September 2, 2013

Prehension is a word used by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1865-1947) to refer to a type of perception or vulnerability to influence that includes and transcends ordinary understandings of sense perception. It includes such subtly meaningful qualities such as belonging, feeling of self, meaning, time, whatever. It's close to experiencing, but Whitehead wasn't yet ready to grant the ability to "experience" to, say, electrons. Others have, though, and have asserted Whitehead's general philosophy of organism, or "process philosophy"---a term his work is most known as, along with the general sub-field of philosophy that has grown around the work of Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, David Ray Griffin and John Cobb, and others.

In this picture, phenomena are processes that prehend other processes and in turn are prehended by them, as well as resonating with mysterious sources, whose source-energy they also pick up. Note that there are innumerable channels, and if this picture were in action, you would see the synapses---the closest word we can identify, derived from the connections between nerves in the brain and spinal cord---pulse.

Again, what this series suggests is the sheer variety and exuberance of the cosmos, the Becoming-Everything, which is a part of Divinity.