1. The World as a Single Living Information Field
The Droplet That Remembers the River
Picture a droplet of water in a river. The droplet is its own thing: it has a shape, a temperature, a motion of its own. And yet it belongs to the river. The river carries it, warms it or cools it, hurries it along or holds it back. The river, in turn, belongs to the ocean — and whatever happens to the ocean, whether tide or storm or current, eventually reaches our droplet too.
We are made the same way. Each of us is an independent living system, with our own purposes, rhythms, and desires. Yet each of us is also part of a family, a team, a city, a country, of humanity itself. And whatever happens at those larger scales reaches us in turn — quite literally, down to the cells of the body.
This is not merely a poetic image but a physiological principle, one rooted in how living systems are organized. It was articulated by Academician K. V. Sudakov, a student of P. K. Anokhin and one of the central developers of the theory of functional systems. Sudakov proposed what he called the “holographic” principle of functional systems, which, in the language of functional-systems theory, runs roughly as follows:
*“From atoms to the cosmic scale, functional systems lower in the hierarchy reflect, in the activity of their elements, the activity of the higher-order systems that unite them. And those higher-order systems, in turn, program the activity of the functional systems nested within them”*¹.
Put plainly: in this picture, lower-level systems are constrained and organized by the higher-level systems that contain them, while those higher systems shape the activity of everything nested within. The part reflects the whole. What happens to us at the level of our cells is shaped in large part by what happens at the level of the organism; what happens at the level of the organism is shaped by what happens in the family, the team, society. And the reverse holds too: every “higher” level is built out of “lower” ones and depends on their condition. The author reads this as a general organizing principle that links biological and social scales.
This is precisely why, when we set out to talk about health, we cannot confine ourselves to cells, tissues, and organs. We have to talk about people, relationships, communities, the information environment. Health is not a property of the body taken in isolation. It is a property of a living system — at all its levels at once.
Modern Biology: The Same Law, a New Language
Remarkably, the modern science of collective intelligence has arrived at a strikingly similar picture — by a wholly different route, through cellular and evolutionary biology. The key figure here is Michael Levin, professor of biology at Tufts University and director of the Allen Discovery Center.
In his landmark paper Bioelectric Networks: The Cognitive Glue Enabling Evolutionary Scaling from Physiology to Mind, Levin argues that each of us is not “a single mind” but a collective, distributed cognition spread across an enormous number of cells — cells that coordinate with one another through bioelectric signals and together form a coherent being with purposes, desires, and memory². The same logic scales upward: organisms form communities, communities form societies, societies form a civilization.
In joint work with Karl Friston (originator of the free-energy principle and of the concept of active inference in neuroscience), Levin develops the idea of nested selves: each level of organization — cell, tissue, organ, organism, group — has its own form of goal-setting and its own boundaries of “self,” even as it sits embedded within larger, higher-order “selves.”
These ideas can be compared with — though they are not identical to — Anokhin’s theory of functional systems; the author reads the two traditions as convergent. They are simply written in contemporary English and supported by a different body of experimental data. This convergence between the Russian physiological school and modern neuroscience lends plausibility to the view that we are parts of larger-scale living systems, and that our condition depends on the quality of our connection to them.
What This Means in Practice
From this follows a very practical conclusion. When a person senses that “something is wrong” — they are exhausted, falling ill, losing interest in life, no longer able to manage their emotions — the first place to look is not the lab report and not the list of symptoms. The first place to look is the quality of their connections: with themselves, with the people close to them, with their work, with meaning.
When connections break down at the level of the physical body — between the cells of the organism — it tends to show up as illness. The same holds at the social level: when connections between people break down, it is typically felt as pain and can lead to declining health. And here is something especially telling — social rejection engages some of the same brain regions as physical pain³. To the brain, “I’ve been rejected” and “I’m in pain” are not entirely separate signals.
This is exactly where the answer to the question “why do we need Functional Systems Facilitation” begins. To see it in full, let us look at what science has shown about the link between the quality of relationships and the quality of life.