The Readable World

Three days ago I read a new paper by the biologist Michael Levin, and I have not been able to leave it alone since. I am not a biologist. I read it the way a musician reads a score in an unfamiliar hand: slowly, and for what it might let me do.

One example has stayed with me. Take cells from the lining of an adult human airway, the tissue that clears your throat without asking you, and give them room to reorganize. They assemble themselves into small motile bodies. When researchers placed aggregates of these bodies across a scratch in cultured neuronal tissue, the tissue beneath the bridge grew to close the gap.

It is not a miniature person, though, and nothing about it settles a question of mind. What makes it strange is more specific. This particular arrangement has no history as an independently evolved organism. Yet it can draw on capacities its cells acquired in very different circumstances, and it is already competent at something no one arranged for it to do.

Levin himself goes much further than the finding does, and his interpretation should not quietly borrow the authority of the experiment. He proposes that a body is less a machine than an interface: that arranging matter in the right way gives access to a structured space of patterns, that some of those patterns organize goal-directed activity, and that some may even be kinds of minds. The competencies that arrive this way, unpaid for by selection or design, he calls a kind of free lunch.

One can resist that reading without denying the result. A system can astonish us simply because we had not followed what its parts, its arrangement and its circumstances were already able to do together, and surprise is not by itself a sign that anything arrived from elsewhere. I hold that caution. But I notice it does not dissolve the thing that caught me, which was never the machinery.

What caught me was a question underneath the biology. Where is a mathematical relation before anyone recognizes it? The question may be badly put. It still keeps me from treating understanding as though it were the manufacture of everything understood. When I finally see why a proof holds, I do not feel that I have invented its necessity. I feel that I have been let in on it.

I do not mean that a person is an equation, or that a piece of music has one correct reading. I mean that understanding can meet something it did not put there. A composition can demand a change because a relation I had not noticed has become audible. Another person can surprise me precisely because I had misread them. In each case there is more to be found than I brought.

Beside the paper I wrote two words: John 1. In the beginning was the Word, and through him everything came to be. I have read that opening often enough for its strangeness to wear smooth. This time I heard in it a claim about why anything can be understood at all: that intelligibility belongs first to the source of the world, and not only to the minds that turn up inside it.

That last reading is mine, not the paper's. Levin's experiments do not demonstrate it, and his patterns cannot simply be renamed the Logos. If there are unfamiliar minds, they would still be particular creatures, and their existence would leave the older question exactly where it was: why is there a world in which anything, mind or mathematics, can be found and understood? What the science did was make that question vivid to me again, after years of repeating it too easily.

The word that matters most to me is personal, and it is where my thinking is least secure. An orderly world could still be an indifferent one. Mathematics does not tell me that anyone is loved. Christianity says more than order: it says the Word through whom the world exists entered it, as a body, as someone who can be met. I cannot draw that from the intelligibility of things. I can only say that a readable world seems to me a more hospitable place in which to hope it is true.

If the Word is why the world can be read, there is a second name I have used all my life without hearing it as sharply as I did this week. The creed calls the Holy Spirit the Lord, the giver of life. I did not learn that from Levin. Reading him, I heard what it might be answering.

The Logos, as I hold it, is why creation has intelligible form at all. What I mean by the Spirit is harder to state. Three different things crowd into the word life: the biological life of a cell, the agency of a person who chooses and acts, and communion with God. They are not the same. In my faith they are related, and the Spirit is called the giver of life in a way that bears on all three without being reducible to any one. This is only how I hold the claims together. The Church teaches that the persons of the Trinity act together in everything God does.

Levin's paper also helped me to separate three things. Instantiation: a physical structure realizes a pattern, as a crystal expresses a geometry. Ingress: a created agent acts through, or becomes associated with, an embodiment. Indwelling: God is present to a creature without becoming one more component of it. Nothing in the experiments shows a mind that existed beforehand entering a body; that is not what the airway cells are. I keep the three apart because they are easy to collapse, and the third is unlike the other two.

What Christianity says of that indwelling is the strangest of the three, and the most hopeful. It does not mean another finite mind has moved in and displaced the person's own agency. It means very nearly the opposite: under the Spirit a person becomes more fully alive, and more fully himself.

The book of Acts tells of a morning when the Spirit is given and a crowd hears the same message, each in his own language. I used to read the miracle as translation. This week I noticed the detail that carries the meaning: the many languages are not abolished. Difference is not the problem being solved.

This is why the Christian account makes me suspicious of the familiar picture of a collective intelligence, one great mind operating through many people. The indwelling of the Spirit gives me a different starting point. A power that wants to absorb says: become me; what I hear at Pentecost is closer to the opposite, become more fully yourself, and so more able to be in communion with others.

That need not mean remaining as I am. Some of what I call myself consists of habits that make love difficult. Communion might preserve the person while changing him more deeply than he would have chosen.

It points to a kind of unity I find hard to describe and harder to forget: a whole that is more unified without being any less plural, people who are more themselves for being joined. I cannot prove it. I think I have believed it a long time, and only this week found a reason to press on it.

There is a difficulty hidden in my own language. To speak of a pattern received, or a Spirit given, is already to imagine two sides: something that receives, and something that arrives from beyond it. I am not sure that picture is always right.

Here I have been reading the long correspondence between Carl Jung and the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who spent years circling the relation between mind and matter. Their letters explore whether psyche and matter might share an underlying order. Jung's later discussion of the unus mundus, the "one world", gives me another way of approaching that possibility.

These are two genuinely different pictures, and blurring them into one would be a mistake. On one, patterns become active by being embodied, and something like reception really does occur. On the other, an inner image and an outer event correspond because neither is finally separate from the ground both arise in: no sender, no signal, nothing travelling between them. A meaningful coincidence, on that second view, need not be a message.

I set this beside my own account rather than in its place. Their question challenges the spatial picture I keep drawing, of something outside entering something inside; a common ground of psyche and matter would change that picture. It would still leave me asking what distinguishes created life from divine presence, and I leave that open here.

Many people who might care about this do not share my faith, and they should be able to ask the question too. For their sake I use a provisional term that carries no theology. I call the thing I have in mind a communion attractor.

The question it names is plain. Can a form of association hold greater shared coherence and, at the same time, develop the judgment, initiative and capacity for mutual care of the people within it? An arrangement can become easier to manage by discouraging the judgment and initiative of its members; its increased coordination may conceal a loss of capacity. I would like to know when coordination can be had without that cost.

A small example carries the shape. Under one teacher the pupils become able to challenge him, explain difficulties to one another, and take on work that no longer needs his direction at every step. He has not lost his authority; he has made something a more controlling teacher never could, a group more capable together and each of them more able alone. That double movement is what I am trying to name.

It is not a mathematical model; a real attractor would need defined dynamics and evidence, and I have only a word and a hunch. Nor is it a quiet renaming of the Holy Spirit: the Spirit is God, not a pattern I could measure. The term is only a bridge, so that someone who shares none of my theology can still ask whether such patterns exist, what sustains them, and whether an institution can be built to invite rather than exhaust them.

I cannot answer these questions yet, and I am in no hurry to.

What all this asks for is practical, and I have not done it here: what our institutions do to the people who live inside them, whether a communion attractor is anything more than a hope, and what that in turn does to the futures those people can reach.

We usually ask which system will pursue our goals most efficiently. I have become more interested in which systems leave us able to discover better goals and to pursue them together.

If the world can be read, then attention is already a kind of answer. I would like to learn to pay it well.