lights Jamess psychological and radically empirical accounts of the stream of experience, especially as extended by Whitehead, satisfy these conditions of adequacy 26

and desiderata.

While the phenomenological (what we live through) is what it is, how we frame, conceive and attend to it may differ with chosen descriptive vantage. Traditional Phenomenology, associated with early work of Husserl, practices a phenomenological reduction that steps back from or suspends the natural attitude concerning the reality of things in the world en route to studying how things in the world are experienced. This practice often seems to me to be diametrically opposed to Jamess, which consults and articulates what he (J1 305) terms "direct awareness of the process of our thinking as such in the course of living. I am not sure that Husserl, from his phenomenological standpoint, can make contact with co-conscious transition or conjunctive relationprecisely where a Jamesian phenomenology must getor with causal efficacy. Here I remember with Whitehead that clearness in consciousness is no evidence for primitiveness in the genetic process (PR 173) and note that for Whitehead perception of causal efficacy is the direct feeling or prehension of the surround, including "the animal body [which] is only the more highly organized and immediate part of the general environment for its dominant actual occasion, which is the ultimate percipient" (PR 119). By contrast, Husserl seems more concerned with the content of perception, not with its formation and functioning in embodied, onflowing experience. Recall too that for James, the concrete perceptual flux, taken just as it comes, offers in our own activity-situations perfectly comprehensible instances of causal agency [read causal efficacy]. The transitive causation in them does not, it is true, stick out as a separate piece of fact for conception to fix on (SPP 218), and because it does not stick out the phenomenological reduction seems to reduce it away. If we take Husserl to be working on the intentionality of consciousness, and in effect to be focusing on intentional content, than John Searles inclusion of intentional causation the feeling of something making something happenin the intentional content of 27

perceptions, intentions, memories of events, among other intentional states, supplies a telling remedy or criticism. On the other hand, although Searle says (195) that "intentionality occurs in a coordinated flow of action and perception, he offers no detailed analysis of the flow: his analysis includes no transitive parts, no anticipation, no co-conscious transition, nor does his perceptual experience explicitly involve focusing, bodily feeling, or recognition. A process-sensitive analysis can include these factors in the intentional contents functioning in the flow of action and perception, enlarging the range of much intentionalistic analysis. As for Husserls account of the flow, his analysis of the retentional-impressional-protentional structure of temporal experience appears sound but too detached, disembodied, and removed from the concrete working of valuational factors to get at the onflowing transitivity of lived experience. In defining Jamesian phenomenology we have recourse to that transitivity central to the third character of thought, but the other characters plainly have a role in leading us into the moment. Starting from intentional content, and attentive to the play of interest in its selection, we can deal with the background habits in play, shaping momentary experience, as well with relevant social constituents of the self (J1 293 ff.) and with our bodily selves which "as we think we feel as the seat of the thinking" (242) and indeed as "the nucleus of all reality" (J2 iv). Radical empiricists can do this recognizing all the while that their descriptions are of a different nature than the actual experiences and that one can seek to draw yet closer. Thus, understanding that in activity-situations the activated or appropriated background is active, guiding action and perception, as it structures, and serves as the organizing center of, experience, we can try to recapture embodied experience in the world had from that world-contouring, 'habit'-enacting, aimserving 'perspective.' Such experience is had not against a background of presuppositions and habits grounded in prior experience, but from an activated background. 'Pulse'-based phenomenology

28

James opened the study of the stream of consciousness and of the pulses constituting individual streams of experience, using notions of transitive parts, feelings of direction, the fringe, co-conscious transition, the characters of thought, and the bud or pulse as involving formation of thought and thinker. Jamess work thus enables one to approach the stream with sensitivity to what habits and dispositions are in play in particular moments of experience, to social setting and role, the transitions toward substantive parts, to those parts with their fringes, to the shifts of attention and the interests carrying attention along, to the intentional content of the substantive parts, to the pulse as a unit of experience, to co-conscious transitions, and so on. Whiteheads philosophy of organism deals fully and systematically with the internal constitution of buds or concrescences (derived from a Latin verb meaning "growing together"). His analysis gives us a further basis for appreciating and feeling our way into what happens in moments of experience, refining our understanding of perception, of thought-formation, and of transition from moment to moment. Concrescence- or pulse-based analysis and its adjunct methodology, concrescual (pulse-based) phenomenology, bring us into the bud whose real internal constitution comprises an act of experience. Following Whitehead, we can enter the moment conceptually, treating it as an act of experience issuing from and into other experiences, an act occurring within the constraints of inheritance from all that is encompassed in ones past and within the onflow of concrescences. In fact, having extended philosophical analysis into the experiential bud, Whitehead gives us the wherewithal to characterize momentary consciousness as it arises from pre-conscious phases of synthesis and thereby to situate the stream of consciousness within the stream of embodied, socially conditioned experience, and within broader onflows. That is, thinking concrescually, we can see that intentional content is abstracted from its formation in the process of concrescence, and can also see the experiential counterpart of intentional content as it arises in that very process. Finally, notice that the phenomenological reduction seems to remain within a natural cultural attitude that is affected by deep cultural presuppositions, in which James and 29

Whitehead, the latter more fully, think syntax plays a vital role. The concrescence-based approach is flexible enough to apply, or more modestly, to attempt to apply to the lived experience of inhabitants of other cultures than ours. For very bare example, acts of perception are acts of selection and abstraction, involving movements of attention, focusings: in some cultures visual directedness may naturally move, rove, more freely and in more tactile fashion, regularly stopping short of Western fixity, but encompassing in the moment more than concern with a single object permits.6 Likewise, we may conjure variations in action: the feeling of self-determination may fall short of volition yet may include elements of responsibility, related to shame perhaps, or may include feelings of self-origination without any of individuality, and the scope of intention may be less focused than that based on means-ends thinking; or apparent action may flow from imitation or from the power of a tradition given over to, or from inspiration, or it may resemble a Taoist form of 'acting without acting' or a form of acting out of readiness to respond, say while hunting, when the circumstances dictate (and the disposition to act is primed per traditional practice). As Ortega y Gasset said of the hunter, he needs to prepare an attention [an alertness,] which consists precisely in not presuming anything and in avoiding inattentiveness (150). With this perforce hasty review of parameters perceptual, agentive, relational, I merely point to cultural differences that are differences in phenomenology, in a culture's shared or collective phenomenology, that is, in how the immediacy of experience is constituted in the lives of a culture's members. A shared or collective phenomenology is a component of a collective intentionality, the taken-for-granted background which enables people to engage in cooperative, mutually coordinated activity on the basis of shared understandings and practices. A collective phenomenology is crucial to such coordination, and the related experiential differences are efficacious in, and reflect and sustain, differences in ways of life. For me, of principal concern here among human practices is language. Not only does our language sustain and reflect cultural characteristics but its deepest presuppositions are anchored in and carry forth a syntactic 30

stance or a cultures natural syntactic attitude, a complex of syntax-related dispositions affecting not only what feels right to speakers syntactically, but more deeply influencing perception, action, and concrescence. I suspect that when Husserl 'bracketed' the natural attitude he brought along his grammatical dispositions. By contrast, Whitehead regarded the idea of subject qualified by predicate as a trap set for philosophers by the syntax of language. In his central work, Process and Reality, Whitehead repudiates the influence of the subject-predicate form of expression on philosophy. But the trap such language sets is laid for all speakers of a given language. The syntax of a language anchors a web of abstractions, and urges on its speakers characteristic ways of segmenting experience and speech, and ways of functioning within their given surrounds. Here I cite the linguistic relativist, Benjamin Whorf (240; see also Gentner): the segmentation of nature is an aspect of grammar.... We cut up and organize the spread and flow of events as we do, largely because through our mother tongue, we are parties to an agreement to do so, not because nature is segmented in exactly that way for all to see. Languages differ not only in how they build their sentences but also in how they break down nature to secure the elements to put in those sentences. In this brief treatment, I have pointed to the overwhelming, yet unconscious, background power of syntax, to indicate that language not only facilitates the build-up of social and cultural backgrounds, but contributes significantly to the collective phenomenology of a cultures members, affecting perception, sense of agency, and feelings of relation. Of course, experience can affect language too: the experience of changes in technologies, communication technologies, and lifeways, can change language as well as phenomenology, as happened with the development of alphabetic writing which supported a new intentional capability, a power of mental representation, namely the ability to hold something steadily in mind, stably enough to think about itthe ability to experience and apprehend substantive partsassociated with what Bruno Snell called the 31

discovery of the mind (see, e.g., O section 7.4; SCM 289). Invariants of experience James and Whitehead have shown how each moment of experience arises in accord with a very few requirements, roughly the constraints or conditions governing all possible moments of experience. I refer to these conditions as invariants of experience. No matter who the experiencing person, what the way of life, the mother tongue, the technological milieu, the social context, the cultural overlay and inheritancenever mind the endless unique particularities of the moment in a stream of experience and in the living ecology and onflowing surroundthese requirements are fulfilled and exemplified, moment after moment, throughout anyones life. They are categoreal obligations of living. Yes, people of whatever age, gender, body type, of whatever genetic heritage in whatever culture, engaged in whatever undertaking, in whatever mood, perpetrating whatever apparently heinous or glorious, mundane or ecstatic deed or practice, are each undergoing or living life in accord with the invariants of experience, principles governing all moments of experience and constituting a framework for any collective phenomenology. These laws of experience, include such principles as these, formulated by combining elements from James and Whitehead: 1. The discreteness of momentary experience: experience comes moment by moment, as perceptions and thoughts take shape, growing literally by buds, drops, or pulses. 2. The continuity in the stream of ones momentary experiences: moments arise from their pasts and issue into their futures all in ones stream of experience. 3. The moment of experience as an integrative act: moments are processes in which many feelingsperceptual, emotional, conceptualbecome integrated or synthesized. 4. The functioning of valuation in the moment: valuing or bias or caring or concern some form of interestis to some degree a factor in every moment. This valuative aspect 32

guides and takes definite shape in the moment and constitutes the momentary aim. (This is treated further in the next section.) 5. The conditioning by ones past of ones possibilities in the moment: the possibilities open in specific moments are conditioned by the experients evolutionary and genetic inheritance, by her or his past experience, accumulated habits and dispositions, and by what has gone immediately before in the experients stream of experience and in the relevant surround, the experients actual world, including momentarily retained or shortterm memory. 6. The conformity in the moment to received purposes, emotions, feelings: as a moment passes into its future, the relevance of that moment to its successors typically varies with the final intensity (properly understood) of the momentary aim and so with the integration or synthesis arrived at in that now-passing momentary experience. 7. Freedom or indeterminacy in the moment: the outcome of a momentary integration is not wholly determined by what was functioning at the moments inception. Language affects experience, yet each moment of experience exemplifies these experiential invariants, and as language affects experience it does not and cannot force experience to violate any of those invariants. In effect, they afford a syntax or grammar of the moment that can give us access to the most concrete elements and actualities of experience. As we start to grasp how the laws of experience function, and come to feel into their functioning in any and every moment, we can appreciate the extent to which, and how, our language-dominated biases affect how we are governed by those invariants in our waking moments. We can grasp, live into, and analyze the working of our language in our experience, and to a lesser extent imagine, grasp, and live into the workings of alternative languages, syntaxes. With this, the notion of common humanity, not to say of common creatural experience, may begin to gain deep traction. Finally, if all experience is to be understood as comprised of moments in a stream, then a correlate philosophy of society will understand all social phenomena, including emergent 33

new phenomena, in terms of concrescences experienced by society members. Via its affiliation with philosophy of organism, an organic philosophy of society is obliged to treat coming into a society, the formation and propagation of social institutions, and processes of social change, including breakdown, concrescually. In short, a concrescencebased philosophy of society should be able to show how different collective phenomenologies may arise. That is another matter; for now, what about neuroscience and pulse-based or concrescual phenomenology?
6. An emotional meeting of Damasio with James and Whitehead

In recent work, while remaining deeply respectful of James, both Edelman and Damasio have offered new critical responses to James. I consider Damasio first, because I find many of Damasios discussions in SCM more related to phenomenological concerns on the table today. In Jamess article on affectional facts, James argues (ERE 150) that such appreciative attributes as dangerousness, beauty, utility, etc., primarily appeal to our attention. In our commerce with nature these attributes are what give emphasis to objects; and for an object to be emphatic means also that it produces immediate bodily effects upon us, alterations of tone and tension, of heart-beat and breathing, of vascular and visceral action. As Damasio has it (LS 55), most objects that surround our brains become capable of triggering some form of emotion or another, weak or strong, good or bad, and can do so consciously or unconsciously. He calls such objects emotionally competent stimuli, and for such stimuli we have dispositions to respond emotionally; these dispositions would be among the psychic powers comprising the Jamesian self. For James the psychologist all objects arouse primary, affective, reactions: "It is as if all that visited the mind had to stand an entrance-examination and just show its face so as to be either approved or sent back. These primary reactions are . . . turnings-towards and turnings-from" (J1 302). Likewise, Whitehead talks of "the primitive functioning of 34

retreat from and expansion towards [as] . . . reactions to the way externality is impressing on us its own character" (S 75). For Whitehead, The basis of experience is emotional and every physical feeling or prehension is valuated up (strengthening its claim on attention) or downward, and in this sense the basic fact of experience is the rise of an affective tone originating from things whose relevance is given, (AI 176) primarily by the concrescence-guiding indeterminate aim arising with transition from the previous bud.7 An affective tone or, equally, subjective form, of a feeling is how the feeling is feltat its simplest whether it is valuated up or down. As the contents of feelings are progressively integrated into a final datum, the subjective forms of the feelings become synthesized into a complex unity of feeling. In each concrescence, the subjective forms become adapted with mutual sensitivity to each other under the coordinating guidance of the subjective aim, which is likewise becoming determinate as it conditions feelings being integrated in the concrescence. Thus, throughout the process, the subjective aim, like a desire, urge, or prompting with indefinite goal (e.g., to quench thirst), shapes and takes shape as it calls elements of past experience and contextual details into relevance and leads to a coherent aim (e.g., get water at nearby sink) that affects consequent action. In the immediate present, by a form of co-conscious transition, we prehend the outcome of our antecedent experiential functioning(s), including the surround as it is ordered in projective appearance, and our state of mind typically reflects a dominant subjective aim as it operates in a habitual sequence in play in an intention-induced activity-situation. In short, and to keep things simpler than a pulse-based phenomenology has to keep them, we can say that at their outset, pulses have aims, whether intentional or dispositional, roused by a homeostatic imbalance or an emotionally competent stimulus felt on the fringe of the prior pulse: valuation functions in every pulse (law 4, above; SCM 268).

For Damasio, emotions are evolved automated programs of activity that can be triggered by emotionally competent stimuli. The body emotes when an emotional program is 35

enacted, and Damasio views emotional feelings as perceptions of what the enacting body is emoting. Note first that, in Jamess words, what Damasio calls emotions are the dispositional programs that produce the immediate bodily effects triggered by appropriate emotional stimuli, and second that what James calls emotions, namely our feeling of the immediate bodily effects, Damasio calls feelings of emotion and emotional feelings. So the differences look to be terminological. True, Damasio's 'emotional feelings' include cognitive aspectsideas, plans, come quickly to mindthat James doesnt seem to include, but given his account of association and plasticity I dont see this as much of a hurdle for a Jamesian to clear. Finally, he thinksa terminological problem again James has conflated feeling and emotion, but he concludes (SCM 116), None of these reservations diminishes in any way Jamess extraordinary contribution. Nor should my comments be thought to intend to diminish Damasios contribution, which I find exciting, illuminating and of great aid to concrescual phenomenology, perhaps especially by opening ways to think about bodily and primordial feelings and also by bringing valuation and emotion down to the level of turnings toward and away. For these latter, like feelings of pleasure and pain, are related to life regulation, homeostasis, which begins in unicellular organisms, and which, in creatures like us, who are capable of having images marked as valuated by emotional factors, the degree of emotion serving as a somatic marker for the relative importance of the image (SCM 175). As a consequence, emotionally competent stimuli, which, for us, abound in the surround (e.g., LS 55), give the emotional a foundational power in the moment of experience. Damasio seems coy concerning Spinozan monismhe describes himself as indulging in aspect dualism (SCM 65)and might have sympathy for Jamesian 'twice-over' monism (see esp. 316) or a Whiteheadian version in which physical and conceptual (e.g., bodily and emotional feelings) are 'poles' within pulses of subjective unity. Also, Damasio certainly might endorse the I-me dialectic, in the form of a '(pulsing) mind-self' dialectic: Damasio's 'core self,' which is about action, ... about a relationship between the organism and the object and unfolds in a sequence of pulses, is not only grounded on a 36

'protoself' with 'primordial feelings' reflecting the current state of the body, but provides biographical knowledge defining an autobiographical self (21-23). Further, Damasio can be enlisted in support of the notion of actual, experiencing, neurons, counterparts in experiential monism, as I present it, of neurons in neurobiology (O 308). In fact, Damasio proposes that the microorigins of cognition and feeling may be found at the neuronal level (252 ff.) and be scaled up in complex organisms from small circuits into larger circuitry and additional processing in each forming pulse. By contrast, Edelman is an unabashed materialist monist, although an emergentist one. Finally, of upcoming note: Damasio (14), unlike Edelman, does not rule out the possibility that quantum physics deals with phenomena that may help explain consciousness.
7. Jamesian and organic challenges to Edelmans emergent materialism

Let me cut to the chase with Edelman, without rehearsing details of his formidable, comprehensive account of how consciousness arises from the workings of the brain.8 One has to have great regard for the syntheses he has accomplished in his analysis of consciousness based on neuronal processes and structures in the brain. Drawing on Edelmans "neural Darwinism" or "theory of neuronal group selection" I have elsewhere (O, ch. 7) gone some length to show that a concrescence-based account of consciousness and experience, and concrescual phenomenology, can claim thoroughgoing neurobiological plausibility. Edelman does not deny the existence of qualia (discriminable properties of conscious experience), but he also flatly asserts that "consciousness arises within the material order of certain organisms" (UC xii), and that "[in] any adequate global theory of brain function . . . consciousness must rest on orderings and processes in the physical world . . . and should be based on a materialist metaphysics" (RP 10). In 2004, in Wider than the Sky, Edelman introduced the notion of a phenomenal transform to subsume qualia in the material order. As background for understanding this, the dynamic core refers to a system of strong mutualreentrantinteractions among a set of neuronal groups, mainly 37

within the thalamocortical system. Now, The fundamental neural activity of the reentrant dynamic core converts the signals from the world and the brain into a 'phenomenal transform'into what it is like to be that conscious animal, to have its qualia. He calls the existence of such a transform our experience of qualia, and specifies that the transform is entailed by that neural activity. It is not caused by that activity but it is, rather, a simultaneous property of that activity. (WTS 77-78). It is causal of other neural events and certain bodily actions but it does not cause consciousness, as if that way lies dualism. Mind you, he has not said why consciousness or experience appears out of the workings of the material brain.... Edelman then asks immediately, Is the phenomenal transform causal? He invokes a principle of causal closure to answer his question in the negative. The world is causally closedno spooks or spirits are present and occurrences in the world can only respond to the neural events underlying the transform. This closure locks out any influence of quantum-level phenomena on mind-brain relations, is consonant with earlier thinking of Edelman's (BA 212 ff.), and appears to close off reasonable possibilities unnecessarily. With this background Edelman now feels armed to respond to Jamess arguments (J1 138-144) against (emergent) materialism, which James called the conscious automatontheory. James who viewed that theory as resting, then at least, on purely a priori and quasi-metaphysical grounds, offers as reasons against it: that consciousness is selective, that if pleasures and pains have no efficacy why the reverse could not holdwith pleasures being painful, and pains pleasantif the theory were correct. He concludes in summary that consciousness is causally efficacious for the sake of steering a nervous system grown too complex to regulate itself. James does admit (142), as Edelman acknowledges, that How such reaction of the consciousness upon the [nerve-] currents may occur must remain at present unsolved. At any rate, Edelman (WTS 84) thinks that Jamess reasons are readily dispatched by considering the appropriate evolution of underlying neural states along with their corresponding conscious states. 38

Without mentioning Edelman, Henry Stapp, in his Mindful Universe, presents a compelling argument that Jamess analysis is vindicated by developments in quantum mechanics during the first half of last century. Stapp's argument turns on his justification for the claim that classical materialism and the principle of causal closurethat the mathematically described physical aspects of nature were completely determined, by the laws of Nature (3)were not sustainable concerning mind-brain interaction. Stapp establishes the need to resort to quantum theory to understand the dynamics of nerve terminals. When electrical signals, called action potentials, reach those terminals they open tiny (roughly nanometer-wide) channels in terminal membranes. The channels are narrow enough to produce an indeterminacy-introducing 'squeezing effect' so that calcium ions passing through those channels into the terminals will or will not be absorbed at target sites therein; consequently, vesicles containing neurotransmitters will or will not release them and what happens will influence the likelihood that the neighboring neurons will fire (30). Stapp adheres to John von Neumanns rigorous mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics. According to it, quantum mechanics deals with probabilities of outcomes of observing or measuring particles which cannot be simply located in terms of what are complementary propertiessuch as position and momentum. An act of measurement reduces the relevant set of probabilities, and just one possible value is realized. This reduction is often called the collapse of the wave function. Stapp maintains that by relying on von Neumann's approach, we can consistently describe the entire physical world, including the brains of the experimenters, ... with the actions instigated by an experimenters stream of consciousness acting directly upon that experimenters brain. The interaction between the psychologically and physically described aspects in quantum theory thereby becomes the mind-brain interaction of neuroscience . (10, 15). Thus, the quantum indeterminacies occur[ring] at the trillions of nerve terminals in the brain propagate via the Schroedinger equation first to neuronal behavior and then to the behavior of the whole brain. (The Schroedinger equation describes the propagation of the wave function of event probabilities or the 39

change of the quantum state over time.) This process

is highly nonlinear, in the (classical) sense that small events can trigger much larger events, and that there are very important feedback loops. Some neurons can be on the verge of firing, so that small variations in the firing times of other neurons can influence whether or not this firing occurs. In a system with such sensitive dependence on unstable elements, and on massive feedbacks, it is not reasonable to suppose that the dynamical evolution will lead generally to a single (nearly) classically describable quantum state. There might perhaps be particular special situations during which the massively parallel processing all conspires to cause the brain dynamics to become essentially deterministic. But there is no likelihood that during periods of mental groping and uncertainty there cannot be bifurcation points in which one part of the quantum cloud of potentialities that represents the brain goes one way and the remainder goes another, leading to a quantum mixture of very different classically describable potentialities. (31)

This mixture or smear of potentialities ... needs to be reduced to a form compatible with the occurrence of a conscious thought, if that thought is to enter a stream of consciousness (34). Is there room here for a Jamesian consciousness that is causally efficacious. Stapp finds it in by way of the quantum Zeno effect, a well-known feature of quantum theory (35). The quantum Zeno effect is the inhibition of transitions between quantum states by frequent measurements of a state, causing a collapse of the wave function described by the Schroedinger equation, usually back to the initial state. Suppose we put mental effort in place of measurement here, as von Neumanns approach appears to permit, and as Stapp, in effect does. Then, if we name template for action a macroscopic brain state that will, if held in place for an extended period, tend to produce some particular action, . (t)he quantum Zeno effect can, in principle, hold an intention and its template in place in the face of strong mechanical forces that would tend to disturb it (34, 36).

40

Stapp finds correlate uses of effort in James. Most concisely (JB 317),
we find that we reach the heart of our inquiry into volition when we ask by what process it is that the thought of any given action comes to prevail stably in the mind. The essential achievement of the will, , when it is most voluntary, is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind. Effort of attention is thus the essential phenomenon of will.

In this vein, James goes on (319-320, 321),

Consent to the ideas undivided presence, this is efforts sole achievement. Everywhere, then, the function of effort is the same: to keep affirming and adopting the thought which, if left to itself would slip away.

To put it less dramatically too, while habit, the great smoother of behavior, abates the need for focal attention or will or even for thinking, it leaves some room for volition, although consciousness only becomes intense within action "when nerve-processes are hesitant" (J1 142) or, per Stapp, groping, uncertain. Consequently, effort is only felt when there is a conflict of interests in the mind (451; cf. O 299). The effort in question then holds fast to the substantive part correlate with reduction of the smear of potentialities to a thought in the stream of ones consciousness. As pulse-based phenomenology, sensitive to influences of active-voice-based thinking, discloses, no active-voice subject makes the choice that, in effect reduces the smear of potentialities to a thought, resulting in a final explosion that is the formation of a pulse, a bud, a momentary subject. The reduction is not volitional. Volition arises with the endorsing commitment to the thought, the effort to hold fast. Hold fast much you might say as the radical empiricist holds fast to the conjunctive relationas if with an act of will, resisting prevailing habits of thought and refusing to lose touch with actualitytaking that relation at its face value... just as we feel it, and not to confuse ourselves with abstract talk about it, involving words that drive us to invent secondary conceptions in order to neutralize 41

their suggestions . What I do feel simply when a later moment of my experience succeeds an earlier one is that though they are two moments, the transition from the one to the other is continuous." (ERE 47-48) Finally, Whiteheads account is not quite concurrent with Jamess. For him, the final explosion, the subject-superject completing the concrescence, projects forth with the feeling integrated in that concrescual outcome. It carries the energy of decision into its future:
. . . the final decision of the immediate subject-superject, constituting the ultimate modification of subjective aim, is the foundation of our experience of responsibility, of approbation or of disapprobation, of self-approval or of self-reproach, of freedom, of emphasis. This element in experience is too large to be put aside merely as misconstruction. (PR 47)

Here Whitehead opens consideration of the moral aspect of concrescence, and of the potential for endorsing, or not, the outcome of each concrescence: autonomous decisions come freely and then one may flow on with them or not, investing effort if necessary (cf. PR 222). Free will thus has two facets: the spontaneous, constrained self-organizing outcome in the moment which is after all a moment in ones life and consonant almost always with the background of who one has been, and which is appropriated from in ones concrescual becoming; and the endorsement (or not) of that outcome in subsequent buds. However, as I indicated in Onflow, Whiteheads view here and the very experience on which it is grounded, may be regarded as deeply language-influenced (as may be materialistic views that try to eliminate the notion of freedom), and one may ask whether human experience structured in accord with the laws of experience may be more deeply subject to cultural variation than Whitehead and James may have considered. That said, I will nonetheless close with an argument that draws on Whitehead's questioning of the subject-predicate form of expression, works against emergent 42

materialism of the sort endorsed by Edelman, and recurs to many themes sounded earlier. Whitehead knows that we naturally use the categories of substance and quality and the notions of simple location and external relation in daily life (SMW 48 ff.). We conceive of the things we normally perceive as having properties and we can specify definite simple locations for them, in space and time, as if they were independent individuals. But when we ask, with Whitehead, how concretely we are thinking when we rely on these conceptions, we find that they involve simplifications of complex matter of fact. In a Whiteheadian philosophy of organism (cf. O 196), qualities, rather than being seen as attributes of substances, are relational characteristics: to possess a quality is to have the power to affect potential percipients, namely those with the capability of being affected by that power, those that have the right prehensive or sensory-perceptual apparatus and sensibility. In the course of concrescence, we have physical prehensions or feelings of ones body and of entities in the surround, and we have 'conceptual feelings' involving concepts for which the physical feelings are the perceptual basis. Such concepts, which serve in effect to translate received signals into features, do not necessarily have a name, and even if they do, they typically function in relation to a physical prehension without any invoking of the name by the perceiver. The ongoing integration of physical and conceptual prehensions continues in a pulse typically terminating for us in a rich, complex, substantive perception. Whitehead distinguishes three modes of perception that figure in everyday perceptual experience. Two of these modes are "pure," namely perception in the mode of causal efficacy and perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, and one of them "impure" or "mixed," namely perception in the mode of symbolic reference.9 All three figure in the constitution of our everyday perceptual experiences. Take easy to conceive cases of simple perception unrelated to any ongoing course of action: you notice a yellow car or a magazine, you hear a bird start to sing. Generally, such cases provide the largely 43

artificial instances of perception most dear to those philosophers who unwittingly excise perception from action and ongoing activity, and treat perceptions as static and accomplished. However, Whiteheads account elucidates them. Moreover, we are free to consider more active perceptual situations and the elucidation seems plainer there: some movement or brightening catches your eye and your gaze quickly turns; perhaps after overshooting the eventual focus, your gaze comes to rest on a patch of color, which, possibly with other features, serves to identify a specific object. Now, assuming that you are reading this, rather than hearing it read, keep your eyes on the text, but notice some indistinct patch of color away from the center of your visual field and turn your gaze to it. It comes into focus and then you recognize it, as you may have done earlier by making an inference or relying on memory, and you can say what it is, if the occasion calls for that. We have here, in traditional analytic language: sense impression, sense perception proper, and object recognition (and conscious perception). In Whiteheads language, we have: perception in the mode of causal efficacy (sense receptionroughly, sense impressions), perception in the mode of presentational immediacy (in this case visual perception involving a located qualitative imageroughly, perception of what is presently more or less clearly in view), and perception in the mode of symbolic reference (interpretation of the image as an object). Three modes of perception, each taking place at a characteristic stage in concrescence. Here, as in typical instances of Western visual experience, we have energetic sense data streaming into the experients sensorium, selective processing of that data in the actual moment of concrescence, and the issuing of an integrated perceptual experience, with a form that is subjectively familiar as a looking through ones eyes, and the perception is infused with a degree of interest depending principally, in the example at issue, on the setting, on the immediate impact of the eyecatching motion or brightness and on attention available. We are in relation with what we perceive, perception is not divorced from the environment or from bodily activity: with perception in the mode of causal efficacy the 44

world enters us as we are in the world. Your perception takes place where you are, and . the event which is the bodily life unifies in itself aspects of the universe (SMW 92). With perception in the mode of causal efficacy we are right here bud after bud where we are, as if pinned to our standpoints, and immersed in our actual surrounds, participants in a community of common activity involving mutual implication (PR 79). With perception in the mode of presentational immediacy (and of symbolic reference too) the world is there, as if thrust off, projected, and we perceivers are here in our private points of view. As if: by shifting from feeling perceptually in the mode of causal efficacy to that of presentational immediacy we withdraw from a kind of vital contact with the world and James's perceptual flux and we are inattentive to the transition involved. Perception is not divorced from environs nor are our perceptual experiences usually divorced from engagement in apparently purposive activity, as if perceiving were separate from intention, aim, or simply all form of valuing. Nor, more generally, is perception divorced from the ongoing course of life, from anticipation, from what went just before, that is, from immediate inheritance, or from the full stream of events comprising the life of a person, in which one has a genetic heritage and has learned how to do so many things. As a consequence we can see that the formulation of perceptual experience in substancequality (and active-voice) terms abstracts such experience from the fullness of our concrete experience and the perceived entity from its interconnection with other things. Emergent materialism remains within the habitual substance-quality formulation. To show this, let me point out that in the philosophy of organism, experiences and the prehensions or feelings constituting them occur in concrescing cellular occasions (actual cells), including neuronal occasions (actual neurons) on the periphery, and in the interior and brain, of the bodythe organic body which Whitehead views as a structured society. Thus (O 186 ff.), Whitehead held that "we have direct knowledge of the relationship of our central intelligence to our bodily feelings. According to this interpretation, the human body is to be conceived as a complex amplifier. . . . The various actual entities, which compose the [actual, organic] body, are so coordinated that 45

the experiences of any part of the body are transmitted to one or more central occasions to be inherited with enhancements accruing upon the way, or finally added by reason of the final integration. The enduring personality is the historic route of living occasions which are severally dominant in the body at successive instants." Furthermore, Whitehead's account continues (PR 119), "the whole body is organized, so that a general coordination of mentality is finally poured into the successive occasions of this personal society." The whole body is itself a "structured society," providing "a favorable environment for the subordinate societies which it harbors within itself" (PR 99), including organs, groups of cells, single cells, and molecules. In this account, the human body is a highly complex structured society favoring "intensity of satisfaction for certain sets of its component members." This intensity "arises by reason of the ordered complexity of the contrasts [integrations] which the society stages for these components" (100), with "the higher contrasts [syntheses or integrations] depend[ing] on the assemblage of a multiplicity of lower contrasts" (95). For Whitehead, with regard to perception, these higher contrasts simplify data, resulting for us in the perception of things with attributes. This and the substance-quality habit of thought lies at the heart of the so-called hard problemnamely explaining how experience can emerge from and as an attribute of the physical brain, nervous system, bodyand is a major ground for Whitehead's repudiation of the influence of the subjectpredicate form of expression on philosophy. From a Whiteheadian perspective, the nature of the hard problem is inverted. The problem emerges with abstraction from experience and the consequent attempt to explain how experience emerges from, and as an attribute of, the ordered complexity of material entities, which are, for materialists, void of subjective experience (PR 167). However, for Whitehead, experience is basic, and not mysteriously emergent from the material; but then some elements of the mental and experiential must be present in what might appear to be merely material entities. This is exactly what Whitehead maintains (O 308 ff.) in his philosophy of organism, and Damasio proposes (SCM 252 ff.). Accordingly, neurons, for pertinent example, although 46

they are actually structured societies, may be construed not just as subject to the onflow but as undergoing concrescence and in some sense having mental poles. On that view, as in an experiential monism, the emergence of images and evident mentality and consciousness is far less mysterious than in any materialism or mind-body dualism. In such an experiential monism, some form of the mental is widespreadall actual entities have mental poles and have inaccessible "interiors" (real internal constitutions) decisive for behavior; cells and neurons are engaged in ongoing concrescence. Accordingly, there is no sudden emergence of mental phenomena from the merely physical; rather, in more and more complex organisms, with 'presiding' occasions capable of more and more complex concrescences, the mental or conceptual figures in more and more complex integrations, termed 'propositional feelings' and finally in 'affirmationnegation contrasts,' and so consciousness is reached.10
Abbreviations
AI BA ERE FWH J1, J2 JB LS ML O PR PU R RP Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas Gerald M. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens William James, The Principles of Psychology, volumes 1 and 2 William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza William James, Manuscript Lectures Ralph Pred, Onflow Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology William James, A Pluralistic Universe Alfred North Whitehead, The Principles of Relativity Gerald M. Edelman, The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness

47

S SCM SMW SPP UC

Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World William James, Some Problems of Philosophy Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness

Works Cited
Damasio, Antonio R. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. Harcourt, Brace. Damasio, Antonio R. 2003. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Harcourt. Damasio, Antonio R. 2010. Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. Pantheon. Edelman, Gerald M. 1989. The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness. Basic Books. Edelman, Gerald M. 1992. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind. Basic Books. Edelman, Gerald M., and Giulio Tononi. 2000. A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination. Basic Books. Edelman, Gerald M., 2004. Wider than the Sky: the Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness. Yale University Press. Gentner, Dedre and Susan Goldin-Meadow, eds. 2003. Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought. MIT Press. Hume, David. 1739. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. Selby-Bigge. Oxford University Press, 1888. Husserl, Edmund. 1928. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Indiana University Press, 1964. James, William. 1884. "On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology." Mind 33: 126. James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology. Dover, 1950. James, William. 1892. Psychology: the Briefer Course. Harper & Row, 1962. James, William. 1911. A Pluralistic Universe. Peter Smith, 1967. James, William. 1911. Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy. University of Nebraska Press 1996. James, William. 1912. Essays in Radical Empiricism. Peter Smith, 1967. James, William. 1920. Collected Essays and Reviews, ed. R.B.Perry. Longmans, Green and Co.

48

James, William.

1988. Manuscript Lectures. Harvard University Press.

Nisbett, R., Peng, K., Choi, I., Norenzanan, A. 2001. Culture and Systems of Thought: Holistic Versus Analytic Cognition. Psychological Review 108: 291-310. Ortega y Gasset, Jos 1972. Meditations on Hunting. Charles Scribners Sons. 1976. Pred, Ralph. 2005. Onflow: Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience. MIT Press. Searle, John. 1992. The Rediscovery of the Mind. MIT Press. Stapp, Henry P., Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer. Springer. 2007. Weekes, Anderson., forthcoming. "The Mind-Body Problem and Whitehead's Nonreductive Monism" Journal of Consciousness Studies. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1922. The Principles of Relativity with Applications to Physical Science. Cambridge University Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1925. Science and the Modern World. Free Press, 1967. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1927. Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. Macmillan, 1958. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1929a. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected Edition, ed. D. Sherburne and D. Griffin. Free Press, 1978. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1933. Adventures of Ideas. Free Press, 1967. Whorf, Benjamin L. 1956. Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. J. B. Carroll. MIT Press.

When one practices Humean self-observation, one finds nothing but collections of perceptions, can never catch oneself without a perception, can never observe anything but those perceptions and so can find no impression from which the idea of self could be derived (Hume, I.IV.VI). 2 James (J1 371) says: "The central part of the me is the feeling of the body and of the adjustments in the head; and in the feeling of the body should be included that of the general emotional tones and tendencies, for at bottom these are but the habits in which organic activities and sensibilities run." The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (154) terms a counterpart of this "central part of the me" the "proto-self": "The proto-self is a coherent collection of neural patterns which map, moment by moment, the state of the physical structure of the organism in its many dimensions." The mapping (149153) is principally of body signals from the internal milieu, viscera, the vestibular and musculoskeletal systems, and temperature, texture and other signals arriving through specialized sensors in the skin. 3 See Onflow, section 4.5 for a less dramatic and more precise processual, and intentionality-sensitive, analysis of co-conscious transition. For a Jamesian example, consider SPP 212, The experiencer of such a situation feels the push, the obstacle, the will, the strain, the triumph, or the passive giving up, just as he feels the time, the space, the swiftness or intensity, the movement, the weight and color, the pain and pleasure, the complexity, or whatever remaining characters the situation may involve. He goes through all that can ever be imagined where activity is supposed. The word activity has no content save these experiences ..., ultimate qualia as they are of the life given to us to be known. 4 I use voice to refer to the relationship of the subject of a sentence to the action described by the

49

verb. In the active voice, the subject or agent acts and is not specified as affected by the action, whereas in the passive voice the subject is affected by an action and is plainly so specified. The active voice didnt rise to dominance in Greek until roughly the 5th century BCE. Prior to that linguistic shift, the primary voice distinction was between a predominant middle voice and the active voice. After the shift in Greek, the primary voice distinction was between active and passive, as in modern English, and the middle is extinguished. In active voice, the subject is an agent either insofar as he or she subordinates activity to the attainment of a goal and remains unaffected, unchangedholding that goal, having the relevant behavior guided by that goalthroughout the process, or insofar as the agent is treated merely as one exercising and fulfilling a fixed role. In the middle voice, the subject is engaged in the relevant process without goaloriented or analytic separation from it and that subject undergoes or is affected by change as it acts and brings about or affects change.See O 274-276. 5 For James's treatment of causation see SPP Chapter XII. For an account of Whiteheads theory of perception, see Onflow, section 6.1. 6 Nisbett et al (296). The authors cite many experiments to support their claims concerning such matters and specify (304) language as having pivotal influence on cultural variations in thought. See also articles available at Kaiping Peng's homepage: http://culcog.berkeley.edu/peng.html. 7 O 126: Whitehead regularly uses the word emotion broadly, to suggest feelings of concern, purpose, involvement, entwinement with things based on past experience, and aversion, at play in each moment of human experience, thus making of the emotional aspects of experience something more fundamental than the intellectual. Whitehead uses it in an unusual sense and cautions (PR 163), "that emotion in human experience, or even in animal experience, is not bare emotion. It is emotion interpreted, integrated, and transformed into higher categories of feeling. But even so, the emotional . . . elements in our conscious experience are those which most closely resemble the basic elements of all physical experience."
8 9

For that, see WTS, or O, chapter 7 and works by Edelman cited there. This passage is adapted from a general account provided in Onflow (189-190). 10 O 311. For a related argument, and an efficient approach to Whitehead's monism, see Weekes.

50