In part one, I wrote about emergence. That moment on the continuum where a bunch of parts becomes a whole. Where the bricks become a house. Where the cells become a body. Where a group of tired, busy individuals becomes a community.
But I left a question hanging. Or maybe it was hanging over me the whole time…
Where does the whole come from?
The usual answer is that it builds from the bottom up. Pile up enough parts, connect them in the right ways, and something new appears. That’s the standard view of emergence—but it’s never quite satisfied me. If the whole is truly something new, something the parts don’t possess on their own, then where was it before it showed up?
Plato had a thought about that.
Plato believed that the things we see in this world are imperfect copies of perfect, eternal Forms. (In Plato’s philosophy, a Form is the ideal pattern behind a thing. Every circle you’ve ever drawn is a little lopsided, but the idea of a perfect circle exists whether anyone draws it or not.) The circle on your napkin isn’t the real circle. It’s a copy. A shadow of something more real.
And we’ve seen this come back around lately in the idea of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra. Baudrillard argued that modern consumer markets no longer trade in physical goods, but rather in “signs” and brand identities that people buy to signal social status. He claimed this creates a state of hyperreality, where mass media and advertising produce images and copies that have no connection to an actual, original reality. Ultimately, this means society has become trapped in a self-referential loop, where simulated experiences and brand perceptions completely replace genuine human interaction.
It’s interesting how fundamental truths are found all around us.
For a couple thousand years, Plato’s idea was mostly just taught in philosophy classrooms. But lately, it’s been showing up, surprisingly… in biology labs. Michael Levin is a biologist at Tufts University, and he’s one of the most interesting thinkers working in this field today. Levin has proposed that there’s a structured, non-physical “Platonic space” of patterns. Not just mathematical truths like triangles and prime numbers, but body plans, behaviors, and maybe even kinds of minds. In his view, living things don’t invent these patterns from scratch. They act as interfaces, or pointers, that let those patterns come through into physical reality. He calls it ingression, a term he borrowed from the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.
Think about that for a second.
A frog embryo doesn’t build a frog out of nothing. It reaches a configuration where the frog pattern can come through. Levin’s lab has even built new living things, like xenobots made from frog cells, that have no evolutionary history of their own. And yet they show organized behaviors nobody designed into them. So where did those behaviors come from? If Levin is right, they were already there. Waiting for something to give them a body.
Now, if we go back to that continuum from the first article, this changes everything about the point of emergence. In the bottom-up view, emergence is the moment the parts create something new. In the Platonic view, emergence is the moment the parts become organized enough to receive something that already existed.
This threshold isn’t where order gets made. It’s where order gets let in. The system doesn’t just become a whole. It becomes an antenna for one.
And I’ll be honest, that makes sense to me. In part one, I said I see an intelligence in the algorithm of reality. This takes it a step further. Maybe the rules aren’t just written so that the parts want to come together. Maybe the whole is calling to them. Maybe the pattern comes first and matter rises to meet it.
Fair warning… this is philosophy more than settled science. Plenty of scientists would say “Platonic space” is just a poetic name for things physics and math already describe. And critics point out that it’s hard to design an experiment that can tell ingression apart from ordinary physical emergence. Fair enough. But as a way of seeing the world, I find it incredibly useful. Especially when it comes to community.
Here’s a detail I love. Whitehead, the philosopher Levin borrowed his language from, described the enduring things of the universe (rocks, trees, bodies) as societies. Gatherings of smaller events held together by a shared pattern. In other words, community isn’t just one of the things that emerges. It might be the shape of everything that emerges.
So what does this mean for those of us out there tying strings? (a reference to the first article)
It means we’re not manufacturing community. We couldn’t if we tried. Nobody can force a group of people to belong to each other. But the form of community—people knowing each other, caring for each other, showing up for each other—already exists. It’s been here as long as people have.
Our job is to build the conditions that let it come through.
The seeds. The strings. The steady flow of energy. Those aren’t the community. They’re the antenna. And that takes a lot of pressure off. When you’re hosting another meeting that only four people attend, you don’t have to believe you’re building something out of nothing by sheer willpower. You’re tuning an instrument. The music already exists.
Which brings me back to the questions I started with in part one. What are we? Where did we come from? What are we becoming? Maybe we’re the parts. Maybe we’re the antenna. And maybe what we’re becoming has been waiting for us all along.
So keep tying those strings. Keep tuning the instrument. Maybe community is trying to come through.
And when it does, you’ll feel it.
Join us in making the world a better place. You’ll be glad that you did. Cheers, friends.
