Michael Levin on Pain as Agent, Healing as Alignment

"We try to think about things from the perspective of the state itself. We too are a temporary metabolic pattern, and we have we have mental states and memories and goals and preferences and thoughts and so on.

I think of all of these things as a continuum, [William James] said that ‘thoughts are thinkers too’, and it's a spectrum. We are also patterns, and we spawn off other patterns and there's a continuum... there’re fleeting thoughts and then persistent, intrusive thoughts that are a little harder to get rid of. Maybe they do a little niche construction in your nervous system to keep themselves around longer. And then, much larger things like personality fragments, like in dissociative identity disorder, and then full human personalities, and then maybe some sort of transpersonal bigger things after that."