Thanks for this - good questions and ideas. I can say a few things in addition to the more general point that this topic is at the furthest edges of our work and my level of certainty about these issues is very low - I’m mostly groping here, for ideas that will help our research.

First, I am suggesting two independent ideas, which could both, either, or neither be true: (1) physical events are partially shaped by non-physical patterns, and especially biology makes good use of this; (2) these patterns are themselves of somewhat agential quality - ranging from facts about prime numbers and such to kinds of minds. I think the case for #1 is quite good; #2 is total speculation, but I think reasonable.

I’m ok separating from Whitehead if need be. I am not prepared to say anything about the divine, but I have been playing with an inversion of the thought-thinker mapping (is the agent the machine, or patterns in the data) and have gotten very comfortable with the idea that patterns, not objects, have causal power. To some extent, we ourselves are patterns, and solitons, alignment defects in polarized media, and truths of number theory seem to have causal power in physics and biology. The only thing left is to ask whether this power is simple and mechanical or of a higher agential kind. “unexplained agency lurking within abstract forms” is fair, but I would counter that to some extent, all agency - even that lurking within brains - is unexplained because we do not know what a satisfying answer to such a question would look like. I’m ok with saying that if patterns can be causal, whether they are in the physical world or not is less critical.

un-evolved intelligent agency (un-evolved because, as eternal, they have no evolutionary history)

I am not sure about that either - I suspect they are not eternal (can change over time, and in fact do change over time - bi-directional relationship) and couple to the physical world precisely so that they can change. Why? That bigger picture is beyond my pay grade for now. But I don’t think it’s an evolutionary history that maps to the biological evolutionary history.

Mike, for his part, does not seem overly concerned with how unorthodox his position is

I’m only concerned with one thing: can we make use of this to drive novel discovery. I understand how unorthodox all this is in science; if it’s also unorthodox in philosophy, I confess I’m less concerned because it’s not clear to me yet that it’s going to be a block to further development. I guess I used up all my concern (about being out on a limb) on the science side…

As he puts it in Science and the Modern World (p. 178): “No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.”

I am just not sure what the implications of this being true or false are, so it’s not causing me to lose any sleep. I like these questions as much as the next guy but until I understand what’s at stake (what they constrain) I don’t feel like being totally agnostic on this issue is a problem.

is he willing to posit some ground of the axiological and mathematical ordering of that space of potential—whether Whitehead and Schelling’s panentheistic vision (or what may better be termed a “pan-gen-theistic” vision, with gen- meaning “genesis” or “creative becoming”), or something else entirely? If something else, what? How and why do bare forms, pure potentials, gain agency?

alright, now we’re talking! yes I am very concerned with the ordering and content of the space, and testing out different models of that. Now, do they gain agency? I suspect that they expand their agency by vertical interactions with the physical world (to whatever extent it really exists) and by horizontal interactions that I’m not prepared to say anything concrete about yet. I don’t think they gain agency (in the sense of mind coming from non-mind), they are agency (and provide agency to things we normally develop it on their own), but they may well increase in agency as a result of their development. I guess I think that “having agency” just means, being a good pointer to patterns that provide specific kinds of minds we assiciate with high agency. As for the biggest question of “where did they come from”, I’d be more worried about it if we had any idea of what a satisfying answer to that question could possibly be. I’ve never heard of one that didn’t bring on the reply “ok well where did that come from?” So, we either have an infinite regress (so I’m with stopping here for now - if you have an infinity to go, why worry about getting there faster), or, we need to decide what an appropriate buck-stop is; if it’s going to be “ah, it’s the patterns, they just are because they had to be” (which is how we deal with a lot of mathematical truths), I’m ok with that too.

I guess the tl;dr of all that is: I am aware that my conjectures bring up further difficult questions; that’s what science experiments do too. I’m fine with that because being able to say something, without having to say everything, is our game. The only things I want to avoid are ones that obscure the next steps.