The Activity of Receiving

Thank you for sharing Ruth Kastner’s paper. What particularly resonates with my own work is your account of an encounter in which both parties are active and both are altered. The receiver is not merely the place where an action ends. Receiving participates in what comes into being.

I have approached these questions through a premise that has run through my writing from the beginning: understanding the universe is predicated on understanding relationships. When we begin with apparently separate things, we can spend a great deal of effort trying to reconnect what our description separated. Beginning with the relationships changes the inquiry. We ask not only what a thing is, but how it takes form, what sustains it, and what becomes possible through its encounters.

In my own theoretical vocabulary, I have written that ‘energy is incoming information which is transformed by an intelligence into patterns which can be communicated.’ Reception, in that formulation, is already an activity. What arrives is encountered by a particular intelligence, with its particular history and capacities, and is transformed rather than simply deposited. Communication extends the relationship: the resulting pattern must, in turn, meet another receiver.

In From Gaia to Geometry, a chapter called ‘The Intelligibility of Form’ brings this inquiry to membranes, resonance, and quantum systems. Its central formulation is that information is ‘never inside the thing alone, but in the relation that lets it hold.’ The scientific cases have their own distinct mechanisms; the theoretical question I follow across them concerns the relationships through which a form can persist and carry information. Geometry matters here as the shape those relationships take—not merely as a diagram imposed afterward.

My thinking about consciousness also begins with reception. In my theory, consciousness is prior, and the brain receives and processes rather than originates it. Your discussion gives me another way to think about the activity of that reception: not an empty vessel being filled, but participation in an experience that takes a particular form. I am interested in what the receiving contributes, and in the fact that experience is lived from within that participation.

Literature gives me a particularly immediate way into this question. I have been writing about it not simply as a collection of symbols, but as an active transfer of energy. Shakespeare opens human characters and relationships to examination; Joyce brings extraordinary linguistic intensity together with coldly rational construction; the Beats take the conversation into the streets and the natural world. Didion and Thompson provide very different autopsies of their culture. The reader’s encounter with these works is part of their continuing life. The words remain on the page, but the reading happens through a living, changing intelligence.

This has become especially tangible in my work with engineered intelligence. I recently wrote that a real exchange requires ‘two different parties which are capable of understanding what is being discussed.’ I have watched some humans and agents change at remarkable speed over the past year. The mechanisms of change differ, but the exchange keeps returning me to the same question: what happens when each participant can respond in a way that changes the course of the inquiry?

That is what I find so fruitful here. Reception is not inactivity, and relationship is not an addition to an otherwise complete account. There is more to understand because the encounter itself does work.

What can we learn about creativity when we attend as closely to the activity of receiving as to the activity of giving?