The Vector Transmission of Feeling


Energy as Throbs of Emotion
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​Panexperientialism and the
Vector Transmission of Feeling

One aspect of Whiteheadian pansubjectivism - or, as David Ray Griffin puts it, Whitehead's panexperientialism - is its proposal that physical energy is a form of "quantitative emotional intensity" and that that causal influence from one entity to others is transmission of feeling, of pulses of emotion. 

The subjects 'feel' this influence; that is, they feel the feelings of the others, and are affected by the feelings they feel. As Whiteheads puts it: "The primitive form of physical experience is emotional—blind emo­tion—received as felt elsewhere in another occasion and conformally ap­propriated as a subjective passion."

This is connected to lived human experience in obvious ways, and it is also connected to physics, Whitehead argues that the basic structure of experience itself contains the same kind of relational and directional character that modern physics later formalizes mathematically through the concept of vectors. Thus he speaks of the vector transmission of feeling.

A vector, in mathematics and physics, is not merely an amount or magnitude. It is an amount-with-direction. Velocity, force, momentum, and electromagnetic fields are all vector quantities because they involve both intensity and directional transmission. A scalar quantity, by contrast, has magnitude without direction: temperature or mass, for example.

Whitehead’s claim is that experience itself is vectorial. Every actual occasion—or moment of experience—receives influences from prior realities vectorially. Experience is not a self-contained mental bubble. It is an inheritance, a reception, a felt transmission of pulses of emotion that come from elsewhere. 

This is one way that feelings, whether in pulsations of energ in the depths of atoms or in moments of human experience, are the energetic glue by which the universe is held together. 

​The Vector Transmission of Feeling

Selected Passages from Process and Reality

The vector character of prehension is fundamental.

- AN Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 317

Vectors are acts of becoming.

Mathematical physics translates the saying of Heraclitus, ‘All things flow,’ into its own language. It then becomes, All things are vectors. Mathematical physics also accepts the atomistic doctrine of Democritus. It translates it into the phrase, All flow of energy obeys ‘quantum’ conditions.

- AN Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 309 

Vectors are acts of feelings the feelings in another and conforming to those feelings.

The primitive form of physical experience is emotional—blind emo­tion—received as felt elsewhere in another occasion and conformally ap­propriated as a subjective passion. In the language appropriate to the higher stages of experience, the primitive element is sympathy, that is, feeling the feeling in another and feeling conformally with another...Thus the primitive experience is emotional feeling felt in its relevance to a world beyond. The feeling is blind and the relevance is vague. 

AN Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 162

Vector feelings carry their marks of origins.

In the language of epistemology, as framed by Locke, it describes how the ideas of particular existents are absorbed into the subjectivity of the percipient and are the datum for its experience of the external world. In the language of science, it describes how the quantitative intensity of lo­calized energy bears in itself the vector marks of its origin, and the spe­cialities of its specific forms; it also gives a reason for the atomic quanta to be discerned in the building up of a quantity of energy. In this way, the philosophy of organism—as it should—appeals to the facts.

​- AN Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 117

What is Inherited in a vector is a feeling-tone.

The crude aboriginal character of direct perception is inheritance. ‘What is inherited is feeling-tone with evidence of its origin: in other words, vector feeling-tone. In the higher grades of perception vague feeling-tone dif­ferentiates itself into various types of sensa—those of touch, sight, smell, etc.—each transmuted into a definite prehension of tonal contemporary nexus† by the final percipient.

- AN Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 119

This inheritance of feeling-tone is the root of causation

The vector character of the datum is this causal efficacy. Thus perception, in this primary sense, is perception of the settled world in the past as constituted by its feeling-tones, and as efficacious by reason of those feeling-tones. Perception, in this sense of the term, will be called ‘perception in the mode of causal efficacy.’ 

- AN Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 120

What is transferred are "throbs of emotion."

The direct perception whereby the datum in the immediate subject is inherited from the past can thus, under an abstraction, be conceived as the transference of throbs of emotional energy, clothed in the specific forms provided by sensa

AN Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 116

The experience of intensity is quantitative feeling

"Generalizing from the language of physics, the experience of M is an intensity arising out of specific sensa, directed from A, B, C. There is in fact a directed influx from A, B, C of quantitative feeling, arising from specific forms of feeling. The experience has a vector character, a common measure of intensity, and specific forms of feelings conveying that intensity.

Energy is "quantitative emotional intensity"

​If we substitute the term ‘energy’ for the concept of a quantitative emotional intensity, and the term ‘form of energy’ for the concept of ‘specific form of feeling,’ and remember that in physics ‘vector’ means definite transmission from elsewhere, we see that this metaphysical description of the simplest elements in the constitution of actual entities agrees absolutely with the general principles according to which the notions of modern physics are framed. 

- AN Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 116

Sensa are how energy clothes itself.

The ‘datum’ in metaphysics is the basis of the vector-theory in physics; the quantitative satisfaction in metaphysics is the basis of the scalar localization of energy in Physics; the ‘sensa’ in metaphysics are the basis of the diversity of specific forms under which energy clothes itself. Scientific descriptions are, of course, entwined with the specific details of geometry and physical laws, which arise from the special order of the cosmic epoch in which we find ourselves.

- AN Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 116

The general principles of physics are abstractions from experience.
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But the general principles of physics are exactly what we should expect as a specific exemplification of the metaphysics required by the philosophy of organism. It has been a defect in the modern philosophies that they throw no light whatever on any scientific principles. Science should investigate particular species, and metaphysics should investigate the generic notions under which those specific principles should fall. 
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- AN Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 116

Vectors in Physics​
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‘Everyone understands what it means to move at some particular speed in some particular direction. But it took a long time to start thinking of such behavior in terms of a single clarifying concept, the vector. Arianrhod’s lively and detailed chronicle explains why vectors and tensors are at the heart of our best ways to think about the universe.’

— Sean Carroll, author of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe

A celebration of the seemingly simple idea that allowed us to imagine the world in new dimensions—sparking both controversy and discovery.

The stars of this book, vectors and tensors, are unlikely celebrities. If you ever took a physics course, the word “vector” might remind you of the mathematics needed to determine forces on an amusement park ride, a turbine, or a projectile.

​You might also remember that a vector is a quantity that has magnitude and (this is the key) direction. In fact, vectors are examples of tensors, which can represent even more data. It sounds simple enough—and yet, as award-winning science writer Robyn Arianrhod shows in this riveting story, the idea of a single symbol expressing more than one thing at once was millennia in the making. And without that idea, we wouldn’t have such a deep understanding of our world.

Vector and tensor calculus offers an elegant language for expressing the way things behave in space and time, and Arianrhod shows how this enabled physicists and mathematicians to think in a brand-new way.

​These include James Clerk Maxwell when he ushered in the wireless electromagnetic age; Einstein when he predicted the curving of space-time and the existence of gravitational waves; Paul Dirac, when he created quantum field theory; and Emmy Noether, when she connected mathematical symmetry and the conservation of energy. For it turned out that it’s not just physical quantities and dimensions that vectors and tensors can represent, but other dimensions and other kinds of information, too. This is why physicists and mathematicians can speak of four-dimensional space-time and other higher-dimensional “spaces,” and why you’re likely relying on vectors or tensors whenever you use digital applications such as search engines, GPS, or your mobile phone.

In exploring the evolution of vectors and tensors—and introducing the fascinating people who gave them to us—Arianrhod takes readers on an extraordinary, five-thousand-year journey through the human imagination. She shows the genius required to reimagine the world—and how a clever mathematical construct can dramatically change discovery’s direction."

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Interview with Arianrhod

​Vectors and Tensors

created by ChatGPT

A vector is a quantity that has both magnitude and direction. A simple number such as “5” is not a vector; it tells you only how much. But “5 meters east” is a vector, because it specifies both amount and direction. In physics, vectors are indispensable because many physical realities are directional. Velocity, acceleration, momentum, force, electric fields, magnetic fields, and gravitational pull all involve directed action or transmission. A vector therefore represents not merely a static quantity but a relational tendency or orientation within space-time itself.

For example, if a wind blows northeast at 20 miles per hour, the wind can be represented as a vector. Likewise, when a planet moves around the sun, its velocity at each moment is a vector pointing in a particular direction. Modern physics came increasingly to understand nature not as composed merely of isolated “things,” but of dynamic fields and directional relations. Hence vectors became foundational.

A tensor is more complex. A tensor generalizes the idea of a vector. If a vector describes a directional quantity, a tensor describes how quantities transform and relate across multiple directions and dimensions simultaneously. Tensors are especially important when space itself is curved, stretched, compressed, or dynamically structured—as in Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

A useful way to think about tensors is this:

• Scalars describe simple magnitude (temperature, mass)
• Vectors describe magnitude plus direction (velocity, force)
• Tensors describe structured relationships among many directions at once

For example, stress inside a solid object cannot adequately be described by a single vector, because pressure may vary differently in different directions. A tensor captures this multidirectional structure.

In Einstein’s relativity, gravity itself is represented tensorially. Matter and energy tell space-time how to curve, and curved space-time tells matter how to move This tensorial framework allows physics to describe reality in a coordinate-independent way: the laws remain valid regardless of the observer’s frame of reference.

This is partly why Whitehead found vectors philosophically suggestive. In Process and Reality he has an entire section called The Vector Transmission of Feeling. He saw modern physics moving away from the idea of self-contained substances toward a world of dynamic inheritances, transmissions, directional feelings, and relational intensities. His claim that experience has a “vector character” means that each actual occasion prehensivly receives and integrates influences flowing from elsewhere. The influences from elsewhere are what physicist call vectors. Reality is not merely located; it is inherited, transmitted, and transformed.

Moreover, he proposed that the mathematical representations of vectors are, in fact, representations of the quantitative dimensions of feelings that are in one actual entity and transmitted to others by means of what, in the recipients, he calls "experience in the mode of causal efficacy."  The passages below make this clear.