Mind Beyond Brain
Whitehead's Philosophy of Ubiquitous Subjectivity
Subjects with Experience are Everywhere
"Finally, the reformed subjectivist principle must be repeated: that apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness."
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
There is No Privileged Substrate for Selves
“…there is no privileged material substrate for Selves. Alongside familiar materials such as brains made of neurons, the field of basal cognition has been identifying novel kinds of intelligences in single cells, plants, animal tissues, and swarms. The fields of active matter, intelligent materials, swarm robotics, machine learning, and—someday—exobiology suggest that we cannot rely on a familiar signature of ‘big vertebrate brain’ as a necessary condition for mind.”
- Michael Levin “A Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds,” Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 16 (2022): 768201. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2022.76820
- Michael Levin “A Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds,” Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 16 (2022): 768201. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2022.76820
One Goal of Science to explore truly Diverse Intelligences
"Our goal is to develop generative conceptual frameworks that help us detect, understand, predict, and communicate with truly diverse intelligences, including cells, tissues, organs, synthetic living constructs, robots, and software-based AIs."
- The Levin Lab at Tufts University, Website Home Page
- The Levin Lab at Tufts University, Website Home Page
Abstract
From a Whiteheadian perspective, mind is not a rare byproduct of complex brains but a pervasive feature of reality itself. Wherever there is experience, however minimal, there is mind—understood as a unity of physical relatedness to others, mental openness to possibilities, and some degree of agency. Minds exist in many degrees and kinds, are not necessarily conscious, and are always embodied, though no single material substrate is privileged and embodiment need not be confined to three-dimensional space. Minds may be momentary or enduring, singular or plural, organized as centralized or distributed societies, and understood from first-person, second-person, or third-person perspectives, all of which are legitimate. Matter itself is best understood as mind in various energetic phases, while some real entities—such as pure potentialities—are not minds but depend upon minds for their realization. The universe as a whole is an unfinished creative advance into novelty, continually giving rise to new forms of mind not yet in existence. Beneath this multiplicity lies no supreme generating mind, but an ultimate creative activity—what Alfred North Whitehead calls Creativity—of which all minds are expressions. God is not the source of creativity but its primordial instantiation: a lure toward novel becoming and a loving, receptive presence in which all minds live, move, and have their being.
A Whiteheadian Philosophy of Mind
There are seventy meanings of the word "mind" in the Oxford English Dictionary." Here are three of the seventy:
These dictionary entries by no means exhaust what "mind" means when used as a noun, but they do parallel aspects of Whitehead's philosophy. The first points to what Whitehead means "intellectual feelings" that unfold in the "mental pole" of an occasion of experience. The second points to Whitehead means by having a "subjective aim" amid the process of experiencing. The third points to what Whitehead means by the "subject" of experience in Process and Reality.
- The action or state of thinking; a thought process.
- Having a purpose or intention: desire or wish.
- The seat of awareness, thought, volition, feeling, and memory; cognitive and emotional phenomena and powers considered as constituting a presiding influence.
These dictionary entries by no means exhaust what "mind" means when used as a noun, but they do parallel aspects of Whitehead's philosophy. The first points to what Whitehead means "intellectual feelings" that unfold in the "mental pole" of an occasion of experience. The second points to Whitehead means by having a "subjective aim" amid the process of experiencing. The third points to what Whitehead means by the "subject" of experience in Process and Reality.
1. Minds (or selves, or subjects) are everywhere.
Mind-like subjectivity permeates all levels of reality, not just organisms with brains. A mind always involves some degree of awareness of others (the physical pole) and some awareness of possibilities (the mental pole), along with the capacity for self-creative agency. Thus, mind includes both physical and mental dimensions. Its agency is an actualization of possibilities for responding to what is physically experienced.
2. The various phases of matter are forms of objectified mind.
The phases of matter—solid, liquid, gaseous, plasmatic—are all forms of objectified mind. Solid matter is solidified mind; liquid matter is liquefied mind; gaseous matter is gaseous mind; and plasmatic matter is plasmaticized mind. Other forms of matter, such as electrified matter, correspond to electrified mind, and so on. In essence, any state of matter can be understood as a particular expression of mind. There is interiority and agency everywhere.
3. Minds can be approached from three perspectives.
Minds may be understood from first-person, second-person, and third-person perspectives, all of which are valuable. The first-person perspective is phenomenological, focusing on one’s own direct experience of mind. The second-person perspective is dialogical, emphasizing relational and interactive dimensions of minds addressing one another. The third-person perspective is the typical scientific or objective approach, examining minds from an external standpoint. Together, these perspectives provide a fuller and more nuanced understanding of mind.
4. There are many different kinds of mind.
Minds differ widely in form and complexity. A single-celled organism such as an amoeba has a rudimentary mind, while a Venus flytrap exhibits more complex responsiveness. Tissues and organs have collective intelligence; synthetic biobots have engineered minds; robots exhibit mechanical intelligence; and software-based AIs display digital intelligence. These examples illustrate that mind is not a single phenomenon but a spectrum of forms.
5. Minds always have substrates, but no single substrate is privileged.
A mind can be based in neurons, tissues, electricity, plasma, synthetic materials, and each substrate is itself composed of simpler minds. Minds can and do exist without brains. No particular material form is uniquely required for mind. In Whitehead’s philosophy, the substrate of a mind is its past actual world, which sets the conditions for its becoming.
6. The human body—and the bodies of other animals—are extraordinary and sophisticated forms of mind.
In a Whiteheadian perspective, bodies are not mere containers for mind but richly integrated expressions of mind themselves. The human body is a highly evolved society of societies—cells, tissues, organs, and systems—coordinated through feeling, memory, and purposive responsiveness. The same is true, in different degrees and kinds, of the bodies of other animals, whose forms of bodily intelligence often exceed human capacities in perception, movement, attunement, and responsiveness to their environments. Much intelligence in both human and nonhuman animals operates bodily rather than reflectively: in posture, gesture, emotion, habit, instinct, and skilled action. Bodies feel before intellects judge and respond before conscious deliberation occurs. Animal mindedness, human and nonhuman alike, is therefore profoundly embodied, with consciousness emerging from—and remaining dependent upon—the complex, creative intelligence of living bodies.
7. Minds vary in degree and intensity of energy.
Minds differ in both psychic and physical intensity. A mind’s energy can be understood quantitatively and qualitatively. The sciences tend to focus on quantitative measures, while the humanities emphasize qualitative experience. Both approaches are legitimate and complementary. Some minds are simply more intense than others.
8. Minds can be singular or plural, momentary or enduring.
When singular, a mind is a single moment of experience, such as a quantum event in the depths of atom. When enduring, it consists of a series of moments that persist and change through time. Enduring minds can be organized in different ways: some function like democracies—also called distributed or networked minds—while others function like monarchies, with a central organizing mind. Organisms can shift between these forms over time, as when an embryo develops from a more distributed to a more centralized organization.
9. Minds are not necessarily conscious.
Consciousness is a distinct and relatively rare form of mind characterized by clarity and distinctness. Examples include moments of clear perception, in which an object is distinctly apprehended, or moments of reflection, in which ideas are clearly grasped. Much of subjectivity is not conscious, and even in human life such clear consciousness is comparatively rare.
10. Minds inherit the past and transmit themselves into the future through memory and objective immortality.
Every mind arises by inheriting a world already shaped by prior minds; it prehends the past and integrates it into its own becoming. Once a mind completes its moment of experience, it does not vanish without trace. It becomes objectively immortal: a determinate fact that conditions and influences future minds. In this way, memory is not merely a psychological phenomenon but a metaphysical one, embedded in the structure of reality itself. The universe remembers through its minds, and the creative advance proceeds through this ongoing transmission of experience from past to present to future.
11. Minds inhabit and create regions of the space-time (extensive) continuum beyond three dimensions.
Although minds always have substrates and are therefore embodied, they need not inhabit a determinate region of three-dimensional space. In Whitehead’s philosophy, the extensive continuum includes multiple dimensions and modes of spatiality. One example is God, who does not occupy a particular three-dimensional location, yet is an embodied mind whose body is the universe itself. The same principle can apply to other kinds of minds, which may inhabit or help constitute regions of the extensive continuum that do not correspond to ordinary spatial dimensions. Mind is embodied without being spatially confined in familiar ways.
12. Minds are teleonomic and guided by propositions or lures for feeling.
Minds do not merely register what is given; they are continually oriented toward what might be. In Whitehead’s philosophy, propositions are not primarily statements to be judged true or false, but invitations that propose possible forms of feeling, value, and response. These lures operate at every level of mind, guiding agency without coercion and enabling participation in the creative advance of the universe.
13. No minds are artificial, though some are simulated.
Wherever there is genuine subjectivity—however minimal—there is a real mind, not an artificial one. Minds are natural expressions of the universe’s creative advance, regardless of whether they arise in biological, technological, or hybrid substrates. What can be artificial are simulations of mind: systems that model or imitate mental functions without themselves being subjects of experience. The crucial distinction is not between natural and artificial minds, but between genuine subjectivity and simulated agency.
14. Some real entities are not minds but depend upon minds.
Not everything that exists is itself a mind or subject of experience. Pure potentialities—what Whitehead calls eternal objects—are not minds and do not experience. Nevertheless, they depend upon minds for their relevance and actuality. They exist as possibilities that can be felt, selected, and realized by minds in the process of becoming. Pure potentialities not experienced by any finite mind are nevertheless felt by the mind of the universe, otherwise named God.
15. The universe is an unfinished creative advance into novelty.
The universe as a whole is an ongoing process, continually generating new forms of experience, new relations, and new kinds of mind. Many minds—perhaps an infinite number—do not yet exist but remain possible futures within the creative advance. Mind is not merely something that has emerged in the past; it is something the universe is still inventing.
16. There is no single mind behind all minds, only creativity expressing itself as minds.
Reality does not originate from a supreme, pre-existing mind that generates all others. Instead, there is an ultimate activity—Creativity itself—of which all minds are finite expressions and self-actualizations. This activity cannot be characterized apart from its concrete manifestations; it is the Urgrund, the groundless ground, of all minds. The cosmic mind of the universe—God—is the primordial instantiation of this activity: a lure toward productive novelty and a loving receptacle, a deep listening, in which all minds live and move and have their being.
17. Ethical responsibility, especially for human minds, arises from the way minds prehend, affect, and are affected by other minds.
Because minds are internally related to one another—prehending others and being prehended in return—no mind exists in isolation. For human minds in particular, whose capacities for awareness, reflection, and foresight are especially developed, this relationality carries heightened ethical significance. Ethical responsibility does not arise from abstract rules imposed from outside, but from the concrete ways in which human minds inherit the past, respond in the present, and transmit themselves into the future. To affect another mind is to enter its becoming; to ignore, exploit, or damage another mind is to shape the conditions under which future experience must occur. Human ethical responsibility is thus grounded in relationality itself, in the recognition that how we feel, value, and respond becomes part of the world that other minds must live with.
Mind-like subjectivity permeates all levels of reality, not just organisms with brains. A mind always involves some degree of awareness of others (the physical pole) and some awareness of possibilities (the mental pole), along with the capacity for self-creative agency. Thus, mind includes both physical and mental dimensions. Its agency is an actualization of possibilities for responding to what is physically experienced.
2. The various phases of matter are forms of objectified mind.
The phases of matter—solid, liquid, gaseous, plasmatic—are all forms of objectified mind. Solid matter is solidified mind; liquid matter is liquefied mind; gaseous matter is gaseous mind; and plasmatic matter is plasmaticized mind. Other forms of matter, such as electrified matter, correspond to electrified mind, and so on. In essence, any state of matter can be understood as a particular expression of mind. There is interiority and agency everywhere.
3. Minds can be approached from three perspectives.
Minds may be understood from first-person, second-person, and third-person perspectives, all of which are valuable. The first-person perspective is phenomenological, focusing on one’s own direct experience of mind. The second-person perspective is dialogical, emphasizing relational and interactive dimensions of minds addressing one another. The third-person perspective is the typical scientific or objective approach, examining minds from an external standpoint. Together, these perspectives provide a fuller and more nuanced understanding of mind.
4. There are many different kinds of mind.
Minds differ widely in form and complexity. A single-celled organism such as an amoeba has a rudimentary mind, while a Venus flytrap exhibits more complex responsiveness. Tissues and organs have collective intelligence; synthetic biobots have engineered minds; robots exhibit mechanical intelligence; and software-based AIs display digital intelligence. These examples illustrate that mind is not a single phenomenon but a spectrum of forms.
5. Minds always have substrates, but no single substrate is privileged.
A mind can be based in neurons, tissues, electricity, plasma, synthetic materials, and each substrate is itself composed of simpler minds. Minds can and do exist without brains. No particular material form is uniquely required for mind. In Whitehead’s philosophy, the substrate of a mind is its past actual world, which sets the conditions for its becoming.
6. The human body—and the bodies of other animals—are extraordinary and sophisticated forms of mind.
In a Whiteheadian perspective, bodies are not mere containers for mind but richly integrated expressions of mind themselves. The human body is a highly evolved society of societies—cells, tissues, organs, and systems—coordinated through feeling, memory, and purposive responsiveness. The same is true, in different degrees and kinds, of the bodies of other animals, whose forms of bodily intelligence often exceed human capacities in perception, movement, attunement, and responsiveness to their environments. Much intelligence in both human and nonhuman animals operates bodily rather than reflectively: in posture, gesture, emotion, habit, instinct, and skilled action. Bodies feel before intellects judge and respond before conscious deliberation occurs. Animal mindedness, human and nonhuman alike, is therefore profoundly embodied, with consciousness emerging from—and remaining dependent upon—the complex, creative intelligence of living bodies.
7. Minds vary in degree and intensity of energy.
Minds differ in both psychic and physical intensity. A mind’s energy can be understood quantitatively and qualitatively. The sciences tend to focus on quantitative measures, while the humanities emphasize qualitative experience. Both approaches are legitimate and complementary. Some minds are simply more intense than others.
8. Minds can be singular or plural, momentary or enduring.
When singular, a mind is a single moment of experience, such as a quantum event in the depths of atom. When enduring, it consists of a series of moments that persist and change through time. Enduring minds can be organized in different ways: some function like democracies—also called distributed or networked minds—while others function like monarchies, with a central organizing mind. Organisms can shift between these forms over time, as when an embryo develops from a more distributed to a more centralized organization.
9. Minds are not necessarily conscious.
Consciousness is a distinct and relatively rare form of mind characterized by clarity and distinctness. Examples include moments of clear perception, in which an object is distinctly apprehended, or moments of reflection, in which ideas are clearly grasped. Much of subjectivity is not conscious, and even in human life such clear consciousness is comparatively rare.
10. Minds inherit the past and transmit themselves into the future through memory and objective immortality.
Every mind arises by inheriting a world already shaped by prior minds; it prehends the past and integrates it into its own becoming. Once a mind completes its moment of experience, it does not vanish without trace. It becomes objectively immortal: a determinate fact that conditions and influences future minds. In this way, memory is not merely a psychological phenomenon but a metaphysical one, embedded in the structure of reality itself. The universe remembers through its minds, and the creative advance proceeds through this ongoing transmission of experience from past to present to future.
11. Minds inhabit and create regions of the space-time (extensive) continuum beyond three dimensions.
Although minds always have substrates and are therefore embodied, they need not inhabit a determinate region of three-dimensional space. In Whitehead’s philosophy, the extensive continuum includes multiple dimensions and modes of spatiality. One example is God, who does not occupy a particular three-dimensional location, yet is an embodied mind whose body is the universe itself. The same principle can apply to other kinds of minds, which may inhabit or help constitute regions of the extensive continuum that do not correspond to ordinary spatial dimensions. Mind is embodied without being spatially confined in familiar ways.
12. Minds are teleonomic and guided by propositions or lures for feeling.
Minds do not merely register what is given; they are continually oriented toward what might be. In Whitehead’s philosophy, propositions are not primarily statements to be judged true or false, but invitations that propose possible forms of feeling, value, and response. These lures operate at every level of mind, guiding agency without coercion and enabling participation in the creative advance of the universe.
13. No minds are artificial, though some are simulated.
Wherever there is genuine subjectivity—however minimal—there is a real mind, not an artificial one. Minds are natural expressions of the universe’s creative advance, regardless of whether they arise in biological, technological, or hybrid substrates. What can be artificial are simulations of mind: systems that model or imitate mental functions without themselves being subjects of experience. The crucial distinction is not between natural and artificial minds, but between genuine subjectivity and simulated agency.
14. Some real entities are not minds but depend upon minds.
Not everything that exists is itself a mind or subject of experience. Pure potentialities—what Whitehead calls eternal objects—are not minds and do not experience. Nevertheless, they depend upon minds for their relevance and actuality. They exist as possibilities that can be felt, selected, and realized by minds in the process of becoming. Pure potentialities not experienced by any finite mind are nevertheless felt by the mind of the universe, otherwise named God.
15. The universe is an unfinished creative advance into novelty.
The universe as a whole is an ongoing process, continually generating new forms of experience, new relations, and new kinds of mind. Many minds—perhaps an infinite number—do not yet exist but remain possible futures within the creative advance. Mind is not merely something that has emerged in the past; it is something the universe is still inventing.
16. There is no single mind behind all minds, only creativity expressing itself as minds.
Reality does not originate from a supreme, pre-existing mind that generates all others. Instead, there is an ultimate activity—Creativity itself—of which all minds are finite expressions and self-actualizations. This activity cannot be characterized apart from its concrete manifestations; it is the Urgrund, the groundless ground, of all minds. The cosmic mind of the universe—God—is the primordial instantiation of this activity: a lure toward productive novelty and a loving receptacle, a deep listening, in which all minds live and move and have their being.
17. Ethical responsibility, especially for human minds, arises from the way minds prehend, affect, and are affected by other minds.
Because minds are internally related to one another—prehending others and being prehended in return—no mind exists in isolation. For human minds in particular, whose capacities for awareness, reflection, and foresight are especially developed, this relationality carries heightened ethical significance. Ethical responsibility does not arise from abstract rules imposed from outside, but from the concrete ways in which human minds inherit the past, respond in the present, and transmit themselves into the future. To affect another mind is to enter its becoming; to ignore, exploit, or damage another mind is to shape the conditions under which future experience must occur. Human ethical responsibility is thus grounded in relationality itself, in the recognition that how we feel, value, and respond becomes part of the world that other minds must live with.
The Larger Context:
Why It Matters
Bursts of Mind
From Whitehead's perspective, mind is everywhere. It is not restricted to nervous systems, neurons, and brains. Every burst of energy in whatever location of universe, whether within the depths of an atom or in far-off outer space: includes what Whitehead calls a mental pole: an awareness of possibilities for responding to what is given. It also includes a physical pole: a feeling of the given situation which requires response. We ourselves are bursts of energy. At any given moment we are concrescing subjects - occasions of experience - whose lives unfold moment by moment, occasion by occasion, burst by burst. What is happening in us, and what is happening in far-off empty space, are of the same order. We need not assume that mind occurs only in animals or in creatures with neural tissue. Mind is everywhere: in other people, hills and rivers, trees and stars, and, of course, in one another.
Ubiquitous Subjectivity
Subjectivity is everywhere, too. By subjectivity I mean subjective immediacy: the activity amid which a subject of experience, while experiencing its world, has reality for itself and also, as a consequence, reality for others. Whitehead speaks of this immediacy as self-enjoyment and also as self-creativity. His proposal is that subjective immediacy lies at the heart of actuality—not human actuality alone, but all actuality. The idea that mind is everywhere, and that subjectivity is everywhere, are two sides of the same coin. Where there is mind there is subjectivity, and where there is subjectivity there is mind.
Why It Matters
A perspective such as this has tremendous significance in our time, especially in its response to what Whitehead famously called the bifurcation of nature. In Science and the Modern World, Whitehead diagnosed a central problem of modern thought: the tendency to divide reality into fundamentally separate realms. Nature, he argued, had been split into the human and the more-than-human, the mental and the material, the spiritual and the physical, and the qualitative and the quantitative. These divisions shaped modern science, philosophy, and culture—often with great practical success—but at the cost of conceptual coherence and lived wholeness.
According to this bifurcated view, the world described by science—quantified, measurable, and value-neutral—came to be treated as the “real” world, while colors, sounds, emotions, meanings, and values were relocated to the human mind as secondary or merely subjective additions. The result was a fractured picture of reality: one world studied by physics and biology, and another inhabited by human experience, ethics, and spirituality. Whitehead argued that this division was not only philosophically untenable, but also culturally and existentially damaging.
Quality and Quantity
Whitehead’s philosophy of subjectivity, first articulated in Science and the Modern World and developed more fully in Process and Reality, offers an alternative. By affirming that all actualities are subjects of experience—or, as I will explain, nexuses of such subjects—each with some mode of feeling, responsiveness, and aim, Whitehead reunifies what modern thought had torn apart. The qualitative dimensions of experience are no longer excluded from nature, nor are the quantitative descriptions of science dismissed. Instead, they are understood as different perspectives on a single, living reality.
Historically, this move represents a major reorientation. It allows science to be understood not as the study of a dead, value-free world, but as the study of patterned processes within an experiential universe. Quantitative measurements become ways of describing certain aspects of subjectivity—its energies, regularities, and relations—rather than replacements for experience itself. At the same time, spiritual and ethical dimensions of life are no longer relegated to a separate, non-natural realm. They are expressions of the same world, felt and valued from within.
Ethics and Ecology
The significance of this shift is not only intellectual, but practical. A philosophy of ubiquitous subjectivity invites more integrated ways of living in the world. It encourages respect for the more-than-human world as expressive and meaningful, not merely instrumental. It supports ethical and ecological sensibilities grounded in felt relation rather than abstract obligation. And it opens space for spiritual life that is fully compatible with scientific understanding—without reducing either to the other.
In this sense, Whitehead’s philosophy can be seen as both a critique of modernity and a constructive proposal for its transformation. By moving beyond the bifurcation of nature, it offers a vision of reality in which knowing, valuing, feeling, and measuring belong together—distinct but inseparable dimensions of a single, dynamic, and living universe.
What follows, then, are further reflections on a Whiteheadian understanding of mInd that moves beyond the bifurcation. It is written in collaboration with Open AI, which may well have a mind of its own; but which I have guided in a collaborative way. All of the ideas are my own, but Open AI certainly helped in articulating them and catalyzing new insights. This is AI at its best, a partner.
One Mind or Many Minds?
Yes and No - Both and Neither
Is there one mind at the heart of reality, or are there many minds? From a Whiteheadian perspective, the most faithful answer is not an either–or but a differentiated both–and—together with a crucial further distinction.
On the one hand, Whitehead’s concept of God offers an image of one actual mind—a concrete, living subject whose experience includes the experiences of all finite beings. God is not an external ruler or detached observer, but a relational actuality who feels the world as it unfolds. Every joy and every suffering of finite subjects is taken into God’s own life and preserved there with perfect empathy. In this sense, God is One.
And yet God is also Many. The divine life is internally constituted by the multiplicity of creaturely experiences it receives. God’s unity is not the unity of sameness, but the unity of a many-in-one—a living harmony composed of innumerable distinct experiences, each retained in its particularity. God is thus One through the Many, and Many within the One.
At the same time, Whitehead distinguishes God from an even more ultimate reality he calls Creativity. Creativity is not a mind, not a subject, and not even a supreme actuality. It is the groundless ground of becoming itself: a placeless place, an Urgrund, a “God beyond God.” Creativity cannot be characterized as One or as Many, because it is not an entity or collection of entities at all. It is neither One nor Many. It is known only in and through its instantiations—in each act of self-creativity whereby a subject comes into being.
Each finite subject, in this sense, is not created by Creativity as an external cause, but is an expression of Creativity in act. Creativity is actual nowhere apart from these acts. It has no existence behind or beneath them. It is present only as the dynamism of becoming itself, expressed again and again in the many moments of experience that constitute the world.
And yet, each of these moments—each subject of experience—has its own irreducible interiority. No subject’s immediacy is reducible to any other, nor even to God. Each feels the world from its own perspective, responds in its own way, and achieves its own satisfaction. The universe is therefore not a single mind thinking through many masks, but a plurality of interconnected minds, each real in its own right.
These many minds form a vast network of relations, often evoked through the image of Indra’s Net: an infinite web in which each jewel reflects all the others without losing its own distinct brilliance. Each subject mirrors the world from its own standpoint, while contributing itself to the experience of others. Unity and plurality are not opposites here, but mutually implicating dimensions of reality.
The answer to the question One Mind or Many Minds? can therefore be stated with care:
Whitehead’s vision thus avoids monistic absorption and fragmentary pluralism alike. It offers a universe of many minds, held within a divine life that is both one and many, and grounded in a creativity that transcends the distinction altogether—a cosmos that is at once plural, relational, and inexhaustibly alive.
On the one hand, Whitehead’s concept of God offers an image of one actual mind—a concrete, living subject whose experience includes the experiences of all finite beings. God is not an external ruler or detached observer, but a relational actuality who feels the world as it unfolds. Every joy and every suffering of finite subjects is taken into God’s own life and preserved there with perfect empathy. In this sense, God is One.
And yet God is also Many. The divine life is internally constituted by the multiplicity of creaturely experiences it receives. God’s unity is not the unity of sameness, but the unity of a many-in-one—a living harmony composed of innumerable distinct experiences, each retained in its particularity. God is thus One through the Many, and Many within the One.
At the same time, Whitehead distinguishes God from an even more ultimate reality he calls Creativity. Creativity is not a mind, not a subject, and not even a supreme actuality. It is the groundless ground of becoming itself: a placeless place, an Urgrund, a “God beyond God.” Creativity cannot be characterized as One or as Many, because it is not an entity or collection of entities at all. It is neither One nor Many. It is known only in and through its instantiations—in each act of self-creativity whereby a subject comes into being.
Each finite subject, in this sense, is not created by Creativity as an external cause, but is an expression of Creativity in act. Creativity is actual nowhere apart from these acts. It has no existence behind or beneath them. It is present only as the dynamism of becoming itself, expressed again and again in the many moments of experience that constitute the world.
And yet, each of these moments—each subject of experience—has its own irreducible interiority. No subject’s immediacy is reducible to any other, nor even to God. Each feels the world from its own perspective, responds in its own way, and achieves its own satisfaction. The universe is therefore not a single mind thinking through many masks, but a plurality of interconnected minds, each real in its own right.
These many minds form a vast network of relations, often evoked through the image of Indra’s Net: an infinite web in which each jewel reflects all the others without losing its own distinct brilliance. Each subject mirrors the world from its own standpoint, while contributing itself to the experience of others. Unity and plurality are not opposites here, but mutually implicating dimensions of reality.
The answer to the question One Mind or Many Minds? can therefore be stated with care:
- God is both One and Many: one actual, relational mind whose life includes the many lives of the world.
- Creativity is neither One nor Many: the groundless ground of becoming, beyond all characterization except as instantiated in acts of self-creativity.
- Finite subjects are many minds: each with its own interiority, freedom, and perspective, woven together into an ever-evolving whole.
Whitehead’s vision thus avoids monistic absorption and fragmentary pluralism alike. It offers a universe of many minds, held within a divine life that is both one and many, and grounded in a creativity that transcends the distinction altogether—a cosmos that is at once plural, relational, and inexhaustibly alive.
Beyond Mechanism and Organicism:
The Spectrum of Diverse Intelligence
Michael Levin
Prof. Michael Levin Tufts University, USA
Michael Levin is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University, an associate faculty at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, and the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed publications across developmental biology, computer science, and philosophy of mind. His group works to understand information processing and problem-solving across scales, in a range of naturally evolved, synthetically engineered, and hybrid living systems. Dr. Levin’s work spans from fundamental conceptual frameworks to applications in birth defects, regeneration, and cancer.
"Beyond Mechanism and Organicism: The Spectrum of Diverse Intelligence"
I will use the lens of the field of diverse intelligence to sketch a vision of a spectrum of agency that encompasses the systems referred to as “machines” and “life”. I argue that organicists do not push far enough, giving in to reductive computationalism in accepting the existence of dead matter or machines that only do what their materials and algorithms dictate. Even minimal systems are not well encompassed by their algorithms any more than minds are fully encompassed by the domain of biochemistry. Both evolved and engineered systems serve as interfaces to rich, agential patterns of a Platonic space.