Perhaps implicit in the original formulation but made explicit through Process Buddhism, the Whiteheadian Process notion that all actual entities in the entire universe feel some level of experience — from the tiniest quantum fluctuation to the most complex organisms and everything in between — resuscitates a more ancient and pre-modern understanding about the nature of experience: that it is seated, not inside the skull in the brain, but at the center of the body, closer to the heart.
To say that all actual entities feel some level of experience is not to suggest that they are actually conscious or self-aware. As far as we know or can tell, only humans experience the kind of conscious self-awareness that we experience. Projecting this kind of advanced awareness onto subatomic particles, rain, rocks or even cells or plants, is too anthropomorphic and anthropocentric. But in a subtle way, to deny that these things could have some level of experience is itself a covert form of anthropocentrism, one that assumes that self-consciousness is an exceptional fact about human beings. There’s no real reason to believe, with absolute certainty, that either humans or self-consciousness are ontologically exceptional in this way.
The Process approach is to affirm human self-consciousness as a significant achievement in the cumulative history of the evolutionary creative advancement of life on this planet, but not necessarily as “the” ultimate achievement whether as a goal to achieve or as a model to replicate by all other life forms. And unless we are committed to eliminating the causal efficacy of intentionality or committed to its arbitrary emergence from nothing (both of these positions are incoherent), we have to see human self-consciousness as the apex of an intentional evolutionary continuum. Yet this apex is less like The stable summit of a mountain or pyramid but one of many ever-generative and incessantly self-differentiating meristems of the ends of a plant: an achievement at the end of an embedded process that is itself dynamically in-process and participating in the production of novelty. The wakeful head of individual self-consciousness lies on, depends upon, a pre-cognitive but deeply affective and intelligent ancestral body distributed through space and time.
Although pre-modern societies knew about the important connection between the brain and cognitive processes and subjective experience, much of their medical practices, spiritual philosophies and cosmologies were based around the idea that the mind is seated at the heart. The heart-mind is the seat of the unconscious and affective dimensions of experience, which are greater in breadth and depth, even if more vague, than the “clear and distinct” forms and ideas entertained by conscious self-reflection. As civilized “rational animals,” we like to think that we are guided by our concepts and notions, but more often than not we are first and most strongly guided by our bodies, by the rhythms and pulses of the heart-mind rather than the cerebral functions of the brain-mind.
The pan-experientialism of Process thought is (or at least, can be, if properly emphasized) an affirmation of the primacy of the heart-mind. The minimal level of experience common to both a trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space and a supreme divine creature is the capacity to “prehend” others—the sympathetic capacity to feel the feelings of others as part of ones own being—and this process of causal prehension occurs at the subterranean level of perception, before the radiant light of self-consciousness comes to shine. There is a deep wisdom and supreme intelligence in this ancestral body, but the light of self-consciousness needs to be intentionally dimmed, at least temporarily, for this to be realized.
Holopoiesis 