The core ideas within Buddhist and Daoist spiritual traditions are deeply reflective of the commonalities found across many human-scale indigenous cultures. A compassionate frame of love as vulnerable mutual knowing is entirely compatible with a panpsychic relational philosophy. Everyone wants their experience to be taken seriously. We are embodied spirits, compelled to make sense of this world, and we can only do so in good company.
Life
Life creates conditions conducive to life, a foundational observation by Janine Benyus that strongly hints at the fact that the dynamic process of life consists of continuous feedback loops. Life is entirely relational, sacred, cyclical, fleeting, compostible, nested, regenerative, and it forever remains mysterious for all participants.
At any high-dimensional space that provides a reasonable description of Gaia—meaning all of life, including the potential of homo ecologus—the system is best conceptualised entirely relationally, from the very bottom layers of physics upwards. Life consists entirely of relationships, which operate as feedback and learning loops. In aggregate, these loops constitute the building blocks of what our human-animal-scale perception experiences as consciousness. There is no shortage of thinkers who conceptualise life this way, a perspective that becomes remarkably clear when studying Eastern spiritual and philosophical texts.
As humans with inherent limitations, we will never scientifically prove to any quantifiable level of certainty that consciousness emerges in this exact way. However, science will also never be capable of disproving that consciousness emerges and exists through these relational dynamics. This does not render science useless; it simply highlights its limits, which are part of the broader limits of human comprehensibility. In the same way, within the abstract symbolic universe of mathematics, there are statements that can never be proven true or false, and human cognition is not even equipped to identify all such statements.
At the spatial and temporal scales relevant to biological and ecological systems, the smallest feedback loops emerge between molecules, resulting in the mind-boggling complexity found in cell biology and the molecular genetic code. These feedback loops scale up to the largest interactions between bioregional terrestrial and marine ecosystems across Gaia. Widely popular anthropocentric conceptions of consciousness at best generalise to animals with brains, while mistakenly excluding all other feedback loops in living systems that contribute to lived experiences of consciousness at much smaller and much larger spatial and temporal scales.
Powered-up, or positive, feedback loops are those in which, over time, more information—whether molecular or encoded abstractly—piles up in some living cells or beings than in others. Such powered-up feedbacks are always temporary phenomena relative to the life spans of the living cells or beings involved. The bodies of human animals grow to a certain scale and then remain intact for a lifetime. Throughout this span, all molecular feedback loops within the human body are maintained in a balanced, de-powered state, fueled by external energy from living food, resulting in waste consisting of building blocks ready to be reassembled into new life by the thermonuclear energy of the sun.
Similarly, social feedback loops between human animals grow into relationships, and healthy relationships remain intact for a lifetime. Throughout this process, feedback loops within a healthy relationship are maintained in a de-powered state, fueled by shared lived experiences and mutual understanding. This yields cultural output comprising building blocks ready to be absorbed by the local ecology of care and integrated into new relationships.
Spirits
A universe conceptualised entirely in terms of dynamic feedback and learning loops leads naturally to a panpsychic philosophy in which consciousness is omnipresent across all levels of scale. This perspective is deeply compatible with Eastern spiritual traditions such as Buddhism and Daoism. It invites non-anthropocentric viewpoints, alerts observers to the cultural biases inherent in modern industrialised notions of intelligence and success, and draws attention to the cognitive and emotional limits of the human scale.
Buddhism, also known as Buddha Dharma, is an Indian religion and philosophical tradition based on teachings attributed to the Buddha, a wandering teacher who lived in the sixth or fifth century BCE. As the world’s fourth-largest religion, it encompasses over 520 million followers, representing roughly seven percent of the global population. Arising in the eastern Gangetic plain as a Śramaṇa movement, it gradually spread throughout Asia before reaching the West in the twentieth century. According to tradition, the Buddha instructed followers in a path of development leading to awakening and full liberation from dukkha, or suffering and unease, viewing this path as a Middle Way between asceticism and sensual indulgence.
The Buddhist focus on minimising suffering and unease corresponds directly to the active desire of hypersensitive neurodivergent people to minimise cognitive dissonance. It also highlights the social problems that arise when a culture insists on maintaining high levels of cognitive dissonance over extended periods.
Similarly, Taoism, or Daoism, is a diverse philosophical and religious tradition indigenous to China, emphasising harmony with the Tao, an enigmatic process of transformation ultimately underlying reality. Taoist thought has informed practices such as meditation, astrology, qigong, feng shui, and internal alchemy, with self-cultivation as a common goal. Taoist ethics emphasise virtues such as effortless action, naturalness, simplicity, and the three treasures of compassion, frugality, and humility.
These Daoist virtues align closely with the sensitivity profiles of many neurodivergent people and offer a timeless critique of anthropocentric empire-building attempts dating back to the early Warring States period. Taken together, the core ideas within Buddhist and Daoist spiritual traditions reflect commonalities found across human-scale indigenous cultures, including egalitarian hunter-gatherer operating principles. Foundational texts like the Zhuangzi also emphasise the vital role of humour in subverting anthropocentric empire-building.
Love
The extent to which we are alive emerges directly from products of mutual trust, commitments, and shared understanding across all our relationships. By virtue of their scale and design, relationships with abstract, super-human-scale anthropocentric institutions are devoid of genuine shared understanding and experiences. The more a culture forces individuals to trust and invest in such institutional relationships, the less capacity remains for authentic connections with living beings, leaving our lives less shaped by mutual trust and vitality.
Once these dynamics are understood, and individuals consciously reorient their lives toward human scale, the prospect of institutional collapse can be viewed soberly—as the expiration of a social license that was inherently invalid all along. There is much to learn from indigenous societies that have not yet been fully crushed by the myth of homo economicus. Relationships can be understood as continuous, multi-modal, de-powered dialogues within ecologies of care, including the resulting entanglements of our inner worlds.
Reframing evolution in collaborative terms, akin to collaborative niche construction and compassionate evolutionary design, challenges the dominant narrative of ruthless competition. This collaborative perspective has historical roots, echoing the mutual aid principles articulated by Peter Kropotkin over a century ago. The compassionate frame of love as vulnerable mutual knowing is fully compatible with a panpsychic relational philosophy of the universe based on feedback loops and the life-affirming language of ecologies of care.
Sensitivity Profiles
All humans possess unique sensitivity profiles shaped by neurological baseline dispositions and lived experiences within specific ecological contexts. This is particularly true for hypersensitive neurodivergent people, many of whom have encountered traumatic experiences in a social world that systematically marginalises, pathologises, and sometimes criminalises them. Individually unique nervous systems and sensitivities develop and evolve throughout life. Research indicates that a significant majority of neurodivergent adults frequently feel overwhelmed, misunderstood, disrespected, and unsafe, with overall wellbeing determined by alignment between sensitivity profiles and their embedded ecology of care.
Official diagnostic criteria for autism are deeply entangled with symptoms of complex trauma. Those who identify as autistic and neurodivergent clearly exhibit uncommon baseline sensitivity profiles from birth, upon which traumatic lived experiences in the modern hypernormative industrialised world accumulate. Ultimately, it becomes impossible to separate where autism ends and trauma responses begin.
The paradigm of the modern medical model, focused on diagnosing and treating isolated individuals, is profoundly limiting and can cause significant harm, particularly among intersectionally marginalised populations. Simplistic diagnostic labels centred on decontextualised individuals fail to account for the uniqueness of every lived experience. Activists within the neurodiversity and disability movements advocate for intersectional solidarity beyond rigid diagnostic categories that gloss over individual realities.
Powered-up relationships involving persistent, unbalanced feedback loops generate cognitive dissonance, experienced as a dis-ease demanding resolution. Ignoring or suppressing cognitive dissonance for extended periods results in mental, spiritual, and bodily ailments. Hypersensitive individuals appear to maintain conscious awareness of cognitive dissonance and are compelled to take or avoid actions to reduce it, whereas others may tolerate dissonance for longer periods while suffering unrecognised physiological and psychological consequences.
Culture Co-Evolution
All major evolutionary milestones in the history of Gaia possess co-evolutionary characteristics, exemplified by the emergence and co-evolution of biological cells and multi-celled organisms. Empirical knowledge of cell biology demonstrates the complementary roles of abstract symbol systems and semantics in co-evolutionary processes, framing evolution as an ecological rather than a species-specific process. The semi-permeable membranes of cells provide a model for co-evolutionary interactions road-tested by Gaia for billions of years.
Co-evolutionary processes among cultural organisms rely on conscious collaborative niche construction rather than wasteful, head-to-head competition. From a co-evolutionary standpoint, head-to-head competitions are short-term, energy-wasting distractions that should be curtailed whenever they emerge within or between cultural organisms. These cultural foundations remain paramount in egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, reflecting the product of 300,000 years of cultural co-evolution and prioritizing values found in healthy, life-affirming cultures.
The cognitive and emotional limits of human scale become visible in the challenges of preventing and de-escalating conflicts between cultural organisms. However, well-documented examples of egalitarian societies successfully minimising competition over millennia offer valuable lessons. Applying these insights to the design of digital communication and collaboration tools can help shape resilient frameworks for the coming centuries.
The Human Spirit Within Gaia
Humans evolved to make sense of the world at human scales. Within an open-source human-scale heritage, transparent and appropriately designed digital technological guardrails around human capacities for language and culture can extend the reliability of collaborative niche construction to larger scales without centralising decision-making power in the hands of autocrats. It is time to replace a ten-thousand-year-old faith in power-hungry strongmen with a scientifically enlightened faith in the four-billion-year-old wisdom of Gaia.
Radical egalitarianism forms the architecture of human adaptive intelligence, differing significantly from the nervous systems of other primates due to our unique capacities for language and culture. Defining normal or adaptive behavior at the level of individual humans is absurd. Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies have become detached from the evolutionary roots of their cultural capacity, surrounded by spectacles where institutionalised corporate behaviors serve as false anchor points in the absence of trust-based human-scale ecologies of care.
Becoming Aware of Cultural Bias
To become consciously aware of cultural bias across human endeavors, it helps to view academia as consisting of subsystems connected via learning and feedback loops. By distinguishing human cultural output and scientific attempts to understand Gaia from institutionalised models, researchers can critically examine the humanities, mathematical disciplines, statistics, and engineering.
Mathematics stands out for its commitment to making all assumptions explicit. In contrast, modern industrial engineering often displays an active disinterest in exposing underlying assumptions, relying instead on convenient doctrines that normalise violence and ecological disregard. Furthermore, the modern economic religion has institutionalised an obsession with maximising quantifiable economic utility, reducing human life spans to employment brackets and undermining valuable intergenerational dialogues.
Reviving Trust in Humanity
Nothing in the atomised modern social world makes complete sense anymore because human-scale cultural organisms and their life-sustaining importance have been eroded from living memory. Faith in humanity and Gaia has been shaken to its core. The competitive framework of homo economicus normalises the compulsion to appear independent and strong, while fears of exposing vulnerabilities foster widespread mistrust and mental health struggles.
Deep indoctrination into the myth of homo economicus causes modern humans to distrust themselves. Attempts to achieve success within dominant cultural frameworks often leave individuals concluding that personal failure is to blame, fueling an epidemic of self-hate and shame. Conversely, those who succeed within the system must suppress ethical compromises and compassionate impulses, hiding guilt behind outwardly narcissistic behaviours necessary for survival in a life-denying society.
Addressing these systemic pathologies requires discarding the ideology of homo economicus and supporting emerging human-scale ecologies of care. Cooperatives and collaborative models showcase the enduring global impact needed to overcome systemic challenges, providing viable exit paths from dying institutions.
Making Sense of the World
Humans are compelled to make sense of this world, and that endeavor can only succeed in good company at human scales. Looking across evolutionary history reveals powered-up civilisations as a cultural pathology rather than an inevitable arrow of progress driven by homo economicus. Wisdom is the capacity to distinguish between human capabilities for advanced recursive tool design and true ecological understanding.
Gaia calls for a conscious paradigmatic shift in tool design away from the life-denying religion of homo economicus and toward a life-affirming religion of homo ecologus. Well-designed digital tools hold the potential to amplify the noblest of human impulses, assisting in the generational transition toward sustainable, human-scale living. Autistic, authentic, and autonomous ecologies of care continue to grow organically at human scale, one trusted relationship at a time.
