Patterns that matter

The core claim of Michael Levin’s Ingressing Minds paper: mind relates to body as math relates to physics. Just as primes and constants shape physical outcomes without being physical themselves, Levin says minds are the same kind of thing, just further along a spectrum of agency. To simplify for myself, I imagined this as two spaces.

An un-intermediated, many-to-many coupling exists between the two spaces, up and down the scales, with no third thing in between.

It’s a cute model, but much of the interestingness of the paper comes from Levin assigning a higher weight of agency to the pattern side. We are patterns incarnate. Our bodies are pointers. Matter constrains what comes through, but doesn’t make the content. We are patterns that matter.

With my coarse comprehension of the paper and Levin’s stated stances, I pushed a bit further.

I don’t like the concept of a division between pattern and matter space.

Levin himself claims no magical line that sets where consciousness emerges, but still he keeps the divide between pattern space and matter space. So perhaps pattern space is closer to a continuous field or manifold, and a mind is a fracture into a discrete entity? Like taking water from a stream into a glass. A path-dependent and opportunistic happening. Levin’s own language half-supports this. Patterns can “pinch off” as individuals. A split embryo making normal twins suggests the number of minds isn’t fixed in advance.

Going further, I started to wonder if the discreteness belongs to the observer, not the spaces themselves. Our ability as mattered patterns to look at other mattered patterns and draw boundaries may be nothing more than another feedback loop between pattern space and matter space itself. And, because of the nesting and the feedback and the immediacy of the intermediation between matter, pattern and patterns that matter, that boundarising is consequential.