My 10-year-old asked me this morning, “mom, how do I know how to chew? Is it my brain, me, or my body?” This is almost as philosophically daunting as the time he asked me where Spirit Halloween goes the rest of the year.

It seems to be the most natural thing in the world to him, to think of himself as three parts, and I actually agree. I also feel like I have a “me” that is more me than my brain constitutes, or certainly than my body constitutes. A few years ago, I read a book, Conscious, by Annika Harris which theorizes that consciousness is an inherent trait tied to mass. That everything is, at least a little bit, conscious. And further that consciousness wasn’t simply being awake, but that it implied self-awareness (the “me” that Grant and I feel).

Just recently, I read this Intelligencer profile in New York Magazine, on Michael Levin, who I hadn’t read about before. I found it delightful, because while I certainly am not going to follow all the biology, chemistry, and math behind the experimentation, the ideas are thrilling. I hope I don’t misrepresent the theory, but my understanding is that he’s saying that intelligence is a universal property, that is accessible and accessed at the cellular level. And that intelligence exists outside of ourselves, in the same way that pi exists as a universal constant. Our cells have an innate intelligence that we don’t know how to manipulate purposefully — for example, they know how to grow an entire human from a single cell, going from simple symmetric division to asymmetry (one hand, five fingers). And that the genome as a map isn’t sufficient alone (it stipulates eye color, but not that we should have two eyes), so something else must be inherent.

I admire when people push into what the article calls magical thinking (Levin’s detractors say he engages in this, not affectionately), because how else are you supposed to gain new perspective and push our collective knowledge further? It’s very much how any artist should work. The key is, in science at least, to be able to work backwards from that “magic” to an experiment that helps you begin to tease out the proof. In math, very often mathematicians need to prove something adjacent to the proof they’re trying to solve, before they can triangulate on how to solve the original proof. Sometimes they also need to disprove the opposite of the proof, so they end up solving their proof through the negative. I assume this is the case in science as well, but in Levin’s case, he started at a really, really big idea, that is far from universally considered a good idea. If I had one question to ask Levin, I’d just ask him what he thinks about “hive mind” — ants, bees, mycelium, aspens.

Anyway. I told Grant that I think it’s all three for chewing. You want to chew (that’s the “me”), your brain knows how to chew and tells your body, and your body does the chewing. I don’t know that I’m right, but it’s exciting to think I might be wrong.