Form is mind, mind is form

And other notes from a fateful encounter with a herd of cattle

“Persistence in current form is impossible” — Michael Levin¹

I.

I was recently sitting on a porch in upstate New York watching trees get slammed by relentless wind, and it seemed obvious enough. Form — of trees, bugs, human bodies, landscapes — is the memory of experience. Biology, in particular, is sensitive to experience, and good at storing it.

In the universe, stuff is always happening. Everywhere you look, there’s an event unfolding. And the involved parties are either made of stuff that can store a memory of what happened (humans), or not (a plastic chair). Events can be turned into experience by finding purchase in form (trans-formed). Or, they can just fall back into the infinite flux of all phenomenon without a trace².

The more of an event any given form is able to capture, the more experience can be generated. Capture is what transforms events into experience³. Once captured, experience can then be mobilized to redirect the flow of events in the world. A neat loop.

Humans are more sensitive to experience than mountains, or crickets. Flesh and muscle is more sensitive than stone. More responsive. Humans are clad with orders of magnitude more muscle than crickets, giving us all manners of physical storage for experiential information.

Our bodies are more capable of responding to the infinite flux of all phenomenon, and storing those responses. That means we can do more with it.

In some kind of literal sense, I think humans can build cities and computers and write poetry and feel deep wells of love and grief while mountains and crickets cannot⁴ because our bodies are more capable of clenching and responding to experience than theirs are.

From the view of evolution, then, we might think of humans as biological forms fine-tuned to generate as much experience out of events as we can muster. Experience is useful. Our function is to wring out each passing moment, to squeeze as much function out of the endless, faceless happenings of the universe as possible. Function for what? To keep on living, I guess.

Being relatively sophisticated experience-catchers is a mixed bag. It’s the root of trauma. Probably the whole shit-storm of suffering in general, too, as per Buddha. But it’s also the source of wonder, awe, conviviality, love, or whatever else you take to be among the most redeeming qualities of being alive. Annie Dillard calls consciousness evolution’s “bittersweet birthday present.” Of course, evolution pays no mind to whether we enjoy our presents.

This sensitivity to experience, our marvelously complex bodies that can make so much out of the ceaseless flow of events, is what’s helped us build shelters from the elements, lay plumbing pipes to mitigate disease, invent vaccines to thwart infant mortality, and everything in-between. Sensitivity to experience helps us deter entropy, and seek joy. By storing so much experience, we can use it increasingly complex ways.

Just like storing food sparked the agricultural revolution, humans as experience-storing-beings sparked a much older inflection point in the development of minds, yes, but more specifically, in how skillful minds can become at realizing their own goals. Like skirting death.

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Relatedly, a favorite moment from my podcast conversation with neuroscientist Mark Miller

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II.

How does this all come to bear on that big mystery of what the mind is, or where it resides? Is mind some invisible substance that inhabits the body on loan from a divine realm? Is it a pattern of electromagnetic information processing?

Maybe mind is the result of holding experience in a muscular amber, repurposing the cosmic drift of all things towards the aims of the living⁵.

In Buddhism, there’s The Heart Sutra, which says “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Similarly, it seems to me like form is mind and mind is form.

The Buddha’s teachings are often translated from Pali into English as something along the lines of “desire causes suffering.” Romeo Stevens has a great article reminding us that the actual statement is “Tanha is the cause of Dukkha,” and everything after that is just someone’s bumpy translation.

Instead of desire, he suggests we translate Tanha as clenching, grasping, clinging, or as Nick Cammarata calls it on Twitter, the “fast-grabby-thing” our minds do.

Clenching or grabbing after experience does sound exactly like the basic function of a mind. It’s what I saw happening between the wind and the trees from the porch in upstate New York. The trees didn’t have muscles to clench, but the pattern of which leaves fell, the way the swaying trunks could subtly shift their slants over time, the carved slices of bark from centuries of stray lightning bolts or rocks thrown in the wind — these all make up the trees’ various clenching apparatuses. They’re primitive muscles that hang on to whatever events happen around them. Records of their entanglement with the world.

And so with humans. Experience courses through us, and we clench, and that clenching creates patterns of muscular tension held in the body. If Michael Johnson’s vasocomputation hunch is right, those patterns of muscular tension sculpt the coursing of blood through the body, which in turn shapes brain activity, which, in turn, delivers each of us our own twisted versions of mind.

Here’s this, a 2008 paper on the link between blood flow and neural processing

III.

After watching the trees, we went for a walk through the 56 acres of our upstate AirBnB. We’d heard rumors that the owners rent part of the land out to a farmer for his cattle to graze.

Sure enough, after a passing through a few alien landscapes, we spotted them. Far off in the distance, speckled against the rolling hills, maybe 50 cows, mostly a silky almond-brown, or black.

We started closing the distance between us. One or two spotted us coming, yanked their heads up from the grass, and stared. After a few seconds, they began trotting towards us, like dogs coming back from a long toss with a tennis ball clutched by the teeth. The commotion of a few trotting cows alerted the others within earshot. They looked up, saw their comrades heading off, looked further and saw us humans heading their way, and joined in.

As we kept walking towards them, I saw the news of our approach spread across the entire herd, like ripples on a lake’s surface shooting outwards. Now they’re all running towards us, maybe 30 in total, and the warier among our group of humans stop, realizing that perhaps a stampede of cattle heading not just in our direction, but all with eyes locked directly on us, might actually be something to run from, not towards.

The rest of us proceeded to the edge of the creek, just beyond which there was a flimsy fence, where the cattle were arriving.

A real moment during out standoff with these creatures, as captured by Kasey Klimes.

Now we’re standing maybe 10 yards across from a line of black and brown cows, a small creek and two thin wires between us, locked in eye contact. Behind them, the mountain is a collage of green, yellow, orange, and red leaves.

I want to hop the creek, duck the wires, and say hello. Scratch their snouts and rub under their ears. Pat their firm bellies, as if to say that creation has really done a fine job with these lot. Some of the larger ones in the back are kind of scary. But mostly, they seem curious. Maybe they think we have snacks.

Or, maybe life wants to know itself. To mingle amidst its own fecundity. Maybe their bodies cannot quite store and repurpose experience so as to develop impulses like “I’d really love to pet that human and scratch just beneath its ears in a display of affection,” but that curiosity in their eyes was almost unmistakable. Maybe it was a more primitive version of what I felt. Or, hell, maybe theirs is more complex.

But we didn’t go over and touch them. Superimposed upon that desire was the complex schema of human ideas. Property lines, the ownership of cattle, the agriculture industry. That note from our AirBnB hosts about making sure to not, under any circumstances, stray beyond the perimeter of their property. DO NOT cross the creek, where the neighbor’s property begins, their “house rules” shouted.

And so I begin to see the cows in front of me not as fellow adventurers in life and form, but as things only perceptible thanks to my own species’ doings, our marshaling of cosmic events into storable experiences, wielded towards our own complex ends. In front of me are walking products. Beef, milk, leather, gelatin. They’re like a field of shoes.

Astrophysicist Sara Imari Walker has this idea that consciousness is a mechanism for bringing increasingly specific and complex configurations of matter into existence across time. Consciousness “defines what we, as features of our universe, might build in the future.”

And I see all the good and bad this entails. The possibility of arranging matter into legal systems that uphold property rights, or into agriculture industries that feed nations while brutalizing animals, these bring me away from the prospect of communion during my standoff with the cows. It’s only because of these wider, more specific possibilities that I do not cross the creek, that I do not scratch beneath the ears of these small and playful looking creatures. What if I upset the farmer who owns them? What if I get a bad review on AirBnB?

The proliferation of forms is a tool for survival. If you buy into the free energy principle stuff, it’s a tool for life’s war against entropy. But it carries no promise of communion, of enlivenment, or as the darker corners of creation cry out for, of redemption.

If there is something rather than nothing, there is no guarantee that something is better than nothing. That’s mostly up to us living creatures, I suppose, to redeem the mysterious fact that existence has occurred. Some cosmic wind blew from nowhere and here we all are, learning how to use our fleshy and responsive bodies to freeze experience, twist it, store it, and send it back out into the world in a way that, hopefully, makes this place a little more beautiful.

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In other news, a few pieces I published over at Vox recently:

- DMT, “the nuclear bomb of the psychedelic family,” kind of explained

- A research round-up on combining meditation with brain stimulation

- The very old and delightfully strange history of nitrous oxide use

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1. On a recent podcast.

2. I’m tempted to say that experience is just the residue of past events, which explains why the pinnacle of presence in meditation — nirodha samapatti, or cessation — extinguishes consciousness altogether. If you’re truly present, if there’s really no trace of the past coming to bear on your experience of the present, then there’s just no experience at all. Without memory of the past, there’s literally no experience of the present.

3. But I’m not saying that capturing events is the sole condition for transforming mere fluctuations of the void into experience. That’s a whole other can of panpsychist worms.

4. I don’t want to be too flippant about the prospect of cities or poetry in both crickets and mountains. But if you read me charitably, then even if mountains have a way of expressing poetry, and mountain ranges are indeed some kind of city, and crickets really do have some sort of urban agglomerations, you can see what I mean.

5. This would fit with the enactivist idea that life and mind always come together. Wherever you have mind, you have a system with some capacity to turn events into experience, and repurpose that experience towards pushing back against death.