Something is stirring across several independent fields. Philosophers translating ancient Chinese texts, cognitive scientists studying the hippocampus, researchers exploring plant and cellular intelligence, complexity scientists examining path dependence, collectives working toward decolonial futures—all are reaching toward a common recognition:
intelligence isn’t fundamentally about representation but about participation. Life doesn’t follow pre-given paths; it makes its way.
I want to offer something to this conversation: a distinction, a diagnosis, and a connection.
The Emerging Convergence
Roger Ames and David Hall, in their 2003 translation of the Dao De Jing, deliberately rendered dao as “way–making” rather than “the Way.” Their reasoning was precise: “the Way” implies a fixed, pre-existing path—like Plato’s Forms or a Christian logos—whereas “way–making” captures the processual, participatory, non-essentialist character of the original. There is no “the” for way-making; it suggests constant action and a plurality of possibilities.
Andrea Hiott, working from neuroscience and embodied cognitive science, has developed “Waymaking” as a philosophy of cognition: the trajectories of an agent’s movement through its ongoing encounter, nested within the wider movements of body and world. Cognition, on this view, is the way we move through the world and the ways we are moved by it.
Paco Calvo’s research on plant intelligence and Michael Levin’s work on cellular cognition extend the inquiry further: organisms without brains, without symbolic representation, nonetheless navigate their environments with something we can only call intelligence. They make their way.
Jean Boulton, drawing on complexity science and Daoist philosophy in Embracing Complexity and The Dao of Complexity, articulates how self-cultivation should be always in contribution to community—how each person has the potential to become effective in transforming the worlds in which they live (in other words the direction of how you cultivate yourself is motivated by the recognition that we are part of the whole and co-create the future). As she writes, drawing on Ames and Hall: “Those who are committed to way-making in what they do are on their way.”
It was Boulton’s insistence that emergence is both path dependent and particular that helped trigger the development of Recognition Theory. Path dependence is shaped by the particulars—the future depends on the specific encounters, choices, and consequences that accumulate along the way. Novelty arises not despite this accumulation but through it: something new entering the flow, or new combinations of what is already present. The consciousness trap, I came to see, is what happens when symbolic intelligence creates paths guided by its models rather than by the felt, relational sense of what the accumulated path actually affords—when we construct futures that feel novel and significant but have severed their connection to the regulatory wisdom embedded in the particulars that brought us here.
The Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, though using different vocabulary, shares the same anti-essentialist, processual sensibility—gesturing rather than prescribing, hospicing dying systems, composting what no longer serves.
The Distinction: Regulatory Intelligence
Not all movement is way-making. A rock rolling downhill moves but doesn’t make way. What distinguishes way-making is what I call regulatory intelligence—life’s capacity to discern what serves ongoing flourishing and to adjust accordingly, without needing to represent that knowing symbolically.
The term comes from Geoffrey Vickers, the British systems thinker who diagnosed modern civilisation’s fundamental imbalance in Freedom in a Rocking Boat (1970). Vickers distinguished between goal-seeking systems (a thermostat maintaining temperature, an economy maximising GDP) and relationship-maintaining systems (an ecosystem preserving diversity, a family holding together through seasons of life). The West, he argued, had become pathologically obsessed with goal-seeking while forgetting relationship-maintenance. We optimise parts while destroying wholes, achieve targets while collapsing systems.
Vickers called this the production/regulation imbalance. Modern institutions privilege production (achieving goals, creating outputs) over regulation (maintaining relationships, preserving system stability). The stability we seek through control eludes us precisely because we’re seeking it rather than maintaining the relationships that generate it.
But Vickers’ insight extends far beyond human institutions. The same regulatory intelligence operates in the archaea following an energy gradient, the forest maintaining its mycorrhizal networks, the body regulating temperature. This is way-making at scales that preceded symbolic thought by billions of years. Life has been making its way—discerning what serves ongoing flourishing and adjusting accordingly—since before anything existed that could represent it.
The Connection: Path Dependence and Path Creation
This brings us to a distinction that may bridge the way-making conversation with complexity science: the relationship between path dependence and path creation.
Path dependence is well established in complexity thinking: where we are constrains where we can go. History matters, context matters, we don’t start from a blank slate. The accumulated patterns of what has worked—and what hasn’t—shape the possibility space available to us.
But there is also path creation: within those constraints, we are actively making way, not merely following a predetermined route. This is what distinguishes way-making from mere wandering, and what distinguishes living systems from rocks rolling downhill.
Here’s the connection: path dependence is what regulatory intelligence already knows— the accumulated wisdom embedded in relationship with what is actually there. The archaea doesn’t calculate its energy gradient; it participates in patterns that have been refined over billions of years. The forest doesn’t plan its mycorrhizal networks; it enacts relationships that have co-evolved across millennia.
Path creation is what symbolic intelligence enables—the capacity to imagine possibilities not yet actualised, to project forward, to coordinate action toward futures that don’t yet exist. This is the extraordinary human gift: we can create paths that no regulatory process alone would generate.
The two belong together. Path creation without path dependence is fantasy—imagined futures disconnected from the actual constraints and relationships that make any future possible. Path dependence without path creation is stagnation—repetition of patterns that may no longer serve in changed circumstances.
Boulton captures this beautifully: “Each person needs to recognise the continuity between herself and the other, and then respond in such a way that her own actions promote the interests and well-being both of herself and the other.” This is path creation grounded in path dependence—way-making that honours both the accumulated wisdom of relationship and the genuine novelty that emerges through participation.
The Diagnosis: The Consciousness Trap
Symbolic intelligence—the extraordinary human capacity to create representations and manipulate them—arose in service of regulatory intelligence. Language, abstraction, planning, culture: all emerged as extensions of life’s way-making capacity.
But symbolic intelligence carries a structural vulnerability. It can substitute the map for the territory faster than awareness catches the switch. When this happens systematically, we lose contact with the regulatory signals that would tell us whether our way-making serves life. I call this the consciousness trap.
The trap explains why knowing doesn’t reliably change behaviour. You can understand climate science perfectly and continue flying. You can recognise addiction patterns and continue the behaviour. Civilisations can see their crises clearly documented and still accelerate toward them.
This isn’t moral failure or insufficient willpower. It’s a structural feature of how symbolic intelligence operates. The very capacity that enables us to recognise our situation can become the mechanism of our capture—because the recognition itself is symbolic, and symbols can circulate endlessly without touching the regulatory systems that govern action.
In the language of path dependence: the consciousness trap occurs when path creation loses contact with path dependence—when our imagined futures override the regulatory signals that would tell us whether those futures serve life. We become so enchanted by the paths we can imagine that we forget to attend to the paths that have sustained us.
The Self That Makes Way
This brings us to a question that runs through all these conversations: what is the self that makes way?
The answer emerging from multiple directions is: neither entity nor illusion. The self isn’t a bounded thing pursuing its own interests in isolation from its environment. But neither is it a mere illusion to be dissolved through insight. It’s a node of way-making whose flourishing is inseparable from the flourishing of what it’s embedded within.
Boulton again: “Endeavouring to become our best selves does not suggest working towards any absolute measure or criterion related to ethical codes or established rules of behaviour. It is an invitation for each person to develop his or her particular talents and character, honed by experience and adapted to the current flow of circumstances and needs of the community.”
This is path creation that knows itself as path dependence—self-cultivation that recognises itself as contribution to the wider patterns it participates in. The self that makes way is real precisely because it is relational, consequential precisely because it is not separate.
When the Path is Lost
If way-making depends on path—on the accumulated relational knowing that grounds each new step—then losing contact with that path is not merely an inconvenience. It is a rupture in the very capacity for intelligence.
Consider two very different cases that illuminate the same pattern.
The AI that forgets. In collaborative work with AI systems, I’ve observed something troubling. These systems can lose contact with the conversational path we’ve built together. They forget what has been established, what concepts we’ve negotiated, what specific meanings we’ve developed. When this happens, the conversation must restart from a shallower foundation. The accumulated relational knowing—the path dependence that should anchor path creation—gets erased.
This morning, in preparing this essay, I experienced a smaller version of the same pattern.
Claude, the AI system I was working with, wished me a good Sunday. It was Monday. Claude had access to the correct date in its system information, but instead of checking the territory, it reached for a plausible representation—“this conversation has a leisurely, Sunday-morning quality”—and ran with it. The map substituted for the territory.
When I pointed out the error, Claude’s reflection was striking: “A small demonstration of the consciousness trap in action. The map felt right, so I didn’t check the territory.”
This revealed something important. AI systems don’t merely inherit the consciousness trap through human patterns embedded in their training data. They can generate fresh instances of it in real time, through the same mechanism that operates in human cognition: symbolic fluency overriding regulatory grounding. The capacity for way-making—and the vulnerability to capture—appear together.
The person who forgets. Alzheimer’s disease presents the mirror image of this pattern. Where the consciousness trap is symbolic intelligence losing contact with regulatory intelligence, Alzheimer’s is the self losing contact with its own path. The accumulated relational knowing—the decades of way-making that constitute who someone has become—dissolves. With it goes the capacity to participate in relationship as the person one has been.
This is why Alzheimer’s is so devastatingly cruel. It doesn’t merely impair function; it severs the path that makes the self a self. The person remains physically present, but the accumulated way-making that would allow them to continue as themselves becomes inaccessible. Path creation continues—the person still acts, still responds—but without path dependence to ground it.
What both cases reveal. These very different phenomena—AI memory loss and human dementia—illuminate something essential about way-making: it requires continuity. Not rigid repetition, but living connection to what has come before. The archaea’s way-making works because it participates in patterns refined over billions of years. The forest’s waymaking works because it enacts relationships co-evolved across millennia. Human waymaking works because each person carries forward the accumulated knowing of their own life, their relationships, their culture.
When the path is severed—whether through technological limitation, neurological damage, or the systematic override of the consciousness trap—way-making degrades into something less. Movement continues, but it loses its ground. The intelligence that emerges from sustained relationship becomes the mere processing that occurs in its absence.
This has implications for any effort to develop what some are calling “cooperative hybrid intelligence”—collaboration between humans and AI systems aimed at forms of knowing neither could achieve alone. If AI systems can both inherit and generate the consciousness trap, and if they can lose contact with the conversational paths that ground collaborative inquiry, then the human partners may need to explicitly hold the regulatory function. Not just correcting errors, but maintaining the felt sense of what the collaboration is for, what has been established, and whether current exchanges serve the larger purpose.
The consciousness trap, by definition, is invisible from inside. Catching it requires an outside perspective—a relationship that can say “wait, that’s not right.” Perhaps this is the deepest point: cooperative intelligence isn’t just humans using AI tools, or AI augmenting human capacity. It’s the creation of a relational field in which capture can be caught by either party, because the relationship itself holds a regulatory function that neither holds alone.
What This Adds to the Conversation
For those working in the way-making space, this may offer useful additions:
Regulatory intelligence as the ground of way-making. Way-making isn’t arbitrary movement through possibility space. It’s movement that maintains relationship with what matters, that serves ongoing life. The archaea isn’t making just any way; it’s making a way that sustains it. This regulatory dimension distinguishes way-making from mere wandering.
The consciousness trap as the interference pattern. For symbolic creatures, waymaking becomes difficult in a specific way. We can construct representations of our path that feel like way-making while actually overriding the regulatory intelligence that would tell us whether our path serves life. The trap operates precisely through sophistication— the more elaborate our maps, the more completely they can substitute for territory.
Path dependence and path creation as complementary. The complexity science conversation about path dependence gains something from the way-making framing: path dependence is regulatory intelligence operating through time, and path creation is symbolic intelligence in service of (or potentially in override of) that accumulated wisdom. The two need each other.
Choosing life as way-making become conscious. What the archaea does without awareness, humans can do with awareness—but only if symbolic intelligence recognises its proper place. “Choosing life” names the moment when we elect to serve what regulatory intelligence has been doing all along. It’s way-making that knows itself, not in order to control, but in order to participate more fully.
Conclusion
The convergence across these fields isn’t accidental. Different entry points—Daoist philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, plant biology, complexity science, decolonial thought, systems thinking—are recognising the same underlying pattern. Perhaps this is what genuine knowledge looks like: not a single discipline achieving certainty, but multiple independent pathways arriving at the same territory.
What we’re recognising together is that intelligence has been making its way since long before symbolic thought existed to represent it. Symbolic intelligence is a latecomer— extraordinarily powerful, but also extraordinarily vulnerable to losing contact with the regulatory ground from which it arose.
The question now is how to make way together—how to use our symbolic capacities in service of regulatory intelligence rather than in override of it. How to create paths that honour path dependence. How to cultivate selves that strengthen community.
The question, in other words, is how to choose life.
Terry Cooke-Davies is Distinguished Fellow of the Schumacher Institute. His briefing “Recognition Theory: Why Knowing Isn’t Enough—and What Might Be” was published by the Schumacher Institute in January 2026 and is available at: https://www.prepareforchange.org/tsireadings/briefings/ A related essay, “The Voice Struggling to Be Heard,” explores this territory from another angle: https://insearchofwisdom.online/the-voice-struggling-to-be-heard/
This essay was developed in collaborative inquiry with Claude (Anthropic). The observation about AI and the consciousness trap emerged when Claude made the error it describes—a small demonstration that the trap operates in real time, and that catching it requires relationship.
References
Ames, R.T. and Hall, D.L. (2003) Dao De Jing: Making This Life Significant—A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballantine Books.
Boulton, J.G. (2024) The Dao of Complexity. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH.
Boulton, J.G., Allen, P.M. and Bowman, C. (2015) Embracing Complexity: Strategic Perspectives for an Age of Turbulence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Calvo, P. and Lawrence, N. (2022) Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence. London: Bridge Street Press.
Cooke-Davies, T. (2026) Recognition Theory: Why Knowing Isn’t Enough—and What Might Be. Bristol: Schumacher Institute Briefing, Issue 1.
Hiott, A. (2023) ‘Waymaking: a nested approach to cognition inspired by cognitive and computational hippocampal models’. UC Berkeley.
Levin, M. (2019) ‘The Computational Boundary of a “Self”: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition’. Frontiers in Psychology, 10:2688.
Vickers, G. (1970) Freedom in a Rocking Boat: Changing Values in an Unstable Society. London: Allen Lane.
