part of Issue 02

Being Gaia – On the Architecture of Culture and Consciousness

Michel de Vries
Groningen (NL), 2025

First, there was empathy

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels saw history as a process that leads to consciousness through conflict and class struggle. But what if another trajectory is possible? One driven not only by struggle, but by mutual attunement. What if history is fundamentally understood as a process of relational refinement, with empathy as its driving force?

In this essay, empathy is conceived as an evolutionary drive: a connective force that permeates all life and gives it direction. It manifests in encounters, the sharing of meaning, attunement and co-existence, forming the foundation for both biodiversity, which emerges through the fragile forms of homeostasis in which ecosystems function optimally. Socially, this ecological empathy reappears in (self-)consciousness and culture.

What appears ecologically as resilience and balance takes shape as relational intelligence in living beings. Research in social neurobiology and evolutionary psychology confirms: empathy is an adaptive mechanism that promotes survival through attunement. It enables us to sense, understand, and anticipate the environment while experiencing ourselves as a node within a whole. What begins on a small scale between individuals grows into patterns of cooperation, shared memory, and shared meaning. From attunement emerges the fabric from which cultures grow. Viewed this way, civilization is a refinement of a deeper infrastructure: an empathic architecture of connectedness.

Consciousness is part of the network, emerging from the embodied, through the emotional, into the cognitive domain of knowledge and imagination. The highly cognitive human entwines even more with their surrounding ecology, without abandoning the biological origins. Empathy springs from that same ecology, influences it, and develops alongside the world in which it exists. This way, empathy is not only a product of culture but also one of its reciprocal sources, and an organizing principle that precedes language and thought.

Empathic Impulse: From Stone to Self-Consciousness

What makes the difference between a stone and a human? Not the number of atoms, not the mass. The difference lies primarily in the history of connections from which they are composed.

Assembly theory, developed by Sara Walker and Lee Cronin¹, proposes that complexity is not determined by what something is, but by how it came to be. How many steps were required to form it? How many unique assemblies, operations, and interactions had to occur before it could exist? The more difficult it is for something to appear by chance, the higher its so-called assembly index is.

A stone has a low index. Its form is the product of relatively simple, repeatable processes. An organism, on the other hand - and even something immaterial like a language or consciousness - arises from a series of nested interactions: layers within layers, in which each step builds upon the previous one. It is an iterative process, in which repetition is never mere copying, but is constantly adjusted, reinforced, or corrected based on what came before - or what is predicted.

From this perspective, assembly theory also becomes a lens for evolution. Life, ecosystems, and even cultures are not leaps from nothing, but sums of relational histories. They emerge layered and intertwine with their environments. It is this layering that enables systems to anticipate developments and respond accordingly. Here, the insights of Karl Friston² and Mark Solms³ are relevant: they describe life and consciousness as processes of prediction within a dynamic probabilistic framework, organized around so-called Markov blankets.

For example, a forest is not a collection of isolated trees, but a network of relationships between trees, fungi, animals, other plants, and microbes. Every change - from a tree falling to seeds sprouting - affects the entire system and is simultaneously predicted and compensated for by the rest of the network. Consciousness works in a similar way: it resonates with its environment, anticipates changes, and grows through interactions with other organisms. This way, life, empathy, and culture are not leaps from nothing, but sums of layered, relational histories.

A probabilistic framework indicates how living systems constantly attempt to foresee what will happen - not in terms of certainties, but in terms of probabilities. The framework is dynamic because it continually recalibrates in response to new experiences and environmental changes. According to Friston and Solms, this predictive process forms the core of both life and emotional consciousness: an ongoing play of perception, estimation, and anticipation.

Within this process, the Markov blanket plays a key role. The concept refers to the boundary that separates a system from its environment while simultaneously allowing interaction with it. An organism continuously predicts and adjusts based on what passes through that boundary, thereby reducing uncertainty and securing its own survival. It develops, in effect, an internal compass that is recalibrated with each interaction.

Where Friston and Solms speak of Markov blankets, i propose thinking in terms of Markov blobs, as a conceptual tool. Their boundaries are rarely sharp, more often they are porous, dynamic, and temporary. Borders leak, blur, flow into one another or overlap. What we perceive as a discrete system turns out to be part of a network of relational membranes that constantly coincide, shift, and reconfigure. The consciousness of an individual, a group, or even an entire culture can be understood as a play of blobs that are in touch with one another. This is where expectations, meanings, and perceptions are constantly renegotiated. Within this dynamic, empathy manifests. It is the capacity of blob-systems to adjust models in relation to others, reducing uncertainty and enabling attunement.

Empathy is a driving force of relational dynamics. It reduces uncertainty of existence as well by serving as a building block of social stability; shared predictions and shared meanings form the basis for cooperation that give rise to dynamic networks of attunement. There individuals and groups can read and anticipate one another’s intentions - an evolutionary drive making cultures possible.

Assembly theory teaches that complex systems arise through the accumulation of relationships and interactions over time. Empathy is an interaction that reinforces itself: it builds upon previous experiences of attunement and provides a context in which new attunements emerge. Just as an organism predicts and responds to its environment, humans predict each other’s emotions, intentions, and behaviors - and adjust accordingly.

Empathy weaves into this circular process, for from it emerge the social structures that give rise to new layers of attunement and complexity. Culture, language, and rituals are an archive of predictive knowledge embedded in material and symbolic patterns.

Empathy is both outcome and instrument of this complexity, thus forming the axis around which human interactions and cultural structures unfold. From this perspective, we can look at the ways in which this dynamic manifests and transforms in biological practice - from organic attunement to cultural patterns.

Social Consciousness Through the Empathic Lens

This empathic lens model sees social empathy as a drive that enables attunement with others and with the world. The drive spans a spectrum, from pre-reflective corporeality to cultural and ecological self-awareness. It is conceived here in four forms of attunement, the last being speculative. While the layers have evolved over time, they do not form a hierarchy: each new layer builds upon the previous one(s), which therefore continue to influence the Markov-blob.

Relational Metabolism: Minimal Meaning Exchange Without a Nervous System

Empathy as phenomenological biological attunement

At this level, empathy is a form of relational attunement, in the absence of a nervous system. Examples include Physarum polycephalum (slime mold) or mycorrhizal networks (fungus-plant symbiosis via roots), which exhibit cooperative behavior. This domain, which Hoffmeyer⁴ refers to as the semiosphere, involves minimal meaning exchange between organism and environment. The self functions here as a metabolic node: sensitivity is not feeling but a biological necessity to maintain homeostasis in an entropic world (Margulis⁵).

Sensory and Affective Attunement: Senses as Gateways to Engagement

Empathy as existentially attuned action

With the emergence of senses and emotions, an acting, affective self arises. Smells, vibrations, and touches serve as portals to relational attunement, not mere stimuli. Bats navigate via echoes, insects communicate with pheromones. Each embodied receptivity evokes a corresponding response. Flowers redden to attract attention, birds sing more beautifully when heard - perception becomes a reciprocal cycle. This forms a pre-emotional tuning: the body becomes receptive to meaningful interactions even before conscious emotions emerge.

More complex nervous systems give rise to primary emotional systems. As Panksepp⁶ defines them, these include CARE (nurturing and attachment), SEEKING (curiosity and exploration), and FEAR (vigilance and avoidance). These systems provide the affective foundation for empathy: caring for offspring, cooperating in groups, and resonating with the emotional states of conspecifics.

Affective empathy enables long-term social structures but has limits. Overstimulation - through group stress, excessive demands, or widespread threat - reduces readiness for attunement and care. In such situations, regulatory mechanisms activate: the organism may withdraw, dampen emotions, dissociate, or channel stress and affect socially and physically. Empathy thus remains a dynamic balance between openness and protection, attuned to the organism’s capacity and its social niche.

Reflective Consciousness: Self-Image Shaped by Mimetic Interaction and Perspective-Taking

Empathy as mimetic attunement

At this level, the self learns to know itself through the other. Interpersonal empathy rests on mimetic attunement, affective resonance, and cognitive perspective-taking. Theory of mind (Premack & Woodruff⁷) and Tomasello’s⁸ concept of shared intentionality provide the foundation for understanding and anticipating the mental states of others. Frans de Waal and Stephanie Preston⁹ emphasize that empathy is a layered process that also encompasses perception, action, and relational dynamics, thereby contributing to group cohesion. René Girard¹⁰, by contrast, points to its shadow side: rivalry and exclusion driven by mimetic desire. The mimetic self is a continual recalibration of self-image, shaped in socio-politically charged mirrors. Affects circulate within economies of proximity and distance. Social norms and expectations determine what confirms or strengthens the self-image, and who is deemed ‘worthy’ of our empathy (Butler¹¹, Ahmed¹²). Here, empathy becomes selective and political: who deserves our involvement - and, just as importantly, who does not?

These three layers - from pre-reflective receptivity to reflective self-consciousness - show how empathy is shaped both biologically and socially. They lay the groundwork for a fourth speculative layer: ecological and collective consciousness, extending beyond individual interactions, in which the self recognizes itself within broader networks of living systems and their relationships.

Ecological and Cultural Consciousness: Empathy Beyond One’s Own Group

Empathy as an ontological expansion of the self

In this forward-looking layer, empathy shifts from social mirroring - the recognition and reflection of emotions within one’s immediate circle - to a broader receptivity to the environment. The self attunes to a larger whole: other people, animals, landscapes, future generations, and non-human systems. Cognitive imagination and experience merge here: by empathizing with what others feel or experience, that experience itself becomes part of consciousness, again generating new possibilities for imagination and attunement.

From this perspective, imaginary others gain an inherently conscious place in the moral world - natural because they move within our embodied and experiential field, conscious because this receptivity must probably be practiced and maintained, and embedded because earlier layers of consciousness continue to exert influence.

The collective self remains receptive to mimetic and emotional influences, while no longer forming impermeable walls but rather porous membranes. Within this fragile receptivity, a fundamental choice has been made: no more withdrawal, but further attunement. In Rebecca Solnit’s¹³ terms, this marks the tension between isolationism and interconnectivism. Choosing isolationism limits resonance with others and ecological systems, causing the self to retreat into closed, homogeneously structured, and exploitative contexts, impoverishing social and ecological connectivity. Choosing attunement, on the other hand, unfolds a richer world: relational beauty and resilience, rooted in networks of mutual connections, symbioses, and other interdependencies, allowing resilience to blossom.

Empathy here acquires new cognitive, creative, and ethical dimensions. Expanding mental frameworks determines what is valued within broader social and ecological networks and opens the self to an inclusive mode of being, aligned with Haraway’s¹⁴ tentacular thinking, Ingold’s¹⁵ ecological connectivity, and Guattari’s¹⁶ ecosophy. Arne Naess’¹⁷ deep ecology emphasizes spiritual and existential engagement with the larger whole, beyond the anthropocentric self.

Layer four, therefore, is a fundamental ontological widening of the self - a self that requires new frameworks, ethics, and practices to honor the complexity and reciprocity of life while subtly constraining humanity’s anthropocene dominance.

The four forms of attunement build on each other evolutionarily, but they do not form a ladder. Each layer continues to resonate within the next (cf. Frans de Waal, Stephanie Preston, and the PAM¹⁸), so that empathy is not a linear progression but an interwoven network of old and new forms.

Towards an Empathic Transformation

The neoliberal paradigm is built on competition, instrumentalization, and exclusion. Dependence is interpreted as weakness, vulnerability as a deficiency, and anything that does not yield immediate returns loses its value and is discarded. This leads to structural alienation, both from one another and from the ecological context.

An eco-empathic orientation functions according to a different principle: it opens itself to signals of reciprocity, seeks balance instead of domination, and understands vulnerability as a call to cooperation. Empathy naturally gravitates toward prosocial attunement, and the challenges of the Anthropocene lend this drive great urgency. As Eva von Redecker¹⁹ emphasizes with her notion of life-affirming practices, these are practices that stand in stark contrast to the neoliberal logic. In this way, networks of care and engagement can emerge, sustained by this attunement, forming the foundation for sustainable communities and ecologies. An eco-empathic orientation is becoming an ever-greater necessity: without it, the fabric of social and ecological systems collapses - a matter of being or not-being.

Beneath the superficial layer of cultural conditioning lie, as Rifkin²⁰ notes, deeper empathic structures. These explain why people, especially in times of crisis, act collectively and prioritize shared values over individual gain. Resilience and survival rarely emerge from individual strength or endurance; they only arise collectively.

Yet everyday empathy is no panacea. It offers trust, love, companionship, and solidarity, yet remains vulnerable, contradictory, and prone to misuse. Politics and culture often render empathy parochial - focused on one’s own group, reinforcing exclusion and anthropocentrism. Without critical reflection, empathy is more likely to uphold the existing order than to break it.

To fundamentally rethink our relationship with the world, an expansion of the empathic repertoire is a necessity - not merely as a moral appeal, but above all as a biological and social (r)evolution toward a broader mode of being-in-the-world. Art may play a crucial role in this process. It can open spaces for practice, thought, reflection and collective connection.

Major cultural paradigm shifts are rare, but not impossible. After all, we are empathic apes with an extraordinary capacity for imagination, memory, and creativity - faculties that may allow us to prepare for an anthropocene future that is certain to come. A comparison with our closest relatives shows just how flexible social organization can be: bonobos and chimpanzees share almost identical DNA, yet live in radically different social worlds. If such closely related species can develop such divergent cultures, why shouldn’t we also be capable of cultural transformation?

A starting question for this essay was: can art change the world? It can. Art influences culture - not directly through political power, but through intersubjective engagement. It operates on time scales: sometimes it creates a shockwave, but more often ideas spread slowly, gradually reshaping values and norms. Over the long term, art helps transforming the framework of societies - the network of shared assumptions and expectations that shapes how we understand the world.

As Bourdieu²¹ shows, art and cultural practices shape social norms and tastes, implicitly influencing our collective worldview. Rancière²² emphasizes how art can reorganize the boundaries of the political and the perceptual, opening up new ways of seeing and acting. At times, history seems to accelerate on its own, with art as trailblazer and catalyst for change.

Perhaps Marx and Engels were even more right: capitalism carries its own endpoint - just not in the way they imagined. Whether it leads to something better depends on our capacity for empathic acceleration.

Afterword

My thanks go to Elisabetta Cuccaro, Laurens Krüger, and Alie B. for their critique and patience. I also want to acknowledge the role of ChatGPT. During the process, i came to know the AI system better - as it came to know me - in what was like a cold-blooded empathy experiment. Form, style, and parts of the notes bear clear traces of this collaboration, yet the insights remain strictly my own.

Endnotes