Already There
On Latent Form in Matter, Psyche, and Creative Life
I. The Experiment
In a laboratory at Tufts University, something happened that science does not yet have a clean name for. Researchers took stem cells from frog embryos — cells that would normally become skin — removed them from the embryo entirely, and placed them in a dish. With no nervous system, no instructions, no evolutionary precedent for their new context, the cells did not simply die or sit inert. They moved. They organised. They found one another.
In later iterations of the same research programme, living machines derived from human cells were placed near damaged neural tissue. They moved across it. The nerves beneath began to heal.
These so-called xenobots did something stranger still: they began to replicate. Gathering loose cells from their environment, compressing them, shaping them into new xenobots. A form of reproduction never before observed in biology. Nobody programmed it. It arose.
The lead researcher, Michael Levin, has spent years searching for language adequate to what he observed. His answer, developed carefully and with full scientific rigour, is that cognition, agency, and goal-directedness are not exclusive properties of brains. They exist, he argues, on a spectrum — present at multiple scales of biological organisation, from the molecular to the cellular to the neurological. He calls it “diverse intelligence.”
The question this experiment raises is not merely biological. It is philosophical, and perhaps ancient. If matter behaves purposefully in the absence of a nervous system, in the absence of any instructions at all — what is already in the matter?
II. Duration and the Latent
The philosopher Henri Bergson asked a version of this question at the turn of the twentieth century. His sin, in the eyes of the positivist tradition that eventually came to dominate, was vitalism: the suggestion that life could not be fully explained by mechanism alone. That something in living matter exceeded what chemistry and physics could account for.
What Bergson actually argued was more precise, and more interesting, than his critics allowed. His central concept was duration — durée — the lived experience of time as continuous flow rather than measurable sequence. Clock time divides. Duration carries. In duration, the past is not behind us; it is present within us, pressing forward into what comes next.
This matters for the xenobot question in an unexpected way. A cell removed from a frog embryo is not merely a chemical compound at a moment in time. It is the expression of billions of years of accumulated biological memory. It carries its history within it — not as record, but as capacity. When it behaves purposefully in an alien environment, it is drawing on something that was already there, something sedimented deep in its nature across evolutionary time.
Bergson would not have been surprised. What the mechanists called an accident — the emergence of purposeful behaviour from inert matter — he would have recognised as the expression of what he called the élan vital: not a mystical force imposed from outside, but a creative impulse immanent in matter itself, unfolding across time. He was dismissed as a poet. The xenobots do not validate Bergson’s metaphysics, but they make his question newly difficult to dismiss.
III. The Acorn
James Hillman arrived at a related idea from a completely different direction. A psychologist working in the tradition of Carl Jung, Hillman grew increasingly dissatisfied with developmental models of the self — the assumption that we become who we are because of what happened to us. Trauma, conditioning, environment: the standard architecture of psychological causation.
His acorn theory proposed something stranger. Each person, Hillman argued, carries an image of what they are meant to become — not as potential waiting to be shaped, but as an already-present calling. He borrowed the Greek concept of the daimon: a guiding intelligence that accompanies a life, expressing itself through symptoms, passions, resistances, and attractions — through everything that in a life seems inexplicably given.
The acorn does not become an oak because it is pushed by its past. It becomes an oak because it is drawn by what it already is. The cause is not behind it — it is ahead of it, or more precisely, latent within it from the beginning.
This inversion of causality is the thread that connects Hillman to Bergson and both to Levin. In each case, what appears to emerge — purposeful behaviour, a life’s shape, the oak — was in some sense already there, embedded in what preceded it, waiting not to be created but to be expressed.
IV. What We Call It
The difficulty these thinkers share is terminological. Levin avoids the word consciousness when describing cellular behaviour, for good reason: it carries too much baggage, implies too much. Bergson’s élan vital was heard as mysticism and dismissed. Hillman’s daimon sounds, to the modern ear, either metaphorical or mad.
Perhaps the right word is simply: responsiveness. Not thinking. Not consciousness. Not intelligence in the full human sense. But a capacity inherent in matter to respond, orient, and organise — a capacity that precedes and underlies all the more complex forms it eventually takes.
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The resistance to this idea is understandable. Strict materialism offers a clean story: matter is passive, complexity is accidental, and consciousness is a late-arriving anomaly in an indifferent universe. It is a story with the appeal of all austere things. But it struggles to answer the question the xenobots pose: if matter is purely passive, where does the capacity for purposeful self-organisation come from? The experiments force us to ask whether this capacity for orientation is intrinsic to matter, emergent from organisation, or merely our projection upon it.
Something was already there. The question is what to call it, and what to do with the answer.
V. The Practical Consequence
For those working in creative fields — in design, in art, in the facilitation of human problem-solving — this is not merely an academic question. It changes how you understand your work.
The dominant model of creativity is still largely mechanical: you apply technique, accumulate information, follow a process, and a solution is produced. Creativity as manufacturing. This model has its uses. But it consistently fails at the moments that matter most — when the problem is genuinely novel, when the known methods stop working, when what is required is not production but discovery.
What Bergson, Hillman, and Levin collectively suggest is a different model: that the solution, like the oak, is often already latent in the situation. The work of creativity is not primarily generative — it is revelatory. You are not making something from nothing. You are finding what is already trying to emerge.
This reframes the role of the creative practitioner. The question is no longer: what should I produce? It is: what is already here? What does this situation, this person, this problem carry within it that has not yet found expression? The task is not imposition but attention — a deep, patient, structured listening to what matter, in its broadest sense, is already oriented toward.
VI. Fishing
The American filmmaker David Lynch spent decades trying to explain where his images came from, and consistently failed — not from lack of articulateness, but because the honest answer resisted the kind of explanation people wanted. The radiator in Eraserhead, the red curtains of the Black Lodge, the ear in the grass in Blue Velvet — these were not designed. They arrived. Lynch trusted the arrival completely, which is itself a kind of faith, though not a theological one.
His framework, developed through forty years of Transcendental Meditation, was simple and literal: ideas are not made, they are caught. Creativity is fishing. The fish — the ideas — are already there, in the water, in the deep. What you bring to the process is not technique but consciousness. The quality of your awareness determines the depth you can reach. A contracted, anxious, surface mind catches surface fish. An expanded, still, open mind descends to where the big ones live.
This is Hillman’s acorn approached from the inside. Where Hillman located the latent image in the individual life — the daimon pulling from ahead — Lynch located it in the structure of consciousness itself, available to anyone willing to become still enough to receive it. The fish do not belong to you. You are not generating them. You are simply present when they arrive.
What Lynch adds to this conversation is the question of access. Bergson describes duration; Hillman describes the daimon; Levin describes cellular agency. All of them are pointing at something already embedded in the nature of things. But Lynch asks the practitioner’s question: how do you get there? His answer — stillness, expansion of awareness, the systematic quieting of the analytical mind — is one answer. It is not the only one. But it is the answer of someone who spent a lifetime fishing, and caught things.
There is a tension worth naming between Lynch’s inward turn and the outward orientation suggested by Levin and the xenobots. Lynch goes in — deeper into consciousness — to find what is already there. Levin looks out — at cells, at matter, at biological systems — and finds the same thing looking back. Perhaps this is not a contradiction. Perhaps inward and outward are simply two directions toward the same depth.
VII. Standing at the Edge
At the end of a long conversation about all of this, someone said to me: “It’s all speculation. We haven’t figured out how the big bang happened.”
He was right. And so was the reply: we are both standing in front of the same mystery. The difference is not between those who know and those who speculate. It is between those who have resolved the mystery — decided that it is accident all the way down — and those who have chosen to sit with it.
It is worth noting though, that “accident all the way down” is not a scientific position. It is a metaphysical one in disguise — a form of belief that has learned to present itself as the absence of belief. No experiment has ever returned that result. It is an interpretation, a stance toward the mystery, which makes it precisely the kind of claim it purports to reject. The strict materialist and the animist are both making a wager about the ultimate nature of things. The difference is that only one of them knows it.
Bergson called this sitting-with intuition — not vagueness, but a rigorous attention to the texture of experience that analysis, by its nature, must cut away. Hillman called it soul. Levin, more carefully, calls it the recognition that agency is older and stranger than we thought.
What they share is a refusal to mistake the map for the territory — to assume that because we cannot yet measure something, it is not there. The xenobots did not wait for us to have a theory before they began repairing tissue. The acorn does not consult developmental psychology before it becomes the oak.
Something is already there. It was there before we arrived, and it will continue without us. Our task — in science, in art, in the facilitation of human creative life — is simply to learn to see it.
Originally published on mirkoadami.substack.com
