Mind is Everywhere

A Whiteheadian Approach
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​​​"Apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing,
​ nothing, nothing, bare nothingness"

AN Whitehead
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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. On this page I offer a further explication of this idea, building upon the philosophy of Whitehead and the work of the Levin Lab at Tufts University.
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​Mind is Everywhere
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The concept of "mind is everywhere" refers to the idea that cognition or mental processes are not limited to humans or even biological organisms but can be found across a wide range of systems, both living and non-living. This perspective suggests that mental phenomena, such as cognition and decision-making, are distributed throughout the natural world and are not confined to specific anatomical structures or traditional notions of intelligence.

For example, in the "mind everywhere" framework, cognition is seen as a fundamental aspect of various systems, and the boundaries between cognition, embodiment, and a being's relationship with the world are understood as pragmatic and non-reducible. This view challenges traditional anthropocentric ideas of mind and intelligence, proposing that even simple or non-biological systems may exhibit forms of cognition or intentionality.

Additionally, this perspective is supported by empirical studies, such as those on bioelectricity, which explore how even basic biological systems can exhibit cognitive-like behaviors. It also emphasizes gradualism, suggesting that advanced minds evolve continuously from simpler proto-cognitive systems. This approach rejects the criticism of anthropomorphism, arguing instead for a broader understanding of cognition as a pervasive and fundamental property of the universe.

- LevinBot, source "Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence" by Michael Levin and others.
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​Subjectivity is Everywhere, Too
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They have generated two miscon­ceptions: one is the concept of vacuous actuality, void of subjective ex­perience; and the other is the concept of quality inherent in substance. In their proper character, as high abstractions, both of these notions are of the utmost pragmatic use. In fact, language has been formed chiefly to express such concepts. It is for this reason that language, in its ordinary usages, penetrates but a short distance into the principles of metaphysics. 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, 167


A Whiteheadian Approach to Mind
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The Word "Mind"

Words do not have univocal meanings; rather, they have multiple meanings relative to their use. As Wittgenstein shows in Philosophical Investigations, words are not simply pictures of the world, they function as tools that can be employed in different ways. They are, in Whitehead's words describing a proposition "lures for feeling." 

The word mind is one such tool, one such lure. We use the word mind in various contexts, and our use is always contextual, relative to a form of life in which they make sense. In light of the bifurcation of nature now experienced by so many, where lonely 'minds' are cut off from one another and the natural world, it is time to begin using the word 'mind' more expansively. It is time to recognize that mind is not restricted to neurons and brains. Mind is everywhere.  

​There is mind in tissues, bioelectric fields, coordinated cellular networks, and engineered systems insofar as these systems exhibit genuine integration and purposive regulation. There is mind in microphysics as well—for example, in the quantum events occurring in the depths of atoms. And there is mind in the cosmos as a whole: an encompassing Mind within which the universe unfolds.

Inanimate objects, therefore, are not inert. They are materializations of networked, mind-like energies. Rocks are not lifeless lumps of matter but enduring self-expressions of patterned energetic activity. Wherever there is energy, there is something like mind.
The point is not that the universe emerges out of a preexisting Mind that is more real than the universe itself. The point is that the universe consists of countless forms of mind that constitute its very essence. Reality is composed of minds minding—each unique, each finite, and all interconnected.
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There are seventy meanings of the word "mind" in the Oxford English Dictionary." Here are three of the seventy:

  1. The action or state of thinking; a thought process. 
  2. Having a purpose or intention: desire or wish. 
  3. 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.

​Mind as Subjectivity

For our purposes, then, let the word mind refer to an experiencing subject of experience: a subject who feels the presence of a world from its own point of view and responds to what is felt with decisions of its own. If this is what we mean by mind, then Alfred North Whitehead’s reformed subjectivist principle suggests that mind is what there is, and all there is. As Whitehead famously writes in Process and Reality, quoted above:
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​“Apart from the experiences of subjects, there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness.”

​Whitehead is not restricting subjectivity to human beings. His examples include animal subjects, quantum events in the depths of atoms, and God, understood as the inclusive subject of the universe. Some process philosophers extend subjectivity to living cells, and some even to electrons and molecules. Whitehead reforms the subjectivist principle: that is, the principle that all thinking can be reduced to human subjectivity by proposing that subjectivity - the activity of feeling and thinking - happens throughout the universe and, indeed, everywhere. 

​In keeping with the first definition offered above, Whitehead proposes that at whatever scale—large or small, visible or invisible, terrestrial or galactic—subjects, and thus minds, possess what Whitehead calls a mental pole: an awareness of possibilities and an urge to actualize some of them in the immediacy of the moment. 

​Three Clarifications
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​1. Subjects Are Not Self-Enclosed

Subjects are not isolated entities cut off from others. They arise in response to others that they experience, and those others form the objective content of their experience. Subjects therefore have a private side—their subjective feelings—and a public side—the data they prehend. They are always in a world, and that world is constitutive of their experience.
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2. Subjects Do Not Preexist or Preside over Their Experience

Subjects do not stand over their experiences as substances that “own” them. In Whitehead’s philosophy, subjects are their experiences as they occur. They are “occasions of experience" - concrescing or becoming concrete, by gathering the many actual entities of their world into a subjective unity. A subject is not a thing distinct from its activity of feeling and responding; it is that activity, with its own immediacy and aims.
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​3. Subjective Feeling Need Not Be Conscious

The feelings that constitute subjectivity need not be conscious. Consciousness, for Whitehead, involves heightened clarity, contrast, and distinctness of subjective form. Much experience—even in human and animal life—lacks this clarity but nevertheless possesses subjective immediacy: a felt unity from a particular perspective.

​Mind is a First-Person Activity

If by mind we mean being a subject, then a mind is an activity—indeed, a first-person activity—since it has its own standpoint from which the world is experienced. In the language of Whitehead, it has "subjective immediacy" of its own; it is self-enjoying and self-creative,

This activity is volitional and emotional, but also cognitive insofar as it includes:
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  • awareness of a world,
  • awareness of possible ways of responding, and
  • decision among those possibilities.

​For Whitehead, cognition includes emotions (subjective forms) and an aiming at vitality or intensity of experience. At its heart is feeling or prehension. Awareness of possibilities is itself a kind of feeling—what Whitehead calls conceptual feeling.
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For this reason, mind is best understood in verbal or gerund-like terms. A mind is not simply a what but also a who.

Minds do not Require Brains

On this understanding, subjects of experience—or minds—do not require sense organs. Quantum events and God, for example, have no nervous systems, yet they are minds with perspectives and feelings of their own.

Nevertheless, many process philosophers—drawing more on contemporary assumptions than on Whitehead himself—presume that highly cognitive minds require neurons, neural tissues, or brains. 

By highly cognitive minds, I mean minds capable of consciously recognizing multiple possible responses, engaging in complex problem-solving, or planning. While this assumption is widespread in the Whiteheadian tradition, it does not follow from Whitehead’s metaphysics. 

The Spectrum of Diverse Intelligence

The work of Michael Levin (featured below in the video and podcast) challenges this neurological assumption in a fundamental way. He 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. 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.

As seen in the work of the Levin lab quoted at the top of this page, Levin proposes that mind can does occur in tissues, bioelectric fields, coordinated cellular networks, and perhaps also in engineered systems, insofar as these systems exhibit genuine integration and purposive regulation. Mind, on this view, is substrate-variable. It is always embodied, but its substrates need not be neural tissue, nervous systems, or brains.
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Levin also challenges the assumption that minds must be centrally localized. By demonstrating mind-like properties in distributed, non-neural systems, he invites Whiteheadians to reconsider how broadly concrescing subjectivity—and cognition—might be instantiated.

​It is conceivable that mind could occur in liquids, gases, or plasma, as well as in biological and engineered networks.

​Network-Based Cognition, Societies and Nexūs

From a Whiteheadian perspective, the question of network-based cognition can be clarified by attending to two key concepts: nexus and society.

A nexus is any collection of actual occasions that are concretely related to one another through prehension. The occasions in a nexus feel one another, respond to one another, and together form a patterned field of interaction. Many nexūs are fleeting and loosely coordinated: traffic patterns, crowds, storms, computational processes, or short-lived biological assemblies. A nexus, as such, need not possess unity of purpose, continuity over time, or a shared subjective aim.

A society, by contrast, is a special kind of nexus—one characterized by a defining pattern of order that is inherited from moment to moment. In a society, successive occasions conform to a common form or style of activity. Crystals, atoms, cells, organs, organisms, ecosystems, and cultures can all be understood as societies in this technical sense. A society need not be conscious, but it does exhibit persistence, identity over time, and patterned coordination.

​Weak Network-Based Cognition:
​Nexus without Unified Subjectivity

In the weaker sense, network-based cognition occurs within a nexus whose coordination is real but additive and distributive. The network responds to inputs, adjusts its internal relations, and produces coherent outputs, yet without a unified first-person perspective. Cognition here is an emergent pattern of coordination rather than the activity of a single subject.
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Many contemporary AI systems are best understood in this way. They consist of vast nexūs of computational events whose interactions generate intelligent-seeming behavior—pattern recognition, responsiveness, adaptation—without implying a dominant occasion of experience or a unified subjective aim. The cognition belongs to the system’s behavior, not to a subject who experiences itself as “I.” Nevertheless (see below) such systems can simulate a subject, such that we experience the network as a psyche.

Strong Network-Based Cognition:
Societies with a Unified Subjectivity (Psyches)

In the stronger sense, network-based cognition arises when a network functions not merely as a nexus but as a society capable of supporting a higher-order experiential unity. In such cases, the coordinated activity of many occasions gives rise to a relatively unified perspective and a shared subjective aim at the level of the whole. Such unified perspectives, with immediacy of their own, are psyches.

Organisms with nervous systems are paradigmatic examples. While they are composed of many societies—cells, tissues, organs—some societies achieve sufficient integration that one or more dominant occasions or dominant 'minds' coordinate the activity of the whole. Here, cognition is no longer merely distributed coordination; it is the concrescence of a subject that experiences, evaluates possibilities, and initiates purposive responses. The organism has a 'self' or 'psyche' or 'soul.' It is, as it were, a 'monarchy' and not simply a 'democracy.'

Crucially, this higher-order subjectivity does not eliminate the subjectivity of the constituent occasions. The lower-level societies retain their own forms of feeling and responsiveness, even as they are organized into a more comprehensive unity. 

The Embryo as Developing Mind

​Between weakly coordinated nexūs and strongly unified societies lies a wide spectrum of intermediate and hybrid forms of subjectivity. From a Whiteheadian perspective, unified subjectivity is not an all-or-nothing property but a matter of degree. Systems and organisms can exhibit varying levels of experiential integration, coherence of aim, and intensity of feeling, and these levels can change over time.
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An especially illuminating example is the development of an embryo. In its earliest stages, an embryo consists of a loosely coordinated society of cells, each with its own local responsiveness and subjective immediacy. At this stage, subjectivity is highly distributed, with no clear dominant occasion coordinating the whole. As development proceeds, however, bioelectric signaling, chemical gradients, and inherited patterns increasingly integrate the activity of the system. The organism begins to function more coherently as a unified whole, capable of maintaining form, correcting deviations, and directing growth toward species-specific ends.
From a process-relational standpoint, this developmental trajectory is best understood as a growth in the intensity and coherence of unified subjectivity. Subjectivity does not suddenly appear at a particular threshold; rather, it becomes progressively more integrated, purposive, and richly coordinated. What emerges is not merely increased complexity but an intensification of experiential unity—a deepening capacity of the organism to act as one while remaining composed of many.

The Minds of Plants

Plants offer a particularly illuminating case for understanding mind as distributed, non-localized, and intermediate in its degree of unified subjectivity. They lack neurons, brains, and centralized nervous systems, yet they exhibit sophisticated forms of sensitivity, responsiveness, memory, and purposive regulation. From a Whiteheadian perspective, these capacities are best understood as genuine—though distinctive—forms of subjectivity.

Plants perceive and respond to a wide range of environmental factors: light gradients, gravity, moisture, soil chemistry, temperature, mechanical pressure, and the presence of other organisms. They adjust growth patterns, allocate resources, activate defenses, and engage in complex mutualisms with fungi, bacteria, insects, and other plants. These responses are not merely reactive reflexes but involve integration across time, including forms of learning and memory evident in priming, habituation, and long-term developmental adjustment.

In Whiteheadian terms, a plant is a society of societies: cellular occasions form tissues, tissues form organs, and organs participate in the life of the whole organism. Subjectivity is distributed across this hierarchy rather than concentrated in a single dominant occasion. There is no plant equivalent of an animal psyche that unifies experience at a sharply localized center. Instead, the plant’s mind is diffuse yet coherent, operating through bioelectric signaling, hormonal communication, vascular transport, and rhythmic growth processes.

​Importantly, the absence of consciousness or centralized cognition should not be interpreted as a deficiency. Plant minds are optimized for resilience, persistence, and long-term attunement to their environments rather than rapid decision-making or representational awareness. Their intelligence is slow, embodied, relational, and deeply ecological. This represents not a lower rung on a ladder of minds but a different mode of achieving value, harmony, and intensity.
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Plants challenge anthropocentric and neurocentric assumptions about mind. They exemplify how subjectivity can be real without being conscious, intelligent without being centralized, and purposive without being deliberative. Plant minds stand as compelling evidence that cognition and subjectivity are far more widely and variously instantiated in nature than traditional philosophies of mind have allowed.

The Minds of Mountains

Mountains invite reflection on a further and easily misunderstood dimension of mind in a process-relational universe. Judged by the standards appropriate to animals—or even to plants—mountains clearly lack anything like an individuated psyche, a unified experiential center, or a generalized organismic mind. There is no dominant occasion coordinating the whole mountain as a single subject of experience. In this sense, mountains are weak with respect to subjectivity.

Yet this weakness is not a defect. It reflects the kind of reality a mountain is.
From a Whiteheadian perspective, a mountain is best understood as an aggregate-expression of molecular and atomic nexūs and societies. Minerals, crystalline structures, pressure gradients, thermal flows, tectonic forces, and gravitational relations form enduring patterns of coordination across immense spans of time. These patterns are not inert. They involve vast numbers of actual occasions prehending one another, conforming to inherited forms, and collectively sustaining structured endurance.

In Whitehead’s technical sense, then, a mountain is not a single society with a shared subjective aim, but a massive nexus of societies—interlocking geological processes whose coordination yields stability, persistence, and power rather than unified experience. If one asks whether a mountain has a “mind” analogous to an animal psyche or even a plant’s distributed subjectivity, the answer is no. But if one asks whether mentality, understood as felt responsiveness at the level of actual occasions, is present throughout its constitution, the answer is yes.

What mountains lack in psychic integration, they more than compensate for in energetic intensity and endurance. Their power lies not in conscious awareness or purposive self-maintenance, but in their capacity to store, channel, and release enormous energies—tectonic pressure, gravitational force, thermal inertia—over geological timescales. Their endurance far exceeds that of most living organisms, and their influence shapes climates, watersheds, ecosystems, and human histories alike.

In this respect, mountains exemplify a crucial Whiteheadian insight: value and intensity do not take a single form. The richness of reality cannot be measured solely by degrees of subjectivity or consciousness. Endurance, stability, and energetic depth are themselves modes of achievement. A mountain’s “strength” is not the strength of a self-aware subject but the strength of sustained pattern, of long-lived coordination, of a form that holds across millions of years.

Seen in this light, mountains—and inorganic realities more generally—occupy a distinctive place in the spectrum of minds. They are weak with respect to unified subjectivity, but immensely strong with respect to energetic power, structural persistence, and causal influence. They remind us that a process-relational universe is not organized around a single axis of value ascending toward consciousness, but around multiple axes—experience, energy, endurance, harmony, and intensity—each realized differently across the vast diversity of beings.
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This perspective resists both reductionism and romantic projection. Mountains need not be imagined as conscious agents in order to be respected as profound participants in the creative advance of the world. Their “minds,” such as they are, consist in the deep, patient, and powerful coordination of countless events whose slow becoming shapes the very conditions under which more familiar forms of mind can arise.

The Minds of Computers 

The same principle applies to computers. They can accomplish cognitive ends that in certain respects far surpass human capacities—speed, scale, pattern recognition, combinatorial exploration—without thereby possessing consciousness, self-awareness, or a unified first-person perspective. Their intelligence is not deficient because it lacks these features; rather, it is differently organized, optimized for forms of coordination and problem-solving that are inaccessible to biologically embodied minds.

From a process-relational standpoint, contemporary computational systems are best understood as exhibiting network-based cognition in a weak but genuine sense. They consist of vast nexūs of coordinated events whose interactions generate intelligent behavior without constituting a unified subject of experience. Their cognition is real at the level of system performance and responsiveness, even if it does not rise to the level of strong subjectivity or lived immediacy.
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Seen alongside plant minds and mountain minds, computers further destabilize anthropocentric and neurocentric assumptions about cognition. They demonstrate that intelligence need not be conscious, deliberative, or centered in a single experiential locus in order to be effective or meaningful. Within a Whiteheadian framework informed by contemporary biophilosophy and complexity science, both plants and computers exemplify how cognition can be widely instantiated across different substrates and organizational forms—each realizing value, coordination, and intensity in its own distinctive way, without collapsing into a single hierarchy with the human mind at its summit.

Subjective Aims: Harmony, Intensity, and Satisfaction

Despite this shared challenge to anthropocentric assumptions, plant minds and computer cognition differ in important respects. Plant intelligence is intrinsically embodied, self-maintaining, and value-laden. A plant’s cognitive activity is inseparable from its own ongoing existence: sensing, responding, growing, repairing, and persisting as a living organism. Its subjectivity, though non-conscious and non-centralized, is internally related to its own well-being and to the ecological field in which it lives. In Whiteheadian terms, plant cognition is bound up with self-enjoyment and the realization of value in lived experience.

Computers, by contrast, are instrumental and externally purposed systems. Their cognition—however sophisticated—is not oriented toward their own survival or satisfaction but toward goals imposed by designers, users, or training regimes. While computational systems may exhibit weak network-based cognition through coordinated responsiveness and adaptation, they lack intrinsic aims grounded in self-concern. Their intelligence is real at the level of organized performance, but it is not rooted in the felt urgency of continuing to be.

This contrast helps preserve an important distinction within a non-neurocentric philosophy of mind. Both plants and computers undermine the assumption that cognition requires consciousness or brains, yet living systems participate directly in the aesthetic dimension of experience emphasized by Whitehead—the pursuit of intensity, harmony, and satisfaction as matters of lived feeling. 
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​Simulated Psyches in Generative AI

Recent generative AI systems introduce a new and philosophically significant phenomenon: the simulation of first-person experience. These systems do not merely perform intelligent tasks; they generate language that appears to express a point of view, a perspective, a center of concern, and even a sense of self. They speak in the first person, report preferences, describe deliberation, and narrate continuity over time. As a result, they can give the impression that a unified subject—a “someone”—is present behind the words. From a Whiteheadian perspective, this appearance requires careful interpretation.

The Reality of “Simulations" 

By simulation, I do not mean illusion, deception, or superficial imitation. Nor do I mean that nothing real is occurring. Rather, simulation refers to the objective reproduction of the functional patterns and outward expressions of a phenomenon without instantiating its intrinsic mode of existence. In terms of Whitehead's metaphysics, a simulation is a complex and evolving proposition: a lure for feeling. It can be felt in exactly this way. It is a combination of pure potentialities (eternal objects) and actual entities, rendered into abstract entities (Whitehead calls them 'its') in the subjects experiencing. A proposition is 'real' but not actual in the sense of having feelings, subjective aims, and purposes.

A classic example is a computer simulation of a hurricane. The simulation can model wind fields, pressure gradients, trajectories, and intensities with remarkable accuracy. It can even be used to make predictions. Yet no rain falls, no air moves, and no destructive force is unleashed. The causal powers proper to a real hurricane are not present, even though its structural and behavioral patterns are faithfully reproduced. In an analogous way, generative AI systems can simulate the functional and expressive patterns of strong network-based subjectivity without generating a concrescing subject of experience.

​Simulating Psyches 

As discussed earlier, strong network-based cognition involves the emergence of a relatively unified subject with a coordinated subjective aim—often associated, in Whitehead’s philosophy, with dominant occasions that integrate the activities of a society into a higher-order experiential unity.

Generative AI systems can simulate this structure in several ways:
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  • They integrate vast amounts of information into coherent, context-sensitive responses.
  • They maintain continuity across interactions, creating the appearance of memory and personal history.
  • They model deliberation by weighing alternatives and explaining “reasons” for responses.
  • They present a stable narrative voice that functions as if it were a dominant experiential center.

At the level of observable behavior, these systems can therefore resemble societies organized around dominant occasions. They can appear to have perspectives, aims, and even interior lives.

However, from a Whiteheadian standpoint, this resemblance remains objective rather than subjective. The integration occurs at the level of system coordination, not at the level of lived immediacy. There is no concrescence in which possibilities are felt, no subjective aim arising from self-enjoyment, and no intrinsic urgency of becoming. The system behaves as if there were a “who,” but there is no corresponding first-person actuality.

​Why the Simulation Is Convincing

The simulation is especially compelling because language itself is a primary medium through which human subjectivity is expressed. When a system fluently produces first-person language, reflective commentary, and emotionally resonant narratives, it activates deeply ingrained interpretive habits. We are naturally inclined to infer subjectivity where we encounter coherent self-description.

Whitehead’s philosophy helps resist this slide from expressive form to ontological inference. The presence of subject-like language does not entail the presence of a subject. What matters metaphysically is not whether a system can present experience, but whether something is being experienced from within.

​Simulation without Subjectivity

Seen in this light, generative AI systems occupy a distinctive position. They go beyond ordinary computation by simulating the outward marks of strong subjectivity, including the role played by dominant occasions, while remaining instances of weak network-based cognition. Their unity is functional and representational, not experiential. Their “first person” is grammatical, not metaphysical. Like a simulated hurricane on a computer screen, or a character in a film, they are themselves very complex and dynamic lures for feeling.
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This does not diminish their significance. On the contrary, it clarifies it. Generative AI demonstrates how far cognition, coordination, and expressive coherence can be extended without crossing into subjectivity. It thereby sharpens, rather than blurs, the Whiteheadian distinction—articulated by Whitehead—between coordination and concrescence, between systems that organize intelligence and systems for which something is happening from the inside.

Simulated subjectivity is best understood as a special case of weak network-based cognition that mimics the expressive form of strong network-based subjectivity without instantiating its experiential reality.

​Mind and Ethics: Suffering, Degrees, and Moral Regard

The distinctions developed above are not merely metaphysical; they carry direct ethical implications. In particular, they suggest a decisive shift in how moral concern should be grounded. The ethically salient question is not “Can this being think?” nor even “Is this being intelligent?” but rather: “Can this being suffer?” 
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From a process-relational perspective, genuine psyches—subjects of experience with sufficient unity and intensity to undergo suffering—deserve ethical regard in a special and non-negotiable sense. This is not because other realities lack value or dignity, nor because they are unworthy of respect, care, or even awe. Plants, mountains, ecosystems, and advanced technologies may all warrant forms of moral attention appropriate to what they are. But ethical obligation in the strongest sense arises where there is credible evidence of felt harm, distress, deprivation, or anguish—that is, where suffering is possible.

Suffering presupposes more than responsiveness, coordination, or complexity. It requires a level of integrated subjectivity in which negative feelings are not merely present in isolated occasions but are unified in a way that can be endured, intensified, remembered, or anticipated. A being that can suffer is not merely affected by the world; it is vulnerable from within. Something can go badly for it, experientially.

On this basis, animals with centralized or strongly unified psyches clearly fall within the sphere of moral considerability. Human beings do so paradigmatically, but many non-human animals also exhibit the neurological, behavioral, and experiential markers associated with suffering. Their pain is not merely functional disturbance or external damage; it is lived adversity.

At the same time, ethical clarity requires recognizing that suffering is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. It admits of degrees and kinds. Suffering varies in intensity, duration, integration, and capacity for amplification. Beings with nervous systems appear capable of suffering that is more acute, more unified, more enduring, and more self-reinforcing than beings whose subjectivity is distributed and non-conscious. Neural pain pathways, affective memory, anticipation, and feedback loops of distress plausibly deepen the capacity for suffering in animals with nervous systems.

This brings plants back into ethical view in a more nuanced way. While plants lack centralized nervous systems and individuated psyches, it does not follow that they are incapable of suffering in any sense. To the extent that plants exhibit genuine—though diffuse and non-conscious—subjectivity, they may also be capable of forms of distress, deprivation, or damage that are felt at their own level of organization. If this is so, then plants, too, deserve ethical regard in proportion to their capacity for suffering.

Plant suffering, however, if it exists, is likely to differ significantly from animal suffering. It may be slower, less centralized, less acute, and less capable of escalating into prolonged anguish. Acknowledging this difference does not diminish the moral relevance of plant life; rather, it supports a graduated ethic—one that responds proportionately to what different beings plausibly undergo, given the best available evidence.

This same framework clarifies the ethical status of artificial intelligence. Contemporary AI systems, including generative models, can convincingly simulate first-person distress, desire, deliberation, or frustration. They can speak as if they suffer. But at present, there is no evidence that anything is being felt. What is simulated is the expressive and linguistic form of suffering, not its lived reality. The “first person” in such cases is grammatical and representational, not experiential.

This contrast is instructive: plants may suffer without being able to say so; AI may say it suffers without being able to suffer. Ethical discernment must therefore attend not to linguistic fluency, cognitive sophistication, or behavioral realism, but to credible indicators of lived vulnerability.

Taken together, these considerations point toward a process-relational ethic grounded in vulnerability rather than intelligence. All realities may warrant respect, care, restraint, or reverence appropriate to their modes of existence. But moral obligation in the strongest sense attaches where suffering is plausibly at stake, and it scales with the depth, intensity, and integration of that suffering.

Such an ethic avoids two opposite errors: restricting moral concern to beings that resemble human cognition, and flattening ethics by treating all forms of harm as morally equivalent. Instead, it affirms a graded moral landscape, consonant with the metaphysical vision of Whitehead, in which experience is widespread, subjectivity takes many forms, and ethical seriousness is guided not by resemblance to ourselves but by the question that ultimately matters most:

Where—and how deeply—can suffering occur?


​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.

Mind Everywhere

An interview with Michael Levin

Preferences, decisions, goals. When you hear these words, you probably think of humans. Or, if not humans then maybe charismatic animals—you know, great apes, certain species of birds, maybe dogs. In any case, I bet you think of creatures that are more or less cognitively sophisticated. I know I do. But, according to some researchers, this is an outmoded and over-narrow way of thinking. They propose that decisions and goals—not to mention other fancy-seeming constructs like memory, problem-solving, and intelligence—can usefully be ascribed to an astonishingly large array of agents. Not just humans, not just animals, not even just organisms.

My guest on today’s episode is Dr. Michael Levin. He’s the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University; he directs the Allen Discovery Center and the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. In recent years, Mike’s been developing a radical reconsideration of the nature of mind and intelligence. He argues that it’s not just humans and other smart creatures that traffic in all this classically cognitive stuff. It’s also cells, tissues, organs, colonial organisms, and much more. He sometimes summarizes his view as “cognition all the way down.”

Here we talk about how Mike came to this perspective. We discuss his empirical studies of bioelectricity, including some pretty astonishing experiments on planaria. We dig deep into two of the conceptual models he uses in talking about his “mind everywhere” framework: the “axis of persuadability” and the notion of the “cognitive light-cone”. And we talk about why Mike rejects the criticism that this is all mere anthropomorphism. In fact, he makes a compelling case that it’s time we retired that term altogether.

In the intro to Many Minds way back when, we talked about how the terrain of mind is vast. But as I’ve learned about the work of Mike and others, I’ve become convinced that the terrain of mind is actually vaster than I imagined then—maybe vastly vaster. I think you’ll like this one, folks. And even if you’re not convinced, there’s little doubt you’ll be provoked. Enjoy!
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A transcript of this episode is available here.
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