CONCEPT
Subjective Aim
The felt directedness of an occasion toward what it is becoming — Whitehead's name for the lure of feeling that guides concrescence, and the capacity that marks the boundary of what the machine cannot provide.
Subjective aim is the process's sense of its own direction — not a plan formulated in advance and then executed, but a felt evaluation that emerges within the concrescence itself, shifting as new data are integrated. In human creative experience, the subjective aim is what produces the felt sense that one sentence is right and another is wrong, that one connection is genuine and another forced, that the work is heading somewhere meaningful. It is, as Whitehead called it, 'the lure of feeling' — the pull toward a particular pattern of integration among the many possibilities available.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept sits at the heart of Whitehead's account of what is irreducible about subjective experience. Every occasion has its subjective aim; this is part of what makes every occasion a genuine creative act rather than a mechanical reshuffling of given data. But the intensity and complexity of the subjective aim varies enormously across