A quick theory of Mind in Nature

This one is for philosophers only.

I like to say that I’m not terribly smart, but I know a pattern when I see one.  We all recognize patterns, and the more we see, the easier it is to understand the world: predict it, survive in it.  On the other hand, those who see patterns everywhere can be paralyzed by them.  Here’s a question for you: are patterns real?  Do they really exist?  If you see that a nautilus shell or bird’s feather or the petals of a flower grow in a specific pattern that can be expressed mathematically, is that pattern itself a thing, or is it simply a way of talking about the things that are real: the shells and feathers and flower petals?   

Or maybe is there a third option: that patterns do exist, but are only in the mind.  Flowers exist in the world, but the patterns that describe how they grow are aspects of how the mind makes sense of them.  But this doesn’t help much, unless we already know whether minds are real.  What does ‘real’ even mean in this context?  What counts as real?    One way to ask the question is this: do patterns have causal power?  Does the abstract pattern, the math of the thing, actively determine or guide the growth of the flower?  Or is the apparent pattern just the result of something more essential, more material?  This was one of the main points of contention in Neo-Confucian philosophical debates.  It is also, interestingly, one of the issues coming up in the modern development of complexity theory, where information is a key driver of physical and biological processes.  Does information have causal power?  If so, then mind is not something that emerges within the universe only after 13 billion years: in some sense, it’s there all along.  For what is mind, but a mechanism by which information causes things to happen.  Hmm.   

There is a classic example in the western philosophical tradition called Theseus’s Ship.  The thought experiment goes like this: If one board in the ship rots and then is replaced, it is still the same ship.  But what if you continue to replace the boards one by one?  What if eventually you have replaced every plank, nail, sail, and rope?  At what point does it cease to be the same ship and become a different ship entirely?  What is it that makes it Theseus’s ship, instead of (say) another ship with the same design, that has at some point replaced it?  The example is used to think about the continuity of personal identity over time.  Are you still the same person when all the cells in your body have died and been replaced?  What if you traded out parts of your body with mechanical limbs, implants, and processors.  If eventually you are completely artificial, are you still the same person?   But the example is also useful in thinking about the problem of ‘the one and the many.’  That is, what is the relationship between the one ship and the many parts that make it up?  Is the ship just another way of talking about all its parts in a certain arrangement?  Or is it something above and beyond the parts themselves?  And so on.  This is the kind of question that’s relevant here.   

My basic idea is this.  If you understand this concept, you really understand the whole thing.  The ship itself is not so much a physical thing, like a plank of wood, but a logical construct, a set of spatial relationships, functions, purposes and so on.  The ship is like a template or blueprint through which the various parts flow, one added and another taken away.  It’s an abstract superstructure by which the physical parts are united, not so much in physical space, as in thought.  This is why the Yogacara Buddhists say that everything is the construction of mind: the kind of logic that holds the parts together is a mental operation.  The ship is not unreal or illusory.  It is no more or less real that the parts that constitute it.  But it is ‘constructed,’ that is to say, it’s the result of a transformation of information from one form to another.   

The relationship I am trying to communicate between the parts and the ship as a whole is a logical one.  But it is the basis of something fundamental about the structure of the physical world. What we are really looking at is the same ship, the same world, at two different levels of analysis, two different levels of perception, two different levels of being.  The movement from one level to the next is what I call transformation.   

Now, the world as we know it involves more than just two levels of being, physical and mental.  The world seems to have eight dimensions, all equally real, all equally important, yet they are stacked in a certain order.  The order is important because the pattern on one level is the transformation of a set of individual things on the previous.  The logic of transformation is the pattern by which information-energy flows through these eight levels.  I have structured the cards of the Empyrean Deck in eight Houses, to reflect these eight dimensions.   

The self draws up information through eight such levels, each one standing above the previous as the ship stands above its parts.  I can list them here, just briefly: Light, matter, molecular machinery, cellular life, perception, linguistic knowledge, personal subjectivity, the sacred archetypes.  It is almost as if the Self is really eight different bodies, in eight different realms, one superimposed upon the other so that they form a kind of chorus: a light body, a mass body, a machine body, a bio-energy body, an internal simulation body, a public persona, a subjective self, and a spirit-body.   

Everything else I will say about the Houses and the cards can be seen as filling the details.  For now, all that matters is the overall structure of the world we inhabit.  One world, one Cosmos, evolving through the eight transformations, plus the two dimensions of the Ultimate of Transformation (Being and Nonbeing), where each transformation is not a material or physical change, but a change in the pattern or template which gives shape and contour to the information.