Michael Levin: Ingressing Minds

I think there’s a deeper metaphysical approach available that works better here, where the universal is not prior to its realization but comes to be through it.

Levin has the useful concept of a rewritten target morphology. Briefly perturb the bioelectric network of a planarian and you can get a two-headed animal which goes on regenerating two heads after the perturbation is gone. If such targets can be learned, rewritten and inherited by the dynamics of the tissue, what additional prediction follows from saying that the new target was found in Platonic space rather than formed by the tissue? At some point Platonic space starts to look like a name for possibilities that only become determinate in the process of realizing them.