Mind in the Making: Bringing Formal and Final Causes Back into Evolutionary Science

Reflections after my conversation with developmental biologist Michael Levin

Michael, host of the podcast Third Eye Drops, invited me and Mike Levin into dialogue. The video of that conversation is posted at the bottom of this page. I’ve had several conversations with Mike before (see below). In this post, I want to riff on some of the themes we explored this time.

I have always been fascinated by the challenge of understanding the human mind and its origins in the natural world. The fact that our minds can discover laws and intelligible patterns in nature suggests something profound not only about human cognition but also about the deep structure of reality itself. It indicates that minds are not a miraculous anomaly in the physical universe but a pervasive possibility.

One of the first provocations I encountered in Mike Levin’s work is that he asks us to consider how we each begin as a tiny packet of physics and chemistry—a fertilized egg—and end up becoming adult organisms capable of the kind of reflective abstraction exemplified by a philosopher like Descartes. Descartes famously proposed a dualism between mind and body, yet he himself began as a fertilized egg in his mother’s womb. While molecular biologists like Richard Dawkins still argue that somehow humans are unique in the biological world as the only creatures who can “rebel against their selfish genes,” contemporary developmental biology, especially in the way Mike frames it, is forcing us to transcend that old dualistic divide. It invites us to consider that we as human beings—with our capacity to explore possible forms in our imagination before deciding how to actualize them—are in fact continuous with the rest of the community of organisms on this planet, now re-conceived as agents of their own evolution.

What I find most exciting is the way Mike rethinks evolution. Traditionally, reductionistic biologists conceive evolution as an essentially random search through genetic microstates, with occasional mutations that may confer an advantage eventually getting “selected” (which isn’t agential selection but just means the environment allows the phenotypes those genetic mutations program to survive at higher rates). Instead, Mike describes evolution as a process that selects for ever-greater agency, where an increase in agency is measured by the ability to realize aims with a wider variety of means (ie, to solve the problems of life in ways that are not overly specialized to specific environmental conditions but generalize across environments). Agency is also always a function of collective or co-active decision-making—what can be understood as swarm intelligence. Rather than evolution having to stumble upon a phenotype or anatomical form through chance genetic mutations, cells and cellular collectives display some degree of agency—spontaneous decision-making and problem-solving ability. Much like we can imagine and explore various possibilities in our own minds, these cells navigate multiple developmental pathways, making decisions that are not merely repetitions of inherited genetic programs.

Mike’s work also reawakens a tradition sometimes referred to as “organicist,” attempting to bridge it with the standard mechanistic approach by placing simple machines along a continuum with more complex organisms. On one end, there might be simpler machines, and on the far other end, there might be something akin to Descartes himself or even forms of super intelligence we have not imagined yet. The definitions of “machine” and “organism” become fluid, which I think is a fascinating challenge. I am not opposed to this sort of continuum in principle, as it may just be a matter of definition. But my usual way of understanding the machine/organism distinction is to say the former, a machine, is a system engineered from the outside, with the shape of its parts and the goal it is intended to achieve being provided by an external designer; the latter, an organism, in contrast, is a system where the parts produce themselves for the sake of the whole to which they belong, with no external designer. What Mike’s approach signals is that human scientists can play the part of bioengineer to coax cellular collectives to adopt novel anatomies and aims not originally operative in the naturally evolved organisms they originate from. This isn’t the reverse engineering of life as such at the microscale, but the persuasion of already agential materials into new developmental pathways.

Talking about a “Platonic morphospace” in developmental biology lets us address what has been largely off-limits in modern science since the time of Descartes—namely formal and final causality. These non-mechanical kinds of causality were first articulated by Aristotle in a non-evolutionary context, but they can be adapted to elucidate contemporary empirical findings where it very much appears as though living organisms are drawing upon a reservoir of possibilities not already stored in their genome to achieve goals in novel environments. It is not sufficient as an explanation to say an organism is the accumulation of its genetic parts. Instead, there is a kind of emergent wholeness that is communicated across the entire cellular collective, luring its morphogenesis and, crucially, telling it when it has achieved its finished adult form. Individual cells do not have a blueprint of the final form; rather, the whole organism or tissue coordinates to manifest a pattern. This introduces a sense of formal causality (manifesting patterns of wholeness) and final causality (purpose and agency) back into our explanations.

Mike’s empirical work, I believe, helps demonstrate how these ideas of purpose and formal cause are necessary for an adequate explanation of what we actually see in the lab and in evolutionary history. It helps erode the rigid wall we once erected between “mind” and “matter.” By recognizing matter is not dead passive stuff but “agential material,” we begin to see how not only living organisms but human minds are possible—and so how science itself is possible. Scientific materialism told a story that might be convincing if you only focused on the inorganic world and exempted the knowing scientist from the equation determining everything else in the universe. But a truly comprehensive explanation must also account for the existence of explainers. The existence of scientific minds starts to make a lot more sense within a cosmos that is not merely driven by mechanical pushes from the past but is also drawn forward by the purposeful pull of future possibilities. Seeing nature in this way makes us feel more at home in the cosmos, because it suggests we, as intelligent agents, belong to an unbroken continuum of agency that pervades the entire universe all the way down and all the way up.

Mike’s work allows us to bring back form and teleology, but without slipping into external “design” arguments in the style of William Paley. Darwin, studying with Paley, initially recognized the complexity of living organisms as evidence of something that might look designed from the outside. But Darwin explained form primarily through descent with modification: organisms inherit their anatomical shapes from ancestors, shapes that happened to succeed in the survival game. Yet even Darwin’s theory hints at agency, especially when he discusses sexual selection, where the organism’s own choices influence evolutionary outcomes. Mike extends that thread further by foregrounding the active, decision-making processes occurring at the cellular level. Form and purpose are not imposed by an external designer, nor are they merely apparent artifacts of environmentally selected genetic copy machines: they are real causes operative in the collective agency of living beings.

Mike’s Platonic morphospace can be understood as a topos or continuum of possibilities available to cells and cellular collectives. Mind, in this sense, becomes the capacity to explore these adjacent possibilities—an activity we typically associate only with human imagination. Where is this mind? It is not confined to a single cell but spread throughout swarms of cells that communicate bioelectrically. Indeed, neurons are simply specialized versions of what all cells do to some extent. So mindlike activity, rather than being an exclusively human privilege, may be present wherever agents coordinate and make decisions together. In this view, Darwin’s emphasis on descent explains how existing forms persist, but it does not fully explain the creative search for and successful realization of new forms. There seems to be an improvisational agency, a real-time capacity to choose which among many latent possibilities to actualize.

Some of Mike’s recent work deals with “self-improvising memory,” describing how memories—whether genetic, anatomical, or human—are not static traces with simple locations. Instead, memory is a dynamic process of continual re-creation. Genes function somewhat like mnemonic devices or symbolic resources for cells, not fixed blueprints that control them. When we describe genes as a “language,” we must carry that metaphor all the way through: when it comes to human languaging, letters and words do not create and maintain meaning on their own; they require an interpreter. In the same way, a cell interprets its genome in context, incorporating past memories as needed for present challenges. The genome is not a static ideal form that dictates the phenotype, but rather a flexible store of possibilities that cells draw from, repair, and even rewrite according to evolving circumstances.

When we speak of a more profound kind of Platonism in biology, we should not imagine the genome as the seat of the forms. Instead, we might consider that what Mike calls the “Platonic morphospace” is a continuum of as yet unactualized possibility that organisms can harvest. These forms seem to be arranged or “tilted” in ways that make certain patterns more readily discoverable and realizable than others—an idea reminiscent of Whitehead’s notion of eternal objects and their “graded relevance” in relation to actual, concrete occasions of experience. Whitehead even introduces a sort of “divine” ordering function in his metaphysics to account for how some possibilities are more relevant or valuable than others. While we do not necessarily need to adopt his theological language, the central point is that we should be amazed the universe is so thoroughly intelligible, and that biological evolution repeatedly discovers complex forms much faster than random mutation could account for. Even beyond biology, least action principles in physics already signal this sort of tilting in the continuum of possibility allowing for what seems an awful lot like teleological behavior at the level of photons. This sense of “order for free” implies deeper structures of potentiality goading all self-organizing systems toward higher-value or higher-complexity forms, as if there were an aesthetic factor driving the evolutionary process.

When we look at the fractal nature of reality across scales, it becomes easier to accept that cognition might not be limited to human beings, or even to animals in a narrow sense. Cognition may be everywhere, to varying degrees, not just in brains but in the weather, in clouds of plasma in deep space, etc. Mike speaks of the “mind-blindness” that keeps us from recognizing intelligent agency elsewhere in nature. While this notion may seem speculative, it has a long philosophical pedigree running through Whitehead, Schelling, Leibniz, and Bruno, all the way back to Plato and his predecessors Empedocles and Heraclitus. And of course some form of panpsychism or animism has been the default world view of all Indigenous peoples for the vast majority of human history. Mind-blind materialism is a rather recent (and hopefully temporary) blip in our species intellectual history.

Seeing nature as shot through with agency has profound ethical implications. A mechanistic view suggests we might rearrange the dead parts of nature at will, imposing our designs on a passive substrate. But if the universe is full of other minds—other centers of agency capable of joy and suffering—we cannot simply engineer or exploit them. We need a model rooted in persuasion and collaboration, not brute force or external manipulation. This perspective places an important and weighty responsibility upon us: pansychism cannot be dismissed as just a product of wishful thinking, like “wouldn’t it be nice if everything was ensouled, how beautiful”; it may be a beautiful idea but it is also sublime in the traditional sense of awful! It seems to me far more unsettling than the classical mechanistic paradigm precisely because it demands of us a deep moral consideration for a much wider community of beings besides ourselves. This will become increasingly urgent as new forms of bioengineered and/or cyborg life begin to populate our eco-social environments.

Plato’s dialogues describe how human beings learned geometry, arithmetic, and timekeeping by observing the ordered motions of the stars, suggesting that the cosmos itself taught us these skills. Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and other founders of modern science similarly assumed a deep mathematical order and purposefulness in nature that our minds could grasp. Today, we need not speak of an external “Designer” in the old sense, but the very fact that the universe is intelligible calls us to look more carefully at the interplay of mind and nature. What if the emergence of mind in human beings is no accident? What if minds were active already in the celestial evolution of stars and galaxies, cellular collective and planetary climates?

In Whitehead’s metaphysics, reality is always a synthesis of actual occasions (which he describes as events or “drops” of experience) and the eternal forms that characterize them. Plato had given primacy to the transcendent forms, seeing the physical world as their incomplete imitation. Whitehead inverts that picture, giving primary value to the concrete immediacy of lived experience, while still recognizing that our experience is always informed by an ordered realm of potentials. Actual experience is in constant interplay with a network of as yet unactualized but relevant possibilities, such that neither pole, actual or potential could exist without the other.

This conception of a creative cosmos leads us back to biology, to Mike’s lab, and to this alchemical sense of accelerating the transmutation of, if not matter into mind, than of less agential materials into more agential materials. Just as alchemists once saw the elements as active and alive, Mike’s view of developmental biology treats cells as improvisational agents, not mere mechanical parts. If the evolutionary story is one of progressive metamorphosis—from physics and chemistry to life and, ultimately, to mind—then perhaps the next chapter is some form of “supermind,” an emergent form of collective agency we can scarcely imagine. Mike’s experimental work with novel living constructs (often referred to as xenobots or anthrobots) illustrates how cells, when freed from their usual developmental constraints, can spontaneously self-organize into motile, problem-solving collectives. This is reminiscent of the great 19th century evolutionary biologist and panpsychist Ernst Haeckel’s maxim “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” but it also points forward, suggesting cells retain ancestral memories and can adapt or rediscover forms that once worked for distant ancestors.