Receptive Without Being a Container

In the last essay I gave up the idea that anything crosses a boundary. The world is legible, I said, and a person becomes able to read it. I was pleased with this for about a day, and then I began to worry about where it leads.

If nothing arrives, and mind and world are made of the same stuff, then it is easy to conclude that a person is just a place where patterns happen to show up. On that view I am a kind of screen. Levin calls the body an interface, and I doubt he means anything sinister by it, but an interface is something you use, and nobody asks it for its opinion.

My distrust of this comes from rehearsal rooms. Musicians sometimes say of a colleague that she is very responsive, and it can mean two quite different things. It can mean that she listens well. It can also mean that she has no ideas of her own and will follow whoever is loudest. Anyone in the room can tell which is meant. On paper the two look alike, and I think theories of mind often confuse them.

On his website Levin allows himself to speculate more freely than in the paper. At one point he wonders whether his space of patterns might be under positive outward pressure. The forms, he suggests, may be pressing to be embodied and looking for matter arranged well enough to carry them. He puts it cautiously. It struck me as the most theological thing he has written, though I doubt he intended it that way.

The opening of Genesis has a similar pressure in it. The Spirit moves over the water before there is any form, then God speaks, and the forms follow. Christians have always thought that things were wanted before they existed and that the wanting came from God. When this happens to a particular person we call it a vocation. A vocation comes as a call, and the person called is free to refuse it.

Nothing of the kind happens in Levin's dish. Nobody asked the airway cells whether they wished to become a small swimming body. The pattern found them suitably arranged, and that was that. As far as I can tell this is how embodiment works throughout nature. The Annunciation is different. In Luke's account an angel comes to a girl in Nazareth and tells her what God proposes. She asks how it can be, and he explains. Then she says, let it be done to me according to your word. The Catechism describes this as her free consent. There is a homily by Bernard of Clairvaux, which I first heard as a boy, in which the whole world holds its breath while it waits for her to reply.

I think this makes Mary the one case of an interface that was asked. A crystal has no say in its geometry and the anthrobot had no say in its form, whereas God's taking flesh was put to a person and depended on her answer. If Levin is right that forms press toward bodies, then at Nazareth the pressure stopped and waited. I have begun to think that this is what separates a person from an organism. An organism can simply be used by a pattern, and a person has to be asked.

The painting at the top of this page is an Annunciation by Albert Bouts. I look mostly at the room. It has a tiled floor and a window with the shutter half closed. There is a bed with curtains and a prayer desk with a book lying open on it. Someone with settled habits lives here. The angel has come into a place that already had its own order before he arrived.

I think the container picture of receptivity misses this. A container is useful because it is empty, and the emptier the better. Mary's room is full. It has her furniture in it and her prayers, and she had presumably made plans that did not include an angel. She receives him as the particular person she already is. When the Church wants to show what reception looks like, she shows a woman in her own room who is asked a question and answers it.

There is a popular imitation of receptivity that consists in having no shape at all. People describe themselves as open to everything, and they mean it as a virtue. I have known a few, and they were hard to have a conversation with, since there was little in them for anything to be received by. In the painting the shutter is half closed.

Levin has a practical way of dealing with the old argument about whether living things are machines. He suggests that we stop asking what a thing is and ask which tools work on it. A surgeon gets good results by treating the body as a mechanism. A psychotherapist who did the same would get nowhere. In practice, he says, a thing is whatever set of tools it responds to. He has found that cells respond to something more like persuasion than rewiring, provided the signals are right.

If you follow his scale of tools upward, from wrenches to signals and beyond, I think you come eventually to the question. A crystal cannot be asked anything. A dog can be asked a few things. A person can be asked almost anything, and may say no, and the asking does not settle what the answer will be. By Levin's own test, then, a person is the kind of thing on which questions work.

It is striking how often God deals with people this way in scripture. After Adam and Eve have eaten the fruit, God walks in the garden and calls out, where are you? When the blind beggar Bartimaeus shouts at him on the road out of Jericho, Jesus asks what he wants, though it could hardly be more obvious. To Mary he sends an angel with a proposal. Levin's best tool for a cell is a signal that the cell will follow. God, who could presumably do as he liked, asks questions and lets people refuse.

The same thought applies in the other direction, which I find a little unnerving. To pray is to assume that God can be asked for things. On Levin's scale that puts God among the beings who can be addressed and who answer, at the far end. The tradition adds that prayer tends to change the person praying more than it changes God. That makes sense to me if the top of the scale is a relationship between persons and no longer a technique. So my working definition of a person, which I expect will need repair, is someone who can be asked, who can refuse, and who can ask in turn.

Accompanists learn this at the piano. A singer comes in with a song, and the pianist has to take in her tempo, her breathing and the places where she wants to hold back. A poor accompanist plays the notes as written and leaves her to fit in. Another kind follows her so slavishly that she has nothing to lean on and begins to sing cautiously. A good one can hear where the phrase is heading and gets there slightly ahead of her, with some weight of his own, perhaps by declining to hurry. She sings better for it. He has received the song by giving her an answer to it.

In the first essay I listed three ways in which a pattern can be related to a body. A crystal instantiates a geometry. An agent can act through a body, which is what Levin means by ingress, and in his strongest version the body is a thin client while the pattern is kept on a server. And God can dwell in a creature without becoming part of it. I have come to think there is a fourth relation, and that Christianity depends on it more than on the other three.

John says that the Word became flesh. He could have said that the Word made use of flesh, or passed through it, and he did not. The Council of Chalcedon worked hard to rule out misunderstandings, and the Catechism still repeats its formula, that Christ is one person in two natures without confusion, change, division or separation. The traditional word for this is assumption. It means that the Word took a human nature as his own, in the way that my hands are my own.

I do not see how Levin's scheme could include this, and the reason has nothing to do with science. His space of patterns has no author. It contains forms that come up through whatever will carry them, and nobody in it is in a position to take a body as his own. Christians claim that the author of all the forms became a man. If that is true, his body was never an interface for him. It was simply him.

I think this affects how we should regard our own bodies. I used to think of the body as a means of access, and I now think of it as the way a person is present and gives answers. Mary answered with her voice, and an accompanist answers with his hands. I have known singers whose voices thinned as they aged. They had not lost their connection to anything. They went on being present with the voice they still had, and a few of them were more moving at seventy than at forty. Christians hope for the resurrection of the body, and the tradition admits that it does not know the details. At the least it means that a person's shape is part of the person.

Levin has a measure for minds that he calls the cognitive light cone. It is the range of things a creature is able to care about. For a bacterium this covers a few minutes and a few thousandths of a millimetre, and for a dog the yard and the afternoon. Human beings can worry about the climate fifty years from now. He says that if you tell him the size of the things that stress you, he can guess what kind of mind you have. I have found this useful ever since I read it. The scale only goes one way, though, from small to large.

Paul's letter to the Philippians describes a movement in the opposite direction. Christ, who was in the form of God, emptied himself and took the form of a servant and was born as a man. His concern had been without limit, and for thirty years it was confined to a few miles of hill country, a dozen friends and his mother. On Levin's scale this would count as an enormous loss of mind. Christians call it the glory of God. I think they are right, and that the scale is missing something.

What I think it lacks is any measure of depth. Minds differ in how much they can care about, and they also differ in how fully they can attend to one thing. A woman with a newborn cares about very little else for some months. Nobody who has watched this supposes that she has become less intelligent. Levin mentions the bodhisattva, who cares for every living being, and I respect the ideal. Mary's attention in that room was on one child. It seems to me that persons are distinguished by being able to narrow their concern to someone in particular, out of love, and that in the Incarnation God did the same.

At the end of the last essay I said I would be more careful with the word receive. I think I can use it again, provided I remember that someone is always doing the receiving. That person has a body and a room with a particular shape, and could have declined. I believe the Logos is the reason there is anything to read. The Spirit is the one I rely on when I am asked for more than I can manage. Luke says that the Spirit came upon Mary before she gave her answer, and the answer was still hers to give.

In rehearsal I now ask a simple thing about any kind of receiving, which is whether it leaves the person better able to answer, and that includes being able to say no. I would like communities to protect this in their members before anything else. Openness is easy to come by. It is harder to keep one's own shape, as Mary kept hers, with her shutter half closed and her book on the desk, and still say yes.