Perry Marshall challenges the case made in Michael Levin's article last Thursday that patterns are alive, and that all life forms and thought are living patterns. Marshall argues that bacteria and viruses are more complicated than we imagine, but this is not a basis to claim that all lifeforms and thought can be explained by patterns.
Michael Levin insists the line between thoughts and thinkers is blurry. Other life forms might exist at forms and scales entirely foreign to us.
He’s right. However… we don’t have a snowball’s chance of recognizing those, until we first acknowledge the living capacities of our own bodies and back yards.
In 1955, Alfred Hitchcock aired "Breakdown" on TV. It’s a gripping episode about William Callew, a businessman left paralyzed but conscious after a car accident. Mistaken for dead, Callew's car is ransacked by convicts. Immobile, he can only watch as passersby also assume he’s deceased.
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