The Logos and the Ingressing Mind

Over four weeks I wrote five essays, each of which corrected something in the one before. It was an honest way of working, but hard on readers. Someone who read only the first two would credit me with views I have since given up.

In this piece I have put the argument into the order I think it should have had. Where I changed my mind I have said so.

The series began with a paper by Michael Levin. He proposes that a body is an interface to a space of patterns, that some of these patterns are minds, and that they ingress wherever matter is suitably arranged. I responded as a musician and a Catholic, and I have no training in biology or philosophy.

The first thing I withdraw is the picture of a door. In the first two essays I wrote as if patterns, the Spirit and life itself arrive from somewhere else. I had taken the picture over from ordinary bodily experience without thinking about it. Reading Jung and Pauli made me question it, and Levin's example of the cicadas persuaded me. The prime numbers and the insects correspond exactly, and nothing passed from one to the other.

The second essay contrasted acquiring with receiving, and I suggested that a grasping civilization needs to become more receptive. I now think this was badly put. People who are merely open, with no shape of their own, are easily used, and institutions are glad to have them. The real alternative to grasping is being able to answer. What I wrote there about friendship, apology and the valley of dry bones still seems right to me. I would only change the word I used to sum it up.

I also misjudged Jung. I had intended to present him as a serious alternative to my own view and leave it there. In the event his account of God's presence was better than mine, and I learned what the creed means about the Trinity by working out why I disagreed with him. It was a surprise to be put right about indwelling by a psychologist.

Finally, I think Levin should reconsider the word ingress. He describes the relation of pattern and body in two ways. In one, the body is a thin client connected to a server in another realm. In the other, he says that whether something is an object or a pattern depends on one's perspective. A door appears only in the first. If he holds the second, as I suspect, then patterns do not enter bodies. They emerge in them.

First, the world can be read. When I understand a proof or a score or another person, I meet something I did not put there. The same is true of the clusters of airway cells that helped damaged nerve tissue to heal without having been taught to. Christians explain this by the Logos, the Word through whom all things were made. Levin's experiments cannot prove that, but they reminded me how remarkable it is.

Second, nothing has to arrive in order to be read. A legible thing is already present, and what changes is that someone learns to read it.

Third, the world is given by God and is distinct from him. I used to imagine this distinction as a wall at the outer edge of things. Augustine says that God is more inward than his inmost part, and I now think the distinction is found within every created thing, including me.

Fourth, the Holy Spirit is both gift and giver. Augustine argues that Gift is one of the Spirit's names. This is why God can dwell in a person without coming from elsewhere. Those in whom the Spirit dwells become more themselves. At Pentecost each person in the crowd heard the apostles in his own language.

Fifth, a person is a creature who can be asked. Levin proposes that we identify things by the tools that work on them. Questions work only on persons, and God regularly uses them. He asks Adam where he is and asks Bartimaeus what he wants, and he sends an angel to Mary with a proposal and waits for her reply.

Sixth, the Word took a body as his own. Besides instantiation, ingress and indwelling there is therefore a fourth relation, which the tradition calls assumption. Levin's scheme has no place for it, since his space of patterns has no author. It also implies that our bodies are part of who we are.

Seventh, a whole can be formed from many members in two ways. Levin has shown how cells do it, by sharing stress and pooling their memories. This is healthy in a body. Among persons it produces something like Babel, and what Paul calls a Power. In the other way the members keep their names. I called this a communion attractor, hoping that people who do not share my faith might look for examples. Christians attribute it to the Holy Spirit.

Looking back over the five essays, I see that I wrote a good deal about the Word and the Spirit and very little about the Father. A reader might think I had forgotten him. In fact I referred to him constantly without using his name, every time I described the world as given.

According to an old formula, which the Catechism quotes, all things are from the Father, through the Son and in the Holy Spirit. Basil of Caesarea describes the Father as the origin of created things, the Son as their maker and the Spirit as the one who brings them to completion. The questions I kept returning to in these essays correspond to the three parts of the formula. I asked why anything is given, why it can be understood, and how many people can become one while remaining many.

This should not be taken to mean that the three persons have separate tasks. The Church teaches that everything God does in the world is done by all three together. The formula describes a single act, which begins in the Father's giving, is expressed in the Word and is completed in the communion of the Spirit.

It seems to me that Levin's scheme corresponds to the second part of the formula only. His space of forms resembles the Logos, as far as a biologist's concept can. Since he has no giver, the capacities he finds in nature have to be free lunches. Since he has nothing like the communion of the Spirit, the only bond he can describe between individuals is one that merges them. I mean this as a friendly observation. His account has difficulties at just the points where a Christian would speak of the Father and the Spirit.

I have attributed many views to Michael Levin in these essays, and he has had no opportunity to reply. I should be clear about how much I have learned from him.

Before reading him I had no idea how a collective self is physically formed, and his account of cells sharing stress and losing track of their own memories was new to me. His cognitive light cone gave me a way to think about the scope of a mind. My definition of a person comes from his question about which tools work on a thing. I also admire his courage. He is a working scientist with a laboratory and a reputation, and he says publicly that physicalism is incomplete.

I disagree with him on four points. Because his space of patterns has no author, its contents can be discovered but cannot be given. The bond he describes between cells depends on their losing their separate identities, and he does not consider what this would mean for beings with names. His measure of mind takes account of breadth and ignores depth, so it would rank a mother absorbed in her baby below almost anyone. And the word ingress conflicts with what he says elsewhere about perspective.

He is always willing to say what evidence would count against him, and I ought to do the same. My claim implies that there are communities in which coordination and the independence of the members increase together. A workshop whose former apprentices send commissions back to it might be one. Cells and their mitochondria might be another, or a choir that improves as its singers become better soloists. If careful study showed that in all such cases the members were quietly losing their independence after all, I would have to give up the idea of a communion attractor. I expect the evidence to go the other way, but it is a question that can be investigated.

Several questions remain open.

In the fourth essay I relied on the claim that Mary could have refused. I believe this. The Church also teaches that she was full of grace from the beginning of her life and was prepared by God for this moment. I accept both teachings and cannot explain how they fit together. I have written in three essays that the Spirit's help left her answer her own, and I still do not really understand it.

I said I half agreed with Blake that Enoch escaped death by making things, and I am still unsure which half. I am convinced that God can be met in the practice of an art. I do not think art saves people, and my acquaintance with musicians confirms this.

I have repeatedly declined to say whether there is a mind behind the Powers, and Levin is equally undecided. I am less comfortable with this than I was. The orchestra I described felt, from the inside, as if something were present besides the conductor and the players.

The hardest question concerns coincidences. I distinguished those that serve a Power, those that merely rhyme, and those that belong to providence. In theory the distinction is clear enough. In practice I doubt I could say, on a particular afternoon, which kind I was dealing with. The tradition advises us to judge by the fruits, which takes years and requires friends who are free to tell us we are wrong. I accept the advice, though I wish there were a quicker method.

If I had to sum up the month in a sentence, I would say that the world is given by the Father, made legible in the Word and shared in the Spirit, and that a person is a creature who can be asked whether he will accept it.

The rest of what I wrote depends on this. The airway cells show how legible the world is. The tower of Babel shows a way of sharing that destroys the people who share. At Nazareth a person is asked, and her answer is awaited.

At the end of the first essay I wrote that attention is already a kind of answer. I would now put it differently. By paying attention we come to hear what we are being asked. The answer is whatever we then do about it, in the particular place where we live and with the people we live among.