In this dialogue for the International Whitehead Conference’s biophilosophy track, Michael Levin and I explored the deep resonances and possible tensions between his empirical research program in bioelectricity, basal cognition, and “ingressing minds,” and Alfred North Whitehead’s speculative cosmology. I began by attempting to translate the conclusions of Levin’s “Ingressing Minds” paper into Whiteheadese. I suggested that Whitehead would distinguish between the continuum of pure potentiality—the realm of “eternal objects” or forms—and the discrete actual occasions that select, emphasize, and finitely realize some constellation of those possibilities. The Platonic space of forms is not itself discrete in the manner of actual entities. Discreteness arises in the becoming of occasions. I also argued that while Whitehead would affirm a kind of feedback between the physical world and forms, this would not mean that the forms themselves change, or that new forms are invented. Rather, as the actual world evolves, the relevance of forms is reordered. The passage of time, as Whitehead puts it, “casts the shadow of truth back upon eternity, enriching it.” I discussed this idea at more length in dialogue with Stuart Kauffman a few days ago:
Mike’s language of the “positive pressure” of patterns that “haunt” matter struck me as strongly convergent with Whitehead’s affirmation of the “eternal urge of desire,” the Eros of the universe, which functions not as a mechanical push from behind but as a lure toward more intense contrasts among unrealized possibilities. Mike asks in his essay whether this pressure could be quantified. I framed Whitehead’s distinction here between extensive order, which can be measured and treated statistically, and intensive order, which is felt, an aesthetic order, and not straightforwardly countable. We may be able to measure observed patterns of ingression statistically, but the underlying relevance that drives novel ingression from within the concrescence of each occasion of experience is not itself reducible to statistical quantification. I unpack this idea at greater length (also in dialogue with Stu Kauffman’s ideas) here:
Mike’s claim that matter “midwifes” life and mind, rather than manufacturing them, also seems deeply consonant with Whitehead’s view that physiology “shelters” and amplifies experience rather than producing it. Bodily organization provides a protected environment in which higher-grade occasions of experience can arise. In this context, I emphasized Whitehead’s direct inversion of Descartes: “the thought is the constituent operation in the creation of the occasional thinker.” The thinker is not a pre-existing substance that has thoughts as accidental properties; rather, the thinker is the final end of the thoughts. For Whitehead, the prehended pattern is not the agent using the prehender or the experient as a “scratchpad.” Rather, the pattern, the thought, is itself a constituent in the self-creation of the experient, the thinker.
One of my questions for Mike concerned whether he thought the agency is located in the pattern or in the one feeling the pattern. What’s the locus of agency? Is agency located in the pattern, in the experiencing occasion, or in the interface between pattern and organism? Mike resisted the search for a single locus. For him, organisms are ecosystems of patterns distributed across a full spectrum, from fleeting thoughts to personality fragments to whole human-scale selves, perhaps nested in still larger agencies. He does place agency on the side of the pattern, but only with the crucial qualification that “we are the patterns.” Patterns are not ghostly visitors entering a merely physical body from outside. Bodies are not just physical blobs, nor are they just one intelligence. They are ecological hierarchies of many nested intelligences: molecular networks, cells, tissues, organs, and organism-scale systems, each driven by patterns with degrees of agency. Mike described luring as bidirectional: patterns attract attention, but organisms also seek patterns. He connected this to his work with Chris Fields on the symmetry between problem-solvers and the solutions they seek. I framed this as a double distribution of agency: horizontally, across cellular collectives on the biological scale; vertically, in the prehensive relation between prehenders and the possibilities that lure them.
We then turned to question of the permanence or evolvability of forms. Levin expressed skepticism about the idea of truly unchanging eternal forms. His preference is for a more dynamical picture, where even mathematical structures may shift on very long timescales. He offered a thought experiment: many people are willing to imagine that the speed of light might change over cosmic history, but would find it incoherent to say that the digits of e were once different. This suggests that people tacitly regard mathematical structures as more stable than physical constants, and not merely as human constructions. I noted that Whitehead, like C. S. Peirce and more recently Lee Smolin, treats physical laws as historically emergent. But Whitehead would still distinguish the mere definiteness of forms from the determinateness of actualization. Eternal objects are definite possibilities, but only actual occasions decide among them, allowing some to ingress into concrete fact. Only with such actualization does determinate truth become possible. In the realm of eternal objects as such, nothing is yet true or false, because pure potentials are not yet propositions about an actual world. The law of noncontradiction applies to determinate fact and to propositions entertained in relation to fact, not to the indefinite togetherness of unrealized possibilities prior to their selection by an occasion of experience.
I asked Mike about the origin of form in the living world. This would lead into a fascinating discussion of his notion of “free lunches”: cases where engineering effort, evolutionary selection, and learning all appear insufficient to explain the order observed in a system. Typically we say there’s heredity and there’s the environment providing boundary conditions. This is natural selection, the standard Darwinian story that form is just the leftovers of environmental filtering of random variations. Ingression implies a free lunch. It’s not just leftovers, but the delivery of a fresh meal preheated in a latent space. He distinguished this from StuKauffman’s “order for free,” while recognizing Kauffman as the “granddaddy” of this line of thought. Stu showed that random networks can exhibit interesting mathematical properties like autocatalytic closure, but Mike thinks current findings are only the tip of the iceberg. Free lunches seem to span many orders of organization, from static patterns, to time-extended developmental sequences (including xenobot stages), to behavioral policies, and even in very high-grade conscious minds. Mike’s hypothesis is that free lunches may be the main driver of evolution, with conventional Darwinian and emergence-based explanations accounting for less than we assume. Molecular networks may already be primed, asymmetrically biased toward agency and intelligence. The arrow toward greater intelligence may predate biology, and perhaps even physics as we usually understand it, arising from the mathematical structure of latent space itself. Mike also raised the open question of whether computation can be performed in latent space without thermodynamic cost in physical space; preliminary work, he suggested, indicates that this may be possible.
We also discussed centralization and multicellularity. Following Whitehead, I suggested that animals may have a more “monarchical” organization, in which experience is gathered into a centralized cerebral organ, whereas plants might be more democratic. Mike was skeptical of this distinction, or at least wary of treating it as absolute. Centralization, he argued, is highly scale-dependent and observer-dependent. What appears centralized at one scale may be a distributed network at another. He also stressed the problem of which interface we query when we study cognition. Even conclusions about unconscious learning are often calibrated by asking the language-using left hemisphere to report on what “the organism” knows. This risks mistaking one communicative interface for the whole cognitive ecology of the body. Levin mentioned active work on tools for communicating with non-linguistic components of the body, precisely to get beyond the tyranny of the verbal-reporting interface.
I then summarized Whitehead’s philosophical project as an attempt at civilizational coherence. Whitehead wanted to integrate relativity and quantum theory, overcome the subject/object split and the bifurcation of nature, and give mind a home within the universe rather than leaving it outside as an inexplicable spectator. But his aim was not only scientific. He sought to integrate scientific knowledge with art, literature, religion, and spiritual life—to recover kosmology in the ancient sense. I described his speculative method as “descriptive generalization”: metaphysics takes what the special sciences have discovered and generalizes it to create categories that are mutually illuminating. Metaphysics is not in the business of producing testable hypotheses in the ordinary scientific sense, but of rendering the discoveries of the sciences coherent in the widest possible context.
The dialogue culminated in a discussion of the paradigm shift Mike’s work may imply, beyond both neo-Darwinism and intelligent design. We agreed that the neo-Darwinian and intelligent-design camps often share a hidden assumption: that order is rare and expensive, and therefore requires some special explanation. In my view, the neo-Darwinian framework gives ammunition to intelligent design theorists precisely by leaving explanatory gaps it cannot fill. Mike’s empirical program offers a third way. It shows that the standard story was always too thin, but without invoking an external designer. I mentioned my recent conversation with Stephen Meyer as an example of how genetic reductionism and intelligent design remain trapped in the same game.
Both presuppose that order must be either painstakingly assembled by blind mechanism or miraculously imposed by an external intelligence. Mike’s ingression framework suggests an alternative, that the space of possible forms is already structured, already fecund, already luring evolution toward more and more intense forms of agential experience. I framed his research program as an empirical realization of what Whitehead described more poetically as the Eros of the universe.
Mike closed by pointing toward several forthcoming lines of work. A preprint on pre-replicator dynamics—what happens to pattern and agency before replicators exist—is expected imminently, and he invited me to attempt a Whiteheadian interpretation. He also mentioned forthcoming empirical work on time in the interaction between the non-physical and the physical; continued work with Chris Fields on the symmetry between problem-solvers and solutions; experiments giving physical embodiment to static mathematical structures; and papers on quantifying free lunches and specifying what kinds of order are obtainable. He also has an upcoming conversation with Stu Kauffman on order-for-free and the adjacent possible. We agreed that further translation is needed between his empirical framework and Whitehead’s philosophical categories, and that the International Whitehead Conference may provide a useful setting for testing and refining that translation.
At stake throughout the dialogue was not simply whether Whitehead can be retrofitted onto contemporary biology, nor whether Mike’s work can be recruited to support a pre-existing metaphysical scheme. The deeper issue is whether biology is beginning to discover experimentally what the philosophy of organism had already intuited: that life is not an improbable accident emergent from a dead, dumb substrate, that form is not an abstraction projected by human minds, and that agency is not suddenly inserted into nature at the level of animal or human consciousness. Rather, the universe is organized by potent patterns that become increasingly explicit as energy organizes itself into living, feeling, thinking societies.
