Whitehead on the Ingression of Novel Form: Toward a New Formal Causality in the Life Sciences

This is my contribution to Michael Levin and Hananel Hazan’s Symposium on Platonic Space. It builds on several years of engagement and conversation with Levin.

Here’s Levin’s Introduction to the Symposium:

You can watch the other symposium talks in this playlist, which is being updated as the sessions occur.

Below is a list of my prior writings about and dialogues with Michael Levin:

* Michael Levin’s Latent Space of Biological Form — On where biological form “resides,” critiquing attempts to locate morphospace in Newtonian space and drawing on Eastman’s logoi framework and Peircean/Whiteheadian notions of potentiae.

* Some Philosophical Implications of Michael Levin’s New Paradigm Biology — A process-philosophical response to Johannes Jaeger, arguing for an evolutionized Platonism (res potentiae, eternal objects) adequate to developmental and evolutionary data.

* The Return of Form in Biology: Thinking Through Platonic Morphospace — A sustained treatment of “Platonic morphospace,” critiquing both reductive materialism and rigid Platonism and reinterpreting forms as non-agential potentiae that ingress into actual occasions.

* Patterns Are Not Puppeteers: The Return and Reformation of Platonic Form in Biology — Follow-up on the “return of Platonism” in biology (Pop-Up School talk with Bonnitta Roy), critiquing the idea of patterns as agents and arguing for a reformed, process-relational Platonism where organisms are the locus of decision.

* Ingressing Minds: Causal Patterns Beyond Genetics and Environment – Reflections on Michael Levin’s Platonic Research Program for Biology — A close reading of Levin’s “Ingressing Minds” preprint, using Whitehead’s categories to distinguish forms as non-agential patterns from actual occasions as true agents.

* Minds in the Making: Bringing Formal and Final Causes Back into Evolutionary Science (with Michael Levin) — Substack essay plus dialogue, framing Levin’s work as recovering formal and final causes in evolutionary science and reading his “Platonic morphospace” through Whitehead’s eternal objects and primordial valuation.

* Goals Go All the Way Down: Responding to the Deacon–Levin Dialogue — On Terrence Deacon’s “normative chemistry” and Levin’s “goals all the way down,” arguing that both require a deeper ontology of possibility and value (Whitehead, Bergson) to make sense of purposiveness in nature.

* The Invariance of Variation: Or Why Metaphysics Must Become Ungrounded (Dialogue with Tim Jackson) — Video + transcript engaging in ongoing dialogue with Tim Jackson about Creativity, invariance, and whether evolution can be understood without something like a realm of forms or eternal objects; includes extended discussion of Levin’s Platonic research program.

Dialogues and media featuring Levin & Platonic form

* Minds All Around Us: Dialoguing with Michael Levin — my reflection post on a Meaning Code conversation with Levin and Clive Thompson, situating his multi-scale cognition framework and Platonic morphospace within a broader “mind everywhere” arc.

* Music, Memory, and the Song of Life (dialogue with Karen Wong) — Near-transcript and reflections on a Meaning Code dialogue where I connect Levin’s developmental morphospace and bioelectric patterning with themes of rhythm, memory, and the musicality of morphogenesis.

* Platonizing Biology: A Dialogue with Michael Levin — Early public dialogue explicitly thematizing the “Platonizing” turn in biology and probing how Levin’s morphospace relates to Plato and Whitehead.

* Taming the Technological Dragon, with Michael Levin — Conversation on “Technological Approaches to Mind Everywhere,” exploring the metaphysical stakes of placing organisms and machines on a continuum and the risk of sliding back into a mechanistic view of form.