19 September 2026

What changes when we understand a person, a classroom or an organisation as an activity that must continually be made possible? We begin to look beyond a snapshot of its performance. We ask how it comes into being, how it continues and what its activity makes possible for others.

Traill Dowie and Julien Tempone-Wiltshire’s 2026 article in Process Studies brings systems thinking, emergence, feedback and autopoiesis into conversation with process philosophy. Its central proposal is that human beings are best understood through ongoing organisation and relationships. It is a philosophical synthesis, rather than a new experimental study. Dowie and Tempone-Wiltshire, 2026, pp. 28–48.

What the paper contributes

The authors connect organisational thinking with Bateson, biological self-production and emergent consciousness. They allow that analysing components has a useful, limited role. I value the paper as an invitation to inquiry, while finding that several conceptual transitions need greater precision.

A useful companion is Anne Sophie Meincke’s argument linking biological autonomy with a process view of life. Her central point is that an organism’s autonomy need not make it an independent, self-contained substance. Organisational closure can be understood as an accomplishment of continuing activity. That helps place this discussion within an existing scholarly conversation rather than a single, newly discovered worldview.

Three distinctions that matter

1. Scientific compatibility and philosophical proof. The paper’s movement from complexity to a process ontology invites a further question: what would establish that this interpretation is necessary, rather than one fruitful interpretation among others? A convincing philosophical position needs explicit arguments about its alternatives. Observing relationships or unexpected outcomes does not, by itself, decide every question about what ultimately exists.

For AE, the corresponding discipline is to state the level of the claim. A way of interpreting reality, a proposed explanation of an event and an intervention that improves an outcome have different evidential requirements. A classroom observation cannot settle an entire metaphysics; a metaphysical commitment cannot establish that a particular teaching intervention works.

2. Feedback and nonlinearity. The discussion on page 40 associates feedback and iteration with nonlinear processes too closely. Feedback also occurs in linear systems, as Åström and Murray’s Feedback Systems makes clear in its treatment of linear state and output feedback. Returning an output to influence a later input describes a relationship; whether that relationship is linear is a separate mathematical question.

This matters in practical inquiry. Calling a difficulty a feedback loop should start an investigation: what returns, through which channel, with what delay and effect? It should not end the explanation. Positive and negative feedback describe amplification and counteraction; neither label alone tells us whether the consequences are desirable for the people involved.

3. Self-production and general interdependence. The Varela, Maturana and Uribe account of autopoiesis distinguishes the organisation that constitutes a living unity from its reproduction and developmental history. That precision matters when the vocabulary travels into education, organisations or AI. We need to specify what is being produced, which processes produce it, and what makes the proposed unity identifiable.

A service that responds to its users, a team that repeats a routine and a living cell should not be treated as equivalent merely because each changes over time. AE also proposes a broader philosophical interpretation of autopoiesis. That extension requires its own argument and explicit criteria; it does not follow automatically from the biological theory.

Where AE can develop the conversation

The EdgeLab research programme asks what makes a particular activity possible, how its conditions are sustained and what changes through its performance. This directs attention to a distinction between constitutive realisation—how an activity becomes actual—and temporal maintenance—how it remains possible over time.

Consider a hypothetical school introducing an AI-supported discussion activity. A lesson may run successfully once because a teacher prepares examples, checks responses and gives students extra support. That first success does not tell us whether the school has the staffing, time and resources to continue it. Repetition may depend on unpaid preparation or on students quietly helping one another.

The research question becomes concrete: what work produced the apparent success, who performed it and can those conditions be renewed? Researchers could compare preparation time, patterns of participation, students’ explanations and the support needed across several lessons. They should also examine rival explanations, including familiarity with the topic and changes in assessment.

Meaning needs similar care. A fluent AI response, a student’s understanding and an assessment record are different accomplishments. Moving words from one setting to another does not guarantee that their meaning or justification travels with them. Observing those transitions can reveal exactly where further explanation, judgement or support is needed.

Keeping power and consequences visible

A relational account must still identify unequal powers to decide. In the school example, students, teachers, managers and software suppliers all contribute, but they do not have the same authority over procurement, assessment or workload. Saying that everyone is connected can obscure these differences unless the analysis names them.

Continuation is also not an ethical verdict. A practice may endure by exhausting participants or excluding some of them. An AE inquiry should therefore examine whose ability to act improves, whose costs disappear from official accounts and what would enable repair or a justified decision to stop.

An assessment for EdgeLab readers

I read this paper as a productive partner for AE: an invitation to take becoming and organisation seriously while keeping the concepts open to scrutiny. Its strongest use for our work is to generate sharper questions. The next step is to specify processes, compare explanations and show what the resulting inquiry helps people understand or change.

Article reviewed: Dowie, T., and Tempone-Wiltshire, J. (2026). Process Philosophy and Complexity Science: Systems Theory, Emergentism, Feedback Loops, and Autopoiesis. Process Studies, 55(1), 28–48. Journal record and DOI. Author-uploaded full text.

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