THE ACT OF PERCEPTION

Concrescence is the Becoming of Actual Entities

An actual entity is a mental construct made by uniting several prehended factors into a unity.  In the collage Athena #1 (detail shown at right), in context with other cues, I prehend the profile of Athena’s nose as an ideal type, a symbol of wisdom, or a boundary between void and Athena’s body.  These are all examples of actual entities.  Inter-subjective thought-objects rising to consciousness via prehensions can become actual entities.  For example, I am aware of a type of guilt, shame or anger of one person toward another.  Actual entities differ among themselves, but through their gradations of importance and diversities of function they are all, first, closures of experience, complex and interdependent. An actual entity, once realized, may perish or it may merge into the unconscious. It may also become a component in further processing, as in a concrescence, or last in memory.  Whitehead defines “concrescence” in its most general form.

“Concrescence” is the name for the process in which the universe of many things acquires an individual unity… [The process is] a determinate relegation of each item of the “many” to its subordination in the constitution of the novel “one” (the particular actual entity of the concrescence).

Gerald Edelman’s work on how the brain processes perceptions, which would include a Whiteheadian concrescence (including a concrescence of Vermeer’s “subliminal” shadow-hand), offers a helpful model to visualize the process.  Edelman finds that the brain responds to the information given by our sense organs by creating “maps.”  There follows a selective strengthening of those mappings that are the most useful and promising for building a closure of meaning.  The perception of a chair depends on the harmonization (Whitehead’s formation of many into one) of a number of scattered mappings throughout the visual cortex.  These mappings connect many varied aspects of the chair: its proportions, its material, its color, the disposition of its legs, and its relation to rocking chairs and stools.  Probably, in other parts of the cortex, the feel of sitting in a chair and the bodily actions needed to do so are also connected.  

This process is always dynamic and depends on the active and incessant orchestration of countless details.  Such a correlation, which is never the same twice, is accomplished by the connections that are reciprocal between the brain’s maps.  These connections may contain millions of fibers.  The continuous transfer, selection and reevaluation between activated maps enables a “concept” or “picture” of a particular chair to be realized.  Christopher Wills, in his book The Runaway Brain, tells us that during the evolutionary process of absorbing and juggling information, it has not been possible simply to add to the complexity of a single map in only one part of the brain, making it more and more detailed in the process.  Instead, the brain distributes information into many different, less-detailed maps in different regions. 

Thus by Edelman’s description, during a Whiteheadian concrescence, we select from the diversity of possibilities in the data and our experience to produce an actual entity.  As mentioned above, the profile line of the nose of Athena, together with other contextual cues (my feelings for classical Greek, “forehead-nose” profiles as signs of intelligence) and knowledge of Athena’s association with wisdom, produces my cognitive mapping of a novel actual entity that, in my mind, denotes acute intelligence. 

Damasio explains why cognitive maps are more likely to be of a superimposed, rather than blended, construction.  A cognitive map for the feelings of particular face shapes may be superimposed on the face of Vermeer’s woman holding a balance, on maps of clothing types, of Dutch history, and so forth.  Remember: Whiteheadian events include every possible category of entities.  “Dutch history” can mingle with, or be superimposed on, “female hair styles” or any other event.  Connections among maps are selected and acted upon by our subjective aim (interpretive scheme), which directs a particular outcome.  To me, such a view of mental process seems consonant with both the collage thinking that produces meaning for the teenager’s term “spaced-out” and for Whitehead’s theory of concrescence.