Conceptual Prehension

We are alive. Being alive is dynamic change, not just to move but transform and grow. How we change is from who we are what we could be. We start with the physical and experiential reality and look outside of ourselves for those improvements we would like to add to our current condition, we want to grow. This growth Whitehead calls prehension as well, but it is a mental prehension, we (the current version of ourselves) are taken over by a more mature version. So the two poles of prehension are physical prehension (who we start as -- focus on the past) and mental prehension (who we could be under the circumstances -- focus on the future). All entities function in the same way, we can feel this is true for us as human beings but we can see it in all living things to a greater or lesser degree. All really real entities, those that constitute reality, are alive in this way from seeming inert forms such as rocks and materials to complex conscious animals and beyond.