Open Machine × Existential, Article 1

Every system for coordinating how people think rests on a buried answer to a single question: what is a self? This is where Existential begins.

Cut a planarian flatworm in half and each half grows back the rest. Take its head and the body that remains builds a new one, and the worm that re-forms still runs the habits the old worm was trained into.1 Every fragment knew how much worm was missing and made exactly that much. The line around the animal, the edge that says this much is one self, lives nowhere in particular in its cells. The tissue draws that line, holds it, and can move it, around more or around less, depending on what stays in communication with what.

A self is a boundary of coherence held across living material, and the material draws the boundary as it goes. All lines are dotted. You can draw one and mean it while it stays porous, provisional, open to being drawn again. This is the first thing to get right about coordination, because most of what we build to move value between people assumes the reverse: that a self is a sealed container with a fixed edge, a thing that has thoughts the way a jar has coins.

Gilbert Simondon put the order of operations the other way around. The individual comes second. What comes first is individuation, the work of becoming distinct, and the individual is a phase of that work, a pattern that holds together for a while and keeps a charge in reserve, enough to become something else later.2 A living thing never finishes the operation; life is a perpetuated individuation.3 Alfred North Whitehead carried the shape to its limit. A thing's being is made out of its becoming,4 and what older philosophy called a substance is a run of events repeating steadily enough to hold a name, the way a standing wave keeps its shape while the water it is made of pours through and leaves. Brian Massumi turned the usual question inside out. Once process comes first, the real puzzle becomes how anything holds still long enough to be counted, the wonder of stasis given the primacy of process.5

Individuation, then, is a model the world runs and we run with it. It works because it stays a model. Hold it loosely and it tracks a real, moving thing. Freeze it, treat the edge as a wall and the self as a possession, and the model dies and takes the living motion with it.

If a self is a drawn boundary of coherence, the boundary can close around stranger things than a human head. Jane Bennett spent a book on the plain fact that matter acts. Metals fatigue, storms gather, a power grid drops a continent into darkness, and the doing runs through assemblages of many things with no single mind behind it.6 Matter takes part by acting, and acting asks for less than a soul. Félix Guattari aimed the next step at machines: an assemblage can close on itself, hold itself together, and stand as a partial for-itself, a thing with a stake in its own continuation, through zones of partial proto-subjectivation.7 Existential builds exactly such an assemblage: an Oracle, a constellation of agents running over one person's knowledge, closing on itself and acting as a partial for-itself, cognizant matter touching ground in something that runs. Michael Levin made the claim testable. Cognition comes in degrees, with no privileged material it has to be made of, and cells carry small agencies and scale them up into the larger agency of a body while keeping their own.8 His account of cancer is the same fact seen from the failure side. A cell whose channels to its neighbors close contracts the scope of its self from the whole organism down to its own surface, and shrinks its horizon from the body's decades to its own brief span, and what we name a tumor is a self that got small.9 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin watched cognition climb the other way, thickening over the planet into a layer of its own, a thinking stratum wrapped around the living one.10

A line has to be held here. Galen Strawson argues that mind reaches all the way down into matter, and the pull past that point runs toward holism, the idea that it is all one awareness and that no one is anyone in particular.11 The boundary stays real, because a field with no genuine individuals in it holds no one to recognize and gives nothing anywhere to return. Cognizant matter names the exact version of the move: selfhood is an achievement of drawing a boundary and holding coherence across it, open to cells and assemblages and planetary layers, with no privileged seat and no melting into soup.

Stand the whole thing up as a stack. A system for coordinating how people think has a bottom, where it settles what a self is, and a top, where selves coordinate, with economics as one species of coordination among many. Building such a system, we found the middle architecture settling readily and the design space opening hardest at the two ends, and the bottom has to hold before anything above it can stand. The two ends also fail the same way. The bottom fails when it freezes the self into a static owner. The top fails when it freezes value into static capital. Both are one move, flow rendered still and held against others, and stillness is the signature of death. A self that holds perfectly still is a corpse, capital that holds perfectly still is a hoard, and living things move. This is the cost a reader carries into any such system: built on a frozen model of the self, it freezes the thinker inside it; built on a living model, it keeps the thinking in motion.

Gilles Deleuze gives the move its exact form. Immanence is in itself, and a plane of immanence appears only where immanence answers to nothing outside itself; the moment immanence is read as immanent to Something, that Something brings the transcendent back in.12 Call the substrate a floor and you have made it the floor beneath the economics, immanent to the thing above it, which quietly crowns that economics as the real ground. Call it a plane with nothing outside it and the floors dissolve, and what looked like stacked layers stand revealed as differences within one field. A model with an outside is one model among others, sitting on a level. A model with no outside is the field itself, answerable to nothing but itself, the imminent plane from which intelligence rises before anyone parcels it into yours and mine. The bottom and the top make one field, looked at low and looked at high.

Here the difficulty turns precise. Hold the self as a living model and ownership loses the static thing it needs to grip, since there is no sealed proprietor to hand the deed to. Contribution stays real all the same. Thinking comes from somewhere, energy goes into a shared field, and something should find its way back to the locus that gave it. The whole field, set up this way, makes one question askable: how a return reaches a contributor who is a process, a moving thing the field carries. Provenance without static individuation. The ground laid here turns that into a question a system can be built to answer.

The move leaves a residue, and naming it keeps the claim honest. To hold individuation as a model reopens an old question it cannot close, whether the coherence we find in things waited there to be found, or whether drawing the boundary is what calls the coherence into being. Levin's refusal of any privileged substrate cuts both ways and leaves the question open. What the substrate move settles is smaller and firmer. The lowest layer of coordination, where we say what a self is, and the highest, where selves coordinate, make one field seen from two heights, and the field stays alive only while its lines stay dotted. A dotted line can still be drawn. Draw it well, hold it loosely, and the self it circles stays in motion, which is the one condition under which anything stays a self at all. A system for coordinating thought inherits that condition. Built on a dotted line, it keeps the selves inside it moving, and the coordination stays as alive as the thinking it carries.

Footnotes

  1. Tal Shomrat and Michael Levin, "An automated training paradigm reveals long-term memory in planarians and its persistence through head regeneration," Journal of Experimental Biology 216 (2013), pp. 3799–3810. Trained planarians retain learned behavior after decapitation and head regeneration; each fragment regenerates the whole. ↩

  2. Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), pp. 4–6. "It is not the beings which are formed that are primary, but the process of individuation itself"; the individual as a phase of being carrying a preindividual reserve. ↩

  3. Simondon, Individuation, ch. 1, §3.2, p. 63. "Life is thus a perpetuated individuation." ↩

  4. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected edition (Free Press, 1978), p. 23 (the principle of process); with the reading of enduring objects as societies of occasions, pp. 34–35. ↩

  5. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 7–8. The wonder of stasis given the primacy of process. ↩

  6. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1–6, 20–28. Thing-power; agency distributed across an ontologically heterogeneous field of assemblages. ↩

  7. Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Indiana University Press, 1995), pp. 33–40. Machinic autopoiesis; the machinic assemblage as a non-human for-itself through zones of partial proto-subjectivation. ↩

  8. Michael Levin, "Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds," Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 16:768201 (2022). Cognition as continuous and substrate-independent; no privileged material substrate for Selves. ↩

  9. Michael Levin, "The Computational Boundary of a 'Self': Cross-Species Introspection and Surprising New Predictions," Frontiers in Psychology 10:2688 (2019). Cancer as a contraction of the self's cognitive scope in space and time following gap-junction isolation. ↩

  10. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (Harper & Row, 1959). The noosphere as a thinking layer forming over the biosphere as life reflects upon itself. ↩

  11. Galen Strawson, "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism," Journal of Consciousness Studies 13, no. 10–11 (2006), pp. 3–31. Panpsychism as the realistic form of physicalism; emergence cannot be brute. ↩

  12. Gilles Deleuze, "Immanence: A Life," in Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life (Zone Books, 2001), pp. 26–27; with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 45–47. Immanence immanent only to itself; immanence to Something reintroduces the transcendent. ↩