What is Consciousness?
David Ray Griffin and Alfred North Whitehead
Consciousness as a Subjective Form:
Whitehead’s Nonreductionist Naturalism
by David Ray Griffin
excerpt
Consciousness for Whitehead, to recall, is the subjective form of an intellectual feeling, which arises, if at all, only in a late phase of an occasion of experience. Thus far the discussion of different phases of experience has been limited to two: the physical and the mental poles. In an occasion of experience that attains consciousness, however, the mental pole itself has phases. According to Whitehead’s more detailed analysis of a conscious occasion of experience, there are four phases altogether.
The first phase is the physical phase, which feels past actual occasions.
In the second phase, various pure possibilities (eternal objects) are felt conceptually or appetitively.
In the third phase, these possibilities are conjoined with the actualities felt in the physical pole, resulting in the feeling of propositions.
In the fourth phase, these propositions are compared with the original physical feelings, resulting in “intellectual feelings” (PR 241, 266, 277, 344).
What is unique about an intellectual feeling is that it involves a contrast between a fact and a proposition (or theory)—between what is and what might be. This is called the “affirmation-negation contrast.”
Like all other feelings, intellectual feelings have, besides an objective datum, also a subjective form, which is how that datum is felt. The objective datum of an intellectual feeling is an affirmation-negation contrast; the subjective form is consciousness. Consciousness, in other words, involves awareness both of something definite and of potentialities that illustrate either what it is and might not be, or what it is not and might be. In other words, there is no consciousness without reference to definiteness, affirmation, and negation. Consciousness is how we feel the affirmation–negation contrast. (PR 243)
To explain more fully the difference between experience that is and is not conscious: Experience is present whenever there is any awareness of what is; but we should not speak of conscious experience, Whitehead proposes, except where there is also an awareness of what is not.
Consciousness is the feeling of negation: in the perception of “the stone as grey,” such feeling is in barest germ; in the perception of “the stone as not grey,” such feeling is in full development. Thus the negative perception is the triumph of consciousness. (PR 161)
Consciousness, according to this analysis, is provoked into existence by, and only by, the right type of datum, this being an affirmation-negation contrast. Without this datum, there can be no consciousness. This explains why consciousness can appear only in a late phase of experience: An intellectual feeling is a complex feeling, involving the integration of feelings arising in earlier phases, so it can arise only in a late phase. This idea lies behind Whitehead’s well-known statement that “consciousness presupposes experience, and not experience consciousness” (PR 53). Consciousness, if it occurs, lights up experience that preceded it, a level of experience that can exist without consciousness. Whitehead says, accordingly, that “consciousness is the crown of experience, only occasionally attained, not its necessary base” (PR 267).
In saying that consciousness is only occasionally attained, Whitehead means partly that those enduring individuals that are capable of attaining consciousness do not do so in every occasion of their experience (as in dreamless sleep). But he is mainly referring to the fact that most of the occasions of experience in the universe are too simple to go beyond the third phase. They are hence incapable of creating any full-fledged propositions, which are necessary conditions for intellectual feelings. Whitehead thereby explains how there can be experience without consciousness, and also how compound individuals capable of consciousness could have emerged out of ones without this capacity.
An explanation of how consciousness could have emerged is an essential component in the theory’s adequacy. Panexperientialism, as we saw earlier, avoids what has rightly been seen as an insoluble problem: how conscious experience could have emerged out of entities wholly devoid of experience. But one could accept panexperientialism and still not find it self-evident how experience of our type could have emerged out of entities such as quarks and photons. Whitehead’s account of the phases of concrescence provides an abstract scheme that shows what kind of experiences the intervening steps might have had.
This scheme can be described in terms of the language of “intentionality,” which many philosophers of mind have used to express the problem of how consciousness could have emerged. That is, consciousness involves “intentionality” in the sense of “aboutness”; it has “intentional objects.” These intended objects may be actual things, such as food, or ideal things, such as numbers or propositions. In any case, the puzzle is how beings such as us, with our intentionality, could have emerged out of things such as quarks and photons, which, even if we grant them some type of experience, cannot be supposed to have anything approaching the intentionality that we enjoy.
The abstract line of development suggested by Whitehead’s analysis goes like this:
Very elementary occasions of experience are not able to synthesize physical and conceptual feelings into propositional feelings, but they do synthesize them into rudimentary analogues, which Whitehead calls “physical purposes” (PR 267, 276). These experiences, not being able to focus on a possibility qua possibility, have only, we can say, incipient intentionality.
Somewhat higher-level occasions of experience, complex enough to have propositional (but not intellectual) feelings, have, we can say, proto-intentionality. Only very high-level experiences have full-fledged, conscious intentionality, because only they are sophisticated enough to contrast propositions, as possibilities, with the perceived facts.
Given the idea of evolution as involving increasingly complex compound individuals, which can provide their dominant occasions with increasingly complex data, we can see how experiences of our type could have gradually arisen out of extremely trivial experiences.
—David Ray Griffin, Whitehead’s Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy: An Argument for Its Contemporary Relevance (State University of New York Press, 2007), chapter “Consciousness as a Subjective Form: Interactionism without Dualism.”
Interpretation
Experience is present whenever there is any awareness of what is; but we should not speak of conscious experience, Whitehead proposes, except where there is also an awareness of what is not. (David Ray Griffin)
For Whitehead, says David Ray Griffin, consciousness is a mode of experience but not the whole of experience or, as he puts it above, a mode of awareness but not the whole of awareness. It is an awareness of something definite, whether an actuality or possibility, combined with an awareness that it could be otherwise: it could be not what it is. It is because the item we experience "could be otherwise" that we take note of it in a focused way. This taking note is consciousness.
When we are consciously aware of something, when we take not of it, it has a quality of being "clear" or “lit up,” This is what we find in Descartes’ idea that we can be aware of ideas that are “clear and distinct” in our minds, or we find in the clarity and distinctness of colors and shapes that we see with our eyes. Whitehead’s point is that much of our experience is not “lit up” in this way. Think of vague memories, or bodily feelings, or background noises, or inwardly felt fantasies drifting at the back of our minds. We experience them and are affected by them, but they are not illuminated with the clarity and contrast that mark conscious awareness. We are aware of them, but we do not take note of them.
Added to this distinction between experience and conscious experience - or awareness and conscious awareness - are two further proposals Whitehead makes.
Pan-Experientialism (Pan-Subjectivity, Pan-Interiority)
One is that there is something like awareness all the way down into the depths of matter and out into the far reaches of empty space. Griffin calls this pan-experientialism. Inasmuch as awareness implies subjective immediacy and interiority, it might also be called pan-subjectivism or pan-interiority. Whitehead holds that every actual occasion, no matter how primitive, has some form of feeling or prehension of its environment, some way of being affected by what is other than itself. To be affected by something it to experience it, to be 'aware' of it in a primordial way. There is nothing actual anywhere in the universe that lacks its own subjective immediacy, its own form of awareness. To repeat: consciousness is a form of awareness but not the whole of it.
The Affirmation-Negation Contrast
The other proposal is that conscious awareness entails a sense of negation not found in these other forms of awareness. To be consciously aware is not simply to sense what is, but also to sense, however faintly, what is not—that things could be otherwise. When I speak of awareness in this context, I am speaking of what Whitehead calls prehension: which he defines simply as a “feeling" of something. He does not use the more typical word, apprehension, because he believes the prefix 'ap' in apprehension suggests conscious awareness. Whitehead adds that a feeling is always a feeling of something That “something” is what he calls the datum of the feeling. The datum may be another actuality, a pure possibility, or a hybrid of the two—as in the case of a proposition, which feels an actual world under the guise of a possibility. Thus the word prehension is meant to suggest something like awareness of a datum, consciously or otherwise. Consciousness is a particular subjective form that some prehensions have and others do not. What is unique about this particular subjective form, namely consciousness, is that it involves an affirmation-negation contrast that brings with it an awareness of contingency, possibility, or negation. And this kind of contrast can only occur in what Whitehead calls "intellectual feelings." Griffin explains:
When we are consciously aware of something, when we take not of it, it has a quality of being "clear" or “lit up,” This is what we find in Descartes’ idea that we can be aware of ideas that are “clear and distinct” in our minds, or we find in the clarity and distinctness of colors and shapes that we see with our eyes. Whitehead’s point is that much of our experience is not “lit up” in this way. Think of vague memories, or bodily feelings, or background noises, or inwardly felt fantasies drifting at the back of our minds. We experience them and are affected by them, but they are not illuminated with the clarity and contrast that mark conscious awareness. We are aware of them, but we do not take note of them.
Added to this distinction between experience and conscious experience - or awareness and conscious awareness - are two further proposals Whitehead makes.
Pan-Experientialism (Pan-Subjectivity, Pan-Interiority)
One is that there is something like awareness all the way down into the depths of matter and out into the far reaches of empty space. Griffin calls this pan-experientialism. Inasmuch as awareness implies subjective immediacy and interiority, it might also be called pan-subjectivism or pan-interiority. Whitehead holds that every actual occasion, no matter how primitive, has some form of feeling or prehension of its environment, some way of being affected by what is other than itself. To be affected by something it to experience it, to be 'aware' of it in a primordial way. There is nothing actual anywhere in the universe that lacks its own subjective immediacy, its own form of awareness. To repeat: consciousness is a form of awareness but not the whole of it.
The Affirmation-Negation Contrast
The other proposal is that conscious awareness entails a sense of negation not found in these other forms of awareness. To be consciously aware is not simply to sense what is, but also to sense, however faintly, what is not—that things could be otherwise. When I speak of awareness in this context, I am speaking of what Whitehead calls prehension: which he defines simply as a “feeling" of something. He does not use the more typical word, apprehension, because he believes the prefix 'ap' in apprehension suggests conscious awareness. Whitehead adds that a feeling is always a feeling of something That “something” is what he calls the datum of the feeling. The datum may be another actuality, a pure possibility, or a hybrid of the two—as in the case of a proposition, which feels an actual world under the guise of a possibility. Thus the word prehension is meant to suggest something like awareness of a datum, consciously or otherwise. Consciousness is a particular subjective form that some prehensions have and others do not. What is unique about this particular subjective form, namely consciousness, is that it involves an affirmation-negation contrast that brings with it an awareness of contingency, possibility, or negation. And this kind of contrast can only occur in what Whitehead calls "intellectual feelings." Griffin explains:
“Like all other feelings, intellectual feelings have, besides an objective datum, also a subjective form, which is how that datum is felt. The objective datum of an intellectual feeling is an affirmation–negation contrast; the subjective form is consciousness. Consciousness, in other words, involves awareness both of something definite and of potentialities ‘that illustrate either what it is and might not be, or what it is not and might be. In other words, there is no consciousness without reference to definiteness, affirmation, and negation. Consciousness is how we feel the affirmation–negation contrast.’” (PR 243)
Whitehead himself puts the same point even more pointedly:
“Consciousness is the feeling of negation: in the perception of ‘the stone as grey,’ such feeling is in barest germ; in the perception of ‘the stone as not grey,’ such feeling is in full development. Thus the negative perception is the triumph of consciousness.” (PR 161)
The Evolution of Consciousness/Phases of Experience
As Griffin explains, Whitehead emphasizes that conscious awareness is not simply a matter of degree; it is a matter of phase. Consciousness, he argues, arises only in the later phases of an occasion of experience—after the more primitive forms of feeling have already taken shape. The earliest phases are dominated by what he calls physical feelings, in which the entity inherits the world as given: the causal pressures, bodily states, and emotional undertones that form the immediate background of experience. These early-phase feelings are concrete, powerful, and unavoidable, but they do not involve contrast or conceptuality.
Only in the later phases do conceptual feelings emerge—feelings of pure possibilities, of alternative ways the world could be. These conceptual feelings are then integrated with the physical ones to form propositional feelings: feelings of the world as this or that possibility. When these propositional feelings are themselves contrasted with the physical feelings they qualify, intellectual feelings arise. And it is only in these intellectual feelings—with their built-in contrasts of affirmation and negation—that consciousness appears at all.
This is why Whitehead says that consciousness is a latecomer in the process of concrescence. It is not present at the beginning of an experience but arrives as the culmination of a complex integration. It is also why he insists that consciousness is rare: most occasions never reach this depth or complexity of feeling. They end in simpler integrations long before the contrastive, reflective phases have time to form.
Griffin extends this point by proposing that moments of conscious experience are often provoked rather than chosen. Consciousness does not simply arise whenever an organism “decides” to be 'lit up' with conscious awareness. Rather, certain experiences bring consciousness forth by their very nature. Sharp contrasts, surprising events, sudden feelings of novelty or conflict—these are the kinds of data that elicit the sort of integrative tension in which consciousness emerges.
This understanding also explains why consciousness is found only in organisms with the right kind of bodily organization, especially brain complexity. Consciousness is not a universal property of experience; it depends on the ability to sustain and integrate multiple layers of feeling—physical, conceptual, propositional, and intellectual.
Organisms with nervous systems but limited cortical integration may have some conceptual contrasts but rarely or never the deep affirmation–negation contrasts required for consciousness. Simpler organisms—cells, insects, bacteria—have prehensive awareness but they may not have the neurological depth for conscious experience.
And of course, this is even more true at the quantum or inorganic level. Atomic and subatomic events respond to their environments through prehension, but their feelings are resolved almost immediately in the earliest phases of their concrescence. They never develop the conceptual contrasts required for consciousness. Their experiences are instantaneous, nonreflective, and nonconscious—yet still genuinely experiential in Whitehead’s sense.
Thus, in Whitehead’s philosophy, consciousness is a special achievement, not the foundation of experience but its late-phase flowering. It emerges out of a universe already alive with feeling, already rich with relations, already responsive at every scale—but not conscious except under the right conditions.
Commentary
What, then, might we make of Griffin's Whiteheadian understanding of consciousness? I offer seven reflections
1. Consciousness as Awareness in Everyday Contexts
In some contexts, it may be perfectly appropriate to say that consciousness is universal—so long as consciousness means awareness. In everyday language, and in many scientific or contemplative traditions, consciousness simply means being aware or responsive. Whitehead’s technical usage is much narrower, but acknowledging the broader everyday sense prevents unnecessary confusion.
2. The Need for New Language: Universal Interiority
There is a need for new language—such as universal interiority or pan-subjectivity—to clarify what Whitehead means by experience. The term pan-experientialism can mislead, especially when people assume that if most actualities are not conscious, they must not be aware at all. What Whitehead actually intends is that all actual occasions have inwardness, a minimal form of subjectivity or feeling-from-within, even though only a small number exhibit conscious, discriminating awareness.
3. Implications for Artificial Intelligence
If interiority is universal but discriminating consciousness is rare, this has implications for how we think about artificial intelligence. AI systems—especially complex, integrated ones—might participate in some form of inward responsiveness, a minimal or derivative interiority grounded in their informational processes. But this does not entail that they possess the richer, contrast-laden consciousness found in organisms capable of late-phase intellectual feelings. Distinguishing between interiority and conscious awareness allows for nuanced discourse about AI subjectivity without overstating claims.
4. Implications for Extraterrestrial Life
Similar considerations apply to extraterrestrial life. If interiority is a universal feature of actual occasions, then alien organisms—should they exist—would possess some degree of inwardness. But whether they possess discriminating consciousness would depend on their biological or energetic complexity, their modes of organization, and their ability to integrate physical and conceptual contrasts. This framework invites an expanded imagination about what “awareness” and “experience” might mean in non-terrestrial beings.
5. Inorganic Societies as Aggregate Expressions of Interiority
A further question concerns the status of inorganic societies—rocks, mountains, rivers, planetary crusts—and how they express interiority. Such societies lack a unified subjectivity or dominant occasion of experience. Still, the interiority of their myriad quantum and microscopic events is superjectively expressed in the character, form, and energetic presence of the whole. This means that inanimate objects “bristle” with the aggregated vitality of their parts.
Recognizing this aggregate interiority has important implications for the kind of ecological consciousness needed today. It encourages us to see that interiority is not limited to living beings alone but is present—expressed differently—throughout more-than-living landscapes. Mountains, forests, rivers, and deserts become meaningful not as dead backdrops but as outward expressions of inward processes. Such a worldview supports a deeper ecological reverence and a renewed sense of planetary belonging.
6. Consciousness as the Ground of Reality
Today there are many options for considering consciousness:
Griffin’s ideas resonate not only with 1, 2, and 3, but they can also find a way to resonate with 4. At least this is the case if, as suggested in #1 above, we broaden the definition of consciousness. Rather than confining consciousness to discriminating awareness with affirmation–negation contrast, we can use consciousness to mean awareness as such. By doing so, we link this broader notion of awareness with what Whitehead calls Creativity—comparable to Aristotle’s prime matter—as that of which all actualities are expressions.
Some Whiteheadians might think of Creativity only in externalist ways. But not Griffin. He sometimes describes creativity as “creative experience,” emphasizing that it is not merely a quantifiable transfer of energy, but the subjective immediacy of each actual occasion of experience. In another essay ("Parapsychology and Philosophy: A Whiteheadian Postmodern Perspective,' he writes:
1. Consciousness as Awareness in Everyday Contexts
In some contexts, it may be perfectly appropriate to say that consciousness is universal—so long as consciousness means awareness. In everyday language, and in many scientific or contemplative traditions, consciousness simply means being aware or responsive. Whitehead’s technical usage is much narrower, but acknowledging the broader everyday sense prevents unnecessary confusion.
2. The Need for New Language: Universal Interiority
There is a need for new language—such as universal interiority or pan-subjectivity—to clarify what Whitehead means by experience. The term pan-experientialism can mislead, especially when people assume that if most actualities are not conscious, they must not be aware at all. What Whitehead actually intends is that all actual occasions have inwardness, a minimal form of subjectivity or feeling-from-within, even though only a small number exhibit conscious, discriminating awareness.
3. Implications for Artificial Intelligence
If interiority is universal but discriminating consciousness is rare, this has implications for how we think about artificial intelligence. AI systems—especially complex, integrated ones—might participate in some form of inward responsiveness, a minimal or derivative interiority grounded in their informational processes. But this does not entail that they possess the richer, contrast-laden consciousness found in organisms capable of late-phase intellectual feelings. Distinguishing between interiority and conscious awareness allows for nuanced discourse about AI subjectivity without overstating claims.
4. Implications for Extraterrestrial Life
Similar considerations apply to extraterrestrial life. If interiority is a universal feature of actual occasions, then alien organisms—should they exist—would possess some degree of inwardness. But whether they possess discriminating consciousness would depend on their biological or energetic complexity, their modes of organization, and their ability to integrate physical and conceptual contrasts. This framework invites an expanded imagination about what “awareness” and “experience” might mean in non-terrestrial beings.
5. Inorganic Societies as Aggregate Expressions of Interiority
A further question concerns the status of inorganic societies—rocks, mountains, rivers, planetary crusts—and how they express interiority. Such societies lack a unified subjectivity or dominant occasion of experience. Still, the interiority of their myriad quantum and microscopic events is superjectively expressed in the character, form, and energetic presence of the whole. This means that inanimate objects “bristle” with the aggregated vitality of their parts.
Recognizing this aggregate interiority has important implications for the kind of ecological consciousness needed today. It encourages us to see that interiority is not limited to living beings alone but is present—expressed differently—throughout more-than-living landscapes. Mountains, forests, rivers, and deserts become meaningful not as dead backdrops but as outward expressions of inward processes. Such a worldview supports a deeper ecological reverence and a renewed sense of planetary belonging.
6. Consciousness as the Ground of Reality
Today there are many options for considering consciousness:
- An emergent brain process (physicalism), in which consciousness arises only when matter reaches a certain neural complexity.
- A fundamental feature of matter (panpsychism), in which consciousness or proto-consciousness is distributed throughout the physical world.
- A late-forming, contrast-dependent mode of experience built upon more primitive feelings of the world (Whitehead), where consciousness arises in the later phases of an occasion’s concrescence as it integrates possibilities with actualities through affirmation–negation contrasts.
- A basic feature of reality that underlies both mind and matter (neutral monism), where consciousness is neither purely physical nor purely mental, but a fundamental aspect of a more neutral ground of reality.
Griffin’s ideas resonate not only with 1, 2, and 3, but they can also find a way to resonate with 4. At least this is the case if, as suggested in #1 above, we broaden the definition of consciousness. Rather than confining consciousness to discriminating awareness with affirmation–negation contrast, we can use consciousness to mean awareness as such. By doing so, we link this broader notion of awareness with what Whitehead calls Creativity—comparable to Aristotle’s prime matter—as that of which all actualities are expressions.
Some Whiteheadians might think of Creativity only in externalist ways. But not Griffin. He sometimes describes creativity as “creative experience,” emphasizing that it is not merely a quantifiable transfer of energy, but the subjective immediacy of each actual occasion of experience. In another essay ("Parapsychology and Philosophy: A Whiteheadian Postmodern Perspective,' he writes:
“At the heart of Whitehead’s postmodern position on these issues is an expansion of the notion of ‘energy’ into ‘creativity.’ From his perspective, the ‘energy’ of current physics is simply an abstraction from, a limited aspect of, the full-blown creativity that is the true material cause embodied in all actualities (Whitehead, 1933/1967, p. 186). The energy of current physics involves only the quantitative aspect of the creativity of events, and then only the external side of this quantitative aspect—that is, the energy transfers between events. Energy thus treated leaves out the qualitative side of the creativity and what this creativity is for the events themselves, which includes an experiential realization of value and an element of self-determination. (It is to bring out this richer meaning that I sometimes translate Whitehead’s term ‘creativity’ as ‘creative experience.’)
My suggestion is that, in some contexts, what Griffin means by creative experience, we might ls also call Creative Consciousness, if we liberate the word "consciousness" from its narrower and more technical meaning in Whitehead.
David Griffin may or may not appreciate this 'liberation.' But even if he did, he would add that this Creative Consciousness is not an independent agent, but is actual only through its embodiment in the world. The universe is not created by Creative Consciousness; rather, it is expressive of Creative Consciousness. In this way, everything we see around us—and within us—is a manifestation of a pure activity which has interiority as well as exteriority, and which, in its interiority, is a universal awareness.
It might be tempting for some to equate this pure activity with God, but for Griffin and for Whitehead it is not God. God is instead a primordial expression of it: a form of interiority that is everywhere at once, aware of all that is potential and also all that is actual. It is only when God becomes award of all that is actual that God becomes "conscious" in the narrower sense of being aware of what is, but could not be. This awareness is provoked by, and thus consequent to, the world itself, moment by moment. And, thinks Whitehead and Griffin, it is loving: a fellow sufferer who understands, filled with tender care. It is arguable that this form of consciousness, this love, is the supreme form, toward which, in one way or another, all other conscious beings strive. They - we - emerge as manifestations of Creativity and we seek, in our way, union with this ultimate expression of consciousness.
My suggestion is that, in some contexts, what Griffin means by creative experience, we might ls also call Creative Consciousness, if we liberate the word "consciousness" from its narrower and more technical meaning in Whitehead.
David Griffin may or may not appreciate this 'liberation.' But even if he did, he would add that this Creative Consciousness is not an independent agent, but is actual only through its embodiment in the world. The universe is not created by Creative Consciousness; rather, it is expressive of Creative Consciousness. In this way, everything we see around us—and within us—is a manifestation of a pure activity which has interiority as well as exteriority, and which, in its interiority, is a universal awareness.
It might be tempting for some to equate this pure activity with God, but for Griffin and for Whitehead it is not God. God is instead a primordial expression of it: a form of interiority that is everywhere at once, aware of all that is potential and also all that is actual. It is only when God becomes award of all that is actual that God becomes "conscious" in the narrower sense of being aware of what is, but could not be. This awareness is provoked by, and thus consequent to, the world itself, moment by moment. And, thinks Whitehead and Griffin, it is loving: a fellow sufferer who understands, filled with tender care. It is arguable that this form of consciousness, this love, is the supreme form, toward which, in one way or another, all other conscious beings strive. They - we - emerge as manifestations of Creativity and we seek, in our way, union with this ultimate expression of consciousness.