An open question to India’s leading technological institutions, AI researchers, educational policymakers, EdTech companies, NGOs, and philanthropic organisations promoting educational inclusion.

Technologizing education is not merely about introducing digital devices, artificial intelligence, or automated systems into classrooms. It is a process through which education itself is increasingly reorganised around technological principles of efficiency, standardisation, measurement, prediction, personalisation, and scalability. What makes this particularly concerning is that these technologies are being developed to optimise an educational paradigm whose fundamental assumptions about human cognition remain largely unexamined.

We are witnessing a remarkable contradiction. While developments in artificial intelligence and cognitive science are bringing renewed attention to the real world, childhood, and the biological foundations of knowing, educational technology continues to make an inherited educational paradigm more sophisticated without adequately questioning its consequences for natural human cognition.

Three developments are particularly significant because they challenge assumptions upon which much of modern education continues to operate.

AI Is Rediscovering What Education Has Forgotten

The first development concerns the growing interest in world models within artificial intelligence research. Researchers are recognising limitations of Large Language Models and exploring systems capable of representing the physical world, anticipating consequences, and learning from interactions with environments. Although language models remain central to AI development, this direction of research reflects an important recognition: linguistic competence and the ability to generate convincing explanations are not necessarily equivalent to understanding how the world works.

Modern schooling, however, continues to organise knowledge predominantly around language, textbooks, information, and symbolic representations, often treating the ability to reproduce explanations as evidence of understanding. While AI researchers are exploring how machines might develop an understanding of the world beyond language, we continue to organise children’s education around learning the word. The fundamental distinction is between language emerging from an organism’s engagement with reality and language becoming the primary medium through which reality is encountered.

The second development is the growing interest among AI researchers in how children acquire knowledge autonomously. Children encounter the world without waiting for someone to organise it into subjects, lessons, or predetermined learning objectives. Through observation, movement, play, experimentation, and continuous engagement with their surroundings, they develop an understanding of materials, structures, processes, functions, spatial relationships, and the behaviour of living and non-living things.

This process does not begin with instruction. Children are biologically equipped to create knowledge, and their spontaneous activities reveal capacities for observation, discrimination, anticipation, experimentation, judgment, and self-organisation long before these are identified and compartmentalised as educational competencies.

Yet modern education continues to operate on the assumption that knowledge must be systematically organised and delivered to the learner. We speak extensively about developing agency in children without adequately investigating the autonomy they already possess or examining how institutional arrangements may undermine it. If autonomy is inherent in natural cognition, the educational question is not simply how to develop agency, but how to preserve the conditions under which it naturally flourishes.

The third development concerns embodied and situated cognition, which challenges the separation of mind from body and knowing from lived experience. These approaches have brought renewed attention to the role of sensory perception, movement, action, environmental relationships, and bodily participation in cognition, questioning the assumption that human understanding can be adequately explained as information processing independently of the organism’s engagement with its world.

Experience, from this perspective, is not merely an educational aid that makes abstract concepts easier to understand. It is fundamental to the formation of understanding itself, as perception, action, judgment, memory, and value develop through the organism’s continuous participation in life.

However, an important question remains insufficiently explored within much of the discourse on embodied cognition: What happens to natural human cognition when education systematically separates knowing from the sensory and bodily processes through which it develops? Recognising the embodied foundations of cognition is one matter; investigating the consequences of educational practices that progressively displace these foundations is another.

These developments bring us back to a fundamental biological question that modern educational discourse has largely neglected: How has life equipped human beings with the capacity to know?

The real world is the primary ground of knowing, and childhood is the crucial period during which the foundations of perception, judgment, value, and relationships with the world take shape. These are not merely questions about improving pedagogy; they concern the biological foundations of human cognition.

My research with children and non-literate artisans has repeatedly brought me to a recognition that remains largely absent from mainstream educational discourse: knowing is an inherent process of life, not a product delivered through teaching. In their spontaneous engagement with materials, environments, and everyday activities, knowing, doing, sensing, judging, and appreciating beauty develop as interconnected dimensions of a living process. Modern education, however, increasingly begins with already formulated knowledge, converting knowing into something to be acquired, measured, and certified rather than recognising the organism’s autonomous capacity to create it.

When Education Becomes Commerce-Centric

The crisis of modern education cannot be adequately understood merely by pointing to its increasing commercialisation. The deeper transformation is that the very purpose of education has become progressively commerce-centric, with human capacities increasingly evaluated according to their usefulness within economic and institutional systems.

Education is organised around employability, productivity, competition, adaptability, and measurable competencies, preparing children to become cognitive labourers whose knowledge and skills can be utilised within the economy. The broader human capacities for autonomous judgment, aesthetic sensibility, contextual understanding, and living in harmony with nature receive comparatively little attention. Even discussions about reimagining education tend to concentrate on preparing children for future jobs and technological disruptions rather than examining whether the prevailing educational paradigm is compatible with the biological foundations of knowing.

Artificial intelligence makes this contradiction particularly visible because many of the cognitive operations privileged by modern schooling—memorising information, analysing texts, retrieving established knowledge, generating explanations, and producing acceptable responses—can now be performed with remarkable sophistication by language models. Instead of treating this development as an opportunity to examine what education has become, much of the educational technology sector is responding with AI-powered instruction, automated assessment, adaptive curricula, and personalised learning systems.

This brings us to the central irony of technologizing education. If the prevailing educational paradigm has already weakened children’s autonomous engagement with the world by making them increasingly dependent upon instruction and externally determined objectives, personalising that process does not necessarily restore their autonomy. It may simply make the same conditioning more precisely adapted to each individual child.

What is being celebrated as personalised learning may become the personalisation of cognitive damage, while the technological capacity to reach millions of children becomes a means of scaling the crisis.

Technological efficiency cannot compensate for an inadequate understanding of human cognition, particularly when the processes being optimised are themselves what require critical examination.

Educational Inclusion: Are We Democratising Opportunity or Universalising the Damage?

There is another uncomfortable question that must be addressed to NGOs, philanthropic organisations, and institutions working towards educational inclusion. Their efforts to ensure that children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds have access to education, digital resources, and emerging technologies are generally presented as an unquestionable social good. Yet the concern for equity, however legitimate, does not eliminate the need to examine what children are being included in.

If the prevailing educational paradigm subordinates children’s autonomous engagement with the world to predetermined curricula, external evaluation, and dependence upon instruction, extending that paradigm to every child cannot automatically be equated with educational justice. It may also mean ensuring that children whose families could not previously afford these interventions are now included in their potentially damaging consequences.

The privileged receive expensive, personalised cognitive conditioning, while the underprivileged receive subsidised cognitive conditioning, and the resulting expansion of access is celebrated as educational equity.

This contradiction becomes particularly significant when we examine the knowledge already present in the lives of children from economically disadvantaged communities. Through participation in family occupations, agriculture, craft practices, local ecological relationships, and multilingual environments, children may develop remarkable capacities for observation, practical judgment, material understanding, and contextual intelligence without these capacities being formally taught or institutionally recognised.

Modern schooling frequently approaches these children through the language of deficiency, measuring what they have not acquired through formal education while overlooking the knowledge they have already created through participation in life. Their existing capacities become invisible because they do not conform to the forms of knowledge that educational institutions are equipped to recognise and evaluate.

When inclusion is organised primarily around bringing such children into the existing educational system, it risks replacing rich formative environments with arrangements that privilege abstract information, externally defined achievement, and institutional dependence. The issue is not whether economically disadvantaged children should have access to literacy, technology, or educational opportunities, but whether such access must necessarily require subordinating their existing capacities for knowing to an institutional model that has never adequately examined its own assumptions.

There is a fundamental difference between democratising the conditions under which children can flourish and universalising an educational paradigm whose consequences for natural cognition remain insufficiently understood.

NGOs and philanthropic institutions must therefore examine whether their interventions genuinely expand children’s cognitive autonomy or merely extend the prevailing model of cognitive conditioning to those who had previously remained outside its reach

Where Is the Critical Thinking About Education Itself?

These questions become particularly urgent when leading technological institutions organise conferences devoted to reimagining education. When the proposed framework is organised around categories such as For Education, Of Education, In Education, and Across Education, education itself remains the unquestioned starting point, while technology is positioned as the instrument through which its practices can be improved, extended, and made more efficient.

What is missing is a serious examination of how human beings naturally create knowledge and how literacy, schooling, institutional instruction, and digital technologies have progressively reorganised the conditions under which cognition takes shape. It is particularly concerning when such foundational questions are relegated to peripheral discussions or spaces created by independent organisations rather than becoming central to the intellectual agenda of institutions proposing to reimagine education.

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The irony becomes even more striking when we consider the extraordinary emphasis modern education places on critical thinking. Educational institutions repeatedly celebrate the importance of questioning assumptions, examining evidence, and developing independent judgment, yet rarely apply the same scrutiny to their own conception of knowledge, learning, intelligence, and human development.

What does critical thinking mean if the educational system that claims to cultivate it remains unwilling to critically examine its own foundations?

A technological institution may possess exceptional expertise in computation, engineering, and artificial intelligence without necessarily possessing an adequate understanding of natural human cognition. This becomes a serious intellectual limitation when technological expertise is treated as sufficient authority for redesigning the conditions under which children develop their capacities for knowing.

Institutions undertaking such work must therefore engage with the biological foundations of cognition, the implications of embodied and situated cognition, and the growing scientific interest in how children autonomously acquire knowledge through participation in the world. Otherwise, what is presented as the reimagining of education may amount to little more than the technological refinement of an inherited paradigm.

Reimagining Education Must Begin With Understanding Human Cognition

The question is not whether technology has a legitimate place in human life, nor whether children should have access to the intellectual and material resources developed by modern civilisation. The more fundamental question is whether we understand the human capacities that these technologies are intended to support, extend, reorganise, or potentially displace.

We need to investigate what happens when children’s encounters with the real world are increasingly mediated through instruction, written language, screens, and algorithms, particularly during the formative years when patterns of perception, attention, judgment, and engagement with reality are taking shape. We must also examine whether educational systems organised around externally determined objectives cultivate genuine cognitive autonomy or progressively condition children to depend upon institutions for the organisation and validation of their knowing.

Children are not incomplete knowledge processors waiting for education to make them intelligent. They are living organisms already engaged in the autonomous creation of knowledge, and their spontaneous participation in the world offers an indispensable reference for understanding the foundations of human cognition.

Perhaps one of the greatest ironies of our time is that researchers attempting to develop artificial intelligence are increasingly turning towards the real world, embodied interaction, and the ways children acquire knowledge, while educational institutions continue to invest in technologies that may move children further away from direct engagement with the world and deeper into systems of symbolic instruction.

Before asking what artificial intelligence can do for education, shouldn’t we investigate what education has already done to natural human cognition?

For technological institutions, educational policymakers, EdTech companies, NGOs, and philanthropic organisations seeking to reimagine education, this leads to a question that cannot be avoided simply by developing better tools, more sophisticated pedagogies, or more inclusive delivery systems:

How can we claim to reimagine education without first understanding how human beings autonomously create knowledge?

#NaturalCognition #CognitiveAutonomy #ArtificialIntelligence #EducationalTechnology #CognitiveScience #EmbodiedCognition #Childhood #EducationalInclusion #ReimaginingEducation

Sustained Participation in a World That Can Still Surprise Us

If primary knowing belongs to life, how does it deepen into sophisticated understanding? Modern education commonly assumes that increasing complexity requires increasing dependence on prior explanation. Scientific discovery, indigenous life, classical music and traditional medical learning reveal possibilities this assumption overlooks.

Across these settings, understanding develops through sustained participation. Existing knowledge assists while remaining open to what the encounter reveals. The unknown provides the context within which something becomes known.

Jane Goodall: From Childhood Inquiry to Scientific Discovery

Jane Goodall’s capacity for patient observation was visible long before her work became recognised as science. At about four years old, while staying on a family farm, she became puzzled by the eggs she collected. Where was the opening through which something so large could emerge from a hen?

She followed a hen into a henhouse but frightened it away. She then concealed herself in another henhouse and waited. Eventually, a hen entered and laid an egg. Goodall recalled remaining there for nearly four hours. Her family had contacted the police. When she returned, her mother, Vanne, recognised her excitement and listened to her discovery instead of scolding her.

Her question arose through an everyday activity. When her first attempt disturbed what she wanted to observe, she adjusted her action and waited. Her mother’s response acknowledged the significance of that inquiry.

Years later, after travelling to Kenya, Goodall heard about Louis Leakey and arranged a meeting. During their time together, Leakey came to recognise her commitment to observing animals in the wild and proposed the chimpanzee study. Leakey recognised an existing capacity for inquiry and helped create the conditions for its exercise. His experience and institutional access made another person’s exploration possible without supplying its discoveries beforehand.

When Goodall arrived at Gombe, the chimpanzees fled whenever they saw her. For months, close observation was difficult. She had to discover how to move, where to remain, and how to respond to the animals’ reactions. The relationship developing through her presence affected what could become observable.

She subsequently observed chimpanzees using stems to extract termites and preparing leafy twigs by stripping off their leaves. Their activities challenged the prevailing definition of humans as uniquely tool-making animals. Something happening in the forest required an established formulation to change. Reality retained authority over knowledge.

Goodall later entered Cambridge to undertake a doctorate, where she encountered objections to naming chimpanzees and discussing their personalities. Familiarity with animals gave her grounds to resist some objections, while her supervisor’s criticism helped her articulate her observations more carefully. Her journey reveals continuity from childhood curiosity to advanced inquiry. Academic knowledge could question her interpretations; her experience could also question academic assumptions.

Jean Liedloff: When the Encounter Creates the Question

Jean Liedloff entered the South American rainforest on an expedition searching for diamonds, without an intention to study children or develop a theory of parenting. Repeated journeys brought prolonged contact with Yequana and Sanema communities. Questions about human well-being emerged through these encounters.

Recognition took time. She recalled spending long periods among people whose lives differed from her own without perceiving the significance of what she witnessed. Familiar assumptions continued to organise her attention.

Physical presence alone does not free perception from conditioning. Understanding requires openness for an encounter to disturb familiar accounts.

Liedloff became attentive to infants’ bodily closeness to caregivers, their inclusion in everyday activities and adults’ confidence in children’s participation. These observations contributed to the understanding she later articulated in The Continuum Concept.

Experience made a difference perceptible; the difference generated questions that required her to reconsider her own formation. Her journey reveals the significance of discovering what deserves questioning.

Larry Merculieff: Trust, Participation and Attention

Ilarion Larry Merculieff’s account of growing up on St. Paul Island in the Bering Sea reveals a formative ecology of natural knowing. He accompanied adults hunting, fishing, gathering berries and preparing food, and listened to elders’ stories. He recalls being welcomed throughout the village. Belonging provided the ground for participation.

The adults’ responsibility, as he describes it, was to make it possible for children to participate, observe and discover for themselves. They trusted him to watch, listen and discover in his own way and time. His traditional mentor accompanied him from about five to thirteen, yet, by Merculieff’s recollection, spoke no more than a few hundred words to him. Conduct, responsibility and reverence for life became meaningful within shared activity.

Accompanying hunters, he wondered how they remained alert through long hours of waiting. Among seabirds, he became fascinated by their movements through an apparently chaotic space. These encounters drew him toward sustained awareness of his surroundings and away from absorption in internal thought.

This sensitivity developed into practical competence. Navigating in fog involved attending to the rhythm of water, differences in colour and smell, and the movements of familiar birds. Sensory impressions, familiarity and responsive action worked together.

Primary knowing deepened into sophisticated judgment. The environment offered activities with real consequences; experienced people offered access, companionship and trust.

Zakir Hussain: Order Before Its Explicit Grammar

Zakir Hussain’s father, Alla Rakha, sang rhythms to him from infancy. Students practised in the household, and Hussain began playing through time spent among them. At seven, he chose intensive instruction with his father. Immersion, initiative, teaching and disciplined practice formed a continuing process.

Classical music possesses elaborate structure, but learning does not begin with an explanation of its grammar. Listening and playing cultivate sensitivity to timing, sequence, proportion and variation before these relationships become explicitly describable. Mother-tongue learning makes this familiar: grammar operates within speech before the speaker can formulate its rules.

Ayurveda: Growing Into Specialised Practice

Accounts of Kerala’s Ashtavaidya traditions describe prolonged apprenticeship connected with scholarly study and medical practice. Where household life and medical work overlapped, familiarity could develop before medicine became a chosen course of study.

Sensory formation begins before birth. Medicinal materials, preparations, conversations and acts of care could become part of early familiarity, later deepened through practice, instruction and responsibility. Textual interpretation and memorisation also belonged within these traditions.

I have heard accounts of traditional Ayurvedic learning in which shlokas were memorised without explanation. An encounter in practice could later recall a verse and bring its words into experiential recognition. Retaining a formulation did not mean that its significance had been comprehended.

Words can preserve an observation and direct attention while understanding continues to unfold. The finger pointing toward the moon expresses this relationship: understanding the pointer cannot fulfil the encounter toward which it directs us.

What we now call higher education could develop through increasingly demanding participation in a field of life. Sophistication need not entail departure from experiential knowing.

The Grammar of Knowing: Content and Process Take Shape Together

The accounts of Larry Merculieff, Zakir Hussain and traditional Ayurvedic learning reveal a continuity that formal education often overlooks. From birth, children grow within the sounds, movements, materials, relationships and practices of their surroundings. Through participation, they become familiar with both what an activity involves and how to attend, respond and discover within it. The content of knowing and the process of coming to know develop together. Just as children acquire the grammar of their mother tongue without first being taught its rules, they absorb the implicit “grammar” of these practices — their rhythms, distinctions, sequences and relationships. What appears unstructured to an outsider has an order within life itself. Children become familiar with this order naturally and spontaneously, without its being arranged as lessons. When formal instruction or deliberate practice begins, it builds upon familiarity, sensitivity and ways of knowing already taking shape.

A Rich Cognitive Environment for Deep Learning

Cambridge’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology offers an example of how a rich cognitive environment sustains shared inquiry. Its Nobel-recognised discoveries arose within a community that acknowledges the collaborative support behind its achievements. Students describe informal exchanges across research groups and ready access to experienced scientists. Around Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, discussions with younger colleagues developed into conferences without a fixed programme, allowing emerging questions to shape the exchanges.

The richness of these environments lay in the relationships among people, their work and their differing experience. Questions could be explored in conversation, observations brought into shared attention and interpretations reconsidered. Expertise deepened inquiry while remaining open to what others noticed.

A cognitively rich environment offers meaningful activity, varied experience, materials and sustained conversation. An unexpected observation can matter. Humility is a practical condition: someone else may have noticed what we overlooked. Learning develops through participation in a community where understanding is continually being formed and refined. Humility belongs to this process: someone else may have noticed what we overlooked.

When Reasoning Short-Circuits Comprehension

Reasoning short-circuits comprehension when working with language produces a premature feeling of understanding. We connect statements and construct a coherent account. Its coherence feels sufficient, and an inquiry that experience has scarcely begun appears complete.

This apparent understanding can obstruct attention. We recognise our explanation while overlooking what is happening. “Literates learn the word; illiterates learn the world” points toward this displacement: command of descriptions can stand for acquaintance with reality.

Reasoning deepens comprehension when it remains within the larger activity of knowing. The short circuit occurs when formulations acquire the authority to declare that activity complete.

Essay 17- The Residual Cognitive Ecology Series

Introduction

Reimagining education requires examining how human beings become capable of knowing, and how the conditions of modern life sustain or displace that capacity. Modern education, however, begins predominantly with knowledge already formulated. It organises the delivery of this knowledge, expects learners to retain and interpret it, and evaluates their ability to reproduce, analyse, and apply it. Within this arrangement, intelligence becomes closely associated with handling information. But what happens to the human capacity to create knowledge when education is organised primarily around acquiring what others have already articulated?

The arrival of Large Language Models makes this question difficult to avoid. I sometimes describe modern schooling as producing SLMs—Small Language Models. The expression draws attention to a common pattern: receiving language, memorising information, following logical relationships, analysing statements and generating responses through combinations of available ideas. These activities occupy much of what schooling recognises as learning. Language-based AI now performs many of the operations around which educational achievement has been organised.

The comparison concerns this pattern of formation, rather than an equivalence between human beings and machines. Human capacities extend beyond what schooling exercises and assesses. AI’s apparent suitability for education exposes an earlier narrowing: education had already made the processing of formulated knowledge a principal measure of intelligence. Replacing books with AI may accelerate this arrangement while leaving its foundation unquestioned.

An almost immediate adult response is to ask what will happen to existing knowledge. How will children acquire everything previous generations have discovered? This concern begins with the knowledge adults wish to transmit. The question that must come before it concerns the formation of the knower: what happens to children’s observation, initiative, sensitivity, and judgment through the arrangements devised for that transmission?

When explanations repeatedly precede encounters, observation can become a search for what has already been described. When questions and conclusions are supplied, understanding can become the ability to follow someone else’s account. The learner increasingly seeks confirmation from teachers and texts. Schooling changes what a person pays attention to, how they seek understanding, and whether they trust their own capacity to know or depend on others to tell them.

The resulting proficiency can conceal what has been displaced. Someone may become accomplished at comparing arguments and analysing information while having little opportunity to originate an inquiry or develop judgment through sustained participation. Institutions recognise the achievement because it corresponds to the capacities their arrangements continually exercise. The diminished autonomy of the knower, however, remains outside the assessment.

Our starting point must be the natural cognitive foundation through which understanding develops. Sensory attention, movement, feeling, imagination, intuition and responsive action belong together within an organism’s relationship with the world. Through this participation, relationships become perceptible, questions emerge and understanding takes shape, often before it can be expressed in words. Knowledge creation begins within this living encounter; it cannot be adequately understood as the processing and recombination of existing formulations.

This living, organismic activity is the non-computational ground of knowing. Reasoning, memory, analysis and calculation participate within it, drawing meaning and direction from the larger process. Computational thinking becomes a problem for education when it is made the organising principle of knowing, and the living whole is judged through the operations that can be specified, reproduced and assessed.

Existing knowledge can then extend inquiry, sharpen distinctions and introduce discoveries beyond immediate experience. Its significance develops through a learner who can question it, connect it with experience and recognise where understanding remains incomplete.

Reclaiming education in the age of AI requires restoring this relationship. Before asking how machines can deliver knowledge more efficiently, we must ask how education sustains the human capacity to discover what has not already been formulated.

The inquiry unfolds in five parts: the primary knowing through which life sustains itself; the development of sophisticated understanding through participation; AI and cognitive autonomy; sustaining and reclaiming the natural cognitive foundation; and the wider conditions for knowing, from home and community to institutions and technologies.

The transmission of accumulated knowledge must remain answerable to the living capacity through which knowledge is created, questioned and renewed.

PART I — WHY MUST WE REIMAGINE EDUCATION?

Recovering the Primary Knowledge of Living

The need to reimagine education begins with a disturbing contradiction. Our societies possess enormous quantities of knowledge and unprecedented technical capacities, yet we continue to damage the conditions upon which our lives depend. We can explain ecological relationships while participating in their destruction. Greater access to information has not ensured greater sensitivity or wiser action. What, then, is missing from what we call being educated?

Before asking what education should provide, we need to recognise a primary order of knowing: the knowing through which life sustains itself. Every organism depends on capacities to obtain nourishment, respond to its surroundings and participate in relationships necessary for its existence. Inherited biological capacities develop through continuing engagement with a context. In this broad sense, knowing belongs to life.

For human beings, this includes recognising what can be eaten, preparing food, obtaining water, finding shelter and caring for others. These capacities develop through practices whose consequences are encountered in everyday life. Where cultivation, making and care remain visible and shared, growing up involves becoming increasingly capable of sustaining life.

My encounters with non-literate artisan communities repeatedly brought this distinction into view. People whom modern institutions might regard as uneducated possessed an intimate understanding of materials, occupations, and the practical requirements of their surroundings. Their knowing was woven into the activities through which life continued. Knowledge, responsibility, and sensitivity to quality developed within these relationships.

Formal education can proceed without this foundation. A person may acquire advanced qualifications while knowing little about how their food is grown, where their water comes from, how everyday necessities are made, or what their consumption requires of other people and places. Their needs are met through systems whose workings remain largely outside their experience. Educational achievement rarely requires this distance to be recognised as a limitation of knowledge.

Specialisation makes extensive cooperation possible, but specialised competence alone cannot provide an adequate foundation for living. Other forms of knowledge must remain connected to primary knowing if increasing capability is to carry an understanding of its consequences.

Our alienation from nature is especially revealing because we cannot cease to be nature. Our bodies depend on air, water, food and other organisms. Yet our institutions and aspirations can become organised as though these dependencies were external matters. The living world becomes something to study, manage and use, while our participation within it recedes from awareness.

This requires us to examine what we mean by education. Is its purpose fulfilled when someone acquires established knowledge and demonstrates competence in using it? Or must we also consider how perception, judgment, values, and the relationship with life are being formed?

A living being does not begin as an empty recipient awaiting instruction. Learning is already underway through perception, movement, feeling and participation. Teaching can offer guidance, demonstration and explanation, but communicating a formulation does not transfer understanding. The learner must participate in its formation.

The term formative ecology names the people, places, materials, occupations, technologies and institutions through which our being takes shape. Within these relationships, we develop habits of attention, responses to authority, trust or distrust in our perception, and a sense of what deserves care.

Reimagining education requires reconsidering this ecology, from home to higher education. How can expanding knowledge deepen the primary knowing through which life continues?

Understanding the Formation of Being

The child as a creator of knowledge is the first reference through which modern educated people can begin to question their understanding of learning and intelligence. Following this inquiry closely reveals that knowledge creation belongs within a larger process: the formation of being, in which understanding, values, and aesthetic sensitivity develop together.

Modern education largely treats knowledge as something already available, to be transferred through teaching and acquired through learning. Yet children develop an immense practical understanding of the world without being taught its principles. Through observing, moving, handling, attempting, and participating, they create implicit knowledge that enables them to respond intelligently to their surroundings.

How does a child understand balance without lessons in equilibrium, recognise relationships without definitions, or develop a language without being taught its grammar? These familiar accomplishments reveal an organisation of knowing that the transfer of information cannot adequately explain. The child makes knowledge creation visible as an activity of life, preceding its recognition as an educational achievement.

Following this inquiry reveals something more fundamental. As children come to understand the world, their ways of attending, moving, feeling, valuing, and relating also take shape. Knowledge creation belongs within the formation of being, together with the development of care, autonomy, and aesthetic sensitivity. What we distinguish as knowledge, values, and beauty can unfold within the same participation.

The child therefore becomes a reference for examining the possibilities of human formation and the conditions that sustain, diminish, or redirect them. This requires attention both to the child’s inherent biological qualities and abilities and to the context in which they develop. The unknown, existential freedom, trusting relationships, and adults who trust life’s developing capacities are as consequential as the materials and activities available.

A child enters a world already alive with activity. People speak, prepare food, carry things, work with materials, care for one another, and respond to circumstances. Water flows, surfaces offer resistance, objects fall, plants grow, and animals move. The child begins participating in this world long before being able to explain it. Through this encounter, understanding develops and a particular way of being takes shape.

What Life Makes Possible

The child arrives with inherent qualities, abilities, and sensitivities through which a world can be encountered. These are living possibilities whose development requires participation. The possibility of speech belongs to the child’s biological inheritance; the particular language that develops belongs to the context of speakers. Movement develops through bodily growth and encounters with support, resistance, distance, and balance. What is inherent and what is encountered become inseparable in formation, which has already begun within the maternal environment before birth.

The child’s initiative also precedes an adult’s decision to educate. Children turn towards sounds, reach for objects, follow movements, repeat actions, and attempt what others do. Their engagement does not require a consciously formulated purpose of acquiring knowledge. Curiosity, playfulness, and the urge to participate name aspects of this movement towards the world. By turning them into separate abilities to be cultivated, we can overlook their organisation within living activity.

The Context and Its Intangible Conditions

Context includes materials, places, people, relationships, and the organisation of everyday life. Where food is prepared, objects repaired, plants tended, and materials transformed, children encounter processes in which they can participate. Where these processes become inaccessible and finished products dominate, the field of formative possibilities changes.

The context is also intangible. It includes the child’s encounter with the unknown, the room available for initiative, the quality of care, and whether the people around the child trust life’s developing capacities. These conditions shape how the child enters relationships before they become subjects of explanation.

For the child, much of the world remains unknown. There are relationships to discover through attention, exploration, and adjustment. An adult may already know what something is while allowing the child’s encounter to unfold. When explanation continually precedes discovery, the child’s relationship with the unknown is reorganised around someone else’s account.

Existential freedom concerns the initiative through which the child responds to life before activity is continually governed by permission, prescribed outcomes, and external evaluation. It exists within dependence and care. The child needs others, but this need does not cancel the child’s own movement towards participation.

Adults who trust life make that trust perceptible through how they wait, respond, allow attempts, and offer help. Their confidence or anxiety enters the relationship. Continually anticipating inadequacy establishes a different formative atmosphere from attending sensitively to capacities as they develop.

The child’s trusting openness makes the character of the surrounding world especially consequential. In modernity, that openness repeatedly encounters representations and claims whose differences from lived reality are obscure, leaving adults to correct a trust that the environment has itself invited.

The context is the content in this fuller sense: the child encounters both what surrounds them and the manner in which life is lived. Care, impatience, cooperation, hierarchy, and competition enter formation through experience, whether or not anyone intends to teach them.

Active Participation Without Making the Self a Project

The child is an active participant in this formation. Children select, attempt, resist, improvise, and discover possibilities that adults, accustomed to established uses, may overlook. A book becomes an enclosure; a bedsheet over a table becomes a dwelling; available objects become materials for reconstructing an experienced event.

Such initiative need not begin in the desire to demonstrate competence or secure recognition. The child can become absorbed in making something stand, discovering what a material permits, or joining an activity without making personal achievement its governing purpose.

This is the possibility of a non-egoistic yet proactive formation. The capacity to act as oneself develops without every action becoming a means of proving oneself. Individuality, responsiveness, and participation can grow together.

This possibility must be examined within actual conditions. Children also encounter comparison, possession, praise, and exclusion, and their activity can become organised around these relationships. The inquiry concerns how involvement in the world develops into a particular manner of being, including how attention to an activity may become concern with what that activity establishes about oneself.

The child participates in its own formation without needing to conceive or manage that formation as a project.

The Implicit Grammar of Engagement

Across my observations, children repeatedly attend to form, function, materials, process, structure, relationship, and context. These are dimensions of reality encountered through activity, although attention may settle more strongly on one at a particular moment.

An upright notebook evokes the form of a house. A bedsheet over a table provides an enclosure to inhabit. Building with available materials brings process and structure into prominence: something must support something else; a span may collapse; one material bends while another remains rigid. Relationships are explored throughout.

I describe this organisation as an implicit grammar of engagement. A person can speak a language without stating its grammatical rules; similarly, a child can develop an understanding of relationships without first possessing explanations. A grammar given by life need not mean a finished conceptual scheme present at birth. It concerns the organisation that becomes possible as bodily capacities meet a world of consequential properties and relationships.

Affordances clarify this meeting. What a surface offers depends partly on the being encountering it. The same ledge presents different possibilities to a crawling infant, a walking child, and an adult. As capacities develop, familiar surroundings disclose further possibilities.

The child attempts an action, encounters its consequences, and adjusts. Apparent repetition may contain continuing changes in pressure, position, timing, and expectation. Participation develops the capacity to perceive and respond; this developing capacity opens further participation.

Imbibing and Becoming

Much of formation happens without being deliberately selected as something to learn. A child enters meaningful exchanges and comes to use linguistic patterns that remain impossible to explain. Explicit grammar may later articulate an understanding already functioning.

Practical understanding develops similarly. The child adjusts balance, anticipates movement, and recognises resemblances without stating principles. Re-enacting an experience requires memory, imagination, abstraction, and invention because the available materials and circumstances differ from the original encounter.

What is imbibed includes the manner of participation. The child experiences how people attend, handle uncertainty, respond to difficulty, and treat materials and one another. Understanding and disposition take shape together. The child comes to know a world while becoming someone within it.

The Formation of the Whole Being

Carrying water involves weight, balance, movement, anticipation, and sensitivity to spilling. Within household life, it may also involve participation in a shared need. Coordination, attention, practical understanding, and care develop within the same activity.

This is the meaning of holistic formation. We distinguish bodily, cognitive, emotional, social, ethical, and aesthetic aspects in description; the child lives encounters in which these aspects affect one another. Holism cannot be achieved merely by providing a separate activity for each.

Why, what, and how offer another way to understand this integration. Why concerns significance—what draws the child into engagement or makes an action matter. What concerns the world being encountered. How concerns the manner and quality of response. These can operate as inherent orientations of attention before becoming verbal questions.

Aesthetic sensitivity belongs within this engagement. Measure, rhythm, proportion, fit, and emerging order matter in doing. An adjustment can make something more stable, usable, and satisfying in its relationships. Value, understanding, and beauty can be explored here as interrelated dimensions of participation.

Yet the involvement of the whole being does not guarantee wholeness. Fear, dependence, competition, and submission can also become bodily, emotional, and cognitive dispositions together. Formation reaches the whole child even when the conditions establish habits of fragmentation.

The Child as a Civilizational Reference

The child makes it possible to examine modernity beyond its stated intentions and measurable achievements. When activity is prescribed, performance continually evaluated, and recognition attached to comparison, the consequences enter the child’s relationship with initiative and value. What matters may increasingly become what receives approval.

The openness through which children participate in life also makes them susceptible to these conditions. Adaptability can sustain rich participation or accommodate a diminished field of possibilities. Successful adjustment does not establish that the environment supports the fuller possibilities of human formation.

The modern crisis therefore concerns the beings our arrangements help to form. What happens to autonomy, perception, care, and aesthetic sensitivity when everyday participation is increasingly displaced by prescribed tasks, prepared representations, and finished products?

Taking the child as reference requires observing inherent possibilities and formative conditions together. From this understanding, retention becomes a responsibility: sustaining the relationships through which initiative, sensitivity, and understanding can deepen as language, cultural participation, and responsibility develop.

The child continues to change. What deserves continuity is the living relationship through which that development becomes one’s own. Understanding this relationship is essential to understanding both what modernity has diminished and what human formation still makes possible.

Reimagining Childhood as the Foundation for Reimagining Education

Reimagining education must therefore begin with reimagining childhood: the formative environments in which children can participate, create implicit knowledge, and develop as whole beings. This becomes especially urgent as AI is offered an expanding role in organising children’s learning. When learning is framed as the delivery of information, the selection of tasks, and the measurement of responses, the child’s living activity risks being reorganised around what a computational system can recognise and evaluate. The next essay will examine this danger alongside the possibilities of rich formative environments, including what design and architecture education might offer when freed from the modern paradigm’s dominance of predetermined outcomes, professional training, and externally imposed frameworks.

THE RESIDUAL COGNITIVE ECOLOGY SERIES / 15

How Modernity Reorganised the Sensory Foundations of Human Experience

Introduction — The Changing Conditions of Human Experience

Some years ago, I noticed something curious while my mother and sister-in-law were watching television news. The broadcast was delivered in a dramatic tone, accompanied by background music intended to heighten its emotional impact. Both were listening intently to the report, but I noticed their bodies were gently swaying to the rhythm of the music. Their conscious attention appeared absorbed in the spoken news, while their bodies responded to the music almost independently.

What interested me was not simply that they could listen and respond to music simultaneously, but that the television was organizing different responses through a single presentation. The spoken narrative engaged their attention through meaning, while the musical rhythm elicited bodily movement. This experience did not arise from their direct encounter with an event, but from an assembled combination of speech, music, and dramatic presentation.

Consider another ordinary experience: eating while watching television. Eating naturally involves a coordinated engagement of the senses — the appearance, aroma, taste, texture, and temperature of food are encountered together. Yet when the screen captures our attention, the eyes and ears become predominantly occupied with events taking place elsewhere, while taste, smell, and touch remain connected to the immediate surroundings. The senses continue functioning, but attention and response are distributed across two largely unrelated experiential contexts.

These apparently insignificant situations raise a fundamental question about the changing conditions of human experience. Our senses are not five independent instruments through which information enters the brain; they participate in an interconnected biological system through which the living organism encounters, responds to, and develops an understanding of its surroundings. But the integrity of experience does not reside in the organism alone. The external event also has its own integrity: its qualities, movements, material conditions, and consequences belong to relationships that constitute the event itself. In natural experience, the organism and the event meet through an unfolding relationship between perception and participation.

What happens when these relationships are increasingly reorganized through experiences assembled independently of the environment in which the organism is actually living?

Literacy introduced a transformation by making the world available through written representations rather than direct encounter. Industrialization extended the external organization of processes into material production. Cinema and television introduced another condition: the sights and sounds of events could be experienced without being present in the environments where those events occurred. Subsequently, computers, video games, and smartphones extended this possibility from watching and hearing to acting and interacting within simulated worlds. Artificial intelligence is now making these environments increasingly adaptive and generative.

We may therefore be witnessing the emergence of a Third Cognitive Order, distinct from both the world-rooted conditions of natural cognition and the word-centred conditions established through literacy and modern education. These are not successive periods in which one completely replaces another, but different formative conditions whose relative influence changes with the organization of everyday life.

The concern of this essay is not simply what audiovisual and digital technologies enable us to experience. It is what happens to the biological formation of the human being when the living world progressively loses its place as the primary organizer of sensory experience.

The Integrity of Experience

The Senses as One Biological System

We commonly speak of five senses — seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting — as though they were separate instruments. This division is useful for studying individual functions, but it obscures how living organisms experience the world. The senses do not ordinarily function as independent channels that collect information for the mind to assemble. They operate within an interconnected biological system.

Consider a child encountering a fruit for the first time. Its colour, shape, texture, smell, and taste are not experienced as separate categories of information. The child looks, touches, turns, smells, squeezes, and perhaps tastes it, discovering its qualities through a continuous process of sensory engagement and bodily action. Each movement changes what becomes available for perception, while each new perception influences subsequent movements. What emerges is not merely information about the fruit, but a developing familiarity with its qualities and possibilities.

This coordination extends beyond the conventionally recognized five senses. Our sense of bodily position, balance, temperature, pressure, and internal physiological conditions continuously contributes to how we experience the world. When walking across uneven ground, visual perception, tactile feedback, balance, and muscular coordination operate together, allowing the body to adjust without consciously reasoning through every movement. Sensory coherence does not require every sense to be equally active; it involves their coordinated availability within the organism’s continuing relationship with its surroundings.

The Integrity of the Organism and the Integrity of the Event

This coherence arises not only from the organization of the senses but from the integrity of the external event. Consider a burning fire. Its light, heat, crackling sound, and smell are not unrelated stimuli; they arise from an interconnected physical process. When the fire changes, its various perceptible qualities change through the causal relationships constituting the event.

The child sitting near the fire can move closer to feel greater warmth, step back, or observe how added wood changes the flame. The event presents conditions and consequences to which the child can respond. Natural experience involves the integrity of the organism, the integrity of the event, and their continuing relationship. The integrity of experience belongs to this relationship — not to either side considered in isolation.

The possibilities for action, or affordances, emerge through this relationship. A child exploring clay encounters its moisture, resistance, and changing form while continuously adjusting pressure and movement. The material responds according to its properties, and each response influences what the child perceives and does next. Understanding develops through this reciprocal relationship. It is this continuity between sensory experience, the relationships constituting the event, and the consequences of action that becomes fundamentally altered when sights, sounds, and possibilities for interaction are extracted from their original contexts and technologically reconstructed.

Cinema and Television: The Fragmentation of Sensory Experience

When the Integrity of an Event Becomes a Constructed Experience

The emergence of cinema and television introduced a transformation far more profound than a mere change in communication. It marked the beginning of a deep cognitive severance: the creation of the disembodied spectator.

Audiovisual technologies made it possible to see and hear events without participating in the environments in which those events occurred. More significantly, they made it possible to separate, manipulate, and recombine sensory characteristics independently of the relationships through which the original events existed.

Consider standing outdoors during heavy rain. The darkening sky, the sound of falling water, the changing temperature, the smell of wet earth, and the sensation of moisture on the skin are not independent occurrences. They arise through interconnected processes. The coherence of the experience emerges through the relationship between an integrated sensory organism and an event whose various manifestations belong to the same unfolding reality. You are in the rain; the rain is in you.

Now consider watching rain on television. The viewer sees the falling water and hears the rain, but the body’s remaining sensory capacities continue responding to the immediate environment — the temperature of the room, the sensation of the chair. Sight and sound are engaged with one represented environment, while the rest of the organism is situated in another.

This is not a harmless split. It is the foundational training for modern alienation. The viewer is taught to receive high-intensity sensory input about the world while remaining physically detached and consequence-free. The screen becomes a buffer against the vulnerability of real life. We are conditioned to witness the world as a spectacle rather than as a reality we are accountable to.

This engineered sensory organization — where narrative, music, and visual effects engage different aspects of experience independently of the reported event — illustrates a profound epistemic violence. News broadcasts routinely employ dramatic music and editing to heighten emotion. The viewer’s body might sway to the rhythm of the music, as I observed in my mother and sister-in-law, while their conscious mind processes a tragedy. The sensory and emotional organization of the experience is designed by the broadcaster, entirely divorced from the actual event.

The distinction between sensory stimulation and sensory participation becomes crucial here. Watching someone climb a mountain provides vivid visual and auditory experience, but not the bodily effort, the burning muscles, the changing balance, or the tactile resistance of the rock. The viewer receives a representation; the climber develops understanding through participation.

By training us to consume the sensory fruits of experience without the bodily labour, risk, or consequence of the act, cinema and television initiated a quiet war against the body. They taught the human organism that it could inhabit a phantom world while the physical body was reduced to a mere vehicle for the eyes and ears. This is the root of how modern humans turned against their own biology: we learned to value the intensity of the image over the reality of the flesh.

The Digital World: When the Screen Became an Interactive Environment

From Discovering Affordances to the Erasure of Consequence

Computers, video games, and smartphones extended this severance beyond seeing and hearing into action itself. The screen was no longer merely a surface for watching; it became an environment in which activities could take place. But this was not a return to participation. It was the creation of a frictionless, simulated agency that fundamentally distorts the human relationship with reality.

To understand the crisis this creates, we must look at how affordances and consequences operate in the living world. A child encountering water discovers that it flows, splashes, and escapes containment. A child stacking stones learns that gravity is unforgiving; if the base is unstable, the tower falls. The world introduces possibilities, but it also imposes resistance, friction, and consequence. Understanding develops through this reciprocal relationship. The world pushes back. The body must adjust.

A child playing with simulated water or building a virtual tower on a screen encounters a profoundly different reality. The available possibilities are governed by models and rules incorporated into the system, but crucially, the material resistance of the world has been erased. If a virtual tower falls, it is reset with a tap. If a digital object is broken, it is restored.

This creates a psychology of entitlement and impatience. The digital world trains the human mind to expect reality to yield instantly to a gesture, without waiting, and without lasting consequence.

When the human organism is formed primarily in environments where action is divorced from material consequence, it loses the capacity for patience, reverence, and care. This is the exact cognitive posture that allows modern civilization to treat the natural world as a resource to be extracted rather than a reality to be sustained. When you are accustomed to a world where every error is instantly reversible and every desire is met with a seamless tap, the slow, resistant, unforgiving rhythms of nature — and of the human body — become intolerable.

Furthermore, the digital world replaces the open-ended affordances of reality with predetermined possibilities. A stick found outdoors may become a digging tool, a support for balancing, or a wand in a child’s imagination. Digital games, however, provide constructed worlds with defined possibilities, challenges, and rewards. The important shift is from encountering a world that continually exceeds our designs to exploring environments whose possibilities have been substantially designed elsewhere. The child is moved from being a creator of meaning to a consumer of pre-packaged interactions.

With the smartphone, this simulated environment became continuously accessible. A person walking through a forest or sitting with their children could remain engaged with events on a small screen while the body continued to inhabit the immediate surroundings. The physical environment ceases to be the principal source of interest and participation. The living world is reduced to a mere backdrop, a waiting room for the digital realm.

Artificial intelligence adds a final, devastating layer to this order. AI does not just simulate the world; it adapts to the user, generating sensory and interactive environments that continuously mirror and respond to our individual preferences. It removes the final friction of encountering an “other.” The world is no longer a reality that stands apart from us, demanding our adjustment; it becomes a mirror that adjusts to us.

The Crisis of Human Formation

When the Fragmented Mind Turns Against Life

The formative concern begins when this arrangement becomes habitual: the world is repeatedly available for our attention and feeling, while its demands upon our conduct remain distant. We can be deeply moved by an image of a forest while remaining practically uninvolved in its ecological reality. We risk mistaking availability to perception for understanding, and emotional response for participation.

The successive developments of modernity disclose a common tendency: relationships that function together within living experience can increasingly be separated, represented, and externally reorganized.

These transformations do not merely change what we do; they change what we are. This is the crisis of human formation.

When the senses are trained to consume the world as a fragmented spectacle, the living biosphere is reduced to a collection of resources and images. When action is divorced from material consequence, the destruction of ecosystems feels like an abstract problem rather than a visceral reality. When the body is treated as a mere vehicle for the eyes and ears, it becomes an object to be optimized, medicated, and disciplined, rather than the primary organ of knowing.

We have become extraordinarily capable of constructing environments for human experience without developing any serious understanding of how those environments participate in constructing the human being. The humans produced by the Third Cognitive Order are inherently alienated. They are formed in ecologies that separate mind from body, word from world, and action from consequence.

It is no coincidence that this is the same civilization that has turned against nature, against the body, against childhood, and against life itself. Not out of malice, but because our cognitive ecology has been rewired to bypass the living world. And when this alienated, fragmented adult looks at a child, they cannot see the original knowing organism. They see an empty vessel to be filled with information, a mind to be programmed, a project to be managed.

The deepest crisis of modernity is not merely ecological, educational, or technological. It is the denial of biology itself. It is the severance of our connection to our own living, sensing, material existence.

The Third Cognitive Order

When the Simulated World Replaces the Living World

The developments examined here amount to more than a succession of technological innovations. What began with the possibility of representing the world through written language has extended into the total organization of sensory experience, action, and interaction. Technologically constructed representations no longer serve merely as sources of information; they have become the primary formative environments of the human being.

The first formative order is grounded in direct participation in the living world. Perception, movement, action, and understanding develop through continual engagement with the surrounding environment. Knowledge, value, practical judgment, and aesthetic sensibility develop as connected dimensions of living. The organism and the world co-create each other.

The second order is marked by the growing authority of written representations and established knowledge. The world is encountered through explanations and classifications. Activities are organized by procedures established in advance. The word begins to mediate the world.

The emerging Third Cognitive Order introduces technologically assembled sensory and interactive environments that entirely bypass the living world. Representations organize sights and sounds, offer possibilities for action, and respond to the user in real-time. The distinction between participating in the living world and participating in its technological simulations collapses.

Nowhere is this starvation more evident than in childhood. Children come into the world with capacities for sensing, moving, exploring, and creating knowledge through direct, bodily engagement with reality. These capacities develop through participation in circumstances that offer possibilities, impose resistances, and reveal consequences. When increasingly large portions of childhood unfold within simulated, adaptive digital environments, the biological foundations of attention, sensory discrimination, practical judgment, and experiential understanding are starved. We are raising a generation in a cognitive ecology that actively blocks them from experiencing the integrity of the living world.

Perhaps the most fundamental question about progress is no longer what more we can make possible, but what kind of human beings we are becoming through the possibilities we have already created. If the mind is fragmented from the body, and action is severed from consequence, can a fragmented mind ever understand wholeness? Or will it only continue to fragment the world further?

To pursue this question, we must return to the child, our most immediate biological reference for understanding how human intelligence develops before it is extensively reorganized and damaged by modern formative systems. In the child’s looking, touching, moving, and exploring, we can examine how knowing develops through participation in the world. The next essay, The Child as the First Knowing Organism, takes this inquiry forward by asking what these beginnings reveal about the conditions through which our capacities for understanding, valuing, and sensing beauty must grow.

Introduction

The previous essay argued that indigeneity is best understood not as another knowledge system, but as a formative ecology in which knowing has never been fully separated from living. This comparison places that formative ecology beside the dominant modern literate paradigm.

All living beings are born with fundamental biological potentials for sensing, responding, adapting and learning. To live is to learn. What differs is the context within which these capacities are formed. Biology provides the potential; the formative ecology gives it direction.

Every child, irrespective of the culture into which it is born, begins with the same fundamental biological potentials for sensing, exploring, relating, learning and creating knowledge. Even within highly literate conditions, the child initially attempts to exercise these original capacities. But repeated exposure to instruction, predetermined meanings, externally organised attention and expected forms of action gradually habituates perception, cognition and behaviour to the conditions imposed upon it.

The biological potential does not disappear; the environment in which the child repeatedly participates progressively conditions its expression.

The comparison is therefore not between two kinds of human beings or two competing bodies of knowledge. It is between two formative conditions. The dominant modern literate paradigm increasingly begins from the KNOWN and approaches the WORLD through the WORD, while indigenous and non-literate formative ecologies remain more directly within the UNKNOWN, where knowing develops through participation in the world.

The Fundamental Difference: The Known and the Unknown

The deepest distinction lies even before the difference between word and world: whether formation begins within the realm of the unknown or increasingly from the known.

A living organism enters a world that has not already been cognitively settled for it. It must attend, sense, explore, imitate, test, adjust and remain responsive to consequence. The unknown is therefore not the absence of knowledge; it is the presence of a world that has not yet been replaced by knowledge.

The dominant modern educational order increasingly reverses this condition. Someone else has already encountered, named, classified and explained the phenomenon, and the learner begins with the product of that earlier knowing. The explanation, method or expected result can arrive before sufficient encounter with what produced it.

This difference does not remain epistemological. The unknown calls forth humility, attention, openness and playfulness because reality retains the capacity to contradict expectation. Beginning from the known can instead produce confidence before capability, because possessing an explanation can begin to feel equivalent to understanding.

The question is therefore not how much either order knows, but what holds cognitive authority at the moment of encounter.

Two Formative Orders - Not Two Knowledge Systems

The table describes tendencies rather than absolute differences. Indigenous cultures are diverse and changing, while modern societies retain many forms of embodied and contextual knowing. Its purpose is to make visible two different formative directions arising from the same fundamental biological potential.

What the Comparison Makes Visible

The table should not be read as an opposition between literate and non-literate people, but as a comparison of where cognitive authority primarily resides. This is what I mean by saying: Literates learn the WORD; illiterates learn the WORLD. I use illiterate deliberately, not as a deficit category, but to expose the bias through which literate civilisation defines a person by the absence of literacy while overlooking the capacities formed through direct participation in life. The deeper distinction is whether the word remains answerable to the world, or whether the world is increasingly approached through the word.

The same movement appears in language. Living occurs as process: knowing, learning, making, dwelling, healing and becoming. Modern institutions increasingly turn these processes into conceptual products: knowledge, education, production, housing, healthcare. Once knowing becomes knowledge, it can be detached, transferred, accumulated, measured and possessed. The noun makes the process cognitively portable. What originally existed only within a living relationship can now travel independently of the context and process through which it arose.

This also has consequences for the formation of the self. The organism is born individuated, but not individualistic. A child has a body, needs, preferences and an emerging sense of self, but is not born with the modern idea of itself as a self-contained individual standing apart from the world and others. Cognitive autonomy is not individualism. It is the organism’s inherent capacity to form understanding for itself, even while its being is formed through relationship and interdependence.

The distinctly modern form of individualism can therefore be understood as progressively produced through particular formative conditions: my knowledge, my achievement, my qualification, my property, my success. When knowing becomes detachable and possessable, the knower too can increasingly experience itself as the separate possessor of knowledge and action. Modern individualism is therefore not simply a biological inevitability, nor merely a cultural idea; it is an embodied outcome of a particular formation of beingness.

The same structure becomes visible very early in childhood. A stone, stick, cloth, mud or discarded object has no single predetermined meaning, and the child must discover what the material affords. A highly predetermined toy, by contrast, arrives with another person’s imagination already embodied in it. Ready-made toys and ready-made knowledge therefore share a formative logic: both give the product before the process. One provides an answer before enquiry has unfolded; the other provides an object whose identity and use have largely been decided in advance.

In each case, what is reduced is the unknown through which autonomous knowing would otherwise have had to form.

Conclusion

What this comparison reveals is not a difference in human biology but a difference in the conditions through which the same biological potentials are formed.

The dominant modern literate paradigm increasingly begins with the KNOWN and approaches the WORLD through the WORD. Indigenous formative ecology remains more directly within the UNKNOWN and allows the WORD to arise from engagement with the WORLD.

Indigeneity matters here not as an alternative system to copy, nor as a collection of methods that modern education can extract and incorporate, but as a civilisational reference through which the formative assumptions of modernity become visible. If embodiment, community, contextual learning or ecological awareness are extracted from their formative ecology and converted into curricula and methodologies, the modern operating system may simply continue under different terminology.

The deeper question is whether the world itself can regain sufficient authority to participate in the formation of the knower.

But these are no longer the only two formative conditions shaping human beings.

A third cognitive order is now emerging. Increasingly, the child encounters neither primarily the living world nor only the literate world of words, books and institutional knowledge, but a technologically mediated environment of screens, images, simulations, games, algorithms and artificial intelligence.

This introduces another profound shift. If literacy allowed the WORD to stand between the human being and the WORLD, the digital environment increasingly places an entire constructed reality between them.

The next essay therefore asks:

What kind of human being is being formed when the primary environment of cognition becomes digital?

Why the Intangible Cannot Simply Be Transferred

This brings us to one of the most difficult aspects of understanding indigeneity from within modern institutions: much of what matters most is intangible, not because it is mysterious, but because its mode of existence is participatory. Sensitivity, restraint, timing, trust, judgment, bodily ease, familiarity with place, aesthetic discrimination, tacit expectation and a sense of what is appropriate cannot simply be extracted and transferred through description. They may be indicated by language, but they become capabilities only through sustained participation in the relationships that give them meaning.

The problem is therefore deeper than the familiar distinction between explicit and tacit knowledge. Once even tacit knowing becomes an academic category, modernity can begin collecting examples of it without changing the conditions through which knowing takes place. The decisive point is that some forms of understanding cannot be separated from the formation of the person who understands. They are not merely pieces of information that happen to be difficult to express; they are relationships incorporated into perception, action and being.

This creates a particular difficulty for modern science. Modern scientific practices have achieved extraordinary power by isolating variables, demanding explicit evidence, establishing repeatable procedures and distinguishing reliable claims from unsupported ones. The problem begins when these requirements are assumed to define the limits of knowledge itself. Practices whose intelligence has formed through generations of situated participation may be treated as intellectually deficient because their practitioners cannot provide the kind of explicit causal account that modern institutions demand. The difficulty begins when modern institutions' forms of knowing become the measure of knowing itself. The deeper question is whether reality can only be known through what can be isolated, made explicit, tested and institutionally validated.

Medicine makes this especially visible. A healing practice embedded within diet, habitat, seasonal change, bodily observation, plant knowledge, relationship and generations of experience may be extracted from that ecology and examined as an isolated treatment. Such examination may reveal important things, including whether particular claims are effective or harmful, but the procedure also changes the object being examined. What was part of a living ecology is transformed into a discrete intervention that can be tested, standardised and administered. What does not survive this translation may then disappear from consideration, not necessarily because it was unreal, but because it belonged to relationships the new frame does not preserve.

The Appropriation Trap

This is the appropriation problem at its deepest level. Modernity does not need to reject indigeneity in order to destroy what is epistemically distinctive about it. It can recognise it, document it, theorise it, create frameworks around it, introduce courses in it and establish experts who speak on its behalf. A living practice can become information, relationship can become principle, participation can become methodology, and a formative ecology can become another field of knowledge. The modern system becomes more inclusive while the cognitive structure through which inclusion occurs remains essentially unchanged.

The task, therefore, is not to construct an idealised indigenous alternative to modernity. Indigenous communities should not become models that modern institutions copy, nor should contemporary people imagine that they can simply return to an earlier way of life. The significance of indigeneity for this enquiry is more demanding. It provides a living reference through which assumptions that modernity treats as universal can become visible as historically specific: that knowledge must be separated from the knower, that education must be organised independently of life, that cognition belongs primarily to the individual mind, that beauty belongs to aesthetics, that value belongs to ethics, that nature stands outside the human being, and that learning requires predetermined outcomes.

Indigeneity as a Civilizational Reference

Indigeneity therefore confronts modernity not primarily with another set of answers but with another condition from which knowing becomes possible. It suggests that knowledge need not begin as a separate object because knowing can remain embedded within participation; that education need not become an autonomous institution because formation can remain within life; and that body, community, material, place, beauty and value need not later be reconnected if they were never organised as independent domains in the first place.

This is why the most useful question is not, What can modernity learn from indigenous knowledge? That question too quickly invites extraction. The more difficult question is: What do indigenous formative ecologies reveal about what modernity has done to the human being?

Seen in this way, indigeneity is not the opposite ideology to modernity, nor another knowledge system competing for recognition. Its deepest significance lies in making visible a possibility that modern cognition finds increasingly difficult even to imagine: that knowing, doing, sensing, valuing, making, belonging and becoming may remain dimensions of one continuous participation in life.

Perhaps this is what it means for knowing never to have been separated from living.

And if this is so, the next question becomes unavoidable. We are no longer comparing two bodies of knowledge. We are confronting two fundamentally different ways in which human beings are formed in relation to reality.

There is another way in which indigenous formative ecology differs from modernity that is easy to overlook. Sometimes what appears absent at the level of language is strongly present at the level of life. A community may rarely speak about freedom, trust or authenticity as abstract ideals because these have not yet become separate problems requiring names, theories or programmes. The word may be absent while the condition itself remains present.

This is particularly visible in childhood. In many less institutionalised and non-literate communities, children gradually acquire a remarkable freedom of movement as they become capable of navigating their surroundings. They move between homes, fields, paths, rivers, forests and communal spaces without the continuous supervision that has become normal in modern childhood. This freedom is not usually announced as a philosophy of child development, nor does the child necessarily understand it as a right granted by adults. It arises from the child’s belonging within a place, from increasing bodily capability, from familiarity with people and terrain, and from a community’s accumulated trust in life and in the child’s ability to become competent within it.

I have come to think of this as existential freedom: not freedom provided through choice among alternatives, but the freedom that accompanies being allowed to exist, explore, move, encounter and gradually become capable within the world.

This is very different from the modern meaning of freedom. Modern institutions often understand freedom as something that must be granted within already organised boundaries: freedom of choice, freedom of expression, freedom within a timetable, freedom within an activity, freedom to choose among predetermined options. The child may be continually supervised, protected, scheduled and instructed while simultaneously being told that autonomy and independence are important educational goals.

There is a further contradiction in the way modern childhood handles freedom. Much of the child’s original freedom is first withdrawn and then gradually returned through permission, encouragement, reward and negotiation. The child may go somewhere if an adult permits it, choose from alternatives adults have already selected, earn additional freedom by demonstrating acceptable behaviour, or receive greater autonomy after proving that it can be exercised in ways adults consider responsible. Freedom, which originally belonged to the child’s condition of being alive, gradually becomes something administered by authority.

Freedom Does Not Need Responsibility Added to It

This becomes especially visible in the familiar modern expression “freedom with responsibility.” The phrase sounds sensible because modernity has already separated the two. Freedom is imagined as the possibility of doing whatever one wants, and responsibility must therefore be attached to it as a restraint. The underlying assumption is that freedom by itself tends towards irresponsibility.

Life does not seem to organise freedom in this way.

The freedom of a living organism is never freedom from relationship, material conditions, bodily limits or consequence. A child climbing a tree is free to explore, but the branch, the height, balance, strength and gravity continuously participate in the action. A child going to a river encounters depth, current, slippery stones, other people and the limits of bodily capability. Freedom is not occurring first, followed later by something called responsibility. The conditions of action already contain consequence.

Responsibility therefore need not initially be understood as a moral quality added to freedom. It can be understood more fundamentally as something that forms through being able to respond within actual situations. The child becomes responsible by encountering what actions do, how other people respond, what materials permit, what the body can manage and where limits actually lie. Responsibility grows within participation itself, rather than being taught after freedom has already been removed.

Modern education often reverses the natural sequence. The child is first protected from consequence, prevented from making many decisions, separated from meaningful responsibility and continuously supervised. Later, adults become concerned that the child is not sufficiently responsible and introduce duties, rules, reward systems and programmes for independence. Once again, a quality that might have developed through life has to return as an educational objective after the formative conditions that could have produced it have been weakened.

The familiar phrase “freedom with responsibility” may therefore reveal a deeper modern confusion. Freedom and responsibility are treated as opposing forces that must be balanced, whereas within lived participation they arise together. Freedom provides the space in which action becomes possible; consequence allows judgment to form; relationship gives action meaning; and responsibility develops through repeated response to all three.

What modernity calls responsibility may therefore be the conceptual recovery of something that was originally contained within participation itself. Existential freedom begins before the separation between freedom and responsibility. It does not mean that a young child is abandoned to danger or that communities have no boundaries, responsibilities or forms of protection. A child’s range expands gradually with capability, familiarity and age. The significant difference is that capability does not always have to be demonstrated before freedom is granted; much of that capability forms precisely because sufficient freedom to encounter, act, make mistakes and receive consequence has been available.

Behind this relationship between freedom and responsibility lies another condition: existential trust.

Modernity increasingly organises life around the anticipation of risk. Parents must know where the child is, what the child is doing, with whom, for how long and under whose supervision. Institutions create procedures because uncertainty itself becomes threatening. The unknown, which is the natural condition from which learning arises, becomes something to be controlled in advance.

Trust then has to return as a concept. We speak about building trust, developing trust, trusting children and creating trusting relationships precisely because distrust has become structurally normal.

In a formative ecology more deeply embedded in community and place, trust may operate before it becomes a subject of discussion. Parents may not be continuously calculating whether the child can be trusted because capability has been forming through everyday participation and because the child exists within a network of relationships rather than as an isolated individual moving through an anonymous environment. Trust is not blind faith; it is generated through familiarity, participation and continuity.

This suggests a deeper distinction. Modernity often tries to teach values that earlier formative conditions may have produced implicitly. Freedom becomes a political or educational principle because ordinary life has become more regulated. Responsibility becomes a virtue to be taught because meaningful consequence has been removed from many areas of childhood. Trust becomes a psychological or organisational concern because systems increasingly operate through verification and control. Community becomes an aspiration because social life has become more individualised. Connection with nature becomes a programme because nature has ceased to be the unquestioned ground of everyday formation.

The abstraction often appears after the lived condition has weakened.

The same may be true of what I would call being in truth. By this I do not mean possessing correct propositions or always speaking factually. I mean living within conditions where reality remains sufficiently present to correct one’s action. When the body, material, place, other people and consequences participate directly in cognition, there is less distance between what one assumes and what reality permits. One can certainly be mistaken, but the mistake is continually exposed through participation.

The artisan cannot indefinitely pretend that clay will behave differently from the way it behaves. The farmer cannot persuade the season through argument. A child climbing a tree encounters its branches, height, balance and bodily ability directly. Reality places limits upon imagination while simultaneously enabling it.

In this sense, truth is not initially a proposition but a relationship with what is.

Modernity increasingly allows another possibility because representation can be separated from the phenomenon it represents. One can construct explanations, theories and opinions at considerable distance from the realities to which they refer. Truth then becomes something that must be established through argument, evidence, institutions and procedures because the knower no longer necessarily inhabits the same world as the thing being known.

This does not make indigenous people inherently truthful or modern people inherently untruthful. The distinction concerns the conditions within which cognition occurs. A life continuously answerable to material, ecological and communal consequence places the person in a different relationship with reality from one increasingly mediated through representations.

Existential freedom, responsibility, existential trust and being in truth may therefore belong to the same underlying condition. They arise when the person has not been excessively separated from the world that forms them. Freedom exists because the organism is allowed to encounter; responsibility forms because action has consequence; trust develops because capability is allowed to grow; truth remains close because reality is allowed to correct.

Perhaps this reveals something important about modernity’s enormous vocabulary of ideals. We speak intensely about freedom, responsibility, trust, authenticity, connection, belonging, community, sustainability and even embodiment because the conditions that once made many of these qualities ordinary have become unstable.

The indigenous formative ecology may rarely name some of these conditions precisely because they have not yet become sufficiently absent to require conceptual recovery.

The absence of the word, therefore, should not be mistaken for the absence of the thing and sometimes the proliferation of the word may be evidence that the thing itself has already begun to disappear.

When the Condition Itself Is Absent

The absence of a word can mean more than one thing. In some cases, as with freedom, trust or responsibility, the word may be absent because the condition is already woven into life and has not yet become a separate problem requiring conceptualisation. In other cases, the word is absent because the condition itself has not been created.

Waste is one such example.

In indigenous and non-literate formative ecologies, there is no separate category called waste in the modern sense. What comes into life remains within cycles of use, reuse, decay, transformation or return. Materials continue to have possibilities. An object that has completed one use may enter another. What comes from the natural world eventually returns to it.

The child growing within such a condition does not need to be taught not to waste. The disposition is formed through the environment itself. The child sees things being used, repaired, transformed, passed on and returned. Economy is not first taught as a moral value; it is embedded in the way life is organised.

The modern urban child encounters a radically different formative condition. Within the living space itself appears an object called a waste-paper basket. Its presence silently teaches an entirely new category: there are things whose usefulness has ended and which can now simply be discarded.

Nobody needs to explain this to the child.

The wastebasket teaches without words.

Later the same society may need to teach sustainability, recycling, conservation and responsible consumption. Once again, education attempts to recover conceptually what the formative environment has already displaced.

Boredom reveals something similar. In the indigenous formative condition there is no condition that produces boredom. Life, participation, work, play, learning, relationship and necessity are not organised into sharply separated domains. Every situation carries something to perceive, respond to, participate in or become capable of. To live is simultaneously to learn.

Within such a condition, attention remains with life. Boredom requires a different arrangement. It arises when a person is required to remain within an activity in which the organism has no participation, interest or necessity. Attention can no longer remain with what is happening and begins instead to attend to time.

Boredom begins when attention leaves the activity and begins watching time.

Modern schooling institutionalises precisely such a condition. The child must sit because the timetable says so, attend because the lesson has begun, continue because the period has not ended, and stop because the bell has rung. Activity and interest need no longer coincide. The body remains present while attention goes elsewhere.

Time, which recedes when one is fully involved in living, now becomes consciously felt. Five minutes can become long. The child begins waiting for the bell. Boredom therefore is not an inevitable condition of human existence. It is produced when participation, interest and activity are separated from one another. Modernity creates the conditions for boredom and then treats boredom as though it were an inherent psychological problem of the human being.

The same is true of waste. Modernity creates conditions in which materials become disposable and later treats waste as a problem requiring management.

In both cases, the formative environment comes first.

The condition creates the experience.
The experience creates the concept.
The concept then appears to describe something universal.

But what appears universal may actually be the consequence of a particular way of organising life. Waste and boredom therefore reveal something fundamental about formative ecology. Human attitudes do not arise primarily because someone teaches them through words. The arrangement of life itself continually teaches.

A world in which nothing is treated as waste forms one kind of person, while a world organised around disposal forms another. In the same way, a world in which living, participation and learning remain continuous produces one relationship with time, while a world organised through compulsory schedules, externally determined activity and waiting produces another.

Culture enters the body long before it enters language.

PART I — INDIGENEITY: BEING FORMED BY THE WORLD

When Modernity Turns Toward Indigeneity

The previous essay ended at a difficult threshold. If the dominant modern paradigm has separated knowing from living, converted knowing into knowledge, placed representation before encounter, and progressively organised human formation around predetermined knowledge, what happens when this paradigm turns towards cultures in which such separations may never have become foundational?

Modernity increasingly speaks of Indigenous Knowledge Systems, traditional ecological knowledge, indigenous medicine, indigenous agriculture, indigenous architecture and indigenous pedagogy, usually with the intention of recognising forms of knowledge that were previously dismissed or marginalised. Yet the very act of naming them as knowledge systems may already impose the structure through which modernity understands knowing.

A knowledge system suggests that knowledge exists as something sufficiently separable from the people, places, materials and relationships through which it arose that it can be identified, documented, classified, compared, preserved and transmitted. Once recognised in this form, indigenous knowledge can enter universities, curricula, research programmes and policy frameworks alongside other organised bodies of knowledge. This may appear to be an act of recognition, but it also raises a more fundamental question: what if what is being recognised was never originally organised as knowledge in this sense?

A farmer living within a particular landscape does not necessarily possess a separate knowledge system called agriculture. The person’s understanding of soil, rain, seed, insects, seasons, animals, food, labour, family, ritual and responsibility may belong to one continuous way of inhabiting a place. An artisan’s understanding of clay may be inseparable from posture, touch, rhythm, weather, available fuel, local use, inherited form, economic need, cultural memory and the material itself. A child growing within such a context does not move between separate domains called environmental education, vocational learning, social development, aesthetics, ethics and culture; the child participates in life, and the whole being is gradually formed through that participation.

This is why even the phrase Indigenous Knowing System remains inadequate. It improves upon knowledge system by restoring knowing as a process, but it still risks treating knowing as a distinct activity that can be isolated from the rest of living. What becomes visible through indigenous and non-literate contexts is something more fundamental: a formative ecology in which knowing is inseparable from the conditions through which the person is formed.

From Knowledge System to Formative Ecology

By Indigenous Formative Ecology, I am referring to the original biological condition of human formation in which the senses connect the organism directly with the real world and knowing develops through participation in that world.

The contexts may differ enormously from one indigenous culture to another, and therefore the knowledge, language, practices, values and forms that emerge will also differ. But the biological process through which human beings know does not fundamentally change. The organism senses, moves, acts, encounters resistance and possibility, adjusts, remembers and gradually becomes capable.

Indigeneity, in the sense used in this enquiry, therefore does not primarily refer to a particular geographical location or a particular body of cultural content. It refers to a cognitive condition: the condition in which human formation remains grounded in direct sensory, bodily and relational engagement with the world.

Different environments produce different knowledge because there are different things that need to be known, but the underlying biology of knowing remains continuous.

This is why the indigenous condition is important to the present enquiry. It makes visible the original relationship between organism and world before knowing is substantially reorganised around representations of the world.

The content is culturally specific; the process is biological.

Within such an ecology, the learner is not primarily acquiring knowledge about a world but becoming capable within a world. A child participating in cooking may be forming discrimination of taste, smell, heat, proportion, timing, texture, economy, patience, responsibility and relationship simultaneously. A child accompanying someone who farms, builds, repairs, gathers, weaves or cares for animals encounters not merely information or technique but sequence, consequence, restraint, bodily judgment, material behaviour, interdependence and the appropriate relationship between effort and result.

None of these need appear as explicit learning objectives because the activity itself carries the conditions through which capability develops.

The distinction between knowledge and capability is crucial. Modern education usually asks what a person knows and seeks evidence through explanation, recall, analysis or symbolic performance. A formative ecology asks, without necessarily stating the question, what a person has become capable of sensing, judging, doing and responding to. An experienced potter may know exactly when clay has reached the right condition without being able to provide a formal account of moisture, plasticity and material structure. A farmer may perceive changes in soil, weather or plant health that remain difficult to translate into general propositions. A cook may know when a preparation is right through smell, sound, consistency and timing without reducing this judgment to a formula. What has formed is not merely information stored in the mind but a relationship between organism, material and situation.

The World as the Formative Field

Context, in such knowing, is not background. Modern knowledge often treats context as additional information surrounding the phenomenon under study: cultural context, social context, environmental context. In lived knowing, however, context participates in what can be known. Soil, season, temperature, available material, bodily strength, social obligation, local need and accumulated memory alter what action is appropriate. Remove the practice from these conditions, and one may preserve the visible technique while losing much of the intelligence through which that technique was originally sustained.

Material participates in the same way. The artisan does not simply impose a mentally conceived form upon passive matter. Material bends, cracks, shrinks, stretches, absorbs, resists and yields, requiring continuous adjustment between intention and reality. Knowing develops within this reciprocity. The maker changes pressure because the material changes; expectation is corrected by resistance; form develops through negotiation rather than execution alone. This is one reason artisanal and indigenous practice is so important to the present enquiry: it makes visible a mode of cognition in which the world is not merely represented in the mind but actively participates in the formation of understanding.

This also explains why the word learning can become misleading when applied too quickly. The child in such a setting is not moving through a separate activity called learning while life happens elsewhere. The child is living, and through participation in the world the organism is continually differentiating, adjusting, remembering and becoming capable. The world is not curriculum. It is the formative field.

Culture: A Redefinition

Culture as the Human Interface with Nature

Culture itself must be understood from within this formative relationship.

It is not merely a collection of customs, beliefs, artefacts, songs, rituals or inherited information that can later be preserved or converted into curriculum. Culture is the interface human beings create with nature: the living set of relationships through which a people inhabits a particular ecology and makes life possible within it.

The existence of nature is therefore not external to culture; it is one of the primary conditions from which culture arises.

Climate, terrain, water, plants, animals, available materials, seasons and the possibilities and limits of a place continually shape how people build, eat, work, move, make, relate and organise life. Human beings respond to these conditions through tools, dwellings, food practices, clothing, language, rituals, social arrangements and forms of making, and over generations these responses become culture.

Culture is therefore neither simply nature nor something opposed to nature; it is the evolving interface through which human beings establish a viable relationship with the natural conditions in which they live.

But culture is not produced by the external environment alone. It emerges through a continuing collaboration between the biological capacities of the human organism and the natural systems within which life takes place.

The world presents conditions, possibilities, limits, materials and relationships. The human being meets them through the senses, the body and action. Over generations, this reciprocal engagement gives rise to distinctive ways of dwelling, making, eating, relating, speaking and organising life.

What we call culture is the form this relationship gradually takes.

The senses are central to this process. They are not merely channels through which information enters the mind. They continuously connect the organism with the world, allowing action to be adjusted to material, place, other beings and changing conditions.

Through this reciprocal movement, the external world becomes incorporated into perception, judgment, capability and eventually into the disposition of the person.

In such a formative condition, every situation can become a knowing situation because living and learning have not yet been separated. To live is to perceive, respond, adjust and become increasingly capable.

Learning is therefore not an activity added to life. It is the continuous formation that takes place through participation in life itself.

To live is to learn.

This relationship also helps explain the distinctive aesthetic quality visible in rural, tribal and non-literate communities. Practical action is not first separated into function, value and beauty and then recombined. The same act must respond simultaneously to material, need, place, available resources, bodily capability, relationship and consequence.

Appropriateness therefore has both a practical and an aesthetic dimension. What works, what matters and what fits together are sensed within the same act.

Knowledge, Value and Beauty Before Their Separation

Knowledge, value and beauty can therefore be understood as three dimensions arising from the same formative relationship between human biology and the conditions of life.

Knowledge arises from what the context requires the organism to understand in order to live and act.

Value arises from what the context reveals as necessary to preserve, respect, share, avoid or sustain.

Beauty arises through the felt appropriateness of action, material, proportion and relationship within the whole.

They are not originally three independent domains that culture later brings together. They emerge together because the same human organism is simultaneously knowing, valuing and sensing the appropriateness of its relationship with the world.

The same inseparability can be seen in value and beauty. Modern institutions have created separate domains for knowledge, ethics and aesthetics, as though one faculty establishes what is true, another asks whether it is right, and another decides whether it is beautiful.

Within a formative ecology these distinctions need not acquire the same independence.

The amount of material used, the damage caused to a place, the energy required by an action, the treatment of another person, the timing of an intervention and the proportion of a form may all be encountered within the same situation.

Value arises through consequence and relationship, while beauty emerges through aptness, economy, rhythm and right proportion within the act itself.

The significance lies elsewhere: value and beauty may remain closer to the same experiential ground from which practical knowing develops, rather than becoming separate intellectual or institutional disciplines. This is also why beauty within many traditional contexts cannot adequately be understood through the modern category of art.

A vessel, house, basket, garment, tool, meal, gesture or ritual may carry extraordinary beauty without having been created primarily as an aesthetic object. Beauty emerges because material, use, proportion, place, bodily action and cultural continuity have found an appropriate relationship. To say that such societies “integrate art into everyday life” already begins from the modern separation of art from life. It may be more accurate to say that beauty had not been sufficiently removed from ordinary activity to require reintegration.

A house suited to climate and material, a tool shaped to the body and task, food appropriate to season and place, an economical gesture in making, or a social practice that sustains relationship can all carry this integration. Beauty here is not an aesthetic layer added after function has been solved; it is the felt coherence that appears when action, material, value and context belong together.

Culture, in this sense, is not merely a collection of inherited practices. It is the living outcome of the continuous collaboration between the biological capacities of human beings and the ecological conditions within which those capacities take form.

When the Environment Teaches Without Words

One of the clearest ways to see this formative process is through the idea of waste.

In indigenous and non-literate formative ecologies, there is no separate category of waste in the modern sense. Materials remain within cycles of use, reuse, transformation, decay and return. What has completed one use may enter another. What comes from the natural world eventually returns to it.

The child growing within such a condition does not need to be taught not to waste. The disposition is formed through the environment itself.

The child sees things being used, repaired, transformed, passed on and reused. Economy, restraint and attentiveness to material are not first taught as moral principles. They are absorbed through the organisation of everyday life.

What the presence of wastebasket teaches.

The modern urban child encounters a very different formative environment.

Within the living space itself appears an object called a waste-paper basket.

Its presence quietly introduces a new category: there are things whose usefulness has ended and which may now simply be discarded.

Nobody needs to explain this to the child.

Later, the same society may need to teach sustainability, recycling, conservation and responsible consumption. Once again, education attempts to recover conceptually what the formative environment has already displaced.

This reveals something fundamental about culture. Human attitudes are not formed primarily by what adults say. They are formed continuously by the conditions within which life takes place.

A world in which materials remain within cycles of use forms one relationship with material.

A world organised around disposal forms another.

The environment teaches long before the lesson begins.

Culture is therefore both the context within which people are formed and the continually renewed human response to that context. The child is shaped by the cultural world already present, but through participation also recreates and modifies it.

Culture is not simply inherited. It remains alive because each generation enters the world afresh and responds through its own sensing, making and living.

When this relationship with nature and context is broken, culture can remain as visible content after its formative ecology has weakened.

Children can be taught traditional crafts without living within the material and social relationships from which those crafts emerged. Festivals can be preserved while everyday life becomes increasingly standardised. Traditional motifs can be placed on industrially produced objects while the deeper sensibility that once connected form, material, place and use disappears.

Culture can therefore survive as representation even while the living interface from which it arose has begun to disappear.

25. What Modernity Embodied—and What It Had to Rediscover

The movement traced in Part V does not end when the cognitive paradigm becomes institutional, social and cultural. The socio-cultural operating system returns to the people who participate in it, and repeated experience of schooling, instruction, evaluation, comparison, competition and institutional authority gradually becomes embodied as habits of attention, expectation, perception and response.

This is the deeper sense in which disembodiment becomes embodied. The body does not disappear; it learns the habits of a world organised through representation, explanation, predetermined outcomes and control. The childhood experience of being instructed, corrected and helped is especially formative because external authority can become an internal expectation that knowing itself requires guidance from elsewhere. Dependence upon explanation, discomfort before the unknown and distrust of implicit knowing can therefore become dispositions rather than merely ideas.

Seen from here, the body, the child, the world, lived experience and indigeneity are not separate rediscoveries but afterthoughts of the same paradigm. What once existed as a living condition can return as an object of knowledge: embodiment as a theory, experience as a methodology, childhood as a learning model, and indigenous life as a knowledge system. The difficulty therefore lies not merely in what modernity has forgotten, but in the condition from which it attempts to remember.

If the paradigm has participated in forming perception, attention, expectation and the experience of oneself as a knower, intellectual correction alone cannot constitute a paradigm shift. The question must therefore move from what modernity needs to think differently to what kind of transformation is required in the person who is doing the thinking.

Modernity: The Operating System Hidden in the Name

There is something revealing in the way the dominant paradigm names itself. To call a condition modern is not merely to locate it chronologically; the term readily acquires a directional meaning in which the modern becomes associated with the advanced, the developed and the future, while other conditions become traditional, pre-modern or located somewhere behind.

The word therefore carries the possibility of a temporal hierarchy. Once different human conditions are placed along a single imagined trajectory, difference can be interpreted as an earlier stage of a journey whose destination has already been defined. The modern condition then appears not simply as one historical possibility among others, but as the future towards which others are expected to move.

modern → advanced → future | traditional → earlier → past

The Operating System, in Its Most Compressed Form

After tracing its emergence through cognition, education, institutions and social life, the dominant modern Western operating system can be stated directly. Certainty increasingly precedes engagement; knowledge can precede knowing; words and representations can precede the world; conscious reasoning acquires authority; the knower becomes separated from what is known; reality becomes fragmentable and classifiable; knowledge becomes detachable, academic and institutionally authorised; learning becomes externally organised; standardisation creates norms; norms enable comparison and ranking; hierarchy projected onto time becomes progress; predetermined futures legitimise intervention and control; and repeated participation in this order becomes embodied.

certainty → representation → separation → classification → institutionalisation → standardisation → comparison → hierarchy → → exclusion → Inclusion as afterthought →

progress → intervention → control → embodiment

Beneath this sequence lies the more fundamental operation that connects the whole argument: what should be known, learned, understood or become is increasingly determined before open engagement with what is actually there.

The Modus Operandi of Modernity

The operating system also has a recurrent way of acting. Once reality is conceptually framed in advance, a theory or framework can determine the method, and the method can in turn determine the tools through which reality is approached.

The recurring structure is therefore:

prior certainty → theory/framework → method → tools → implementation → measurement/evaluation → correction and control

Instead of engagement with reality generating understanding and allowing methods to emerge from the situation, a prior conceptual understanding increasingly determines how reality will be approached. Theory precedes engagement, method follows theory, and tools are created to implement the anticipated direction or outcome.

Measurement and evaluation then determine whether reality is moving according to that expectation, while correction brings deviations back towards the intended result.

This is the practical expression of certainty before engagement.

26. Why Modernity Cannot Think Its Way Out of Its Own Crisis

We can now return to the question with which the essay began: why does modernity repeatedly recognise its own fragmentation without fundamentally altering the conditions that produce it? One reason is that recognition itself can become another intellectual product. A crisis can generate a critique, the critique a theory, the theory a methodology, the methodology a programme, and the programme new expertise and institutions, while the underlying operating system remains substantially intact.

Alternative education can challenge conventional schooling without questioning why adults organise children’s learning in the first place; interdisciplinary approaches can challenge fragmented disciplines without questioning the cognition that rendered reality disciplinary; and embodied cognition can challenge disembodied theories while embodiment itself becomes primarily an academic concept. Modernity does not always need to reject what challenges it because it can preserve its deeper structure by naming, theorising, professionalising and institutionalising the alternative.

The crisis therefore cannot finally be resolved by another theory of cognition, another educational philosophy or another methodology of wholeness. If the paradigm existed merely as thought, better thought might be sufficient. But the paradigm has participated in forming the thinker.

27. No Paradigm Shift Without a Transformation of the Knower

If the paradigm has participated in forming the thinker, a paradigm shift cannot consist merely of replacing one body of thought with another. The dominant modern Western paradigm is not only something we believe; it has entered our attention, expectations, relationship with uncertainty, dependence upon explanation, sense of time, relationship with the body, experience of ourselves as individual knowers and our very Beingness.

The required transformation is therefore not primarily from wrong thought to correct thought, but in the condition from which knowing takes place. It points towards reality-led rather than representation-led encounter, availability to the unknown rather than prior certainty, articulation emerging from experience rather than explanation preceding it, participation rather than intervention, emergent process rather than predetermined outcomes, capability rather than knowledge acquisition, and a willingness to let reality continually correct the knower.

These are not new methods to be applied, because the moment they are turned into a prescribed method the old operating system may already have returned. They point instead towards another relationship between organism and world in which process is not subordinated in advance to an already imagined product.

This is why childhood remains an important epistemic reference, not as an image of innocence to which adults can return, but because the young child reveals a condition in which many of the separations later reconstructed conceptually have not yet become dominant. The child enters an unknown world and forms through sensory engagement, movement, relationship, action, consequence and adjustment rather than through a prior theory of embodied cognition or a methodology for experiential learning.

Forms of knowing that remain embedded within land, craft, community, material practice and relationship matter for the same reason. Their significance is not that they provide another model for modernity to copy, but that they confront us with another possibility of being.

28. Toward Indigeneity: Another Condition of Being and Knowing

This brings us to a difficult threshold. If modernity now turns towards indigenous societies in search of another knowledge system, the operating system described throughout this essay can immediately reproduce itself by identifying characteristics, documenting practices, classifying cosmologies, comparing epistemologies, creating frameworks and establishing new forms of expertise. Indigeneity can thereby become another field of modern knowledge.

The more fundamental question may therefore have to be asked differently: What is indigeneity as a condition of being and knowing? Its epistemic significance may lie precisely in conditions through which knowing remains inseparable from place, body, community, material, participation, continuity and life.

If so, indigenous knowing cannot simply be added to the modern knowledge system without being transformed in the process. Once extracted from the conditions that form it, what enters the institution may already be different from the knowing that existed within the life from which it was taken. Nor can contemporary concepts such as embodied cognition automatically provide a bridge if the modern knower continues to approach embodiment primarily through texts, concepts and institutional discourse.

The question therefore turns back upon the person asking it: can a cognition formed through the dominant modern Western paradigm understand indigeneity without first becoming aware of the conditions from which it is looking?

Perhaps the deepest opposite of the dominant modern Western paradigm is not another system of ideas at all, but another relationship between organism, world, community, experience and knowing. If that is so, the next task cannot simply be to study indigenous knowledge; it must be to ask what it means for knowing never to have been separated from living in the first place. That is where the next enquiry must begin.

What Is Indigeneity?

Why Indigenous Knowing Cannot Be Understood From Outside the Conditions That Produce It

Once knowledge has been academised and learning institutionalised, the cognitive paradigm acquires the infrastructure through which it can reproduce itself socially and culturally. Its effects, however, do not remain within schools, universities or systems of knowledge. The same assumptions begin to organise who is authorised to know, what human beings are understood to need, what constitutes capability and success, how differences are evaluated, what counts as progress, and who has the authority to intervene in the lives of others.

A way of knowing has begun to become a way of life. It is at this point that the socio-cultural operating system becomes visible, not as an abstract theory but as something embedded in the ordinary organisation of childhood, education, work, development, aspiration and everyday life.

17. Expertise, Authority and the Loss of Epistemic Autonomy

The academisation of knowledge and the institutionalisation of learning produce a new form of social authority: the expert. Expertise itself is not the problem, since human communities have always contained people with different capabilities, experience and depth of understanding. A farmer may know more about a particular soil, a craftsperson about a material, a healer about particular conditions, and an elder about relationships, histories or places.

The deeper transformation occurs when specialised and institutionally authorised knowledge acquires greater authority than the lived knowing of those whose lives are being acted upon. The teacher becomes the expert in learning, the psychologist the expert in childhood, the agricultural scientist the expert in cultivation, the architect the expert in building, the planner the expert in the city, and the development professional the expert in the village. Knowledge that was once distributed through participation in life becomes increasingly concentrated within specialised institutions, and the ordinary person consequently loses epistemic authority over progressively larger areas of living.

This relationship to authority does not suddenly begin in adulthood. For those formed through institutional schooling, it is repeatedly experienced from childhood through teaching, instruction, correction, guidance and what is commonly called help. The child is continually positioned as the one who does not yet know, while someone else is assumed to know what should be learned, how it should be done, when intervention is necessary, what constitutes error and when the child has succeeded.

Repeated participation in this relationship does not remain merely intellectual; it becomes embodied. Waiting for instruction, seeking explanation, expecting correction, looking towards someone who knows better and accepting intervention as assistance can gradually become normal dispositions. The experience of being taught, corrected and helped begins to shape the person’s expectation of how knowing itself works.

The adult may therefore experience expert intervention not as a reduction of epistemic autonomy but simply as the normal condition of learning and decision-making. What begins in childhood as someone else knows what I need to know can gradually become someone else knows what is good for me.

This is one of the deeper consequences of the movement from knowing to knowledge. Once knowledge is externalised, organised and authorised elsewhere, dependence upon those who possess, interpret and apply it becomes increasingly normal. The movement is therefore not simply from ignorance to expertise; in many areas of life, it is also a movement from epistemic autonomy towards epistemic dependence.

18. The Standardisation of Needs

Once authorised knowledge acquires the power to interpret human life, needs themselves can increasingly be defined in advance. Questions such as what a child needs, what a family requires, what constitutes a good house, a good education, meaningful work, health, mobility, comfort or development begin to receive answers from systems that operate beyond the particular life in question.

Human beings certainly share fundamental biological needs, but the ways in which those needs are understood, prioritised and met have always emerged within particular ecological, cultural and relational contexts. Climate, landscape, materials, livelihood, family structure, community relationships, food, local skill, ritual, memory and ecology participate in shaping both what is experienced as necessary and the forms through which those necessities are met.

Needs therefore do not exist only as abstract universal requirements waiting to be satisfied by standard products, services or institutions. They are also embedded within ways of living.

The modern institutional order progressively alters this relationship. Once the human being is abstracted from context, needs can also be abstracted from context. The child becomes a universal developmental subject, the citizen becomes a recipient of education, healthcare, housing and transport, and communities separated by geography, ecology, history and culture can increasingly be understood as requiring the same forms of development.

A profound reversal follows. Instead of ways of living generating their own appropriate forms, standardised ideas of human need begin to generate standardised ways of living.

The same kind of school becomes necessary everywhere, the same qualifications become desirable, the same professional careers acquire prestige, the same technologies become signs of advancement, and similar forms of housing, transport, consumption and infrastructure begin to represent the good life. The system no longer merely responds to needs; it increasingly participates in defining what those needs are.

19. The Homogenisation of Life

The consequence of standardised needs is not merely the standardisation of products and services but the gradual homogenisation of life itself. When the same ideas of education, employment, housing, mobility, consumption, comfort and success travel across radically different places, local ways of living are progressively reorganised around common models.

The built environment provides a visible example. Buildings that once emerged from climate, locally available materials, craft traditions, family structures and local aesthetic sensibility increasingly give way to forms that can appear almost anywhere. Construction methods, technologies, interior environments and architectural aspirations begin to converge.

The same movement occurs in education, where children living within very different ecological and cultural contexts increasingly encounter similar curricula, age divisions, examinations, learning outcomes and definitions of achievement. It occurs in work, where diverse forms of livelihood lose status while a narrower range of salaried and professionally certified occupations come to represent advancement. It also occurs in consumption, where needs once met through different materials, practices, relationships and forms of local knowledge increasingly encounter the same manufactured solutions.

Homogenisation therefore does not require a deliberate programme to destroy cultural difference. It can occur simply because the same image of a desirable life is installed everywhere. A society may continue to retain its cuisine, clothing, festivals and visible cultural symbols while the deeper organisation of life — education, work, housing, aspiration, childhood, consumption and definitions of success — becomes increasingly similar to that of societies elsewhere.

This is deeper than cultural imitation. It is the homogenisation of the conditions through which life is organised.

The process is also self-reinforcing. Once standardised needs have been established, standardised systems become necessary to satisfy them, and those systems in turn generate further needs. Schooling produces the need for qualifications; qualifications produce the need for particular occupations; those occupations encourage particular forms of urban living; and urban living generates further requirements for transport, housing, energy, childcare, technology and consumption.

Modernity therefore does not merely satisfy needs; it continually participates in producing them. The deeper transformation is that context ceases to be the primary source from which forms of life emerge, while life itself becomes increasingly reorganised according to models formed elsewhere.

20. Exclusion as the Default; Inclusion as an Afterthought

Once needs, expectations and ways of living become standardised, the standard inevitably produces a norm. Institutions require categories, sequences, benchmarks and measurable expectations because they must administer large numbers of people. Children of the same age are grouped together, curricula specify what should be known at particular stages, developmental milestones establish expectations, examinations require common criteria, and qualifications demand comparable standards.

Standardisation makes administration possible, but the moment a norm is established an outside is also created. Some children will be considered too slow and others too fast; some will learn differently, some will not respond to the prescribed form of instruction, some will resist the sequence, and others may understand but fail to demonstrate their understanding in the authorised form.

Exclusion therefore need not begin with an intention to exclude. It can arise from the very structure of the norm.

The system first establishes what the normal learner, normal development, normal capability or normal life should look like, and then encounters people who do not correspond to that construction. Inclusion arrives afterwards, producing one of modernity’s recurring patterns: the structure generates an outside and subsequently develops mechanisms for bringing those outside back into the structure.

Inclusion may be humane and necessary, but it remains an afterthought when the underlying norm itself is left unquestioned. The excluded person is accommodated within the system rather than the system asking whether its definition of normality helped create the exclusion in the first place.

A system that first establishes the norm must later invent inclusion for those whom the norm has excluded.

The same standard that creates an outside, however, performs another operation at the same time: it creates a common scale for those who remain within it. Once people can be measured against the same norm, they can also be compared with one another.

21. Comparison, Ranking and Continuous Competition

Standardisation therefore does more than produce exclusion; it makes previously incomparable people comparable. Two children embedded in different families, places, histories, interests, temperaments and capabilities cannot meaningfully be reduced to a single common scale as whole human beings. Once they are required to perform the same task under the same conditions and are evaluated through the same measure, however, comparison becomes possible.

Context disappears, and a common scale appears.

Measurement then makes ranking possible, and ranking makes competition increasingly normal. Children compete through marks, schools through examination results, universities through rankings, researchers through publications and citations, workers through performance indicators, corporations through market share, and nations through economic growth, innovation, technological capability and educational performance.

The structural movement is remarkably consistent: standardisation enables comparison, comparison enables ranking, and ranking normalises competition.

It is important here to distinguish competition with others from the human impulse to improve one’s own capability. A child attempting something repeatedly, a craftsperson refining a skill, an athlete extending their own capacity or a person trying to do something better than before need not be competing with anyone. Such striving can arise from interest, pleasure, curiosity, mastery or the intrinsic demands of the activity itself.

Comparative competition is different. It requires other people to become the measure of one’s own capability.

Modern institutions systematically produce this condition by placing people on common scales and continually comparing their performance. Once this logic is introduced early in life, it can become internalised, so that the individual increasingly experiences capability not simply in relation to the activity itself but in relation to the performance of others. Learning becomes doing better or worse than somebody else, while becoming capable becomes advancing relative to others.

The socio-cultural operating system thereby enters the individual’s experience of self. What began as an external system of measurement gradually becomes an internalised way of evaluating one’s own worth, capability and progress.

The language of “survival of the fittest” has provided a particularly powerful biological metaphor for this competitive order. The phrase was coined by Herbert Spencer and later adopted by Darwin as an auxiliary expression for natural selection. Yet fitness in evolutionary biology does not simply mean being stronger or defeating others; it concerns being better suited, in evolutionary terms, to surviving and reproducing under particular conditions. The popular expression has nevertheless often travelled far beyond this biological meaning.

The movement from evolutionary biology into social life is revealing because a complex biological process can become culturally simplified into the idea that competition is nature’s fundamental law: the strong survive, the weak fall behind, and competition therefore appears both natural and inevitable.

Living systems present a much more complex picture. Competition certainly exists, but cooperation, interdependence and mutually sustaining relationships are also fundamental features of life. Cooperation occurs at many levels, from genomes and cells to multicellular organisms, social groups and relationships between species, and evolutionary processes can themselves favour cooperative arrangements.

The deeper question, therefore, is not whether competition exists in nature, but why a civilisation increasingly organised through comparison and ranking should find competition such a compelling description of nature itself.

Rather than assuming that modern society simply learned competition from nature, it may be more revealing to ask whether modernity increasingly interpreted nature through a social order already organised around comparison, ranking and competition. “Survival of the fittest” could then function not merely as biological language but as a cultural metaphor through which hierarchy and differential success came to appear natural and inevitable.

A complex ecology of competition, cooperation, interdependence and adaptation can thus be reduced to a much simpler socio-cultural imperative: to compete, perform, advance and survive.

22. Progress: Hierarchy Projected onto Time

Once comparison and ranking become normal, another powerful idea becomes possible: progress. Progress does not simply mean change through time; it implies direction, and to call one condition more advanced than another requires an already existing representation of where development ought to lead.

Hierarchy can therefore be projected onto time.

One society becomes modern and another traditional; one becomes developed and another developing; one becomes advanced and another backward. The second is no longer understood merely as different but as occupying an earlier stage of the same journey.

Difference becomes delay.

The developed society consequently becomes the imagined future of the developing society. This temporal hierarchy is one of the most consequential operations of modernity because it gives legitimacy to development, improvement, modernisation and intervention.

It also creates continuous competition, since no society ever finally arrives. Every achievement produces another standard: economic growth must continue, technology must advance, productivity must increase, education must expand, skills must be continually updated and innovation must accelerate. The destination continually recedes as each achievement generates another future condition to be reached.

The epistemic time-gap that first appeared between receiving knowledge and arriving at understanding now expands into a civilisational condition. The present itself becomes insufficient because its value is increasingly measured against what it has not yet become. The child is not yet sufficiently educated, the worker not sufficiently skilled, the institution not efficient enough, the nation not developed enough, the economy has not grown enough, and the individual has not yet realised their potential.

Modernity therefore produces a condition of permanent deficiency in which the present is continually measured against an imagined future.

Progress is not only hierarchy projected onto time; it is also the institutionalisation of dissatisfaction with the present.

23. “We Know What Is Good for You”: Intervention Becomes Benevolent

Expertise, standardisation and progress eventually converge in a particularly consequential relationship. If I possess valid knowledge, if my institution certifies that knowledge, if the destination is already known and if you have not yet reached it, intervention can appear not merely permissible but necessary, and even benevolent.

The parent knows what the child needs, the teacher knows what the learner must learn, the psychologist knows what development should look like, the expert knows what the community lacks, the institution knows what the population requires, and the developed society knows what the developing society should become. The sentence that follows from this structure is almost inevitable: “We know what is good for you.”

Power therefore need not appear violent or coercive. It can present itself as educational, developmental, professional, therapeutic, scientific, humanitarian or progressive, which is precisely what can make it difficult to recognise.

The intervention may arise from genuine concern and good intention, but the epistemic structure remains unchanged because one party already possesses an authorised representation of another party’s future. The child, person, community or culture does not need to be encountered in its unknownness before someone else already knows what should happen.

The starting point has once again been settled in advance, and the unknown disappears from the relationship.

24. From Participation to Control

The socio-cultural operating system reaches its mature form when the future can be predetermined and the present organised to produce it. Institutions find open-ended participation difficult because they require accountability, predictability, replicability and measurable outcomes, and they therefore establish goals, plans, procedures, indicators, timelines, assessments and mechanisms of evaluation.

Education establishes learning outcomes, development projects establish deliverables, organisations establish targets, governments establish indicators, and research establishes measurable objectives. Once the outcome is known in advance, reality can be monitored according to whether it is moving in the prescribed direction.

What began cognitively as certainty becomes socially organised as control.

The problem is not that planning, measurement or organisation must disappear. The deeper issue concerns the relationship established with reality. Participation remains available to what may emerge, whereas control begins from what should emerge. The first allows reality to correct the knower; the second attempts to make reality conform to the plan.

This distinction returns us to the beginning of the enquiry. When the unknown remains the condition of knowing, observation, responsiveness, humility, exploration and adjustment become necessary because the direction has not yet been settled. When the outcome is already known, the central question changes from asking what is happening here? to asking how do we make this produce the result we have already decided upon?

The same cognitive structure has now travelled from the individual act of knowing into the organisation of collective life. Knowing became detachable knowledge; knowledge became academically organised; learning became institutionalised; institutionalisation concentrated epistemic authority; expert authority enabled needs to be defined; standardised needs contributed to the homogenisation of life; common norms generated exclusion and made comparison possible; comparison enabled ranking; ranking normalised competition; hierarchy projected onto time became progress; progress and expertise legitimised intervention; and predetermined futures made control appear rational.

The socio-cultural operating system is therefore not separate from the cognitive paradigm. It is the cognitive paradigm made social, institutional and cultural.

What began as a transformation in the relationship between knower and world has become a way of organising education, culture, society and human life itself. Yet the movement does not end there, because the socio-cultural operating system eventually returns to those who live within it. Through repeated participation, its structures become habits, expectations, emotional responses, perceptual dispositions and ways of acting.

In this sense, the operating system eventually becomes embodied.

The cognitive transformations explored so far do not remain within the individual knower.

Once knowing becomes detachable knowledge, once representation begins to precede encounter, once conscious reasoning acquires authority and the individual increasingly experiences herself as the rational centre of cognition, a new social possibility appears.

But before examining this institutional and cultural transformation, there is another capacity of the paradigm that needs to be understood: its ability to absorb what challenges it.

13. Appropriation: Turning What Challenges the Paradigm Into Knowledge

The dominant modern Western paradigm has another extraordinary capacity. It can encounter something that challenges its assumptions and converts that challenge into another body of knowledge.

The process is familiar.

Something is encountered in lived reality. It is extracted sufficiently from its context to be named. Once named, it can be conceptualized. Once conceptualized, it can be classified, researched and theorized. Theory can then become methodology. Methodology can be taught. Teaching produces expertise. Expertise requires institutions.

What began as a challenge to the paradigm can therefore become content within the paradigm.

Play becomes play-based learning.

Experience becomes experiential learning.

Autonomy becomes self-directed learning.

Wholeness becomes systems thinking.

Nature becomes environmental education.

Embodiment becomes embodied cognition.

Indigenous ways of living, embedded in land, community, ancestry, material practice, ritual and place, are extracted and recast as Indigenous Knowledge Systems.

The problem is not that these concepts are necessarily useless. Many may illuminate important aspects of reality.

The deeper problem is that a living condition becomes an object of knowledge administered by the cognitive structure that had lost the condition in the first place.

This is appropriation at a level deeper than cultural borrowing.

Modernity need not defeat what challenges it. . It can name it, study it, teach it, and turn it into another professional field.And the operating system remains untouched.

14. When the Cognitive Paradigm Becomes a Social Operating System

Once knowing becomes detachable knowledge, once representation begins to precede encounter, and once knowledge can be accumulated, classified, standardized, transmitted, certified and administered independently of the situations from which it arose, a new possibility appears.

A cognitive paradigm becomes a socio-cultural operating system when the assumptions embedded in knowing begin to organize the conditions of living.

What began as a particular relationship between the knower and the world can now begin to organize what counts as knowledge, how learning takes place, who possesses epistemic authority, what constitutes capability and success, what people are expected to need, and eventually what forms of life come to be regarded as desirable.

The transformation is therefore not merely institutional. It is cultural.

A way of knowing and being gradually becomes embedded in schools, universities, professions, bureaucracies, technologies and systems of certification, but it also enters everyday expectations, aspirations, values and assumptions about what a properly educated, successful or developed human being should become. What begins as a cognitive ordering of reality therefore becomes a way of organizing society and, through society, a way of organizing life itself.

Two developments are especially consequential in this transformation: the academization of knowledge and the institutionalization of learning. Together, they create the infrastructure through which the paradigm can reproduce itself across generations.

The first increasingly determines what society recognises as legitimate knowledge. The second increasingly determines where, when, how and under whose authority learning is expected to occur.

Together, they do something even deeper: they gradually normalise a particular relationship to knowledge until it no longer appears to be one possible way of knowing among others.

It begins to appear simply as how knowledge works and how learning happens.

At this point, the cognitive paradigm has become more than an epistemic arrangement. It has become part of the cultural common sense through which people interpret themselves, educate their children, evaluate capability, imagine progress and organise their lives.

A way of knowing has begun to become a way of life.

15. The Academization of Knowledge

Knowing originally exists within life. It belongs to the person, the material, the place, the relationships and the activity through which understanding develops. The farmer knows through soil, seasons, weather, plants, memory and repeated participation. The artisan knows through hand, material, timing, proportion, error, adjustment and bodily judgment. The child knows through movement, play, imitation, curiosity, relationship and direct sensory engagement with the world.

When knowledge becomes detachable from these conditions, it can be articulated and organized independently of the life that produced it. Understanding about plants becomes botany. Understanding about human behaviour becomes psychology. Understanding about societies becomes sociology. Understanding about building becomes architecture. Understanding about childhood and learning becomes education. Understanding about beauty becomes aesthetics.

The problem is not that these fields exist. The deeper transformation occurs when the organized representation acquires greater authority than the living process from which it arose.

Once knowledge becomes academic, what can be written, defined, classified, theorized, cited, measured, examined and formally communicated becomes increasingly visible and legitimate. What remains tacit, embodied, contextual, intuitive or inseparable from practice becomes more difficult to recognize precisely because it cannot easily be detached from the person and situation in which it exists.

A non-literate artisan may possess extraordinary knowledge of material, proportion, rhythm, timing and form, but much of this knowledge may remain invisible to an academic system because it does not exist in explicit conceptual form. The asymmetry is therefore profound: knowledge about life begins to acquire greater authority than knowing within life.

Academization does more than organize knowledge. It begins to determine what society recognizes as knowledge in the first place. What can be written, theorised, cited, examined and certified increasingly acquires cultural legitimacy, while what remains embodied, tacit, contextual or inseparable from practice becomes easier to overlook.

The transformation therefore extends beyond the university. It gradually enters society’s common sense. The academically articulated form begins to appear not merely as one form of knowledge, but as knowledge itself.

Knowing within life becomes increasingly subordinate to knowledge about life.

16. The Institutionalization of Learning

Once knowledge has been detached from life and organized in explicit form, learning too can be separated from living. This may be one of the most consequential transformations of modernity.

The young child does not originally require an institution in order to learn. Learning occurs because the organism is alive and embedded within a world. Language, movement, relationship, spatial understanding, social behaviour, material knowledge and innumerable distinctions are acquired through participation in life.

Learning is therefore not initially a specialized activity. It is a condition of living.

Once society comes to believe that there exists a body of knowledge that the next generation must acquire, however, learning has to be deliberately organized. Someone must decide what is to be learned, when it should be learned, how it should be taught, who is qualified to teach it and how understanding should be demonstrated.

From this requirement emerge curricula, teachers, classrooms, subjects, age groups, timetables, examinations, grades, certificates, pedagogies and learning outcomes.

A remarkable reversal gradually takes place. Learning, which originally required no institution, becomes almost unimaginable outside one.

A child may spend hours exploring movement, materials, water, insects, tools, language or relationships and yet be described as “not learning” because the activity does not correspond to an institutional objective. An adult may be highly capable within the demands of life and yet be described as “uneducated” because that capability has not been institutionally certified.

Institutional recognition begins to replace capability as evidence of knowing.

There is also a deeper consequence. The institution assumes responsibility for the learner’s learning. The teacher knows what the child must know. The curriculum determines the sequence. The timetable determines the duration. The examination determines whether learning has taken place.

The child is therefore not merely receiving information. The child is being initiated into an epistemic relationship in which knowledge is understood to come from elsewhere.

The explicit lesson may be mathematics, science or language, but the implicit lesson is more fundamental: someone else knows what I need to know.

The institutionalization of learning is therefore simultaneously the institutionalization of epistemic authority.

But the consequence does not remain within the institution. Over generations, this arrangement becomes culturally normal. Learning comes to mean being taught. Education comes to mean schooling. Capability increasingly requires certification. The knowledgeable person becomes the person whose knowledge has been institutionally recognised.

What began as an organisational solution gradually becomes a cultural assumption:

someone else must know what I need to know, and some institution must determine whether I have learned it.

At this point, learning has not merely been institutionalised. The institution has entered our very idea of learning.

8. The Emergence of the Rational- Egoic Knower

As understanding increasingly becomes something consciously performed through reading, interpreting, comparing, remembering and reasoning, the one who performs these operations also becomes increasingly visible. The apparent location of knowing begins to shift towards an explicit individual subject:

I am the one who reads, thinks, interprets, reasons, understands and knows.

In natural cognition, there is not necessarily an explicit inner declaration that says, I am now learning. The child playing with water, balancing an object, acquiring speech, following insects, arranging stones or experimenting with sound does not need to maintain an image of herself as a learner.

Life is occurring, and learning is inseparable from participation in it.

But once knowledge exists as something detachable, external and acquirable, a fundamentally different relationship becomes possible.

There is knowledge, and there is me, the person who must acquire it.

I learn. I remember. I understand. I know. I do not know. I succeed. I fail. My marks, qualifications, expertise, career and eventually my intellectual position become attached to the acquisition and possession of knowledge.

What emerges is not simply the individual, but the egoic knower: the self that increasingly experiences cognition as its own activity and knowledge as something it can acquire, possess, defend and use.

At the same time, conscious reasoning is acquiring a new status. It is no longer merely one capacity operating within knowing. It increasingly becomes the privileged means through which knowledge is organised, justified and defended. From this develops what modernity comes to call rationality.

The person who can explain, analyse, compare, argue, provide reasons and arrive at logically defensible conclusions increasingly appears as the ideal knower—the rational individual.

These two developments reinforce one another.

The more knowledge is consciously acquired, organised and justified, the more visible the individual becomes as the one performing these operations. And the more the individual experiences herself as the agent of cognition, the more reasoning appears to belong to and validate the autonomous mind.

What emerges, therefore, is a particular epistemic formation: the rational-egoic knower.

This does not mean that literacy created the biological sense of self, nor that non-literate human beings lack individuality or reasoning. The deeper proposition is that the representational knowledge system strengthens a particular positioning of the self: an individual subject standing apart from a world that must be understood, analysed and explained.

The knower becomes increasingly visible to herself as the agent of cognition.

This may be one of the deeper cognitive roots of modern individualism.

When knowing occurs primarily through participation in a living world, self, community, place, action and understanding remain entangled within the same unfolding situation. But when knowing increasingly becomes an activity through which an individual operates upon representations, cognition can begin to appear as something located within and belonging to the individual mind.

The movement is subtle but profound.

Knowing as participation begins to become knowledge as possession.

The organism participating in a world increasingly becomes the individual subject looking at a world.

And as rationality acquires epistemic authority, another reversal takes place. Bodily knowing, intuition, tacit judgment, aesthetic discrimination and contextual sensitivity increasingly have to justify themselves in the language of explicit reason. What cannot be articulated, demonstrated or logically defended becomes more difficult to recognise as legitimate knowledge.

Reason no longer remains simply within knowing; knowing increasingly has to present itself before the court of reason.

The result is not merely the rise of reasoning, nor merely the emergence of the individual. It is the fusion of the two: the individual increasingly experiences herself as the rational centre from which knowledge is acquired, judged and validated.

Seen from here, Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” appears less as the starting point of this transformation than as one of its most precise philosophical expressions.

Reasoning and the “I” have come to occupy the centre of knowing.

10. The Epistemic Time-Gap: Time Enters Between Experience and Understanding

Once learning is experienced as something I must consciously accomplish, understanding can become something towards which I move. It need no longer arise within the immediacy of participation. A temporal separation can open between receiving knowledge and arriving at understanding. This is the epistemic time-gap.

In direct experience, understanding is forming within the event itself. When the hand encounters heat, the body does not first store the experience and later reason its way towards the need to withdraw. When a child repeatedly negotiates uneven ground, bodily capability is being formed as the activity occurs. When an artisan senses that material is becoming unstable, adjustment and understanding belong to the same unfolding situation.

What is experienced is simultaneously being imbibed.

There is no separate learner standing outside the event waiting for understanding to arrive later.

Representational cognition makes a different arrangement possible. Something can first be received symbolically and only later interpreted, connected or understood. Meaning may have to be reconstructed through deliberate mental effort because the situation from which the knowledge originally arose is absent.

The epistemic time-gap has appeared.

Modern schooling institutionalises this epistemic time-gap. The child is repeatedly asked to learn something now that may become meaningful later: memorise this now and understand its relevance later; study this because it will be required next year; learn this for the examination; prepare now for the future.

Education progressively becomes preparation.

This insertion of time into cognition has consequences far beyond schooling. Once a known destination can precede the process, the present becomes increasingly organised from a future that does not yet exist.

Living becomes preparation for living.

11. Fragmentation: Reality Becomes Knowable by Being Separated

By this stage, a deeper separation has already begun to take shape. The knower increasingly experiences herself as a subject who stands before something to be understood, while the world appears as an object of cognition. Once this separation between knower and known becomes normal, analysis proceeds by making reality further separable.

In order to analyse something, the analytical mind first has to make it separable.

Mind can then be separated from body, subject from object, cognition from emotion, reason from feeling, science from art, knowledge from action, learning from living, human from nature, individual from community and one discipline from another.

Once separated, each fragment can be named, studied, measured, specialised and developed.

The remarkable success of this operation should not be underestimated. Modern science and technology have achieved extraordinary precision partly because phenomena can be isolated sufficiently to make particular variables visible.

But the epistemic success of separation can conceal its cognitive cost.

The separation created for purposes of analysis can gradually be mistaken for a separation existing in life itself.

A child is a particularly clear example. Modern developmental knowledge can describe cognitive development, motor development, emotional development, social development, language development and aesthetic development as distinct areas. These divisions can be extremely useful to researchers.

The child, however, does not live them separately.

A child climbing a tree is not switching between motor development, risk assessment, emotional regulation, spatial cognition, sensory learning, social awareness and aesthetic experience. The event is whole. The categories belong to the observer.

Modernity therefore performs a curious operation. It separates what life presents together and then spends enormous effort trying to restore the relationships between the fragments.

We consequently create mind–body integration, interdisciplinary education, social-emotional learning, art–science integration, human–nature reconnection, systems thinking and holistic education.

The language of reconnection reveals the prior cognitive act.

One cannot reconnect what has not first been separated.

12. The Future Governs the Present

The normalisation of absence eventually acquires another form: the imagined future begins to govern the present.

The future child does not exist. The future career does not exist. The learning outcome does not yet exist. The development target, growth projection, ideal society, sustainable future and regenerative future are representations of what might exist.

Yet these absent futures acquire enormous authority over what exists now.

The present child becomes material from which a future adult must be produced. The present landscape becomes material for a development plan. The present community is evaluated according to a model of what it should become. The present moment gains value according to what it contributes to a later outcome.

Education consequently becomes preparation rather than living.

Childhood becomes preparation for adulthood. School becomes preparation for higher education. Higher education becomes preparation for employment. Employment becomes preparation for security. The future continually colonises the present.

Once the destination exists conceptually, process becomes subordinate to product.

Goals generate plans. Plans generate methods. Methods generate tools. Tools make measurement possible. Measurement allows evaluation. Evaluation enables correction and control.

This grammar now appears across education, organisations, government, research, personal development and institutional life.

The absent governs the present.

The Operating System Revealed: Certainty Before Engagement

The characteristics described so far—certainty, representation, conscious reasoning, fragmentation, the epistemic time-gap and the authority of imagined futures—come together in a recognisable operational pattern. This is perhaps where the idea of an operating system becomes most visible.

The decisive feature is not whether a philosophy comes first or a destination comes first. In some cases, a philosophy or theology generates an image of what human beings and societies ought to become. In others, an already desired destination calls forth theories that explain and legitimise it. Often the worldview and the destination develop together.

What matters is that the starting point is already conceptually settled.

There is already an idea of what is true, what is desirable, what is lacking, what constitutes improvement, or where the process ought eventually to lead. Reality is therefore not entered primarily as an unknown from which direction might emerge. It is approached through a prior certainty.

Once the desired condition has been established, whether as an ideal, theory, philosophy, ideology or imagined future, methods can be devised for reaching it. Methods generate procedures. Procedures require tools. Tools make implementation possible. Once implementation begins, progress can be measured against the predetermined destination, and whatever deviates from the intended direction can be corrected.

The sequence need not always be historically identical, but the operational grammar remains recognisable:

prior certainty → imagined destination or conceptual framework → method → tools → implementation → measurement → correction

This structure can appear in projects whose stated purposes are radically different from one another. Religious, political, economic, educational and developmental movements may disagree profoundly about what human beings or societies ought to become, while nevertheless sharing a similar project-form: an already conceived condition guides the transformation of present reality.

The content changes. The operating logic can remain remarkably similar.

This is also why many movements that arise in opposition to modernity can reproduce the same structure. Alternative education, sustainability, regenerative development, transition movements, decolonisation and other reform movements can begin with a critique of the existing order and yet quickly establish their own desired future, conceptual framework, methodology, toolkits, training programmes, indicators and measures of success.

The paradigm does not necessarily reproduce itself through agreement about the destination. It reproduces itself through the form of approaching reality from a destination already imagined.

This is the deeper distinction from natural cognition.

Natural cognition begins from the unknown. The organism engages, observes, acts, receives consequences, adjusts and gradually discovers both understanding and direction through participation.

The modern project-form begins differently. Some version of the answer is already present at the beginning.

The central question therefore changes.

It is no longer primarily:

What is happening here, and what might emerge if we remain attentive to it?

It increasingly becomes:

How do we move what exists towards what we have already decided should exist?

Once this shift occurs, method becomes necessary, standardisation becomes useful, measurement becomes meaningful and control becomes rational.

What begins as certainty in cognition thus becomes direction in action.

The epistemic structure eventually becomes a project structure.

Modernity does not begin with the unknown and discover a direction. Increasingly, it begins with a direction and organises reality towards it.

We can now see that these are not merely separate characteristics of modern cognition. Certainty, future orientation, representation, fragmentation and the egoic knower begin to combine into a recognisable way of acting upon the world. At this point, the metaphor of an operating system can finally be made explicit.

From Lived World to Rational Knower

5. When Word Precedes the World

Once knowledge becomes detachable from the conditions in which it was formed, the word can arrive before the world. The learner encounters the name, definition, diagram, explanation or category before encountering the phenomenon itself. What was once articulation after knowing begins to organise perception before knowing has had a chance to arise.

Reality therefore becomes increasingly available through representations of reality.

The tree becomes botany. The body becomes anatomy, physiology, psychology and cognition. The child becomes developmental theory. Beauty becomes aesthetics. Community becomes sociology. Nature becomes ecology. Indigenous ways of living become Indigenous Knowledge Systems.

None of these representations need be false.

The decisive question is which comes first and which acquires authority.

In natural knowing, encounter precedes articulation. The organism meets the phenomenon, forms relationships with it, begins to distinguish qualities and patterns, and may eventually name or explain what has been understood.

Within representational learning, this sequence is frequently inverted. The name comes first. The explanation comes first. The diagram comes first. The category comes first. Reality is subsequently encountered through what has already been said about it.

The representation therefore begins to organise perception itself.

The tree is no longer simply encountered as this particular living presence in this place, with this smell, bark, shade, movement, season, relationship with insects, birds, soil and human life. It can increasingly be encountered as an instance of an already known category.

The word no longer follows the world.

Increasingly, the world is required to appear through the word.

6. Epistemic Absence: Knowing No Longer Requires Presence

Representation introduces another profound change: what is represented no longer has to be present. This creates what may be called epistemic absence—a condition in which cognition proceeds without the sensorial presence of what is being known.

Presence is no longer necessary for representational cognition.

Human beings have always been capable of remembering, imagining, anticipating and speaking about what is absent. Literacy did not invent absence. What literacy does, however, is make sustained engagement with absence reproducible and transmissible; through schooling and other institutions, this condition becomes increasingly central to knowing.

When reading, the object of cognition is frequently not present to the senses. The person, event, landscape, process or phenomenon described by the words may be somewhere else, may have existed centuries ago, or may never have existed at all.

The reader has to construct what is absent.

The body remains where it is, but attention can inhabit somewhere else.

This is one of literacy’s extraordinary powers. It allows human beings to move beyond the limits of immediate place and time, to encounter histories, possibilities and experiences otherwise unavailable to them.

But when this becomes a dominant mode through which knowledge is acquired from childhood onwards, absence itself can become normalised as a condition of being.

The body is in one place while the mind is elsewhere.

The senses remain open to the immediate environment, but the content occupying conscious attention belongs to another place, another time, another person’s description, an imagined situation, a future possibility or an internally generated idea.

The immediate world progressively loses its epistemic necessity.

The classroom is perhaps the clearest institutional expression of this condition. Twenty or thirty children can be physically present in a room while the content of learning has almost nothing to do with that room, the weather outside, the materials around them, the people present or the events actually unfolding.

Their bodies inhabit the present environment while their conscious minds are repeatedly trained to inhabit represented worlds.

Presence itself becomes secondary.

And when presence becomes secondary, observation also changes. To observe deeply, one must remain available to what is actually happening, including what one did not expect. But cognition operating upon absent or already represented content does not require this degree of availability to the immediate world.

The organism remains in the present.

The literate mind increasingly learns to live elsewhere.

This is one beginning of disembodied cognition: not the disappearance of the body, but the progressive removal of the body and the immediate world from active participation in knowing. The body remains present, while conscious cognition increasingly proceeds elsewhere.

7. Conscious Reasoning Becomes the Primary Cognitive Tool

Reasoning is not absent from natural cognition. Ordering, inference, distinction, anticipation and correction occur continuously within living activity. The difference is that these processes are inseparable from perception, action and direct engagement with the world. They occur within knowing rather than being applied to knowledge from outside.

A child acquiring a mother tongue provides one of the clearest demonstrations. The child becomes capable of extraordinarily complex grammatical relationships without first learning grammatical rules. Sentence structure, tense, agreement, rhythm, emphasis and contextual appropriateness gradually become embodied within speech. The child can speak grammatically long before being able to explain grammar.

Similarly, when we see traces left by rain, we may immediately understand that it has rained without consciously constructing a sequence of propositions. The inference is already contained within perception. An artisan adjusting pressure as material changes does not pause to construct an argument before responding. Discrimination, inference, and correction occur within the act of knowing itself.

Reasoning, in this sense, is inherent within cognition. It is not yet a separate intellectual tool.

The situation changes when the learner is presented with ready-made knowledge.

What is received is no longer the unknown world waiting to be explored, but the product of somebody else’s knowing: a statement, explanation, theory, definition, classification or conclusion. The process through which that knowledge was originally formed is no longer available to the learner. What remains is the explicit product.

The learner can now deal with this product in essentially two ways. It can be memorised more or less as received, or analysed, compared, classified, interpreted, connected with other information, and organised before being stored.

This is where conscious reasoning acquires its new authority. It becomes the primary cognitive tool for dealing with already constituted knowledge.

Representations are compared with other representations. Statements are examined in relation to other statements. Concepts are organised, contradictions identified, arguments evaluated and conclusions drawn. Information becomes increasingly structured and internally coherent.

These capacities are extraordinarily useful. The difficulty begins when people mistake the successful organisation of information for understanding.

The distinction between rote memorisation and reasoning makes this particularly visible. Rote memorisation is rather like dumping clothes into a cupboard exactly as they arrive. Reasoning is like sorting them, folding them, arranging them into categories and storing them systematically. The second cupboard is considerably better organised, but the fundamental activity in both cases remains storage.

The same can happen cognitively.

Reasoning lets ready-made information be classified, compared, sequenced, and logically connected, producing a much more coherent structure than rote memorisation. Because that structure is intelligible and orderly, the learner can experience the organisation itself as understanding.

But what has been reorganised is still information.

No experiential validation may have taken place. A learner may be able to explain a theory, compare it with another theory, defend it, criticise it and draw conclusions from it while having no direct experiential ground for what either theory refers to.

This is where reasoning becomes particularly deceptive.

Reasoning can short-circuit comprehension.

It can take the learner from information to conceptual coherence without passing through the experiential process through which understanding would otherwise have to form. The representation becomes organised before the reality it refers to has been encountered. Because the learner can now explain the representation, the mind feels it has understood.

What has actually been achieved may be considerably narrower: the successful organisation and storage of information.

In this sense, reasoning can be more deceptive than rote memorisation. With rote learning, the learner may at least recognise that they have merely remembered something. Reasoned knowledge produces a stronger illusion because the learner can analyse it, reconstruct it, defend it and use it to reach further conclusions. The capacity to operate intelligently upon the representation can therefore conceal the absence of experiential understanding.

Rote memorisation stores ready-made information as received. Reasoning reorganises the same information before storing it. Neither, by itself, recreates the living process through which understanding is formed.

The problem is therefore not reasoning itself, nor is the distinction between reasoning and non-reasoning. The crucial distinction is between reasoning inherent within knowing and conscious reasoning applied to already constituted knowledge.

In the first, perception, bodily action, inference, consequence and correction participate together in the formation of understanding. Reality continually participates in correcting the knower.

In the second, the learner operates primarily upon representations. Their relationships can be analysed and made internally coherent even when their experiential ground is entirely absent.

Modern education repeatedly blurs this distinction. Rote memorisation is recognised as superficial, while reasoning and analysis are treated as evidence of deeper understanding. Yet reasoning may remain entirely within the same world of ready-made knowledge. It may organise information far more intelligently without restoring the experiential process from which knowing originally arose.

Over time, this second mode becomes privileged until it begins to stand for cognition itself. The person who can analyse, explain, argue and reach conclusions is assumed to have understood, even when that understanding has never been formed or corrected through direct engagement with the phenomenon.

This produces one of the deepest confusions of the modern knowledge system:

the ability to reason about knowledge becomes mistaken for the ability to know.

Or, stated differently:

Modernity mistakes the successful organisation of information for understanding.

Reasoning short-circuits comprehension precisely at this point: the mind mistakes organised information for understood reality.

The problem, therefore, is not conscious reasoning. It begins when a cognitive capacity extraordinarily useful for operating upon explicit knowledge becomes the principal measure of understanding, while the sensory, bodily, contextual and experiential processes through which understanding is actually formed become secondary or disappear from view.

8. A Deeper Epistemic Shift: From Knowing as Experience to Knowledge as Argument

Once conscious reasoning becomes the primary cognitive tool for dealing with ready-made knowledge, a deeper epistemic shift becomes visible. Knowing, clarified through renewed observation and engagement with reality, is increasingly replaced by knowledge that exists as propositions that can be accepted, rejected, defended, criticised, and argued over. The authority of experience gives way to the authority of argument.

Another consequence of this shift is easy to overlook. In direct, experiential knowing, agreement and disagreement are not the primary means of resolving uncertainty. If I mistake a rope for a snake, argument cannot finally establish what is there. I may defend my perception, another person may disagree, and both of us may construct reasons, but clarification occurs only when attention returns to the situation itself. One has to look again. Reality has to correct the knower.

This differs from a knowledge system organised around propositions. Once knowledge exists as statements, theories, explanations and conclusions detached from the original encounter, it becomes possible to agree with them, disagree with them, defend them, attack them, compare them and construct arguments around them. Reasoning therefore does not merely become a tool for organising ready-made knowledge; it also creates an epistemic world in which understanding increasingly appears to be something reached through argument.

This marks a profound shift. In natural knowing, the encounter remains the final authority. What is unclear must be clarified through renewed observation, participation, or experience. Argument may direct attention, but it cannot substitute for seeing.

In modern knowledge systems, however, coherence between propositions can begin to stand in for correspondence with experience. A position can be considered convincing because it is logically consistent, well argued and supported by other accepted propositions, even when the person engaging with it has no direct experiential ground for what is being claimed.

The distinction is therefore not simply between experiential and intellectual knowledge. It is between two different conditions of correction. In one, reality corrects the knower. In the other, propositions are corrected primarily through other propositions.

This may also help explain why many indigenous and practice-based traditions do not organise knowing primarily through argumentative discourse. Knowledge remains embedded in doing, observing, participating, remembering, adjusting and living within a context. The question is not first whether one agrees with a proposition, but whether one’s perception and action remain aligned with the world.

Modern knowledge, by contrast, increasingly makes knowledge discussable independently of the conditions that produced it. Once that happens, argument, agreement, disagreement and rational justification become central epistemic activities.

The greater danger is that winning an argument can then be mistaken for establishing what is true, just as successfully analysing information can be mistaken for understanding it.

But reality cannot finally be argued into being.

Where direct knowing is possible, clarification ultimately requires returning to the world.

Once knowledge can be organised, argued over and validated within a world of representations, another figure begins to appear more clearly: the one who performs these operations. The person who reads, analyses, agrees, disagrees, remembers, reasons and concludes increasingly experiences herself as the agent of knowing. The epistemic transformation now becomes a transformation of the self.

Essay 12

A 6-part series

Part I — When Knowledge Precedes Knowing

How certainty replaced the unknown and began shaping the modern knower

The previous essays have followed a curious history. The body had to be rediscovered when the machine had to act. The child had to be rediscovered when the machine had to learn. The world had to be rediscovered when intelligence built predominantly from representations began to encounter the limits of representation. Phenomenology, much earlier, had already attempted to return Western thought from abstraction to lived experience.

Taken separately, each of these can appear as an intellectual development within its own field. Taken together, however, they raise a more disturbing question: why does modernity repeatedly rediscover what it has excluded without fundamentally changing the conditions that produced the exclusion?

Perhaps the difficulty lies deeper than any particular philosophy, scientific theory, educational system, political ideology, economic order or technology. Beneath changing ideas there appears to be a more persistent cognitive order—an operating system that continues to organise how reality is encountered even when the content of thought changes.

I use the term dominant modern Western paradigm deliberately. I am not suggesting that everything historically Western belongs to a single way of knowing, nor that every person living in the West inhabits the same cognitive condition. The paradigm examined here is the particular order that became increasingly dominant through the convergence of literacy, modern science, institutionalised schooling, industrial organisation, bureaucratic systems, technological mediation and the modern idea of progress. It originated historically within particular Western conditions, but it is no longer geographically Western. It has become global.

Nor is this enquiry proposing that these developments unfolded through one simple historical sequence, and the phrase operating system is not meant literally. It is a way of identifying a recurrent set of cognitive and social operations through which a particular mode of knowing reproduces itself even when its explicit ideas, theories and institutions change.

The starting point of this enquiry is simple: before asking what the dominant modern Western paradigm thinks, we need to ask from what condition it begins knowing.

Natural knowing begins before the unknown. The organism must observe, explore, act, respond and remain available to what the world reveals. But something fundamental changes when the product of previous knowing—knowledge—arrives before one’s own process of knowing. The learner increasingly enters a world that has already been named, classified, explained and interpreted.

This first part examines that inversion and its immediate consequence: certainty begins to displace the unknown as the starting condition of cognition. The question is no longer merely what happens to knowledge, but what happens to the human being repeatedly formed under these altered conditions.

For the paradigm is not simply a collection of ideas. It is also a way of forming the knower.

1. Stop Blaming Descartes

The familiar history of modern disembodiment often begins with René Descartes. His famous statement, “I think, therefore I am,” is repeatedly invoked as the moment when thought was privileged over the body and the thinking mind became the foundation of human existence. Descartes has consequently come to personify the separation of mind and body.

But there is something revealing in this explanation itself.

A vast civilisational and cognitive transformation is located in an identifiable thinker, an identifiable text and an identifiable proposition. Once the cause has been located in Descartes, intellectual history can proceed by finding other thinkers who modified, opposed or corrected him. A thinker produced the problem; another thinker may eventually solve it.

This may itself be an expression of the paradigm we are attempting to understand. The visible intellectual product is isolated while the conditions that made that product possible recede from view.

A simple question exposes the difficulty. Does mind–body fragmentation happen only to people who have read Descartes?

A child sitting in a classroom may never have heard of Descartes and may never encounter the sentence “I think, therefore I am.” Yet the child is already participating in a structure in which the body is asked to remain relatively still while something called the mind is educated. Knowledge arrives through words, books, explanations, diagrams and representations. Mathematics belongs to one realm, physical activity to another, emotion to another, art to another. Intellectual achievement becomes largely demonstrable through what can be verbally or symbolically expressed.

The fragmentation is already being lived.

Descartes therefore becomes more interesting if we stop treating him simply as the origin of disembodiment. His formulation can instead be understood as an extraordinarily clear philosophical articulation of a separation that had already become conceivable within a changing cognitive ecology. His thought certainly contributed to subsequent intellectual developments, but the deeper question is what made such a formulation imaginable and persuasive in the first place.

The problem is therefore not adequately explained by saying that Descartes separated the mind from the body. We must ask what happened to knowing itself that allowed the thinking mind to appear as something that could stand apart from the living body and the world in which that body existed.

That question takes us beneath philosophy.

2. When Knowledge Precedes Knowing

Knowing begins as a living process.

A child encounters a material that is not yet known. The hand touches, presses and changes its pressure. The eyes notice what the material does. Movement produces consequence. Expectation is corrected. Curiosity redirects attention. Memory participates without needing to announce itself. The material yields in one direction and resists in another. Gradually, understanding forms within the relationship.

The important condition is that the outcome is not already known.

The unknown requires the whole organism to remain available. One has to look because one does not yet know what will be seen. One has to listen because the answer has not already been supplied. One has to move, touch, wait, compare, alter one’s action and attend to consequence. Observation, bodily sensitivity, intuition, curiosity, exploratory action and playfulness do not need to be separately taught because the unknown calls them forth.

Knowing in this sense is not the acquisition of something already existing outside the knower. It is a process in which both understanding and capability are forming.

At some point, what has been understood may become articulated. It may become a word, description, classification, principle, formula, theory, explanation or method. What was once a living process can now acquire a form that can be preserved and communicated.

This product is what we ordinarily call knowledge.

There is nothing inherently problematic about this transformation. The capacity to articulate and preserve understanding has enabled human beings to communicate across distance and generations, to accumulate discoveries and to extend thought far beyond what any single life could directly encounter.

The fundamental change occurs when the product becomes detached from the process that created it and becomes the starting point for another person’s cognition.

What originally came after knowing now comes before knowing.

The definition precedes discovery. The classification precedes observation. The theory precedes encounter. The explanation precedes experience. The answer precedes the question.

The sequence has been reversed.

Knowing once produced knowledge. Modern education increasingly begins with knowledge and assumes that knowing will somehow follow.

Something profound happens at this point because the unknown is increasingly displaced as the starting condition of cognition. The learner no longer encounters something in order to discover what it might be. The learner encounters what somebody else has already discovered, classified and explained.

And when the unknown disappears, many of the capacities that the unknown naturally calls into activity also begin to lose their central place. Bodily observation, intuition, sustained attention, exploration, spontaneous experimentation and playfulness become secondary because the learner’s principal task is no longer to discover reality but to understand, remember, interpret or apply an already constituted representation of it.

This epistemic reversal is far more consequential than a change in educational method. It begins to reorganize the human being.

3. When Certainty Displaces the Unknown

The unknown places the organism in a particular relationship with reality. Because the answer is not yet available, one has to remain open. Reality can surprise. One’s expectation can be wrong. The material can refuse one’s intention. Observation can reveal something that one’s previous understanding did not contain.

The unknown therefore contains a natural demand for humility.

Ready-made knowledge alters this condition because something has already been settled before the encounter begins.

The child enters an already interpreted world. The teacher knows the answer. The textbook carries the authorised explanation. The curriculum establishes what must be learned. The examination defines what counts as correct.

This does not produce absolute certainty, but it trains a relationship to certainty.

The learner begins not from What is this? but increasingly from What am I supposed to know about this?

Observation becomes less necessary because identification can replace discovery. Curiosity becomes more difficult because the important questions have already been formulated. Exploration becomes inefficient because there is a correct route. Playfulness becomes peripheral because play cannot guarantee a predetermined outcome.

The epistemic movement is therefore from availability before the unknown towards operation within the known.

Once certainty becomes the starting point, it does not remain confined to knowledge. It becomes a general structure.

If the destination is known, one can establish an aim. If there is an aim, one can design a plan. If there is a plan, one can specify a method. Methods can be standardised. Progress can be measured. Outcomes can be evaluated. Systems can then be controlled.

The movement from unknown to certainty gradually becomes a movement from participation to management.

4. The Shaping of the Modern Knower

Knowing does not merely produce knowledge; it shapes the knower. When the conditions of knowing change—when certainty increasingly displaces the unknown—the human being formed through that process also changes. What is being shaped is not cognition alone. The process enters the body, emotion, behaviour, attention and perception, gradually reorganising the person’s relationship with the world and, eventually, their very way of being.

When a child repeatedly engages with weight, distance, texture, movement, relationship, language, material, terrain, other people and the consequences of action, something much larger than information accumulates. The body becomes capable. Attention becomes discriminating. Perception becomes refined. Expectation becomes more accurate. Judgment develops. Emotional responses become calibrated. Confidence and restraint find their appropriate places. The organism becomes increasingly aligned with the world in which it lives.

Knowledge formation and human formation are therefore not originally separate processes.

The child does not experience one process called cognitive development, another called physical development, another called emotional development, another called social development and yet another called aesthetic development. These divisions belong to the observer who has already separated the whole into categories. The child lives, and through living the whole being forms.

Once knowledge becomes detachable from this process, however, it becomes possible to accumulate knowledge independently of many of the conditions through which knowing originally formed the person.

A person can know about plants without being able to recognise the health of a plant growing outside the window. One can acquire sophisticated theories of ecology while having very little sensory relationship with a living ecosystem. One can study developmental psychology while finding the unpredictable behaviour of an actual child deeply disturbing. One can possess a theory of embodiment while remaining almost entirely dependent upon conceptual understanding.

Knowledge can increase while capability does not.

This is why the change from knowing as process to knowledge as product has to be understood as a transformation in the formation of being.

The consequences appear cognitively, because attention moves increasingly toward concepts, explanations and symbolic relationships. They appear physically, because the body participates differently when learning occurs through sedentary reception rather than active engagement. They appear emotionally, because correctness, error, approval, comparison and evaluation become powerful conditions of experience. They appear behaviourally, because instruction, predetermined tasks and externally organised goals train particular patterns of response.

And they are eventually existential.

The child gradually learns to experience herself as a person who does not know and must acquire knowledge from those who do.

This is not simply a pedagogical arrangement. It changes the relation between the human being and the world.

Instead of life revealing itself through participation, knowledge increasingly appears as something located elsewhere, possessed by somebody else, contained in books, stored in institutions, authorised by experts and acquired by the individual.

The knower is being formed at the same time as knowledge is being transmitted.

This is why the dominant modern Western paradigm cannot finally be understood as a collection of ideas. It is a system for forming human beings.

Natural knowing begins with the unknown and produces knowledge. Modern learning increasingly begins with already-produced knowledge and expects knowing to follow.

Once knowledge can precede knowing, another transformation becomes possible. The learner no longer needs to begin with the world itself. Names, explanations, categories and representations can arrive first. The next question is therefore what happens when the word begins to precede the world.

Before Reading

A Note on Method

This essay does not begin with phenomenology.

My enquiry into cognition developed for many years largely outside books—through observing children learn, watching artisans work, and living and working among non-literate communities. Rather than beginning with an existing theory, I tried to remain with what was happening and allow the questions to emerge from observation and experience.

Only much later did I turn to Western philosophy and cognitive science to see whether similar questions had appeared there. I have not undertaken a systematic scholarly study of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Dreyfus, or the phenomenological tradition. In developing this essay, I collaborated with AI to trace their central ideas, historical relationships, and subsequent intellectual trajectories.

I therefore write not as a scholar of phenomenology, but as someone encountering phenomenology from the ground of an enquiry that preceded it. My purpose is not to offer an authoritative interpretation of phenomenology, but to ask what becomes visible when its attempt to recover the body, lived experience, and the world is viewed from the perspective of natural cognition.

The literature did not give rise to the enquiry. It helped me recognise where Western thought had encountered similar questions—and to ask what happened once those insights became articulated knowledge.

A Note to the Reader

There is an obvious paradox in writing an essay that questions whether reading and conceptual knowledge can recover lived experience. I am aware of it.

This essay is therefore not offered as something to be believed. To persuade you of its argument would risk reproducing the very problem it is examining.

Instead, use it, if at all, as a provocation to look again.

Notice what happens when you experience something directly. Notice what occurs before you name it. Watch a child learning, a hand adjusting to material, a body correcting itself before conscious thought intervenes, understanding taking shape within action. Then notice what changes when an explanation, category, or conclusion arrives before the experience itself.

The question is not whether this essay convinces you.

The question is whether what it points towards becomes visible in your own experience.

Now to the Essay-

The original phenomenological enquiry moved from the phenomenon towards articulation. Once its discoveries entered books, universities, philosophical traditions, and scholarly interpretation, the direction could reverse. A reader could encounter being-in-the-world, the lifeworld, embodiment, intentionality, or the lived body as already constituted concepts without undergoing anything resembling the enquiry through which those concepts had first emerged.

This does not mean that later phenomenologists merely repeated Husserl or Heidegger. Many undertook serious phenomenological enquiries of their own. The structural problem is different. Once an insight has been articulated, literate culture makes it possible to acquire the articulation independently of the process that produced it.

Heidegger’s being-in-the-world can therefore become something to interpret. Husserl’s lifeworld can become something to define. Merleau-Ponty’s lived body can become something to write about. The student can compare one phenomenologist with another, trace influences, analyse concepts, defend interpretations, and become highly knowledgeable about phenomenology.

Yet none of this necessarily requires returning to the phenomenon itself.

A subtle reversal has occurred:

phenomenon → attention → insight → articulation

has become

articulation → interpretation → commentary → further articulation.

The product of phenomenological knowing can now precede the phenomenological process.

Phenomenology can therefore become non-phenomenological through the very process by which it is transmitted.

The irony is profound. A movement whose central impulse was to return from representation to lived experience becomes another body of representations through which lived experience is understood.

This distinction between understanding something conceptually and recovering it experientially is crucial. A student can spend years studying embodiment while remaining almost entirely within a life organised around books, classrooms, screens, and conceptual analysis. One can become exceptionally knowledgeable about perception without recovering the ability to perceive without immediately imposing categories upon what is seen. One can write extensively about the lifeworld while the actual conditions of one’s life become increasingly mediated and abstract. One can become an authority on Merleau-Ponty while the sensory capacities he describes continue to be shaped by precisely the cultural conditions his philosophy helps us question.

The problem, therefore, is deeper than philosophy because the severance was never merely philosophical. It was embodied through the very organisation of modern life. Childhood, schooling, literacy, work, architecture, technologies, specialised knowledge, and habits of attention gradually reorganise how the organism encounters the world. Once this reorganisation has taken place, learning a new concept does not automatically undo it. A theory of embodied cognition does not restore embodied knowing any more than reading about silence produces silence. One cannot acquire pre-reflective experience as another piece of explicit knowledge.

This becomes especially revealing when phenomenology later enters cognitive science, artificial intelligence, design, and human-computer interaction. Hubert Dreyfus drew heavily on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to challenge early symbolic artificial intelligence. His criticism was, in essence, that human intelligence cannot be reduced to the manipulation of explicit rules and representations because ordinary skilled action depends upon a background familiarity with situations that is difficult to formalise. Human beings do not continuously calculate their way through ordinary life. Much of what we call intelligence is already situated within bodily competence, social familiarity, practical involvement, and an experienced world.

The limitations of early artificial intelligence therefore began to reveal, technologically, what phenomenology had already diagnosed, philosophically. Something was missing between representation and life. A system might possess rules describing a situation while lacking the situated familiarity through which a human being encounters that situation meaningfully. The problem was not simply insufficient information. The problem was the absence of the lived context within which information becomes relevant in the first place.

Similar ideas travelled from the work of Winograd and Flores into computing and design, and later, through embodied interaction, into human-computer interaction. Gradually, concepts that had begun as philosophical challenges to the detached mind became usable frameworks within technology. Embodiment, situatedness, context, lived experience, interaction, and practical engagement entered the vocabulary of design and computing. In one sense, this represented a genuine intellectual advance. Modern technological fields were being forced to confront dimensions of human cognition that had previously been neglected.

Yet another characteristic movement of modernity appears here. What is rediscovered is also reframed. Experience becomes “user experience.” Embodiment becomes a framework for interaction. Situated action becomes a design principle. Phenomenology becomes a methodology. The body, once excluded from theories of cognition, returns as something that can be incorporated into research programmes, educational curricula, design methods, and technological systems.

There is nothing inherently wrong with such applications. The difficulty begins when the description of wholeness starts to substitute for wholeness itself. The same pattern appeared earlier when design process became design thinking, when empathy became a tool, when play became pedagogy, and when embodied cognition became embodied learning. *Modern thought has an extraordinary ability to absorb critique by converting it into method. * Once converted into method, even a critique of fragmentation can become another fragment within the system.

This is why phenomenology presents such an important case. It came remarkably close to exposing the original error. It recognised that the world is not first an object represented in the mind, that the body is not simply a container carrying cognition around, and that human knowing begins within participation rather than detached observation. Yet this recognition did not fundamentally alter the organisation of modern education. Children continued to be placed in institutions organised around predetermined knowledge. Learning continued to be understood largely as the acquisition of explicit content. The body remained disciplined while the mind was instructed. The world continued to enter education increasingly through its descriptions.

Embodiment became a subject to be taught

In fact, we have now reached the peculiar situation in which embodiment itself can be taught. Schools introduce movement, sensory activities, craft, gardening, dance, play, or outdoor learning and describe these as forms of “embodied learning.” But the child was embodied before any such intervention. Embodiment is not something education adds to learning. It is the unavoidable condition in which all learning takes place. Even the child sitting silently in a classroom is embodied. The body is learning the chair, the timetable, the teacher's authority, the interruption of its own attention, the need for permission, the distinction between correct and incorrect responses, and the organisation of knowledge by someone else. The mind may be learning the declared lesson, but the organism is imbibing the entire situation.

Phenomenology helps us see the severance, but seeing the severance intellectually is not the same as escaping it. Indeed, the historical fate of phenomenology may itself demonstrate the problem: an enquiry intended to return us to lived experience becomes another body of knowledge about lived experience.

It could diagnose the severance with remarkable depth, but it could not, by itself, restore the cultural and biological conditions that preceded it. Philosophy can expose the illusion of the detached mind, but philosophy cannot recreate childhood. It can describe the lived body, but it cannot automatically recover sensory autonomy. It can speak of the lifeworld, but it cannot reconstruct a way of life in which knowledge, work, body, community, material, value, and environment have not already been separated into specialised domains.

Natural cognition is therefore not another philosophy of cognition. It is not an alternative theoretical account that must compete with phenomenology, cognitivism, enactivism, or embodied cognition. It refers instead to the biological process of knowing that precedes these conceptual distinctions. The child does not need phenomenology to return to the world because the child has not yet left it. The artisan whose knowledge has formed through long participation with material does not need to integrate body and mind because the division may never have become cognitively dominant in the first place.

This may also explain why embodiment appears to be such an important discovery in modernity. Embodiment becomes visible as a concept only after disembodiment has become sufficiently normal to require correction. The world becomes a philosophical problem after cognition has learned to stand apart from it. Experience becomes something that must be recovered after representation has acquired greater authority than the phenomenon being represented.

The Question Phenomenology Leaves Behind

The deepest question raised by phenomenology is therefore not whether its descriptions of embodiment and lived experience were correct. Many of them may have been extraordinarily perceptive. The more difficult question is why such a profound recognition produced so little fundamental change in the conditions that had created the problem in the first place.

Phenomenology recognised the detached mind, returned attention to the lived body, questioned the separation of subject and world, and attempted to recover experience before abstraction. Yet modern education continued to organise childhood around predetermined knowledge. The sciences continued to specialise. Work, learning, art, value, body, nature and knowledge remained divided into separate domains. The world continued increasingly to reach us through representation. Eventually, even embodiment itself could become something to be studied, taught, and methodically introduced.

This suggests that the difficulty lies deeper than the absence of the right theory.

Perhaps modernity’s problem is not that it has failed to recognise what has been lost. It has repeatedly recognised it. The body has been rediscovered. The child’s capacity for autonomous learning has been rediscovered. The world has been rediscovered as indispensable to intelligence. Phenomenology rediscovered lived experience. Yet each discovery seems capable of being taken back into the very structure that produced the separation.

The body becomes embodied cognition.

Autonomy becomes self-directed learning.

Experience becomes experiential learning.

Wholeness becomes systems thinking.

The world becomes a world model.

What begins as a challenge to fragmentation becomes another concept within the fragmented field of knowledge.

Phenomenology therefore leaves us with a question more disturbing than whether Western thought can rediscover the body:

What is it about the structure of Western cognition that allows it to absorb even its own critique without fundamentally changing?

Perhaps the problem begins much earlier than philosophy. Perhaps it begins when knowing itself is separated from living—when the process through which an organism encounters the unknown, senses, explores, judges, acts and gradually forms understanding is converted into a product called knowledge. Once the product becomes separable from the process that created it, it can be stored, classified, analysed, transmitted and taught. The body that participated in its formation is no longer necessary for its acquisition.

At that point, disembodiment becomes much more than the philosophical separation of mind and body. It becomes a fragmentation of the integral formation of the human being. Knowing is extracted from living. Knowledge becomes a specialised domain. Reasoning and analysis increasingly operate upon the products of previous cognition, while sensory attention, intuition, curiosity, exploration, bodily judgment, relationship and participation become secondary.

This may explain an extraordinary feature of modernity: its alternatives often retain the cognitive structure of what they oppose. Conventional education and alternative education may disagree over methods while retaining the assumption that learning must be organised. Capitalism and its critiques may contest ownership and distribution while retaining industrial abstraction as their ground. Religious belief and atheistic rejection may oppose each other while continuing to conduct their dispute through propositions. Ecological thinking, embodied cognition, regenerative education and systems thinking may challenge fragmentation while themselves becoming frameworks, programmes, methodologies and professional fields.

The alternatives may differ profoundly in content.

But what if they continue to run on the same cognitive operating system?

Phenomenology took Western thought almost to this threshold. It recognised that the body and world had been left behind, but its own fate reveals an even deeper problem: modernity possesses an extraordinary capacity to turn the recovery of experience into knowledge about experience.

The question that follows is therefore no longer simply how to restore the body, the child or the world.

It is more fundamental:

What is disembodiment itself? When did knowing become separable from living? How did knowledge become more important than the integral formation of the being? And what is the operating system that repeatedly converts every attempt at fundamental change into another variation of the same paradigm?

That is the question to which the enquiry must now turn.

The body returned when the machine had to act. The child returned when the machine had to learn. The world returned when intelligence built predominantly from representations began to encounter the limits of representation. Yet long before artificial intelligence forced these rediscoveries, another movement within Western thought had already sensed that something fundamental had gone wrong. Phenomenology was, in many ways, an attempt to return from abstraction to experience, from the detached mind to the lived body, and from representations of reality to the world as it is actually encountered. What makes phenomenology particularly important to this enquiry is not simply that it spoke about the body and the world, but that it recognised the inadequacy of the very separation between mind, body, subject, object, and world that had shaped much of modern thought.

Beginning with Husserl and moving through Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology questioned the idea of a detached observer standing outside reality and constructing an internal representation of it. Husserl turned attention towards lived experience and eventually towards the lifeworld, the world already present before scientific explanation and theoretical abstraction begin their work. Heidegger radicalised this move through the idea of being-in-the-world, refusing to treat the human being and the world as two separate entities that must somehow establish a relationship. Merleau-Ponty brought the body even more decisively into this enquiry by showing that perception is not simply information arriving at a mind through sensory channels. We perceive as embodied beings already situated, moving, attending, responding, and acting within a world.

From the perspective of natural cognition, there is something remarkable about this philosophical development. Western thought, after centuries of privileging abstraction and the thinking mind, appears to turn around and rediscover that the human being was never a detached mind in the first place. The body had always been present, the world had always been present, and cognition had always occurred within their inseparable relationship. What philosophy was beginning to recover intellectually was precisely what a young child lives without having to understand it conceptually.

This is where a profound difficulty appears. The child does not experience something called “being-in-the-world”; the child is simply in the world. An artisan does not consciously integrate perception, movement, material, judgment, memory, body, and environment every time something is made. These have not first been separated in order to require integration. When a person walks across uneven terrain, handles wet clay, balances a load, judges the ripeness of a fruit, or responds to another person’s gesture, the living organism does not first construct a theory of embodiment and then act according to it. Sensing, movement, attention, memory, action, and understanding occur together within the situation.

Phenomenology recognised this pre-reflective condition with extraordinary sensitivity. Yet phenomenology encountered an unavoidable paradox: it could recognise pre-reflective experience only through reflection. What was lived had to become articulated; what preceded concepts had to become conceptualised before philosophy could speak about it. The lived body became the lived body. Being in the world became being-in-the-world. The world as encountered before abstraction became the lifeworld. The attempt to return from abstraction to experience necessarily took place through language, texts, arguments, concepts, interpretation, and thought.

This is not an argument against phenomenology, nor is it a complaint that philosophers used words. Philosophy could hardly do otherwise. The more difficult question is whether the mode through which the recovery was attempted could actually restore the condition being described. If a civilisation has undergone a deep cognitive reorganisation through literacy, schooling, abstraction, specialisation, and an increasing separation of knowledge from direct experience, can it reverse this merely by producing a more accurate philosophy of experience? Can the literate mind think its way back into a mode of cognition that precedes the dominance of literacy? Can the word, however subtle, return us to the world?

But there is another, perhaps even more revealing, question. Even if the original phenomenologists arrived at their insights through an authentic enquiry into experience, what happened once those insights were written down?

The movement had originally been from phenomenon to attention, from attention to insight, and from insight to articulation. But once the articulation became a text, another person could begin at the opposite end. The experience was no longer necessary as the starting point; the concept was already available.

What had emerged from phenomenological enquiry could now become knowledge about phenomenology.

And this is where the paradox deepens. A philosophy that attempted to return thought to experience could itself become something to be acquired primarily through thought.

When the Machine Could No Longer Live by Words Alone

The third accidental afterthought revealed by the history of cognitive science is the world.

The body returned when the machine had to act.
The child returned when the machine had to learn.
And now the world returns because intelligence built largely from representations begins to encounter a more fundamental problem:

What is intelligence actually learning from?

This question is especially revealing because modern education has, for centuries, answered it in one direction. The content of education is predominantly the description of the world. The child learns about gravity, plants, animals, materials, history, society, mathematics, geography—and eventually even experience itself—through language, books, images, explanations, and increasingly screens. The description becomes knowledge. The world becomes its illustration.

Yet at the frontier of artificial intelligence, this relationship is now being questioned.

The Literate Learns the Word; the Non-Literate Learns the World

There is a fundamental epistemic split at the root of the modern crisis: the literate learns the word; the non-literate learns the world.

This is not merely a cultural observation. It points to a profound biological reality: the world is the original content of natural cognition. Cognition is not the disembodied processing of symbols; it is a biological phenomenon forged through the organism’s direct participation in physical reality.

This simple fact has been entirely missing from the modern paradigms of both education and cognitive science. And it is only now, at the frontier of artificial intelligence, that this missing fact is forcing its way back into view.

The Biological Reality of Natural Cognition

Cognition did not begin as the manipulation of language. It began as a living organism’s biological necessity for navigating, surviving, and adapting within a physical environment.

For the child, the world is not a collection of facts to be memorized; it is the primary cognitive source. The child learns gravity by falling, material by handling, balance by moving, and consequence by acting. The world answers back. It resists, yields, breaks, and responds. Natural cognition is the body’s continuous, biological adjustment to this material reality. The world is the curriculum of biology.

The Great Inversion: Literacy Replaces the Territory

Literacy changed this relationship. Once knowledge could be codified and stored outside lived experience, description began to replace territory.

Modern education institutionalised this inversion. The child is no longer allowed to learn about the world directly; the child is taught about it through the word. The law of gravity precedes the experience of falling. The names of plants precede the relationship with the forest. The map precedes the territory. The word becomes the primary content, while the world is reduced to demonstration.

In this paradigm, the literate mind becomes highly skilled at handling descriptions, explanations, and symbols, while the biological capacity to engage directly with physical reality atrophies. The word displaces the world. Explanation replaces experience.

The Blind Spot of Cognitive Science

Cognitive science inherited this exact literate bias. For decades, it treated intelligence as a purely mental, computational process—a mind manipulating abstract symbols in a void. It studied the “software” of the mind while ignoring the biological “hardware” of the body.

Because cognitive science accepted the literate paradigm, it failed to see that cognition is inextricably bound to the physical world. It looked for intelligence in logic puzzles and language games, completely missing the fact that natural intelligence is formed through bodily participation in a complex, material environment. It studied the word and, in doing so, missed the world.

The Machine Forces the Return of the World

Artificial intelligence is now exposing the limits of this disembodied, word-centric paradigm.

Large language models represent an extraordinary achievement of literate civilisation. They learn from enormous bodies of human language and reveal just how much structure is contained within words. They do not encounter a mountain; they encounter what humans have written about mountains. They are brilliant at the word, but they are entirely disconnected from the world.

Yet as researchers attempt to build autonomous agents that can act, plan, and navigate physical environments, they are hitting a wall. Language prediction alone is not enough. Yann LeCun has argued for systems capable of learning internal models of how the world works. Meta’s V-JEPA 2 pursues this through large-scale video learning and robot interaction. Google DeepMind’s Genie 3 generates interactive environments for agents to act within. OpenAI’s computer-using agent combines visual perception, reasoning, and action. The machine is being pushed toward the world because intelligence built largely from representations cannot survive in reality.

The World Returns — But as a Model

Yet this rediscovery must be examined carefully. The world does not simply return—it returns reframed. For many AI systems, “the world” means video, images, sensor streams, interactive simulations, latent representations, predictions, and generated environments. A world model is precisely that—a model.

A million hours of video about reality is still not participation in reality. The camera has selected a viewpoint; the frame excludes everything outside it. Touch, smell, weight, temperature, bodily vulnerability, effort, and consequence may remain absent. The return from language to world models represents a significant shift, but not necessarily a return to natural cognition. The living organism begins somewhere else entirely: it does not first possess a model and then enter reality. It is already in reality.

The Difference Is Consequence

A child does not merely receive information about a world—the child belongs to it. A cup falls and breaks. The sound startles. A shard cuts. An adult reacts. Something valued may be lost. The child becomes cautious next time. The event does not merely update a representation—it enters the formation of the organism.

The world can resist expectation. Material can refuse intention. A body can be harmed. Another being can respond unpredictably. Something is always at stake. This is what gives the world an authority that representation cannot possess. The world answers back. And natural cognition remains answerable to it.

The Contradiction of Modernity

Here lies the profound irony of our time. AI researchers are trying to give machines what modern education takes away from children.

The machine needs direct interaction with its environment, physical feedback, and consequences to become intelligent. The child receives curriculum.
The machine needs autonomy. The child receives instruction.
The machine should explore. The child is guided.
The machine should learn from consequence. The child receives explanation before consequence has had time to teach.
The machine must build models from observation. The child is given the model first.

We are trying to reduce dependence on artificial intelligence while systematically creating dependence on natural intelligence. We ask how machines can learn more from the world, while education continues to ask how children can learn more from words.

The technological frontier is questioning an assumption that the educational system still treats as obvious.

The Real Content of Education

What is the real content of human learning? Is it information about reality—or reality itself?

Modern education has accumulated enormous valuable knowledge. The argument is not that books, mathematics, scientific descriptions, or abstract thought should disappear. The question is one of order. Does the word precede the world? Or does the world give meaning to the word?

A description of gravity becomes powerful when it names relationships already encountered. A botanical text becomes meaningful when the reader has learned to see plants. Mathematics becomes powerful when abstraction grows from lived relations of quantity, proportion, pattern, movement, and space. Formal knowledge can enormously extend cognition. But when description becomes the primary content before experience has formed its ground, the representation begins to replace what it represents. Education then produces knowledge about a world rather than knowledge through participation in it.

The World Was Never Missing

The irony is that the world did not have to be rediscovered. The child never left it.

Before schooling progressively moves cognition toward the word, the young child is already learning through gravity, material, movement, sound, space, and consequence. The world is not curriculum, teaching material, or educational resource. It is the original content of cognition.

If even our machines require an increasingly direct relationship with the world to become intelligent, we must confront an uncomfortable question: Why do we continue to separate children from the world to educate them?

Perhaps the future of intelligence does not lie in discovering a new source of knowledge. Perhaps it lies in recognising the one that was present before the word:

the world itself.

Yet this is not the first time modern thought has tried to return to the world. Long before AI began speaking of embodiment and world models, phenomenology had already questioned the detached mind and called for a return to lived experience, perception, body, and the world as encountered.

But another question then arises:

Can a civilisation recover lived experience through thought alone?

That is where phenomenology enters the story.

The Question Education Never Asked

The second accidental afterthought revealed by the history of cognitive science is the child.

The child had never been absent from psychology, education, or developmental research. Piaget, Vygotsky, Gibson, and many others had studied development long before contemporary artificial intelligence. The afterthought lies elsewhere.

Modern education did not organise itself around the question: How does the child already create understanding? It organised itself around another question: How can the child be taught what adults already know? The distinction is fundamental. The first question begins with the organism's intelligence; the second begins with knowledge already formed.

For generations, education has grown more refined in its curriculum, assessment, developmental stages, teaching methods, and learning outcomes. Yet the extraordinary fact remains strangely peripheral to education itself: a child gains some of the most basic capacities of human life before any formal teaching.

Then the machine had to learn. And suddenly the child became interesting in a different way.

The Paradox That Stopped AI

Early artificial intelligence could be supplied with rules, symbols, representations, and ever larger bodies of information. But constructing flexible intelligence revealed another difficulty. How does a system acquire understanding rather than merely receive information? How does it learn from incomplete experience? How does it recognise patterns in unfamiliar situations? How does it form expectations about objects, people, movement, cause, and consequence? How does it acquire language? How does it know what deserves attention?

The child becomes difficult to ignore because children perform these feats with astonishing efficiency. A child does not need millions of labelled examples before recognising a dog. A child does not need formal instruction in gravity before anticipating that an unsupported object will fall. A child learns language without grammar lessons. The young organism observes, imitates, repeats, varies, predicts, fails, adjusts, and slowly builds a fuller understanding of its world.

Artificial intelligence faced a paradox: the supposedly ignorant child was doing something that even the most sophisticated machines found extraordinarily difficult. The child now appeared not merely as someone who needed education, but as a clue to intelligence itself.

The Child Returns as a Learning Model

This produced an important shift. Researchers began asking whether machines might learn more like children. Developmental psychology, infant cognition, curiosity, imitation, intuitive physics, causal learning, active exploration, and developmental robotics became relevant to building more capable machines.

The rediscovery is real. It recognises capacities that conventional education often underestimates: autonomous exploration, rapid generalisation, learning through action, sensitivity to patterns, and the ability to form understanding without constant explicit instruction.

But the return is also revealing. The child enters the technological frame as a learning model. Curiosity becomes an exploration strategy. Play becomes a mechanism for discovering possibilities. Imitation becomes a learning procedure. Development becomes an architecture. Attention becomes selection. The child is examined for transferable principles that might make machines more adaptive.

What is discovered is not false. But something happens in the translation. The living child becomes a model of efficient learning.

The Child Is Not a Learning Algorithm

This is where the distinction between natural cognition and artificial learning becomes important. A child does not merely improve performance on tasks. The child is becoming capable. Every encounter changes not only what is known but the organism that knows.

Walking changes the world available to perception. Language changes relationships. Touch changes material judgment. Repeated participation changes skill. Trust changes exploration. Fear changes attention. Learning is inseparable from development because the learner itself is always being formed.

The child also has no external objective called “understand the world.” The world matters because the child is already living in it. People matter because children depend on them. Objects matter because they can be reached, dropped, carried, broken, desired, avoided, or used. Knowledge emerges within relationship and consequence. This is much more than data efficiency.

A machine-learning system may be designed to explore. The child explores because being alive already places the organism in an unfinished relationship with the world. This difference is easily lost when childhood is translated into computational terms.

The Most Revealing Contradiction — Teaching Machines, Stifling Children

The renewed scientific interest in childhood becomes particularly revealing when placed beside modern education. Artificial intelligence researchers have come to value capacities such as autonomous exploration, learning from limited experience, curiosity, interaction with environments, learning through consequence, self-generated variation, and flexible generalisation.

Yet formal education frequently reduces precisely these conditions. The child who could explore is instructed. The child who could follow curiosity is scheduled. The child who can learn from consequences receives an explanation beforehand. The child who could remain with uncertainty is given the answer. The child who could repeat until understanding forms is moved on by the timetable. The child who could form a question receives the teacher’s question.

This does not mean children should be left without adults, culture, language, or accumulated knowledge. The issue is more fundamental. Why does the machine project keep reaching for the autonomous learning of childhood while education keeps organising childhood around instruction?

The contradiction is difficult to overlook. We are trying to make machines less dependent on teaching while making children more dependent on it.

What AI Accidentally Reveals About Education

This is why the child’s return within cognitive science matters beyond artificial intelligence. It unintentionally raises questions that education should have asked long ago. If children naturally detect patterns, why is learning organised around explanation? If curiosity can organise attention, why is attention constantly directed? If action produces understanding, why does experience so often follow instruction rather than precede it? If children form causal expectations through interaction, why must knowledge first arrive as language? If learning is developmental, why do we treat knowledge as content that can be transferred apart from the forming of the organism?

So the attempt to build artificial intelligence produces an unexpected mirror. It reveals that intelligence may not begin where schooling begins. By the time formal education takes charge, much of the cognitive foundation has already been created. The child has learned to perceive, move, recognise, anticipate, imitate, communicate, judge distance, tell people apart, handle materials, acquire language, and take part in a social world. None of this waited for a curriculum.

Education enters after one of the most extraordinary periods of autonomous knowledge creation in human life—and then behaves as though learning has just begun. That may be the deeper afterthought.

Rediscovered, and Reframed

As with the body, the problem is not that modern science has discovered nothing important. Developmental research has greatly expanded our understanding of infancy and childhood. Contemporary AI researchers are right to be interested in the remarkable ways children learn.

The question is what happens when these capacities enter the technological frame. The child becomes valuable because the machine needs a better learning model. Childhood is translated into mechanisms. What had existed as the development of a living organism becomes a source of principles for building machines.

Modernity once again encounters something it had underestimated and reframes it according to the problem it is trying to solve. The body returned as embodiment. The child returns as a model of learning. And this raises the same question that runs through these essays: Can modern thought recover what it excluded without converting it into something usable?

Beyond Words, Beyond Curriculum

The history of artificial intelligence may therefore have accidentally made one important fact visible again: the child was never waiting to be made intelligent. The child was already at work creating understanding.

What needs explaining is not how adults can produce learning in children. The deeper question is how the conditions in which children naturally learn can stay intact as language, culture, formal knowledge, and adult participation enter their lives.

AI turns towards childhood because it wants to understand how intelligence develops. Education may eventually have to turn towards childhood for a more uncomfortable reason: to understand what it has been interrupting.

And once the child returns, another absence becomes hard to ignore. The child does not learn from words alone. The child learns a world. The third accidental afterthought is therefore the most revealing of all: the return of the world.

If the whole organism receives the situation, then the body cannot be understood merely as a platform carrying cognition. This is where the modern rediscovery of embodiment remains incomplete.

A robot may possess cameras, microphones, pressure sensors, joints, balance systems, and continuous feedback from its surroundings. It may move, adapt, and learn through interaction. In an important technical sense, it is embodied.

But a living body is not simply an intelligent system equipped with sensors and movement. It breathes, hungers, tires, heals, fears, trusts, grows, suffers, and dies. Its relationship with the world is not optional because its existence depends upon that relationship. The world therefore does not merely provide information. For the organism, something is always at stake.

The Body as Organism

A platform carries processes. An organism is the process of living.

The hand does not merely execute instructions generated by the mind. Touch changes perception. Material resistance changes intention. Movement changes what the eye can see. Failure changes expectation. Body, world, action, and understanding continually reorganise one another. Knowing forms within this relationship.

This is why biological need matters. Hunger is not simply data indicating low energy. Pain is not merely a signal. Balance is not simply successful motor control. These experiences matter because the organism can flourish, suffer, or be harmed. Value therefore does not have to be added to cognition afterwards. It begins within life itself. The organism continuously senses what nourishes or damages, what fits or resists, what is excessive or sufficient, what is safe or threatening.

Here cognition, value, and aesthetic judgment have not yet been separated.

There Is No Such Thing as Embodied Learning

This also exposes the confusion in the contemporary expression “embodied learning.”

Learning is embodied. There is no biologically disembodied learner to whom the body must later be added. Even the child sitting silently in a classroom is learning bodily. The body experiences stillness, authority, interruption, comparison, approval, correction, and dependence.

Adding movement does not necessarily change this. A child may jump to memorise numbers, gesture to remember words, or use clay to illustrate a predetermined concept. The body has become active, but the structure of learning may remain entirely controlled from outside.

Embodiment is not bodily activity added to mental content. It is the condition in which understanding forms through the organism’s own participation in a situation.

A child balancing on a stone is not receiving a lesson on balance. An artisan shaping clay is not applying mental knowledge through the hand. Weight, gravity, pressure, timing, material, judgment, movement, and consequence form one event. There is simply knowing.

When Embodiment Becomes Method

Modernity has a remarkable capacity to convert what it rediscovers into method. Process becomes methodology. Empathy becomes a design tool. Play becomes pedagogy. Embodiment becomes a learning technique. The missing reality returns, but inside the same institutional frame that had excluded it.

A school may therefore speak of embodied learning while still deciding what the child will experience, when it will happen, what must be discovered, and how the result will be assessed. The body returns. Autonomy does not.

This is why recovering the body requires more than introducing bodily activity. It requires restoring the conditions in which the organism can attend, act, experience consequence, and form understanding autonomously.

The Strange Inversion

The contradiction becomes particularly visible today. Machines are increasingly being given richer sensory systems, environments, movement, exploration, feedback, and greater autonomy so that they can learn from the world. Children are increasingly given representations of the world.

Machines are encouraged to explore. Children are directed. Machines are expected to learn through interaction. Children are told what they are expected to learn before the encounter begins.

We are reconstructing technologically some of the conditions through which living organisms naturally become capable, while weakening those same conditions in childhood. The body has become important to the machine at precisely the moment when modern life asks less and less of the human body as an organ of knowing.

The Body as Afterthought

This is why the body remains an afterthought. The rediscovery is real. Cognitive science has increasingly recognised perception, movement, environment, action, materiality, and bodily participation. But the body can return to theory without returning to life.

It can return as sensorimotor architecture while biological autonomy remains outside the frame. It can return as embodied learning while the learner remains controlled. It can return in pieces while the living organism was never fragmented.

A genuine recovery therefore requires something more fundamental than adding the body back to cognition. It requires recognising that cognition was never separate from the living organism in the first place. The body is not where intelligence is placed. The living body’s relationship with the world is where intelligence begins.

And once this is recognised, another afterthought becomes unavoidable. A living body does not arrive fully formed. Its capacities emerge through years of sensing, moving, imitating, exploring, failing, repeating, anticipating, and participating in the world. The body therefore leads us directly to the child.

If intelligence develops through the activity of a living organism, then perhaps the child was never waiting to be made intelligent through teaching. Perhaps the child was already engaged in the far more fundamental process of creating understanding.

That is the next accidental afterthought.