AoE #34 - Is Everything Agential?

🎙️Episode 34: Is Everything Agential!? (Intelligence, coherence, and the living world through the ideas of Michael Levin) 🎧Hey there, this is James Tripp — and welcome (back) to Agents of Everything. This is episode 34 - a bit of a reboot, really. It’s October 2025 as I record this, and I haven’t released as many episodes this year as I’d have liked. So this one’s both a reorientation and a deep dive - a return to why I began this project in the first place…AoE Sponsors…* Learning Hypnotic Phenomena work* Join the AoE Nexus* Learn Changework* Book me for coaching or changework* Get My book (Hypnosis Without Trance: How Hypnosis Really Works)Remembering the “Why”Simon Sinek’s famous idea — Start With Why — feels particularly relevant here. When we first begin something, there’s a reason, a pulse, a purpose that fuels it. But over time, as we find what works, the process takes over and the why drifts into the background.That’s what happened to Agents of Everything for me. It started as a free-form space to explore ideas beyond my hypnosis and change-work content — a space for curiosity, philosophy, systems thinking, and the art of living creatively and intelligently in a complex world.I began this because I wanted to explore:* How we adapt to an ever-changing world.* How we engage creatively and intelligently with that world.* How we bring about better outcomes — for ourselves and for others.That curiosity led me from martial arts and Qigong, through NLP and hypnosis, into complexity science, Daoism, and philosophy. All of it points toward the same question:How can we live artfully and intelligently within an uncontrollable and largely unpredictable, living, dynamic reality?Adaptive vs. AdaptedBefore we dive into the main topic, here’s a quick distinction that’s been travelling with me for a long time:* Adapted means fitted to an environment — optimized for what is.* Adaptive means capable of transforming when the environment changes.We need both. Being adapted gives us stability; being adaptive keeps us alive in motion. When we lose adaptiveness — whether as individuals, institutions, or societies — we lose our capacity to grow.That balance between adaptation and adaptability is part of what I mean by agency. It’s also part of what Agents of Everything explores.Enter the Word “Agential”The theme of this episode is a single word: agential.I came across it through the work of Michael Levin, a biologist doing extraordinary research on intelligence in living systems. Levin explores how intelligence shows up in biological materials — not just in brains, but in tissues, cells, and even sub-cellular systems.He uses the term agential materials to describe biological matter that demonstrates goal-directed, adaptive behavior. In other words — materials that act as if they have intelligence.Intelligence All the Way DownLevin’s research shows that intelligence isn’t confined to the human brain. It’s distributed throughout life — all the way down.He’s famous for creating xenobots (made from frog cells) and anthrobots (made from human cells) — tiny living entities that, remarkably, repair damaged tissue and even build replicas of themselves. What’s astonishing is that their DNA contains no explicit instructions for doing this. The organizing intelligence seems to arise through bioelectrical fields — the invisible patterns of communication and coherence between cells.This echoes what Rupert Sheldrake called morphic fields, or organizing patterns that shape form and function. It also resonates with Plato’s “realm of forms,” and with countless metaphysical traditions that see consciousness or intelligence as fundamental, not emergent.Levin’s conclusion?All matter is potentially agential.That means everything — from a cell to a person to a planet — possesses some degree of agency, intelligence, and purposefulness.The Nature of CoherenceIf everything is agential, then intelligence isn’t just about thinking — it’s about cohering.Each cell in your body is an intelligent agent, but they’re not all doing their own thing. They cohere into a larger intelligence: you. When coherence breaks down — as in cancer — the cells start operating as independent entities, no longer participating in the collective intelligence of the organism.Levin’s approach to cancer research is fascinating: instead of destroying “bad” cells, he explores ways of restoring coherence — reestablishing communication so that cells reintegrate into the whole.That idea applies just as beautifully to the psyche as to the body.Psychological CoherenceIn changework, when people struggle, it’s often because inner parts are out of sync. There’s a loss of internal coherence — a kind of inner “civil war.” The solution isn’t to cut out the “bad parts,” but to help the system rediscover harmony.When the parts realign, creativity and agency return. ...