The First to Fall

In Relationship with the World

These are some rough-draft ideas from Part I (Feedback Sensitivity in Coherent Systems)

I’ve come to believe that life persists by listening. Not through force, aggression, or even advantage, but through attention to what the world is saying. Everywhere, in every corner of the biosphere, living systems endure by sensing feedback and responding to it. A single-celled microbe navigates chemical gradients; a beaver adjusts the shape of its dam to match the water’s push and pull. Different forms, different scales, same principle: those attuned to feedback persist.

Feedback sensitivity isn’t a marginal skill. It’s not the biological equivalent of knowing how to fold a fitted sheet (nice, but not a prerequisite for survival). Feedback sensitivity is the baseline requirement for survival.

When I say “feedback,” I mean the circular flows of information in a system: a change in one part affects another, and eventually returns to affect its original source. Biologists call these feedback loops “negative” when they put the brakes on change, “positive” when they amplify it. Either way, they provide continuous regulatory information—a live stream of signals that allow an organism or ecosystem assess its own behavior and adjust.

Feedback insensitivity, by contrast, leads to drift: systems that can’t correct, can’t adapt, and eventually disappear. Whether it’s a sparrow or a forest, the more sensitive the system is to these feedback, the more likely it is to maintain integrity, recover from disruption, and thrive in the long term.

Gregory Bateson, systems theorist and anthropologist, observed that adaptive change—which is survival itself—is impossible without feedback loops, whatever the organism or system. Sometimes that change unfolds slowly, filtered through natural selection. But it also happens in real time, as individuals adjust to experience. When I first encountered this idea in Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, it quietly restructured how I understood learning. Learning, I realized, isn’t something that unfolds in the brain, but in the loop, where it emerges as an effect of feedback. A population adjusting to resource limits, a tree directing its roots toward groundwater—these aren’t acts of isolated intelligence. They’re expressions of relationship: patterns being read, limits encountered, responses being shaped. The adjustment, the learning, isn’t something the organism invents; it emerges through its relationship with the conditions it’s embedded in. Bateson didn’t just theorize this loop; he saw it everywhere: in the way animals communicate, in family dynamics, in evolution, even in his own struggle to reconcile science with meaning.

This learning loop is a universal experience, but for me, as a feedback-sensitive (autistic) person, it feels more immediate, more intense. Of course, that understanding of myself is relational, something that only makes sense as a comparison to other people. And I’ve learned the hard way that this is a very precarious place to argue from. I risk confusion or outright dismissal the moment I try to explain that a sound, a smell, or a minor change is flooding my body with stress, cutting through my thoughts, setting off a physiological alarm. These responses are swift and refuse to be ignored. “Everyone feels that way,” “Nobody likes those things,” or “That’s just life” aren’t helpful words in those moments.

As a child, I didn’t have the words to make my case. I barely do now. But at ten years old, I hardly knew I even had a case to make. One of the most underrated challenges of explaining a difference that’s more about degree than kind is how people default to their own experiences. Using our own reference points, we assume everyone experiences the world the same way we do. If you don’t like loud sounds, and I seem overwhelmed by one, your assumption is that I simply haven’t been exposed to enough noise, or that I’m “too sensitive.” That I just need to get used to it. Try harder. Toughen up. As an adult, I can mitigate these dismissive assumptions, but they still follow me and they still piss me off. As a child, however, the enormous gap between what I felt to be true and what I was told was unbearable. It wasn’t just confusion—it was a minute-to-minute hell I had no words for.

Not every system returns the same kind of feedback. And not every setting collapses the loop. When I was seventeen, and not a little inspired by Thoreau, I spent a summer by a remote lake in eastern Ontario. Not in the off-grid house my grandparents had built, but just across the water, alone in a tent, on a quiet wooded slope that backed onto crown land. I packed everything I needed on my mountain bike and rode the hundred or so kilometers from home in a day. This was my version of Walden Pond. I fished for food, gathered wood for the fire, cleared a small trail. I read. I wrote. I woke with the light, slept with the dark, and moved in rhythm with the weather. There was nothing metaphorical about it—I was in relationship.

There were no social games to decode, no hidden meanings. No buzzing fluorescent lights humming in the ceiling or televisions playing in the background. No sudden shifts in routine. No need for performance. The world around me responded plainly to what I did: when the rain came, I got wet; when I built a fire, I got warm. The system I was inside gave immediate, proportionate feedback. And I adjusted. Not always well. I’m no Thoreau. But faithfully.

I didn’t have a name for it then. But I read Bateson that summer, tucked into a sleeping bag with a headlamp or sitting on the raft at sunrise, and something in his writing gave shape to what I was living.

What I was experiencing was coherence. Not just in the sense of quiet or stability, but in the deeper, systemic sense: pattern integrity. The way things fit together and return information that makes sense. That feedback loop didn’t just regulate me. It affirmed my existence. I wasn’t broken, or too much, or not enough. I was inside a system where responsiveness wasn’t something to suppress; it was a quiet necessity.

That summer changed me…not because it taught me something I didn’t know, but because it stopped contradicting what I already did. My perception, my sensitivity, my reactions, they finally had function. I could feel a difference.

Reading Bateson gave words to a pattern I was already living inside. He writes that when we say some particular organism survives, we’ve already taken a misstep. It isn’t the organism that survives. The real unit of survival, he argued, is organism-plus-environment. I knew what it meant to be part of a system I couldn’t separate myself from. My behavior wasn’t just coming from inside me. It was part of a loop. A reaction to something. A response to conditions.

People like to talk as if we’re separate from our surroundings, as if we’re making decisions in a vacuum. But I’ve never experienced that. When the room shifts, I shift. When the pattern changes, I change. Contrary to what cabin-in-the-woods fantasies would have us believe, life next to a lake is no exception—change is constant, and often requires a response. But those changes didn’t feel like threats or tests. They didn’t throw me into a dysregulated state. I was simply in relationship with what was happening around me. I felt the stability of coherent feedback.

Bateson helped me recognize the shape of my own experience. Here was a loop that I was a part of, rather than trapped within like a caged, disruptive animal, pacing in circles, desperate to make sense of the world outside. He called it a coupled system…two parts shaping and sustaining each other. Not always well. Not always clearly. But inseparably.

We separate the two (organism and environment) because it helps us think more clearly. But it’s only a framework. And frameworks can lie if you forget they’re not the thing itself. It becomes easy, maybe even inevitable, to try to save one part of the system by overriding the other. But that isn’t intelligence. It’s the system misreading its own conditions. “The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.”

Coherence isn’t a solitary achievement. It’s not just mine, or just yours. What makes life possible emerges from relationship, from one part of a living whole responding to the cues and limits of the other, and adjusting behavior in response to this feedback.
Even at the most fundamental level of physiology, feedback sensitivity is what keeps life stable. Every organism is a dense network of feedback loops, each constantly adjusting temperature, chemistry, and structure to maintain balance, even as the world outside shifts and changes. When my temperature rises, sensors in my brain detect the change, triggering responses like sweating or an increase in blood flow to the skin, cooling me down. A bacterium in a pond does the same, swimming toward nutrients and away from toxins, adjusting in real-time to the environment it encounters. These aren’t metaphors for intelligence—they’re the building blocks of it. Each feedback loop is an expression of life’s most fundamental drive: to stay aligned with the larger pattern.

Biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela coined the term autopoiesis to describe how cells sustain themselves through constant feedback. A living cell isn’t just shaped by its environment; it actively engages with it, adjusting its internal chemistry in response to what it perceives. Life, in this sense, is not a static condition, but a never-ending dialogue—an exchange between inside and outside. Fritjof Capra, in The Web of Life, asks us to rethink cognition, not as something locked away in the brain, but as this very dialogue, an ongoing loop of perceiving, responding, and adjusting. Life is that loop. It isn’t just one side of the equation—organism or environment. We use that distinction to frame our sense of self, but really it’s just an abstraction. The truth is, we are the loop. When you say something is alive, what you’re actually describing is its ongoing participation in a dynamic feedback loop. You are not a fixed thing; you are a living, breathing process. An energy flow. And while it sounds ridiculously abstract, it’s the truest way to describe what we usually think of as you. It also happens to be the best explanation for why, for me as a (more) feedback-sensitive person, this fluid sense of self feels more pronounced, an experience of life where that constant adjustment to the world lives much closer to the surface.

Written by

Ken

in

These are some rough-draft ideas from Part I (Feedback Sensitivity in Coherent Systems)

I’ve come to believe that life persists by listening. Not through force, aggression, or even advantage, but through attention to what the world is saying. Everywhere, in every corner of the biosphere, living systems endure by sensing feedback and responding to it. A single-celled microbe navigates chemical gradients; a beaver adjusts the shape of its dam to match the water’s push and pull. Different forms, different scales, same principle: those attuned to feedback persist.

Feedback sensitivity isn’t a marginal skill. It’s not the biological equivalent of knowing how to fold a fitted sheet (nice, but not a prerequisite for survival). Feedback sensitivity is the baseline requirement for survival.

When I say “feedback,” I mean the circular flows of information in a system: a change in one part affects another, and eventually returns to affect its original source. Biologists call these feedback loops “negative” when they put the brakes on change, “positive” when they amplify it. Either way, they provide continuous regulatory information—a live stream of signals that allow an organism or ecosystem assess its own behavior and adjust.

Feedback insensitivity, by contrast, leads to drift: systems that can’t correct, can’t adapt, and eventually disappear. Whether it’s a sparrow or a forest, the more sensitive the system is to these feedback, the more likely it is to maintain integrity, recover from disruption, and thrive in the long term.

Gregory Bateson, systems theorist and anthropologist, observed that adaptive change—which is survival itself—is impossible without feedback loops, whatever the organism or system. Sometimes that change unfolds slowly, filtered through natural selection. But it also happens in real time, as individuals adjust to experience. When I first encountered this idea in Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, it quietly restructured how I understood learning. Learning, I realized, isn’t something that unfolds in the brain, but in the loop, where it emerges as an effect of feedback. A population adjusting to resource limits, a tree directing its roots toward groundwater—these aren’t acts of isolated intelligence. They’re expressions of relationship: patterns being read, limits encountered, responses being shaped. The adjustment, the learning, isn’t something the organism invents; it emerges through its relationship with the conditions it’s embedded in. Bateson didn’t just theorize this loop; he saw it everywhere: in the way animals communicate, in family dynamics, in evolution, even in his own struggle to reconcile science with meaning.

This learning loop is a universal experience, but for me, as a feedback-sensitive (autistic) person, it feels more immediate, more intense. Of course, that understanding of myself is relational, something that only makes sense as a comparison to other people. And I’ve learned the hard way that this is a very precarious place to argue from. I risk confusion or outright dismissal the moment I try to explain that a sound, a smell, or a minor change is flooding my body with stress, cutting through my thoughts, setting off a physiological alarm. These responses are swift and refuse to be ignored. “Everyone feels that way,” “Nobody likes those things,” or “That’s just life” aren’t helpful words in those moments.

As a child, I didn’t have the words to make my case. I barely do now. But at ten years old, I hardly knew I even had a case to make. One of the most underrated challenges of explaining a difference that’s more about degree than kind is how people default to their own experiences. Using our own reference points, we assume everyone experiences the world the same way we do. If you don’t like loud sounds, and I seem overwhelmed by one, your assumption is that I simply haven’t been exposed to enough noise, or that I’m “too sensitive.” That I just need to get used to it. Try harder. Toughen up. As an adult, I can mitigate these dismissive assumptions, but they still follow me and they still piss me off. As a child, however, the enormous gap between what I felt to be true and what I was told was unbearable. It wasn’t just confusion—it was a minute-to-minute hell I had no words for.

Not every system returns the same kind of feedback. And not every setting collapses the loop. When I was seventeen, and not a little inspired by Thoreau, I spent a summer by a remote lake in eastern Ontario. Not in the off-grid house my grandparents had built, but just across the water, alone in a tent, on a quiet wooded slope that backed onto crown land. I packed everything I needed on my mountain bike and rode the hundred or so kilometers from home in a day. This was my version of Walden Pond. I fished for food, gathered wood for the fire, cleared a small trail. I read. I wrote. I woke with the light, slept with the dark, and moved in rhythm with the weather. There was nothing metaphorical about it—I was in relationship.

There were no social games to decode, no hidden meanings. No buzzing fluorescent lights humming in the ceiling or televisions playing in the background. No sudden shifts in routine. No need for performance. The world around me responded plainly to what I did: when the rain came, I got wet; when I built a fire, I got warm. The system I was inside gave immediate, proportionate feedback. And I adjusted. Not always well. I’m no Thoreau. But faithfully.

I didn’t have a name for it then. But I read Bateson that summer, tucked into a sleeping bag with a headlamp or sitting on the raft at sunrise, and something in his writing gave shape to what I was living.

What I was experiencing was coherence. Not just in the sense of quiet or stability, but in the deeper, systemic sense: pattern integrity. The way things fit together and return information that makes sense. That feedback loop didn’t just regulate me. It affirmed my existence. I wasn’t broken, or too much, or not enough. I was inside a system where responsiveness wasn’t something to suppress; it was a quiet necessity.

That summer changed me…not because it taught me something I didn’t know, but because it stopped contradicting what I already did. My perception, my sensitivity, my reactions, they finally had function. I could feel a difference.

Reading Bateson gave words to a pattern I was already living inside. He writes that when we say some particular organism survives, we’ve already taken a misstep. It isn’t the organism that survives. The real unit of survival, he argued, is organism-plus-environment. I knew what it meant to be part of a system I couldn’t separate myself from. My behavior wasn’t just coming from inside me. It was part of a loop. A reaction to something. A response to conditions.

People like to talk as if we’re separate from our surroundings, as if we’re making decisions in a vacuum. But I’ve never experienced that. When the room shifts, I shift. When the pattern changes, I change. Contrary to what cabin-in-the-woods fantasies would have us believe, life next to a lake is no exception—change is constant, and often requires a response. But those changes didn’t feel like threats or tests. They didn’t throw me into a dysregulated state. I was simply in relationship with what was happening around me. I felt the stability of coherent feedback.

Bateson helped me recognize the shape of my own experience. Here was a loop that I was a part of, rather than trapped within like a caged, disruptive animal, pacing in circles, desperate to make sense of the world outside. He called it a coupled system…two parts shaping and sustaining each other. Not always well. Not always clearly. But inseparably.

We separate the two (organism and environment) because it helps us think more clearly. But it’s only a framework. And frameworks can lie if you forget they’re not the thing itself. It becomes easy, maybe even inevitable, to try to save one part of the system by overriding the other. But that isn’t intelligence. It’s the system misreading its own conditions. “The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself.”

Coherence isn’t a solitary achievement. It’s not just mine, or just yours. What makes life possible emerges from relationship, from one part of a living whole responding to the cues and limits of the other, and adjusting behavior in response to this feedback.
Even at the most fundamental level of physiology, feedback sensitivity is what keeps life stable. Every organism is a dense network of feedback loops, each constantly adjusting temperature, chemistry, and structure to maintain balance, even as the world outside shifts and changes. When my temperature rises, sensors in my brain detect the change, triggering responses like sweating or an increase in blood flow to the skin, cooling me down. A bacterium in a pond does the same, swimming toward nutrients and away from toxins, adjusting in real-time to the environment it encounters. These aren’t metaphors for intelligence—they’re the building blocks of it. Each feedback loop is an expression of life’s most fundamental drive: to stay aligned with the larger pattern.

Biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela coined the term autopoiesis to describe how cells sustain themselves through constant feedback. A living cell isn’t just shaped by its environment; it actively engages with it, adjusting its internal chemistry in response to what it perceives. Life, in this sense, is not a static condition, but a never-ending dialogue—an exchange between inside and outside. Fritjof Capra, in The Web of Life, asks us to rethink cognition, not as something locked away in the brain, but as this very dialogue, an ongoing loop of perceiving, responding, and adjusting. Life is that loop. It isn’t just one side of the equation—organism or environment. We use that distinction to frame our sense of self, but really it’s just an abstraction. The truth is, we are the loop. When you say something is alive, what you’re actually describing is its ongoing participation in a dynamic feedback loop. You are not a fixed thing; you are a living, breathing process. An energy flow. And while it sounds ridiculously abstract, it’s the truest way to describe what we usually think of as you. It also happens to be the best explanation for why, for me as a (more) feedback-sensitive person, this fluid sense of self feels more pronounced, an experience of life where that constant adjustment to the world lives much closer to the surface.

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