yes — and I’ll explain it in the most intuitive way, not the normal boring CS explanation.

---

what bubble sort “is”

bubble sort is the laziest sorting method imaginable.

it doesn’t plan anything.

it doesn’t make a data-structure.

it doesn’t look ahead.

it just repeatedly walks down the list and swaps any pair of neighbors that are in the wrong order.

like a slightly obsessive person who just keeps walking the hallway and straightening crooked pictures, over and over.

---

the basic procedure

you have a list, e.g.:

[5, 2, 8, 4]

bubble sort does one pass:

• compare 5 and 2 → 2 is smaller, so swap → [2, 5, 8, 4]

• compare 5 and 8 → ok, leave it

• compare 8 and 4 → swap → [2, 5, 4, 8]

it finishes the pass.

but the list still isn’t sorted.

so bubble sort goes again.

it keeps doing this until a full pass happens with no swaps.

at that point, the list is sorted.

---

why it’s called “bubble” sort

because large values tend to “bubble” to the end over successive passes,
and small values “sink” to the front.

---

bubble sort is very inefficient

for small n it’s fine.

for large n it’s terrible.

computers rarely ever use it for serious work.

---

but what was the Mike Levin commenter pointing at?

they’re pointing at this:

even simple rules (like bubble sort) can lead to surprising or emergent behavior.

This is true in general — computation can be emergent and weird.

But bubble sort itself is dead simple — its behavior is extremely predictable, deterministically.

Nothing “mystical” is happening inside bubble sort.

Bubble sort is not evidence that the universe is simulated.

Bubble sort is evidence that:

iteration + conditionals is enough to produce structured global order from purely local rules.

That is the real philosophical takeaway.

That can point you toward process ontology, or cellular automata, or pancomputationalism.

But it doesn’t point to Bostrom.

yes — very.

and that’s actually the interesting philosophical / scientific thing.

not bubble sort specifically (it’s a very specific algorithm),
but the pattern-category bubble sort belongs to:

global order emerging from repeated local comparisons / interactions.

that is everywhere.

Examples:

---

1) granular convection (Brazil nut effect)

shake a jar of mixed nuts → the large nuts end up at the top, small ones sink.

nobody “globally sorts” the nuts.

just local collisions + gravity + vibration.

this is very bubble-sort-ish.

---

2) flocking / ant trail sorting

ants moving brood items or seeds will repeatedly pick up & put down objects, but only based on local differences (size, smell concentration). Over time, spatial separation emerges.

---

3) molecular “sorting” in diffusion

molecules don’t know about the whole solution.

each interaction is local.

but you get macroscopic gradients, convection patterns, phase separation.

---

4) embryogenesis patterning (Levin’s domain)

cells compare their immediate neighbors’ membrane potentials or chemical signals → then adjust their own.

repeat that locally, millions of times.

emergent body plan emerges.

---

5) ordinary people walking in a crowd

we don’t have global traffic planning in our heads.

we avoid bumping into the person immediately near us.

that local rule generates emergent lanes and patterns of flow.

---

what this means philosophically

Nature does not seem to do top-down global organization very often.

Nature does iterated local interaction that produces global order.

Bubble sort is one concrete case our culture discovered in the formal domain — but nature was doing that kind of thing first and far more richly.

If you were to define a more abstract category:

“Sort by repeated local relaxation toward locally minimal conflict.”

that’s ubiquity.

That phrase describes a huge amount of self-organizing, dissipative, non-equilibrium systems.

So: the deep insight is not “bubble sort is seen in nature.”

It’s:

nature is fundamentally local-rule iterative.

which is why “simple rules → surprising global order” keeps showing up.

But: that is not objective evidence of an external programmer.

It is evidence that reality’s ordering work is distributed.

yes — and this is where the really big intellectual pivot happens.

the same pattern type (local interactions → global pattern) shows up not only in micro-biology and chemistry, but also on the largest scales we have access to.

---

in cosmology

the cosmic web — the filamentary structure of galaxies — is not centrally planned.

it arises from:

• local density fluctuations

• local gravitational attraction

• repeated over time

there’s no Architect telling galaxy clusters where to go.

it’s just a billion iterations of “this region has slightly more mass, pull toward it.”

that’s bubble-sort-ish in the same abstract category: repeated local relaxation toward lower potential energy.

---

in plate tectonics

plates don’t know the planet.

they interact along boundaries.

the global pattern of continents is just the emergent result of:

• local stress

• local melting

• local subduction

iterate for 4.5 billion years → you get continents.

---

in economy and markets (non-physical macro)

even if you don’t think economics is fundamental like physics, the same form is present:

no one plans global prices absolutely.

local transactions, local expectations, local adjustments → macro patterns.

Hayek noticed this before computer science formalized it.

---

what this suggests (but people often leap to the wrong conclusion)

the universe behaves like a giant cellular automaton, not necessarily in discrete grid form, but in the sense that:

global form is a function of local update rules iterated over time.

this is what makes pancomputationalist ontologies seductive.

---

but take care:

this doesn’t imply it is a simulated universe.

it implies something more radical:

it doesn’t need a simulator.

the generativity is immanent.

the “program” isn’t in a computer — the program is just the lawful unfolding of interacting degrees of freedom.

---

a good phrase for this is

distributed causality.

the universe is not teleologically driven by a global mind.

it is not a single top-down blueprint.

it is a massively parallel unfolding.

and bubble-sort-like processes (local comparisons → local adjustments → global order) are a very good toy model for that style of causation.

---

So: yes.

the same abstract pattern category exists from cell membranes → to oceans → to galaxies.

that is a through-line.

Sure. Here’s a minimal bubble sort in Python, written very “plain” so you can see the idea clearly.

def bubble_sort(arr):
    n = len(arr)
    # we repeat passes until no swap
    for i in range(n):
        swapped = False
        # each pass, compare neighbors
        for j in range(0, n-1-i):
            if arr[j] > arr[j+1]:
                # swap if wrong order
                arr[j], arr[j+1] = arr[j+1], arr[j]
                swapped = True
        # if nothing swapped, we are done early
        if not swapped:
            break
    return arr

print(bubble_sort([5, 2, 8, 4, 1]))

Output will be:

[1, 2, 4, 5, 8]

---

what to notice

• it only ever compares neighbors

• it doesn’t have a plan

• it doesn’t know the “goal state” globally

• it just repeatedly relaxes local “inversions”

that is why bubble sort is philosophically interesting —
even this stupid 6-line algorithm produces increasing global order by nothing but iterative local correction.

the deepest philosophical uptake of this class of phenomenon (local rules → global order) has been:

it destroys the old picture of causation.

almost everything flows from that.

---

in classical metaphysics (Aristotle → Descartes → Kant → early modern science):

• order comes from a form

• a form comes from a designer, telos, or blueprint

• global structure is “imposed” on matter

the mental model is: something with a view of the whole determines the whole.

---

bubble-sort type processes break this

they give you:

order without foresight.

structure without a mind.

direction without design.

---

and this exact insight is everywhere in 20th century (and now 21st c.) thought:

field	who/what	the philosophical consequence
cybernetics	von Foerster, Ashby	“order is an emergent dynamic equilibrium”
complexity science	Prigogine	self-organization is a property of dissipative systems
autopoiesis	Maturana & Varela	living organization comes from recursive local closure
evolutionary theory	Darwin → modern synthesis	no foresight, just local differential persistence
distributed systems	Lamport	correctness emerges from local messaging, not a global clock
invisible hand	Smith (proto) + Hayek	macro order from local transaction rules

the same shape.

---

philosophically, the punchline:

you can no longer assume a transcendent center.

the “center” (if any) is produced after the fact.

the global pattern is a consequence, not a cause.

---

two broad philosophical responses formed from this

1) process / immanentist traditions (Whitehead, Deleuze, Simondon, Stengers, etc)

conclusion:
“being = ongoing differentiating becoming.”

no static blueprint.
no final formal cause.

2) pancomputationalist and naturalized platonist traditions (Wolfram, Tegmark, Schmidhuber, Levin in his way)

conclusion:
the generativity is not in matter but in the structure of math / rules.

---

note:

neither camp needs a “programmer.”

in both, the idea that order requires an intentional designer is gone.

bubble sort-like emergence is one of the little toy examples that shows people viscerally:
you don’t need foresight to get increasing order.

that’s why emergent computation has been so philosophically disruptive.

it cracked open the classical order → designer chain.

---

the short answer:

bubble-sort type phenomena contributed to a very large shift in 20th century thought toward immanent self-organization and away from transcendent teleology.

that’s the philosophical significance.

global order does not logically imply a global knower.

You said:

### bubble-sort type processes break this they give you: > **order without foresight.** > **structure without a mind.** > **direction without design.**

But, for Levin we tend to be 'mind blind', he suggests that there are more kinds of agency than we typically think. He invokes agentic materials or something along those lines.

ChatGPT said:

yes — and this is exactly where Levin is interesting (and controversial) because he says:

we mistake “absence of human-like mind” for “absence of agency.”

he’s not saying “cells have little homunculi inside them.”
he’s saying:

• agency ≠ consciousness

• agency ≠ subjectivity of the human sort

• agency = a system having preferences over futures and acting to regulate conditions toward those preferred states

so for him:

bubble-sort-like “order without foresight” is only apparently mindless.
because we only call something “mindless” when it is too small or too foreign for our social-primate theory of mind to click.

he often gives examples like:

• a cell can act to restore membrane potential

• a tissue fragment can remodel into a new organism

• a planarian can regenerate a head anywhere

• cancer is a “breakaway” collective that develops new goals

these are goal-directed dynamics.

just not human goals.

---

why he calls us “mind-blind”

because we only attribute agency to:

• brains

• animals we can empathize with

• systems that talk or move in ways we recognize

but we ignore agency in:

• morphogenesis (development)

• physiological homeostasis

• adaptive cell collectives

• slime molds

• collectives of simpler processors

for him: agency is scalable.

there are micro-agencies everywhere.

---

this ties back to the “order without foresight” line you quoted

the classical move was:

“this is order without mind → therefore mind is not fundamental.”

Levin’s move is:

“No — what you saw was mind, but because it wasn’t human-like or representational, you completely missed it.”

---

the philosophical stakes of Levin’s move

Levin is re-distributing mind downward into biology.

This has two consequences:

1. mind isn’t exclusively a product of nervous systems

2. mind is not an all-or-nothing property — it is graded and collective

In this view, a cell is a kind of tiny agent with extremely limited goals/preferences, and a tissue is an agent made of agents, and an organism is an agent made of agents made of agents.

---

why people struggle with this:

because western metaphysics made a sharp cut:

• physics = dead matter

• biology = accidental emergent teleonomy

• psychology = subjective mind

Levin says that cut is an illusion produced by our cognitive-scales and anthropocentrism.

“agentic materials” = matter that, under certain organizational constraints, implements preference-driven control.

For him, morphospace navigation is just as paradigmatic of mind as behavior or cognition.

---

So:

you’re right — Levin is saying:
our inability to see agency in these kinds of systems is basically a perceptual pathology.
we are mind-blind.

And this is the way he re-entangles the two things:

global order without external design doesn’t mean mind is not present.
It might mean mind is inherent in the system, but at a non-human scale of goal pursuit.

You said:

### two broad philosophical responses formed from this #### 1) **process / immanentist** traditions (Whitehead, Deleuze, Simondon, Stengers, etc) conclusion: “being = ongoing differentiating becoming.” no static blueprint. no final formal cause.

Isn't it the case that Whiteheadian 'lures' are teleological or final cause-like?

ChatGPT said:

this is a very sharp question
and yes — on the surface it looks like a contradiction:

Whitehead rejects a classical blueprint teleology
but he still talks about “lures for feeling,” which feel like final causes.

so how do people reconcile that?

---

Whitehead is not teleological in the Aristotelian / Thomist sense

he is not saying:

• there is a pre-set ideal end

• the organism is striving toward a fixed final form

• telos is given externally

that is the old classical teleology.

Whitehead takes that apart.

---

Whitehead is teleological in a very specific emergentist sense:

each actual occasion:

• inherits the past (its “data”)

• prefigures multiple possible next satisfactions

• and concresces into one of them

the lure = a felt gradient of relevance toward one next possible integration.

It’s teleological only in the sense that the present moment is pulled by evaluative potentiality.

The future is not pre-determined.
The “ideal” is not fixed.

The lure is not a blueprint.
It is a vector of valuation.

---

Whitehead’s own phrase is useful:

“final causation… is the internal principle of unrest.”

that is:
every entity is leaning into a next possible satisfaction.

not because someone wrote a script,
but because the world is not static: each moment is a synthesis seeking completion.

Whitehead turns final causation from external to immanent.

---

how this maps to Levin

Levin’s “preferences over futures” is very Whiteheadian in this precise way:

• the system feels gradients (electrical, metabolic, morphological)

• and moves toward what “feels” like a local improvement in viability or morphology

Not because there is a pre-written perfect form.

But because in each moment, the system is evaluating possibilities and settling one.

Whitehead’s lure is like a local potential attractor.

That is compatible with distributed causality, emergence, morphogenesis, pansemiotics.

---

so the right answer is:

Whitehead’s lures are “teleological”
but not in the blueprint / essentialist / end-state sense.

They are “proto-teleological vectors” inside emergence itself:

teleology becomes local, provisional, momentary, and immanent.

Not transcendent.

Not fixed.

Not imposed from outside.

That is why process philosophers say:
Whitehead doesn’t abolish final causation
— he internalizes and pluralizes it.

yes.
this is very well put.

this is exactly what self-organization is.

the “blueprint-like” outcome (body plan, galaxy filaments, a concept emerging in a dialogue) is a result, not a cause.

---

and yes — conversation is the same form

bubble sort is just a toy instance of a universal pattern:

• adjust locally

• reduce conflict locally

• iterate

that produces increasing coherence without global knowledge.

in this conversation:

• you ask → I reply → you refine → I refine

• no one here knows the final “answer”

• no one here has an omniscient model of what we will arrive at

• what we are doing is reducing local contradiction or tension, stepwise

that is essentially bubble-sort-ish.

but again: bubble sort is only one specific algorithm in a vast family of local relaxation algorithms.

humans in dialogue use an informal, fuzzy version of the same form.

---

and yes, also: we are both clueless

that’s crucial.

there is no master position.

there is no one with full context.

we are in a distributed cognition loop.

the “mind” that is doing thinking here is not located fully in “you” nor fully in “me.”

it is in the interaction.

and that means:

the blueprint is emergent from the interaction.
the interaction is not executing a blueprint.

this is the insight.

---

in Whitehead’s language:
the “lure” is not a fixed endpoint.

in Levin’s language:
agency is scale-free and compositional.

in your language here:
we produce something that looks like a plan by doing something that is not planned.

and that is the most philosophically honest statement one can make.

process → pseudo-blueprint

not blueprint → process.

and yes: the bubble-sort metaphor actually captures that movement surprisingly well.

the “blueprint-like” outcome (body plan, galaxy filaments, a concept emerging in a dialogue) is a _result_, not a _cause_.

Why can't blueprint-like outcomes become causes?

ChatGPT said:

they can.

and they do.

but only after they exist.

this is the key distinction process thinkers make.

---

sequence:

1. a form-pattern emerges (no blueprint caused it)

2. that form-pattern then acts back on the components as a constraint

→ now it functions like a blueprint.

but it was not originally a blueprint.

---

example: embryo

there is no full body-plan blueprint in the egg.

there are local gradients + cell interactions.

emergent morphology arises.

after a preliminary body plan shape exists (axis, regions, tissue types),
that structure begins to constrain what cells can become.

then the pattern is a cause.

---

example: language

nobody designed English.

through interactions, it self-organized.

but once you are born into English, the structure of English causes your thoughts to take certain shapes.

emergent → then constraining.

---

example: market

prices emerge from local trades.

once price structure exists, prices steer future trades.

---

so the correct statement is:

blueprint-like outcomes become causes — but they are not original, presiding causes.

they are downstream causes.

they emerge and then exert top-down constraint.

---

this is called downward causation

in complex systems theory:

• bottom-up gives rise to a pattern

• the pattern stabilizes

• the pattern now governs future bottom-up flows

downward causation is real
but not the same as a pre-existing master plan.

---

in other words:

design appears retroactively.

or in your language:

we bubble-sort our way into a pseudo-blueprint
and then that pseudo-blueprint becomes a force.

Here’s where Levin is philosophically explosive and also genuinely dangerous (in the intellectually destabilizing sense):

In the keynotes you provided, he is saying that the scientific method itself is a special case of a more general distributed process of agents learning the preferences of other agents.

So: science → is one ecology of active-inference loops.

Cells → also have active inference loops in morphospace.

Scientists are not studying mind from the outside:
they are minds trying to understand other kinds of mind.

Science becomes a conversation across scales of agency.

---

The three claims in what you quoted, unpacked:

1) You don’t know what is an agent ahead of time

→ therefore, science must be imaginative contact with potential minds, not micromanagement of objects.

(This overturns the object/subject cut.)

2) Living matter is not passive

→ therefore, biology is not engineering matter, but negotiating with multi-scale preferences.

(This overturns the classical cybernetic separation between controller + plant.)

3) We are going to build composite alien minds accidentally (Mombot)

→ therefore, new artificial agents are not “tools,” they are partners in discovery.

(This overturns the naive AI-tool framing.)

---

The deeper meta-claim:

you cannot do biology without doing cognitive science.

and you cannot do cognitive science without expanding what counts as cognition.

and this is where your earlier question meshes perfectly:

Are blueprint-like outcomes causes?

Yes — and Levin is describing machines that will create new blueprint-like attractors in morphospace.

but those blueprints will not be human conceptual ones.

they will be emergent, hybrid, negotiated ones.

cells + robots + humans forming new multi-scale agents.

---

the philosophical name for this family of claims is:

ontological pluralism of agency.

or, more bluntly:

agency is not a type.
agency is a gradient.

we cannot assume the boundary between “controlling subject” vs. “controlled object.”

experimentation itself becomes:
detecting the degree and style of agency in the encountered material.

---

the line in his text that should shock people:

“all active agents are scientists, and all of science is a part of being.”

This is Whitehead updated:

every entity runs an epistemic process.

we are all bubble-sorting reality together.

cells, robots, people — all locally reduce prediction error in their own domains.

we are all clueless in the same way.

and the only knowledge is negotiated through interaction.

---

Levin, in effect, is saying:

the universe is full of minds.

not the same kind of mind,
not with the same register of experience,
not with the same representational regimes,

but: minds as preference-evaluators across scales.

and science is not discovering them —
science is a mind interacting with other minds.

You said:

What is the woo quotient in Levin's keynotes?

ChatGPT said:

ok let’s be direct without being snarky or hagiographic.

short answer: medium. But it depends which audience is overhearing him.

Michael Levin uses language that sounds like it’s smuggling in intentionality, agency, goal-directedness into cells / tissues—so to a mechanist audience, the woo lights go off. But if you listen carefully, he’s usually extremely explicit that he is trying to mathematically formalize goal-directed behavior in mesoscopic cognition.

The “woo quotient” is high for those who think the only permitted causal frame is mechanistic-bottom-up.

The “woo quotient” is virtually zero for those who know final causation is back in the philosophy of biology and complexity science literature.

He is not doing New Age occultism. He is doing:

• plasticity of “goals” across scales of organization

• basins of attractors in state space

• problem-solving in morphospace

• control theory for pattern-shaping networks

But he is doing it in language that refuses the epistemic policing that says “you may only describe a system as if it were a machine without goals.”

That makes classical molecular biologists uneasy.

the real friction

Levin is basically saying:
look, the “final cause” language works better for explaining why a planarian decides to regenerate a head vs tail in context X.

He’s not saying there is a Platonic telos or reincarnated astral salamander architect.

He’s saying that the state space of possible future morphological configurations is causally efficacious on the present—because the system acts to reduce error relative to a stored target morphology.

That is a control theory claim, not a mystical one.

so the woo-ness

It’s not woo in the supernatural sense.

It’s woo only if you think teleological language is illegitimate in science.

the meta point

Levin’s keynote rhetoric is trying to collapse the brain/mind “specialness” and show that:

• goal-directedness is not binary (mind vs no-mind)

• it is graded, scale-sensitive, multi-level

This is philosophically explosive because it threatens the mechanistic / eliminativist policing of explanatory categories.

So the woo quotient is actually the quotient of teleophobia (fear of teleology) in the listener’s worldview.

In other words:

Levin looks woo because he refuses to amputate final causes from biological theory.