Ingressing Minds: Causal Patterns Beyond Genetics and Environment in Natural, Synthetic, and Hybrid Embodiments
Authors: Levin Michael 
Published: February 2025

How best to explain the properties and capabilities of embodied minds? The conventional paradigm holds that living beings are to be understood as the sculpted products of genetics and environment, which determine form and function of the brain as the unique seat of intelligence. Some provision is made for emergence and complexity, as additional “facts that hold” about networks, circuits, and other components of life. Here, I present a sketch of a framework and research roadmap that differs from this view in key aspects. First, the evolutionary conservation of mechanisms and functionality indicate fundamental symmetries between the self-construction of bodies and of minds, revealing a much broader view of diverse intelligence across the agential material of life beyond neural substrates. Second, surprising competencies (not just complexity or unpredictability) in systems that have not had a history of selection for those abilities suggest an additional input into patterns of body and mind that motivates a research program on a latent space of patterns ingressing into the physical world. Emphasizing the principles of continuity and pragmatism, and using morphogenesis as a tractable model system in which to develop these ideas, I explore the implications of the following ideas: (A) Evolution favors living forms that exploit powerful truths of mathematics and computation as affordances, which contribute as causes of morphological and behavioral features. (B) Cognitive patterns are an evolutionary pivot of the collective intelligence of cells; given this symmetry between neuroscience and developmental biology, I propose that the relationship between mind and brain is the same as the relationship between mathematical patterns and the morphogenetic outcomes they guide. (C) Many mathematicians, and a non-mysterian approach to science in general, suggest that these patterns are not random facts to be merely cataloged as “emergence” when found, but rather can be systematically discovered within a structured, ordered (non-physical) space. Therefore, I hypothesize that: (1) instances of embodied cognition likewise ingress from a Platonic space, which contains not only low-agency patterns like facts about triangles and prime numbers, but also higher agency ones such as kinds of minds; (2) we take seriously for developmental, synthetic, and behavioral biology the kinds of non-physicalist ideas that are already a staple of Platonist mathematics; (3) what evolution (and bioengineering, and possibly AI) produces are pointers into that Platonic space – physical interfaces that enable the ingression of specific patterns of body and mind. This provides a new perspective on the organicist/mechanist debate by explaining why traditional computationalist views of life and mind are insufficient, while at the same time erasing artificial distinctions between life and machine, since both are in-formed by diverse patterns from the latent space. I sketch a research program, already begun, of using the tools of the fields of synthetic morphology and diverse intelligence to map out key regions of the Platonic space. Understanding the mapping between the architecture of physical embodiments and the patterns to which they point has massive implications for evolutionary biology, regenerative medicine, AI, and the ethics of synthbiosis with the forthcoming immense diversity of morally important beings.