Seeing red

[Angrboda]

A galaxy appears to lack a means of representing things.   It's possible that it is forming a representational system that I simply do not comprehend, but then the onus of supporting that notion would be on the person suggesting that it does.  You've suggested that mind is endemic to matter.  To date you don't appear to have supported that with anything but speculation.  Speculation is fine, but it doesn't establish anything.  Regardless, that form of representing things would be entirely separate from the type of material representational systems which I suggest are essential to mind.

I'd argue that ALL states represent something-- they at the very least represent previous states and some function over time.  I mean, an atom which absorbs a photon is carrying a record of an interaction from the transmitting body.  If a billion photons are absorbed in a small burst into a patch of rock on some planet, is this not, until they are re-emitted, a kind of memory?

No it isn't a memory. The information is represented in these states, but these states do not form a representational system. Note that in the case of the robot, a representational system consists of information, a system for representing it, and an environment for which that representation is meaningful (and by meaningful here I mean that it contains information which, by its content, guides the behavior of the representational system; in the robot driver example, this element is reflected by the road being represented being amenable to the motion of the vehicle; a robot driver in mid-air or on its back wouldn't be representing objects in a meaningful sense).