However this problematic question is answered, there can not be a
simple physical feeling of a future actual entity.
But if all conceptual feelings could be derived
from physical feelings, the category of conceptual valuation would suffice.
Over a long period of time there is mutual cancellation of
physical feelings which results in a gradual decay of matter.
This second brain influences our emotions, even though they're sometimes expressed
as physical feelings rather than thoughts that are easy to articulate.
Pure mental feelings and
pure physical feelings are exactly parallel in that their origination does not involve consciousness.
Our immediate experience of relationships, derivative, actual, and effective, is founded
on physical feelings.
A
hybrid physical feeling is the perception of an actual entity by means of that entity's projected conceptual feelings.
Positively, it means that novel forms or structures can be integrated and reintegrated (at levels of increasing complexity) with
physical feelings in such a way that the complexity, intensity, inclusiveness, and direction of these feelings can be altered.
Thus the datum for
physical feeling by a new occasion consists of some of the constituent feelings of every occasion in its «actual world.»
In a simple
physical feeling there is a double particularity in reference to the actual world, the particular cause and the particular effect.
Thus from the synthesis in the proposition there results an elimination of the objective efficacy for that
particular physical feeling from whence the actual entity is abstracted.
Whitehead introduces God's consequent nature for a number of reasons, one of them being that this integration of God's conceptual feelings with
physical feelings makes propositions and consciousness as subjective form possible, and this makes it conceivable that God possesses consciousness.
Hence, we must attribute to God not only the conceptual ordering of the eternal objects by virtue of which he lures the occasions of the world toward order and value; we must attribute to him as to all other actual
entities physical feelings as well.
In its most important function, a transmuted feeling is a
complex physical feeling of a nexus whose separate members are felt as requiring each other (PR 384).
Physical feelings also have the advantage of relating more readily to the physical pole they constitute, although then it is not clear why we do not have «mental feelings» designated in parallel fashion.
Just as there is mutual determination
between physical feelings in efficient causation, there is mutual interaction between the coercive and the persuasive, between the physical pole and the mental pole (PR 343, 470).
Concern with the deepest reaches of relational
physical feelings combined with the widest range of conceptual generality in the unity of an act of experience is characteristic of Whitehead's value theory as a whole.
Broadly differentiated initial data are capable of yielding connections, discriminations, and contrasts which provide an extensive relatedness for
physical feeling at the causal level and for subsequent integration in the higher phases of experience.
In this process the
original physical feelings of causal efficacy are submerged (not eliminated) by an inrush of conceptual feelings, so that the throbbing causal world of the immediate past now appears as a passive display of qualities «presented» to our senses.
It is possible that the child's experience of trying of new foods in the modelling situation is positively reinforced by the pleasant
physical feelings experienced when they eat the healthy foods that are being modelled for them, making them more likely to try new foods again in the future.
In the case of a simple
physical feeling X belonging to a new actual entity A, the feeling Y by which X objectifies the past actual entity B is called the «objective datum» of X. Whitehead describes this second subphase in the following passage: