CONCEPT
Prehension
Prehension is the most basic operation in Whitehead's metaphysics: the way one actual occasion takes hold of the settled data of prior occasions and draws them into its own process of becoming. The term is deliberately neutral between conscious and non-conscious grasping. A quantum event prehends the quantum events that preceded it. A cell prehends its chemical environment. A human mind prehends memory, sensation, and half-formed intuitions. Every prehension has two sides: positive, in which a datum is incorporated into the occasion's synthesis, and negative, in which a datum is deliberately excluded. Both are essential; an occasion that included everything without exclusion would achieve no determinate pattern at all.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept extends and revises the classical notion of perception. In the empiricist tradition from Locke through Hume to Kant, perception was treated as a conscious mental act performed by a perceiving subject upon passive data. Whitehead considered this picture doubly inadequate: it restricted the relation to conscious beings,