Rewriting the Entwurf

All life began in the sea. Or so we are told, in fluid depths, where freedom of movement conditioned the objective chance—that in the mingling of chemicals a cell would take shape, that earliest and simplest kernel of life.

But the version I learned earlier held my childish mind captive—that the speaking of some powerful word produced darkness and light, sun and moon, land and sea, fish and birds—and created a conviction, long held, that it was crashing condensed waves of sound that first gave matter form.

I want the story that could tell these two together.

All life began in the sea, and there found its first problem: to keep up with a shifting environment requires the organism to engage in a kind of counting, or at least accounting, of the way its own action influences that environment and its perception of it. Perception and action are always linked. Since an organism's actions change the content of the world and how it appears, it has to distinguish perceptions that result from what it does from those that reflect what the wider world is up to.

And in the sea, life found an early solution: to keep a clean count, the single-celled organism learned to make a copy of every internal command for an action (“make this chemical”). This efference copy helped to clarify the situation when a moment later that chemical was perceived in its environment (Godfrey-Smith, 2016). The development of this capacity to make a copy, to “feed” its senses with information from the inside—what you could almost call mindedness already, matter sensing itself—facilitated effective exchange between organism and environment, and thus survival, further elaboration of life.

If not yet quite a word, at least a first inscription. Which is almost to say: life was always minded, and it was always writing.

Contemporary accounts of the natural history of subjective experience point to how psychoanalysis connects the body to writing to subjectivity—not through theory, but by its working their connection ov