Author: ramsey affifi

Environmental educators do not merely criticise explanations, knowledge and understanding for being reductionistic and mechanistic, but also for being linear. In this third blogpost, I would like to challenge the idea that linear explanations and thinking are necessarily dangerous. I will do this not by presenting a methodological argument (for example, asserting that linear explanations are needed or important to generate stable or usable knowledge), but instead through arguing for how it appears in ecologies. This sets me up in contrast to the common trope that ecologies are circular and therefore ecological thinking is inherently circular as well. This is based on a very simplistic notion of what ecologies are.

Relative to a linear view that only sees things in terms of x -> y type interactions, circular conceptions (such as we find in feedback loops, cycles, and so on) is a dramatic improvement. The world is not a series of causal chains disconnected from one another, and treating it as such is highly destructive. But the opposite conclusion, that circularity is what ‘actually’ exists and linearity is an abstract illusion, is itself still an abstraction. Ecological processes involve both circular and linear processes, and the distinction between them is as important as their interplay.

Let’s address ‘cyclical’ processes first. A cycle is a kind of circularity that tends to repeat the same pattern again and again. It is important to consider how pervasive feedback loops actually are. Some might conceive that feedback loops only occur in the relationship between living things, while they are absent in processes like ‘gravity’ and therefore irrelevant when considering the constitution of (say) the cycle of the moon. (Of course, for those holding this view, the cycle of the moon may in turn participate in many other feedback loops generating cycles, so long as living organisms are part of the processes – e.g. menstruation?). However, holding this view is part of the long shadow of the Newtonian picture, which essentially saw gravity as an instantaneous (action-at-a-distance) tug of war between two objects. From the Einsteinian perspective, the gravitational field interacts with itself, and the energy lost to gravity changes the orbit, which in turn changes the gravitational attraction. In relativity theory, gravitational attraction between objects occurs as a feedback loop in time.

Cycles can be considered as feedback loops that generate recurring temporal patterns. When we stop and ask why there aren’t ‘just’ recurring patterns, we take the first step to understanding the importance of linear interactions in ecologies. But before getting there, we need to first address what might seem like two possible answers: 1) change is possible because positive feedback loops destabilise negative feedback loops, and 2) change is possible because different feedback loops (even different negative ones) at different space and time scales disrupt each other. I suggest that while obviously both these cases are true, neither is necessary, and moreover, even if they were necessary, they still do not discount the presence of linearity.

First, let’s consider positive feedback loops. Positive feedback loops exacerbate certain relationships, driving things exponentially towards infinity or zero. They are intrinsically unstable and crash. While it is clear that positive feedback loops generate change and disrupt the balancing processes of negative feedback, if they crash, we are forced to ask why positive feedback loops don’t themselves go extinct? After they all crash, why do they keep coming back?

The reason is because positive feedback loops alone do not explain what gives rise to their possibility from out of a balanced relationship. What is needed is an account of contingency: events that disrupt order and are the conditions for both new patterns of order and of disorder. Such events are widespread, both because systems are never sealed from what is outside of them, and because randomness also occurs from within.

Second, let’s consider circularities interacting between space and/or time scales. Circular conceptions perceive connections missed out when parsing the world into linear interactions. Some might argue that the problem is that a circular interaction is itself an abstraction, insofar as the world is more interconnected, and therefore involved in more kinds of recursive networking than any possible model can capture. From this point of view, what I view as the linear rupture of a given circular process should itself be attributed to how different circularities (in different space and time scales) interact. Surely such interactions happen. However, this does not cast doubt on the existence of linearity in the world. In response to the claim that ‘everything is interconnected’, one reply is ‘well, yes, but not everything is equally interconnected’. Another way of putting this, is that there are different ways in which things are interconnected, depending on the state of the system at a time. For example, some connections reinforce stability, others produce change.

Let’s consider how the integrity of a cell requires it maintains a series of internal and external relations. As it does this, there are events that arise that are not necessary or normal, and possibly deleterious for the cell, such as a temperature shift, a new chemical in the environment, etc. In many cases, these events are utterly new, arising from geological or exoplanetary factors for example. But for the sake of the its-all-cycles argument, let’s assume this shift or chemical has occurred before, say in some long ‘season’ in which they return every several million years. In this case, either the cell type existed back then or its ancestor did. If the latter, it is obvious that however the cell responds will itself be ‘new’ and therefore a real case of linear causality. However, what if the cell type did exist back then? We can imagine that the temperature or chemical cycle might be something it would ‘expect’, and have a repertoire to respond as certain gene regulation patterns kick in that are normally dormant. However, even here, unless every condition remained the same, it is difficult to imagine the cell would behave exactly as it did previously. For starters, other organisms in its environment will likely have evolved, to some extent are approaching this change as ‘new’ by doing new things in response, and altering the cell’s environment. But even if (miraculously) they were not, it is a fact that cells do new things spontaneously even in highly controlled environments. Of course, all of this grants too much: the cell would have changed in many ways in between each cycle.

The case for linearity is clearer when we consider how dramatic contingent events such as Theia smashing into the earth, the development of photosynthesising bacteria, or the evolution of human consciousness, have upheaved the existing order. In these instances, many things go extinct and previously well-operating negative feedback loops either fail to persist or reorganise into less functional relations. But what is also unleashed is the possibility for new relations, and so negative feedback loops between aerobic organisms and photosynthetic ones eventually evolved, while Theia stabilised the Earth’s axial tilt, giving way to more consistent seasons and climate, essential for further life. What will happen in the aftermath of human destruction, and how we are part of the subsequent flourishing is an open question. Single events rupture the order of circularity with opportunities but also many dangers, and nothing is assured.

Single contingent events are linear (they follow a very obvious x -> y causality) and not circular or cyclical. For that reason, it is perhaps wise that environmental educators are suspicious of linearity. Such events are dangerous and full of risk. One of the might wipe us out entirely. But they are also essential and not necessarily dramatic as the examples above suggest. Every gene mutation is a case in point. And it is important to acknowledge that circularity without linearity is just a well functioning machine – which is another concept that environmental educators resist. In fact, what we usually refer to as a ‘machine’ is precisely that which is unable to exapt or adapt to contingent events. Linear events deteriorate or destroy machines. So linearity is the true enemy of mechanism (and mechanism is an attempt at closed loop circularity). By contrast, linearity is intrinsically connected to creativity when it interacts with circular systems.

Part of the confusion, I think, is that there are two common opposites to linearity. It is sometimes contrasted with circularity, but other times with nonlinearity. The meaning of nonlinear is itself vague. In some cases, it means that the maths required to model the systems are not linear equations (in other words, the function has some exponential making it curved, and so on). In other cases, it means something like being intrinsically unpredictable (like the equations from chaos theory). think it is clear from the discussion above circular systems can be nonlinear in the first sense but not necessarily in the second. It is, however, the second sense that is the interesting one: those cases where one event causes another one, and history changes as a result.

Linear and circular concepts of time

There is a common trope that Western time is ‘linear’ while some Indigenous cultures see time as ‘circular’. I think this probably both bad philosophy and bad anthropology. While I admit to ignorance here, I do not see how an Indigenous culture, steeped in close attention to the land and inherited knowledge, would not clearly see how new events come into the scene, even if they emphasise the return of cycles such as seasons and the like. Conversley, ‘the west’, however allegedly linear, has identified thousands of cycles through scientific investigation, circularities within circularities all the way up and down. It is hard to imagine a culture that does not conceive of some interplay between linear and circular time, between what is new and what returns, though they may emphasise these differently in important ways.

Finally, radically ‘circular’ conceptions of time, such as Nietzsche’s (western) eternal return (1882), don’t seem to really help out in ecologising thinking – precisely because linearity is gone. After all, it is because linearity exists that humans can mess up ecological circularity, and it is also because linearity exists that we might turn things around -or not.

References

Affifi, R. (2025). My baby and his beeping box. Ecologising Education blogpost. https://ramseyaffifi.org/blog/my-baby-and-his-beeping-box/

Affifi, R. (2025). Misunderstanding ‘reductionism’ in environmental education research. https://ramseyaffifi.org/blog/misunderstanding-reductionism-in-environmental-education/

Nietzsche, F. (1882). The Gay Science (Kauffman, trans.). Vintage Books.

Ecologising Education
We are well beyond the idea that there is a simple relationship between knowledge and action, and that environmental education involves something straightforward like disseminating the ‘right’ information to bring about a more sustainable world. There are too many cases where knowledge simply doesn’t lead to action for faith continued faith in that relationship. And so, in recognition of the partiality and contingency of knowledge, a range of other aspects of the human experience, including thoughts, beliefs, feelings, worldviews, attitudes, and social relations, have been targeted instead, alone or in some combination. However, is it any more the case that the ‘right’ attitude or belief (and so on) might fare any better?

One premise of the ‘ecologising education’ perspective I have been developing is that any and all such aspects are as context dependent and partial as knowledge is, and that practitioners and theorists alike fall into the trap of assume they have found the eco-silver bullet needed to approach the ecological crisis. There are a web of reasons why this might be the case, including the psychological need for simple stories amidst scary confusions, the egoistic need to feel one knows what one is doing or is contributing something unambiguously meaningful, not to mention the fact that the current socioeconomic structure encourages the promotion of confident solutions (like how academics need their ‘take’), and so on.

But the silver-bullet approach is problematic because linear causal relationships between things is highly unlikely in phenomena and is highly likely to be an epistemological simplification that distorts our perception of what is happening. Of course, in a sense the shift to how all these aspects (worldviews, attitudes, knowledge, feelings, etc) are themselves elements of a mental ecology, where what they do (in part or completely) depends on what they interact with, is my own silver bullet. However, where I differ is that I am agnostic about how much even this ‘overall view’ should itself be entertained. It might be ‘true’ as an overall view, but important (or essential) to consider only sometimes to reorient our attention or action in some way. It might be highly destructive if attempted as a continuous perspective. In other words, the ‘ecologising’ perspective applies to itself by considering the ecologising view as itself an aspect interacting within mental ecology.

Aesthetic knowing
What I want to develop here are some connections between this overall view and ‘what’s next’. Although I have written about ways forward (e.g. Affifi 2022, 2024), it is also true that I sometimes leave the reader with ‘it depends’ that might seem to scatter everything into indecisive relativism. I will be clear about some ways forward in what follows, but only after more precisely articulating the ecologising perspective through a concrete example.

If the question is ‘what does this thought or belief or feeling actually do?’, then what is needed is a greater capacity to pay attention to the ecology that it influences and is influenced by. For example, the belief that ‘we should protect nature because of the services it provides’ might do something very different in a room filled mining investors compared to being stated in a ‘deep ecology’ forum. In one case, it might serve to pull people towards more responsible choices for resource extraction, in the other in might ignite judgement and ire at the apparent superficiality and selfishness of the position (though see Contradictions). Of course, these two scenarios are quite contrived, but they are outlined to illustrate the point that in some degree, whatever aspect we choose to work on (beliefs, thoughts, attitudes etc), but also what ever particular kind of that aspect we might cherish (this or that belief or thought or attitude as a favoured way), have qualities and effects co-constituted with the field of interactions within which they occur. And of course, what effect a given element has also depends on the scale we are looking at. For instance, as time passes, the deep ecologist’s judgement may soften into something else, the investor may forget about ecological services and go on to seek some dilution of previously agreed standards.

This outline suggests several things. The first is that effects are ecological and therefore relational, and that how we observe, understand and interact with those effects must be of a kind suited to perceiving and participating in relationship. The second is that despite our best efforts to choose a tool up to that task, the actual relations are vastly complicated and spread across different space and time scales. The third is that as we scale in and out, expanding or framing our perception, we are at risk of introducing quite a lot of fiction into our perception. A frame may cut out a vital effect, whereas stretching out may produce a magnified story that exaggerates a causal effect just because the string of relations might seem feasible.

In the face of these considerations, one key strategy of ‘ecologising education’ is to work on aesthetic knowing (Affifi 2019; 2024). Aesthetic knowing is a word I use to describe the perception and participation in relationship, whether that be the perceived coherence, discoherence (or relationship between coherence and discoherence) between things. This can include anything from the relations between parts of a painting or piece of music, to the perceived quality of relations between myself and others, and the very relations between various mental aspects reciprocally influencing one another in my mental ecology. Aesthetic knowing catches ‘forms’, which means the way things connect together across space and time. But it is also evaluative. Certain gestalts feel beautiful or ugly, and so on, and these felt responses tell us something about the quality of the relations we perceive.

However, because the relationships themselves are more complicated than we can actually perceive, and also because they may themselves be changing in important ways (of their own accord perhaps, or maybe through our interacting with them) whether or not we have homed in on important relations is fallible and itself an ongoing question. Aesthetic knowing does not involve a continuously skeptical attitude towards any perceived pattern, as this would itself permanently disorient the person from their ability to participate in co-constituting healthful relations. Rather, it means that the quality of relations between when we do or do not put our prior perceptions into question is itself part of the process of doing aesthetic knowing. In practice, this also ushers in interplays between confidence and humility, action and reception, repetition and novelty, courage and cowardice, and many others. The ecologising principle of ‘it depends’ also applies to the means by which we evaluate whether ecologising is occurring towards healthy and healing ecologies, or towards some kind of dysecology.

The ecologising perspective can only do certain things as a perspective. As a way of understanding, it is primarily in what we might call the ‘cognitive’ register of thoughts and understanding. This is partly why the question of how much it should be used is a question, because such cognitions have a tendency to get generalised across contexts. And so, while ecologising’s concerns about ratios and relationships are intrinsic to aesthetic knowing, aesthetic knowing can do things that cognition itself cannot. Aesthetic knowing feels quality of relationship whereas conceptual relationships stand outside of the relationship to posit it, consider it, counterfactually engage with it, and so on.

The interplay between the cognitive and the aesthetic has itself an aesthetic aspect and can also be considered cognitively. For example, while aesthetic knowing evaluates the quality of relationships, the cognitive can pull away from immersion in them and ask whether those are the relationships we should be focusing on. Have we scaled too far in or out? Have we considered all who are relevant? This act of separation now introduces new relationships with their own qualities as the tensions, possibilities, connections and questions that can now be felt by virute of the very distance opened up. And so on.

It is also the case that other registers are at stake, which are not at base aesthetic or cognitive, but that interact necessarily with aesthetic and cognitive dimensions as well. For example, with ethical engagement, there might be an ongoing tension between whether I should care for some specific being or whether I should abide by what I think is a universal good. The relationship between my focus on the particular and the universal can be felt aesthetically, and understanding what is at stake when leaning into one or the other or some combination of both is itself cognitive. However, the aesthetic and cognitive registers feed back, affecting one another as well as the ethical aspects of the experience.

Aesthetic knowing and flexibility
Rather than presuming that we should teach aesthetic knowing with the aim of having people be able to effectively ‘home in’ on gestalts and act accordingly, a more flexible attitude is truer to the situation. Being ‘good’ at aesthetic knowing is half about perceiving relations and half about abandoning them. It is about the capacity to hold onto a frame for as long as is needed, but no longer. It is also about sustaining framelessness when the frames available seem misleading or superficial. Moreover, it is about sustaining the flexibility not only with what one is holding and backgrounding as ‘relationship’ in the world, but also towards one’s relationship with aspects of mental ecology. Does our flexibility allow us to sustain the aesthetics of a cognition when appropriate, but to flip to the aesthetics of the relationship between a cognition and its ethical dimension in another? Whenever the perception of relationship is at stake, whether this is within something one is engaging, or between things one is considering, or something else altogether, aesthetic knowing is at stake. And of course, as is always the case in mental ecology, where metalevels instantly arise our of streams of thought, there is also aesthetic knowing about aesthetic knowing: what is happening to the quality of relationships I am actually participating in when I pay attention to the quality of relations in X?

And in this way, whereas the ecologising perspective is the ‘what’, aesthetic knowing is the ‘how’. Both engage, like content and form or theory and practice, in ecological process, and they co-occur and affect one another.

References

Affifi, R. (2019). Beauty in the darkness: Aesthetic education during the ecological crisis. Journal of Philosophy and Education.

Affifi, R. (2022). Ecologising education beyond angels and villains. Environmental Education Research

Affifi, R. (2024). Aesthetic knowing and ecology: Cultivating perception and participation in the ecological crisis. Environmental Education Research

Affifi, R. (2025). Contradictions from within: Beyond angels and villains in environmental education, Ecologising Education blogpost.

Today my baby (who is nearly six months old) was absorbed with a plastic box that makes different sounds when its buttons are pressed. He would stretch his hand out, press down on a button, stop, and listen to the sound produced. He would wait until the sound ended, and then he would reach his hand back out again. I was fascinated watching him so fascinated. It led me to thoughts about buttons.

A button is a perfectly designed cause-and-effect device. The box has been designed so that various physical and chemical interactions are channelled towards establishing clear, consistent and visible causal interactions. The cause-effect relationship is clear in the sense that it is not ambiguous or multifactorial, it is consistent in the sense that it is reliably reproduced every time, and visible in the sense that the entire set up is designed for a prominent experienced effect.

Four most of the universe’s 4.5 billion year history, and in most places in the universe today, such boxes do not exist even though their underlying components may be present in substantial numbers. This indicates that most combinations of the physical and chemical subcomponents does not lead to a clear, consistent and visible cause-effect pathway. In most cases, causes are interconnected and effects are variable, which is why scientific experiments need to be carefully designed and controlled to extract a predominant relation from its context. For example, some combinations of plastic and metal (say if they were dust) might instead leads to many little nonrepeatable causes, like forming a pile or getting pushed by the hand into some shape, or swept away by wind. In other cases, the causality might be invisible, such as would happen if there were slow chemical reactions happening at a microscope level. Even if the shape was retained by the device was broken, we can imagine the same parts participating in different kinds of causal interactions such as being used as a projectile or a bat. If the plastic were still oil it would obviously have a range of other causal possibilities.

Through interacting with a device with well-defined causal dynamics, my baby is learning to see the world mechanistically. As I define it here, a mechanism is a structure that has reduced the degrees of freedom of its components to ensure the reproducibility of certain (unlikely from a thermodynamic perspective) causal paths. We can see how this operates in the plastic box: all its components are organised to reproduce the relation ‘button pressed -> sound effect.’ This relation is maintained at the expense of other causal interactions through redundancy. For example, I could scrape away bits of plastic or wire, and the device would still function. This means that ‘extra’ matter is engaged is harnessed to buttress a specific causal relation rather than doing something else. This is another way of saying they have been highly constrained and put together in an unlikely way, i.e. that the system has reduced degrees of freedom.

As an environmental educator, I have both learned and instinctive suspicions of mechanistic thinking. It is a common critique of unecological thinking that it is ‘mechanistic and reductionistic’ (though I hope it is obvious that these are not the same thing, and in some tension. On reductionism in environmental education, here). One reason environmental educators are often suspicious of ‘mechanistic’ thinking is that one of the key insights, from ecology to relational pedagogies, is that things are ‘interconnected’. Another is that mechanistic thinking seems to suggest that everything is determined (by its structure or organisation), which goes against the freedom and variability we sense in the living world and that we may also see as crucial for ecological ethics or politics.

I will consider the first aspect of mechanistic thinking first. A mechanism actually does not teach that things are not interconnected. Instead it foregrounds and reinforces a small subset of interconnections. Consider how the button pressed and the sound produced are clearly interconnected. When my baby becomes a child, finds a screwdriver and opens the box, he will see that there are a number of components that are in very specific reciprocally dependent interactions that underlying the translation of button pressing into sound. But what mechanisms teach by virtue of foregrounding certain interconnections is that others do not exist or are not important. This happens because the mechanisms has redundant features, as discussed above, that ensure robustness against perturbation from other things, and a buffer against diverse causal interactions. So, precisely because a mechanism is able to show a causal pathway so consistently and clearly, it also obfuscates or diminishes other causal interactions. This is part of the meaning of reducing degrees of freedom.

Before turning to the second aspect of mechanistic thinking mentioned above, I want to point out that even freedom or indeterminacy, even the most robust mechanism teaches my baby something about ’emergent properties’. Emergent properties can be defined in many ways, and are a complicated philosophical topic with many facets (just like mechanism), but for the sake of this discussion I define it as features that unexpectedly arise when material components are configured in specific ways, and that are not aspects of of those components in isolation. In the case of the plastic box, my son is witnessing that the organisation of matter leads to things happening that are unlikely otherwise. This will become clear when he eventually breaks the toy and realises there are vastly *many* possible broken states compared to states that function.

The second feature of mechanisms mentioned is the sense that if something is mechanistic it is therefore deterministic. The case of the plastic box may be quite deterministic and therefore re-enforcing some particular notions about how things work in the world. But many mechanisms that he will encounter are not so fixed in what they do. While all mechanisms reduce causal pathways when compared to the disorganised bustle of underlying atoms, some mechanisms produce emergent properties that do still have indefinite possibilities. For example, a guitar is a mechanism constrained to produce sound but this is clearly an ‘enabling constraint’ that can generate countless kinds of sound in concert with a person’s skill development in drawing them out. Living organisms can be considered mechanisms insofar as the constraints of their anatomy and physiology create entities that behave unpredictably and learn. From this, one might then think a mechanism is something where the underlying components are ‘deterministic’ even if the macroproperties appear not to be, and that those properties are therefore an illusion. But mechanisms don’t even need to have fixed components to be mechanisms. Sometimes stochastic probabilities are sufficient (like how intrinsically disordered proteins provide an indefinite ‘range’ of possible structures that feed into what kinds of broader organismic structure and behaviour are possible).

One might think a kind of appraisal of good vs bad mechanisms is possible, and be wary of having a child exposed to too many of the bad kind for fear of what they may be tacitly learning from them. But it is tricky to define what those might be. For example, from the discussion you might be attracted to the idea that indeterministic mechanisms are to be favoured educationally because they reveal contingency and interconnectedness more clearly. A caution against this is that many indeterministic mechanisms are likely problematic too (for example scrolling Youtube channels is novely generating), while on the other hand it may be that acquaintance with clear and consistent mechanisms is actually helpful for emphasising how life is different from such typical machines. What seems crucial is the kinds of questions and discussions that surround different kinds of mechanisms so that the presumption that the world is ‘just’ or ‘ultimately’ a machine is challenged: either through realising cases where it is not, or by challenging presumptions about what it means to be a machine, or both.

(This is the third instalment in a series reconsidering the relationship between physics and “higher level” or emergent sciences. The others are here and here.)

A physics teacher recently told me that physics studies the very small and the very large. It’s a flattering folk definition, but if both ends, why not the centre? Why bind the grandest and most intricate scales into one discipline while leaving the middle to others? The real dividing line isn’t scale but scope. Physics generates the most generalisable descriptions and explanations.

By “generality” I mean a family of traits—breadth across materials and taxa, invariance under interventions and background changes, range across scales, and applicability beyond special set-ups. In these ways, electromagnetism scores extraordinarily high; homeostasis scores lower. Of course, it remains powerful within organised systems that satisfy its boundary conditions (Polanyi 1968). In this view, disciplines are profiles of generality, not boxes of subject matter.

This is about explanatory scope, not causal priority. Electromagnetism is certainly necessary for what cells do, but it is not sufficient to explain where and when mitochondria arose. That requires organisational closures, ecological niches, and histories—enabling constraints that actualise particular forms from the many physically possible ones. For more on this, visit my earlier post.

A mitochondrion or a homeostatic system arose through a combination of underlying causes and contingent contexts. Sometimes contexts create and ramify differences. For example, in an embryo, a cell at the centre encounters different signals than one at the edge; those differences cascade into differentiation, leading to cell specialisation, which diversifies context for the cells still further. In other cases, contexts buffer underlying differences, such as how morphogen gradients, membranes, and feedbacks stabilise some micro-trajectories over others. But in either case, the point is clear. The ‘middle’ of the universe, the place physics is seen to hand over to other disciplines, is where bottom-up causes and constraining contexts interplay. This is almost an inevitable consequences of being in the middle, of being made up of small constituent parts and participating in the co-constitution of larger entities.

One might assert physics is “special” because it is more general. But the idea that scientific knowledge is more important if it can be applied across more situations comes from a specific understanding of the purpose of knowledge. The more generalisable sciences are by definition less context dependent (or not context dependent at all) so they are also most amenable to prediction and manipulation. If we see the sciences as a spectrum between the nomothetic and the idiographic (Affifi 2019), we can also see that knowledge has different roles across the spectrum. Physics studies what is highly similar across contexts. On the other end of the spectrum, we have phenomena that is nearly absolutely unique and/or in a rapid process of unanticipated change. Across the spectrum, similarity and difference coexist in patterned ways. Between uniqueness and uniformity lie themes with variations: members of a species differ, yet share form. Where cross-context similarity is high, patterns tend to be stable and mathematisable. Where organisation and feedback dominate, sometimes richer mathematics or mixed-method modelling can capture what is happening. The world of precision medicine lies somewhere in this murky middle.

However, as we move towards the increasingly idiographic, manipulation becomes more risky and indeed stops making sense. For example, applying highly general knowledge inside idiographic settings brings side-effects when contextual relations are overlooked. This is one of the cardinal sins of our age of ecological disaster. But going further, as knowing increasingly becomes a kind of encounter with what is singular and unique, the desire to manipulate (wise of side-effects or not) becomes increasingly unthinkable. Along the spectrum, science can foster curiosity, admiration, care, gratitude, humility — and informed ignorance, as when new knowledge reveals uncertainties that were previously invisible. But it also help us recognise the limits of “knowing” as a way of engaging the world when conceived in its usual way of seeking stable explanations and expectations. We begin to think about knowing at this farther end as a mode of encounter, intimacy and participation.

Of course physics also contains diversity—phase transitions, chaos—just as biology contains recurring motifs—homeostasis, modularity, canalisation. We need to be careful about what we are claiming. However, even here the difference is clear. In biology, knowing the metapattern is not sufficient for predicting the phenomenon. We can understand homeostasis in abstract but be continuously surprised at the different ways in which organisms have evolved it across the kingdoms of life. Modelling faces trade-offs among generality, precision, and realism (Levins 1966): push one corner and you typically give on another. Physics often optimises generality (and precision) via abstraction; biological models often trade some generality for organisational realism or case-level precision.

Perhaps all I am doing is asserting that there is indeed something “special” about the special sciences. I think there is. But I am not saying that utilitarian exploitation is the only value of physics, even if it is perhaps the dominating one nowadays. I don’t want to be reductionistic about reductionism. But even within physics, a fixation on manipulation can occlude other human possibilities that general physics can offer us from the sense of its sublime universality (Affifi 2024) to the very mysteries it confronts us with when contemplating the relation between our living, feeling world and the necessity of natural law. The point isn’t to enthrone a level, but to recognise different profiles of generality and the different virtues and limits that come with them.

References

Affifi, R. (2024). The ecology of sublimity: Education between existence and the ungraspable. Environmental Education Research.

Affifi, R. (2019). Restoring realism: Themes and variations. Environmental Education Research.

Levins, R. (1966). The strategy of model building in population biology. American Scientist.

Polanyi, M. (1968). Life’s irreducible structure. Science 160(3834), 1308-1312.

Living organisms sustain, and are sustained by “vital norms” (Canguilhem, 1966). A norm is vital if it is necessary for life. For example, the human body maintains a norm of 37C temperature and specific levels of minerals, despite fluctuations in the external environment. From the point of view of physics or chemistry, vital norms are abnormal. 37C is a far-from-equilibrium state, and so it is only because life can tap into, store and distribute energy, that it is able channel material flows towards norm maintenance.

There are several feedback loops sustaining any norm. First, there is the fact that maintaining a norm keeps the organism alive, which in turn maintains the norm. On a smaller scale, every norm is itself maintained by feedback loops between contrasting tendencies. 37C is achieved through a feedback loop between processes that heat the body, and those that cool it. All norms are dynamic fluctuations around some ideal, optimised point or range. There are also the feedback loops between different norm sustaining feedback loops. Life sustains norms at varying scales, from those norms sustained through gene regulation in a cell to global nutrient cycles, with many interconnecting levels in between. Because organisms sustain such vital norms, life is intrinsically normative.

What maintains a vital norm is valuable, what does not may be destructive. Unlike the world of phyiscochemistry, life exists in a world where healing, pathology, strength, weakness, safety and danger all exist. From the point fo view of physics and chemistry, these words make no sense. They are surely just vague global descriptions of processes that can ultimately be understood by mechanical underlying components. Not so, says biology, and feedback loops are the way out. Pathology is an ontological state on equal footing with chemical reactions or quarks because it is a description of the dynamics of feedback loops. The scale of the atom or molecule brackets space and time too narrowly to perceive these feedback loops, let alone explain them. When an organism’s vital norms are at risk, the feedback loops themselves are threatened. If the norms cannot be sustained, neither can the organism they sustain. And vice versa. Physics and chemistry are only necessary and sufficient explanations for a lifeless world, and will lead to one unless biology restores itself.

It should follow that a basic understanding of different kinds of feedback loops (ex positive, negative, and interlocking combinations of both), and how they manifest vis a vis norm sustaining relations, ought to be foundational for biology education. Instead, many school systems hardly emphasise the pervasiveness of feedback in bio-logic. For example, in the Scottish biology curriculum, it pops up as simply one among many dislocated factoids about this or that phenomenon, such as in glucose regulation or predator-prey cycles. This is not because it is too complicated; many national curricula do demand understanding (or at least the performance of understanding) of many much more intricate biological processes. It seems instead a vestige a 20th century vision of life premised on its ultimately reducibility to chemistry. We are in the midst of a transition towards a 21st view that acknowledges and seeks to understand what and how life accomplishes what it does, on its own terms. While there is basic lethargy underlying resistance to any change, many industries still profit from the 20th century vision. This means the transition to an empirically more satisfying and unifying understanding of the living world is further gummed up. The reduction of life to chemistry ‘works’ for certain purposes, even if it piles on downstream side effects.

The view that life sustains itself through feedback loops that can be healthy or not also implies a different kind of empiricism, which suggests a different approach to teaching biology. Because such feedback loops are often meso-scale (meaning neither too small nor too big for the eye to see), we can perceive the quality of such relationships directly through the senses. There is an ‘aesthetic quality’ to understanding life’s maintenance of norms. For example, we can tell if a plant or animal is sick because we can sense disruption in its internal relations. The role of the senses in perceiving, evaluating and diagnosing quality of biological relationship could be given some prominence amongst the ‘skills’ development science curricula insist upon. This does not mean there is no place for instrumentation or computation in perceiving the health of living systems. It is instead to suggest that our sensory engagement in the world is not detached from the reality of things in the way we suppose when pondering whether a chair ‘really is’ just jostling molecules, or colour ‘really’ just specific frequencies of wavelength. The scale in which many norms are established and sustained is often the same scale we perceive the universe. And this is not surprising, given we evolved our senses in order to sustain the norms of our own physiology and that of the community of others we depend upon. Another angle into making science curricula have more contact with the ‘real world.

Perceiving, understanding, and responding to vital norms should itself be a vital norm which human societies orient around. An education system that does not work towards these ends is itself engaged in pathological feedback loops, while not even providing students with the eye to see the destruction it is complicit in.