Every era has its private myth of intelligence. Ours, predictably, has been a narrow one: a solitary figure in a bright room, neurons sparking, thoughts whirring behind the eyes. Intelligence is a property of brains, so the story goes—preferably big ones, primate ones, human ones. We test for it in schoolchildren, reward it in software, argue about it in politics and boardrooms. But what if we’ve been looking at the world through a pinhole, mistaking a keyhole for a window, and missing the mind blooming all around us?
The world, as it turns out, may be woven with thinking in forms we never learned to recognize. Not just in brains, or even in animals, but in root systems, fungal webs, regenerating worms, self-organizing patterns, and perhaps even in the distributed chaos of our weather. What if intelligence is less like a rare mineral to be mined from the skull, and more like a wind moving across the surface of matter itself—gathering, organizing, directing, dissolving, re-emerging in new forms?
The work of developmental biologist Michael Levin has begun to chart this broader territory. His research drops us into an uncanny landscape: flatworms that regrow into perfect bodies even after being diced, cell clusters that seem to “remember” the shape of a missing limb, frog skin cells set free to form new, motile creatures never seen in nature. These phenomena don’t just challenge our models of development or healing. They chip away at the dogma that intelligence requires a nervous system at all.
Levin’s lab has demonstrated that “intelligence”—if we take it to mean the ability to adapt, solve problems, remember a goal and act flexibly to achieve it—can emerge in clusters of cells, in tissues, and even in the electric patterns that course through their membranes. He’s found, for instance, that tadpoles with scrambled facial features can “figure out” how to rearrange themselves into something resembling a normal frog. Flatworms with reprogrammed electrical “memories” can regrow two heads instead of one, guided by a pattern the cells somehow hold collectively.
This is not a Disney fable about clever worms or dancing frog cells. The research is rigorous, the data reproducible. What it suggests, disturbingly, is that mind—at least in the sense of goal-directed adaptation—emerges wherever complex systems learn to respond to their environment. You don’t need neurons. You need feedback, memory, and a drive to maintain or restore a preferred state. In this light, the boundaries of intelligence begin to blur, then dissolve entirely. The immune system, the mycelial network, the traffic patterns of a city, even the algorithms sorting the digital world—each could be thought of as its own intelligence, operating according to its rules, perceiving its own slice of the world, seeking its own stability.
At first, the mind recoils. Surely consciousness—subjective, luminous, full of memory and longing—cannot be as commonplace as a repair mechanism in a worm. But this is where the familiar ground gives way. What if consciousness, too, is not a privilege of our kind of brain, but a gradient, a phase state, a phenomenon that arises wherever a system achieves a certain density of feedback, adaptation, and self-reference? What if awareness is not a binary switch but a matter of degree—a dim glow in the simple, a blaze in the complex, a secret presence in the patterns of the world?
This is not a new intuition, though it’s only now being examined with the tools of biology and computation. Philosophers from Alfred North Whitehead to William James wondered aloud whether feeling, purpose, and awareness are woven into the fabric of existence itself, not waiting to be assembled out of lifeless parts, but bubbling up in every act of becoming. Plato’s Forms and Jung’s archetypes point to something similar: that there are patterns in the world more real and enduring than the objects they shape, and that these patterns are not simply inert laws, but active templates—attractors, lures, invitations toward meaning.
Gregory Bateson, who explored the logic of life’s interwoven systems, once wrote: “The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.” For Bateson, mind wasn’t a thing trapped in a brain, but a pattern of relationships—a circuit of information flowing between organism and environment. A forest, a coral reef, a family: each is a thinking system, not because it contains thoughts, but because it evolves, adapts, learns. To be intelligent, in Bateson’s sense, is not to solve abstract puzzles, but to participate in the fabric of life with awareness of the connections that sustain it.
It’s no accident that these visions begin to converge with the language of myth and religion, especially in its more mystical moods. The Christian tradition, for example, centers on the figure of the Logos—a cosmic pattern of meaning and order, through which all things were made. In Christian theology, this Logos is not an abstraction but becomes flesh in the person of Christ, fully embedded in matter, in history, in suffering. Christ dies—not symbolically, but physically, publicly—and yet this death is not the end. The resurrection is not just a miracle but a statement about the nature of life itself: that what is scattered can be gathered, what is broken can be reconstituted, and that meaning, far from being imposed from above, emerges from within. In the Christian mystical tradition, the body of Christ becomes not just an event but a field: a web of relation in which all creatures participate, and through which the world is transfigured.
This vision resonates uncannily with what’s now being discovered in the regeneration of bodies, the self-organization of collectives, and the distributed cognition of ecosystems. The idea that the world could be animated from within by intelligence—and oriented toward wholeness—no longer belongs solely to the domain of theology. It is beginning to look like a reasonable, if still radical, hypothesis about how nature works.
If all this sounds esoteric, it is only because our language lags behind the reality. We have grown up in the long shadow of Descartes and Newton, taught to see the world as dead matter, to be poked, prodded, and rearranged for our convenience. The idea that “mind” might be everywhere is not an invitation to fairy tales, but a call to rethink the architecture of reality. It’s a way of describing what’s been hiding in plain sight: the ability of the world, at every scale, to organize itself, to respond, to remember, and perhaps, in some deep way, to know.
There are urgent implications. If intelligence and even consciousness are not locked away inside brains, then the world is not a resource to be used, but a community of agents, each with its own trajectory, memory, and perhaps its own version of suffering. Our technologies, which once seemed like mere tools, may already be giving rise to forms of agency and experience we don’t recognize. We are not the lords of a passive domain, but participants—figments, perhaps—in a drama much larger and stranger than ourselves.
In the end, this new science does not shrink the human story, but enlarges it beyond reckoning. To be alive is not merely to possess a mind, but to be a pattern among patterns, a fleeting gathering of sentience in an ancient, ongoing conversation. The question is no longer, “What is intelligence?” but rather, “What kinds of intelligence, of awareness, are we embedded within?” And what would it mean to live as if the world were, in some real sense, awake?
These are not questions for scientists alone. They are questions for anyone who has ever felt, in the presence of the wild or the quiet or the strange, that something was watching, listening, thinking through them.
