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Higher to lower v's lower to higher (cont.)
The proposition is not that atoms and molecules are conscious, but that there is, even at their level, something akin to sentience that takes the environment into account internally.
For example, we can talk about a richness of experience that is markedly different for a mosquito compared with a human being. Hence it is proper to speak of an 'evolution of experience' that at some stage becomes consciousness. Thus, beings with consciousness may be said to have evolved from forebears in which experience was not conscious.
The effect of the doctrine of internal relations on the understanding of nature is radical. It destroys the notion of 'material substances' and substitutes that of 'events.'
The notion of substance is something that exists independently of anything else. According to classical physics, atoms and molecules are substances that behave in certain ways.
But in 'event' thinking, 'events' come first and are more basic. The world is made of 'events' and not substances. A hydrogen atom is an event and so are all the so-called fundamental particles. Modern physics recognizes this but still tends to use the language of substance thinking--as illustrated by the example of the gluons as previously described.
The events that constitute the 'being' of any particle are their internal relationships. An internal relation, unlike an external relation, is constitutive of the character, even the existence of something.
Our proposition is that we need to study phenomena at each level as they are shaped by phenomena at a higher level (the reverse of the reductionist approach). All reality from protons to people is process. The process moreover is one of feeling or experience. The ultimate entities of the world are not objects but subjects--and are the final real things of which the world is made.
The word feeling or experience for an elementary entity--such as an electron, an atom, or for events in the minds of humans--are examples of the thoroughgoing unification which the Whitehead system1 seeks to achieve.
'Feeling' or 'experience' means any kind of acting, or being acted upon, in such a way that the make-up or constitution of the subject is affected.
Another way of putting this is to say that the entity takes account of its environment in such a way that it itself is constituted, at least in part, by that internal relationship. The analogy with human experience is complete. We are what we are by virtue of our internal relations changing our constitution moment by moment and day by day (but it is important to note that not all of the internal relations are conscious activities--there are different degrees of consciousness shading off to unconsciousness with which these relations are associated).
God's feelings
What is the origin of this subjectivity, (feelings), in nature? Asked how they feel about it, materialists often feel they must blindly deny they have feelings.
As far back in time as the physicist can take us, about 13.6 billion years, there was the Big Bang--indicating that somewhere there must have existed the potentiality for our universe to become. This general potentiality Whitehead called the "the mind of God"--meaning the unrealized possibilities, values, purposes, and feelings that were yet to be.
The proposition that the universal existence of subjectivity requires the existence of cosmic mind appears to be unavoidable--the alternative is to simply ignore the problem.
Physicist Paul Davies2 made the case for the existence of the laws of physics before there was any physical universe. Thus the laws of physics must be eternal and omnipotent. Other thinkers have argued that these laws came into existence with the universe. But then these laws cannot explain the origin of the universe as they would not have existed. Davies answer is they were in the mind of God.
But Davies, Pascal, and many others differentiate between the God of the philosophers and the God of mankind's religions. The ideas associated with omnipotence, intervention, law-giver, and judge are not part of the thought we are trying to convey--which is God as persuasive love as opposed to coercive power. Three propositions are put forward:
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