The Defensive Intelligence of Life: Natural Autonomy and the Self-Regulating Organism

In every living being, autonomy is not a philosophical abstraction but a biological fact. Life organizes itself. It resists entropy, maintains coherence, and acts to sustain its own continuance. Yet no organism survives by inward stability alone. To live is to be exposed—to weather uncertainty, interact with change, and continually adapt. This dynamic relationship between organism and environment is what may be called natural autonomy: the self-regulating intelligence of life as it navigates a world of flux.

In martial practice as in nature, survival depends not merely on defence, but on adaptation—the capacity to read, respond, and regulate in concert with shifting conditions. The study of natural autonomy thus becomes more than biology; it becomes a philosophy of living equilibrium, offering insight into how human beings can cultivate resilience, foresight, and moral agency in a complex world.

The Outward Turn: From Biological to Natural Autonomy
Having conceptually established self-preservation and biological autonomy as the inner architecture of life, the focus now turns outward. The next step is natural autonomy: the organism’s capacity to sustain itself through active regulation and engagement with its environment. Whereas biological autonomy as previously argued secures internal coherence, natural autonomy coordinates that coherence with external conditions, enabling survival in a world that is unpredictable, shifting, and often hostile.[1]

This outward orientation incurs costs. Organisms must continually allocate energy and resources toward monitoring, adjusting, and restoring equilibrium. Peter Sterling observes regulation itself as energetically expensive and ongoing, requiring continuous investment rather than passive maintenance.[2] Building on this physiological picture, enactive and ecological approaches emphasize that regulation is inherently meaningful as well as mechanical. Organisms do not simply endure their surroundings but interpret them as a form of sense making, establishing significance in relation to survival.[3]

Natural autonomy thus names the shift from sheer self-preservation to adaptive coordination. It extends the defensive logic of life into active regulation, where survival depends on interpreting and negotiating external conditions rather than merely resisting them. The next section develops a more precise definition of natural autonomy and identifies its core features as being goal-directed regulation, sense-making, and graded responsiveness across the spectrum of life.

Defining Natural Autonomy: Regulation, Meaning, and Sense-Making
Natural autonomy refers to the organism’s capacity to regulate itself internally in relation to changing external conditions. Whereas biological autonomy secures structural integrity through ongoing self-maintenance, natural autonomy extends this principle outward, coordinating internal processes with external demands in ways that sustain viability. [4] To call such regulation goal-directedness does not yet imply conscious intention; rather, as Hans Jonas emphasized, it means that living activity is inherently normative—organized around survival-relevant viable ends.[5]

Living systems achieve this through more than just passive reactive mechanisms. They are embedded and structurally coupled with their environments, continuously exchanging matter, energy, and information in ways that shape both organism and niche. Varela and Thompson describe this coupling as the basis of sense-making: organisms do not simply and passively endure external conditions; rather, they negotiate them, sustaining their individual identity through dynamic exchanges that are inherently normative.[6] In this sense, the environment is never encountered as neutral—it is always lived as significant and meaningful, either sustaining viability or threatening it. [7]

This definition highlights natural autonomy as goal-directed, normative, and environmentally coupled. But sense-making does not appear as a single undifferentiated form. It unfolds in degrees—ranging from basic reactivity in simple organisms to predictive capacities in more complex animals, reaching more refined reflective awareness in human beings.[8] [9] The next section turns to this graded character by examining natural autonomy across multiple scales of life.

Natural Autonomy Across Scales of Life
This graded character of sense-making can be observed across the spectrum of life Even the simplest organisms regulate in this way: a bacterium in a water soluble environment orients itself towards nutrient-rich conditions and avoids toxins.[10] More complex animals display flexible strategies, mobilizing resources not reactively but in advance, coordinating physiology with environmental changes, and modifying behavior in light of past experience. At higher levels, regulation becomes increasingly anticipatory. McEwen and Gianaros describe the HPA axis as a system that mobilizes energy in advance of demand, a principle consistent with Peter Sterling’s account of allostasis. Together, their work shows that natural autonomy includes prediction as well as reaction. [11] [12] At its peak, sense-making culminates in consciousness; and in humans, it extends even further into reflective awareness, where the world is encountered as significant, remembered, symbolized, and evaluated in normative terms. [13]

This graded responsiveness is also evident across structural scales.  At the cellular level, immune regulation coordinates defences against pathogens, distinguishing self from non-self.[14] At the organismal level, behavior flexibly balances the demands of feeding, fleeing, or defending, echoing previously mentioned ethological insights from Tinbergen and others.[15] Beyond the individual, at the ecological level, processes of more complex cooperation and niche construction extend survival through collective adaptation, as argued by John Odling-Smee and colleagues in their framework of ecological inheritance.[16] Taken together, these capacities define autonomy as an active system of self-regulation enacted within a dynamic world.

Viewed across these scales, a consistent pattern of logic emerges: viability demands are not equally relational, but rather are nested and hierarchically structured. At the most basic level, organisms preserve their physical integrity; at higher levels, they safeguard reproduction, cooperation, and social cohesion. In human beings, this hierarchy culminates in the defense of autonomy and agency. Self-defence thus traverses this hierarchy, preserving the conditions under which higher-order forms of autonomy, agency and culture can emerge.[17]

Having seen how natural autonomy manifests across scales, the next section shifts focus from structure to time—tracing how autonomy develops from immediate reactivity to adaptive regulation.

From Reactivity to Adaptive Regulation
A defining feature of natural autonomy is the progression from immediate reactivity to adaptive regulation. Reactive behavior is immediate and stimulus-bound: withdrawal from heat, contraction when touched, or acceleration of metabolism under oxygen deprivation. Such reactions are essential, but they are limited—tethered to the present moment with no capacity to adjust for context or anticipate future needs.[18]

Adaptive regulation, by contrast, organizes responses in light of both current and projected conditions. Organisms integrate past experience, environmental feedback, and anticipated demand to balance short-term pressures with long-term viability. Hans Jonas observed that living beings are not only reactive but oriented toward preserving their form over time—a task that requires interpretive adjustment rather than reflex alone.[19] This developmental progression deepens self-regulation, shifting life from mere reaction to orientation toward unfolding and continuous temporal patterns.

Examples illustrate this gradient. Bacteria alter flagellar rotation in proportion to nutrient gradients, integrating chemical signals over time rather than flipping between on/off reactions.[20] Birds migrate in anticipation of seasonal change, conserving viability across generations.[21] Mammals cache food against future scarcity, drawing on memory and foresight to extend survival across time.[22] These cases reveal an expanding temporal horizon, where regulation evolves from immediate reaction to strategies that span days, seasons, and even lifetimes.

What distinguishes adaptive regulation is its reliance on feedback loops and plasticity. Organisms refine their responses to present signals and to accumulated patterns of experience improving survival across changing conditions and time. Eric Kandel’s work on synaptic plasticity demonstrates how even simple conditioning modifies behavior in ways that extend viability over time.[23] In higher animals, this plasticity includes learning and conditioning; in humans, it culminates in culture and symbolic planning. Across all cases, the principle is the same: environmental signals matter because they are evaluated for relevance to viability, and behavior is shaped accordingly.[24]

This shift reflects the movement from indiscriminate reaction to relevance realization[25]—the active discernment of which aspects of the environment are significant for present and future viability.[26] Seen in this way, the progression from reactivity to degrees of regulation is more than a biological upgrade; it is a reorientation of life itself, toward a world that must be interpreted as supportive, threatening, or uncertain. This recognition prepares the ground for the next step where autonomy is never exercised in isolation, but always through embeddedness in an environment.

Environmental Embeddedness: Living Through Relationship
Natural autonomy cannot be reductively understood apart from the environments in which it is exercised. Organisms are not closed machines operating in isolation; they are open systems, living only through continuous exchange with their surroundings. Erwin Schrödinger and later Ilya Prigogine emphasized, that organisms can only endure by importing energy and matter while exporting entropy.[27] Embeddedness names this type of reciprocity: where external conditions are not simply received but actively incorporated into the organism’s regulatory logic. Relevance realization clarifies how this occurs:[28] organisms parse their surroundings into what James Gibson, in ecological psychology, called affordances—fields of action possibilities that sustain or threaten life.[29]

This reciprocal relationship is evident across different domains of life. Plants reorient their leaves toward light, recalibrating growth and hormone distribution in response to shifting conditions, a phenomenon well documented in plant physiology. The human immune system depends on—and is shaped by—trillions of microbial partners in the gut microbiome; where disruptions in this ecological balance can impair immunity, digestion, and even mental health.[30] Among social animals, vigilance, foraging, and defensive behaviors are calibrated to the perceived signal patterns and positions of conspecifics, embedding individual survival within group dynamics, as Tinbergen and behavioral ecologists have shown.[31] In each case, survival is not achieved in isolation but distributed across organism–environment relationality.

What emerges from these cases is a kind of structural coupling—the idea, drawn from Francisco Varela’s enactive theory, that organisms and environments co-constitute one another through interdependent cycles of action and feedback.[32] Embeddedness therefore extends autonomy outward: the organism sustains itself by enlisting its surroundings as an active partner in regulation. This functions less as reflective cognition than as adaptive sense-making, in which the world is continuously evaluated in terms of what sustains or threatens viability.[33]

To be autonomous is to be inseparably entangled with the world. Yet this entanglement would mean little if organisms could not also resist when the environment turns hostile. Here, self-defence is integral to autonomy, forming the very part of its internal structure rather than a secondary addition—a theme to which we now turn.[34]

Self-Defence as a Condition of Natural Autonomy
If embeddedness shows how organisms rely on their environments, defence shows how they resist when those environments turn hostile. Autonomy is inherently fragile. To remain self-governing, an organism must continually defend itself against forces that threaten to overwhelm or redirect its organization. Hans Jonas argued that living systems, by their very nature, are perpetually exposed to dissolution and must actively sustain their form against it.[35] Without protective barriers, repair mechanisms, or immune defences, the system ceases to regulate itself and becomes heteronomous—its activity dictated by external forces rather than by internal regulation. Here, defence is an enabling condition of autonomy—the background upon which all self-determination rests.[36]

Pathology illustrates the point. Defence can fail in three ways: by invasion, misdirection, or internal rebellion. Viruses hijack cellular machinery, redirecting a cell’s processes to their own replication, as Bruce Alberts and colleagues detail in their account of viral life cycles.[37] Autoimmune disorders misdirect defensive capacities inward, eroding the distinction between self and non-self, a distinction at the core of modern immunology.[38] Cancer represents the opposite failure: cells pursuing unchecked proliferation at the expense of the organism’s coherence, a hallmark process outlined by Douglas Hanahan and Robert Weinberg.[39] In each case, the breakdown occurs at the level of the defensive architecture that sustains autonomy, leaving metabolism and reproduction intact but unprotected.

This defensive work also carries energetic costs, requiring organisms to balance the resources spent on vigilance and repair against those needed for growth, reproduction, and exploration. Ilya Prigogine emphasized the maintenance of order in open systems comes at the price of continuous energy flow and dissipation.[40] To be autonomous is thus to live within this tension: sustaining coherence against entropy, injury, and invasion. Defence is the silent condition of regulation, the unseen work that makes sense-making and adaptation possible.[41]

Defence, in this sense, is the price of existence. Every act of regulation rests on the capacity to resist dissolution. The next step is evolutionary: to ask how this defensive logic has been elaborated, diversified, and scaled across the history of life?[42]

Evolutionary Significance: Cooperation, Defence, and Emergent Agency
Natural autonomy does not stop at the level of individual organisms. Across evolutionary history, it has expanded through cooperation and coordination, yielding new forms of autonomy that extend survival beyond individual bodies. W. D. Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness demonstrated that parental care, kin defence, and social alliances embed survival within networks of shared protection.[43] In mammals and birds, parental investment shields vulnerable offspring, distributing survival across the defensive labor of parents—a principle central to Tim Clutton-Brock’s analysis of reproductive strategies. In social insects, cooperative defence transforms the colony into a regulatory unit that endures despite individual loss, as E. O. Wilson and Bert Hölldobler in their studies of ant societies.[44]

These developments illustrate what evolutionary theorists call major transitions—shifts from solitary cells to multicellular organisms, and from independent individuals to interdependent groups. John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry identify such transitions as turning points in life’s history, each creating a new layer of autonomy in which parts coordinate to sustain a greater whole.[45] Crucially, defence plays a central role in these transitions, compensating for vulnerabilities and enabling larger, more complex forms of organization to endure.[46]

Collective defence also anticipates emergent forms of agency. David Sloan Wilson argues that group survival requires communication, division of labor, and coordinated responses to threat—adaptive behaviors that, though not reflective in the human sense, represent flexible strategies shaped by selection at multiple levels.[47] Evolutionary history therefore presents autonomy as a dynamic, expanding principle: a logic of regulation and defence that scales upward from the individual to the collective.

These trajectories point beyond natural autonomy itself. In human beings, the defensive and adaptive core of autonomy becomes integrated with symbolic reasoning, foresight, and moral reflection. Here, autonomy ceases to be only biological and evolutionary; it becomes ethical. This integration sets the stage for the next step: the emergence of human autonomy, where biological self-regulation and evolutionary defence are carried into the reflective space of moral life.[48]

Concluding Reflections: The Logic of Defence
Natural autonomy reveals that self-preservation is never static. It is an ongoing conversation between the organism and its world—between defence and openness, coherence and change. From the cellular to the social, life sustains itself through continuous feedback, coupling, and coordination. This is the same principle that underlies effective martial discipline: awareness, adaptability, and the capacity to act without losing coherence of self.

Seen in this light, self-defence is not only a tactical skill but a manifestation of nature’s deeper logic—the living impulse toward order within uncertainty. To understand natural autonomy is to see that every act of protection, whether biological or moral, is an affirmation of life’s inherent dignity: the will to remain self-governing amidst the forces that would dissolve it.

Excerpt from our flagship publication here.

 

 

About The Author

Nathan A. Wright
Nathan is the Managing Director and Chief Instructor at Northern Sage Kung Fu Academy, and Chief Representative of Luo Guang Yu Seven Star Praying Mantis in Canada and China. With over 25 years of experience living in China, he is deeply committed to passing on traditional martial arts in its most sincere form. As part of his passion Nathan regularly writes on related topics of self-defense, combat, health, philosophy, ethics, personal cultivation, and leadership. Email Nathan if you have questions on this article, or if you have interest in learning more about studying traditional Seven Star Praying Mantis Kung Fu.

 

 

End Notes
[1] Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 96–103.
[2] Peter Sterling, What Is Health? Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), 15–22.
[3] Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 96–103.
[4] Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 96–103.
[5] Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 80–84.
[6] rancisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 172–180.
[7] Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 172–180.
[8] Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press, 1991; Catherine Read, Agnes Szokolszky, Ecological Psychology and Enactivism: Perceptually-Guided Action vs. Sensation-Based Enaction, Frontiers in Psychology, 2020.
[9] Weichold, M., The Ethics of Sense-Making, Frontiers in Psychology, 2023.
[10] Thompson, Mind in Life, 104–112.
[11] Bruce S. McEwen and Peter J. Gianaros, “Central Role of the Brain in Stress and Adaptation: Allostasis, Allostatic Load and Resilience,” Neuropsychopharmacology 35, no. 1 (2010): 105–110.
[12] Peter Sterling, What Is Health? Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), 15–22; Bruce S. McEwen and Peter J. Gianaros, “Central Role of the Brain in Stress and Adaptation: Allostasis, Allostatic Load and Resilience,” Neuropsychopharmacology 35, no. 1 (2010): 105–110.
[13] Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, 149–158.
[14] Kenneth Murphy and Casey Weaver, Janeway’s Immunobiology, 9th ed. (New York: Garland Science, 2016), 1–12.
[15] Niko Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), 132–141.
[16] John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman, Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 41–50.
[17] Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 84–90; Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 149–158.
[18] Ernst Mayr, This Is Biology: The Science of the Living World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 90–97.
[19] Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 80–84.
[20] Howard C. Berg, E. coli in Motion (New York: Springer, 2004), 57–65.
[21] Peter Berthold, Bird Migration: A General Survey, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 14–21.
[22] Timothy J. Smalley, “Food Caching in Mammals,” Mammal Review 8, no. 1 (1978): 3–13.
[23] Eric R. Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 120–127.
[24] Peter Sterling, What Is Health? Allostasis and the Evolution of Human Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), 15–22.
[25] John Vervaeke, Timothy P. Lillicrap, and Blake Richards, “Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science,” Journal of Logic and Computation 23, no. 2 (2012): 355–386, https://doi.org/10.1093/logcom/exq034
[26] Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 172–176.
[27] Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944), 69–76; Ilya Prigogine and Dilip Kondepudi, Modern Thermodynamics: From Heat Engines to Dissipative Structures, 2nd ed. (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2015), 425–433.
[28] John Vervaeke, Timothy P. Lillicrap, and Blake Richards, “Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science,” Journal of Logic and Computation 23, no. 2 (2012): 355–386, https://doi.org/10.1093/logcom/exq034
[29] James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986), 127–136.
[30] Justin L. Sonnenburg and Erica D. Sonnenburg, The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-Term Health (New York: Penguin Press, 2015), 45–54; Rob Knight, Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 72–78.
[31] Niko Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), 132–141; Tim Clutton-Brock, The Evolution of Cooperative Breeding (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 87–95.
[32] Francisco J. Varela, “Organism: A Meshwork of Selfless Selves,” in Organism and the Origins of Self, ed. Alfred Tauber (Dordrecht: Springer, 1991), 79–107.
[33] Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 96–103.
[34] Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 80–84.
[35] Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 80–84.
[36] Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 96–103.
[37] Bruce Alberts et al., Molecular Biology of the Cell, 6th ed. (New York: Garland Science, 2014), 176–185 (viral infection and replication).
[38] Kenneth Murphy and Casey Weaver, Janeway’s Immunobiology, 9th ed. (New York: Garland Science, 2016), 12–21.
[39] Douglas Hanahan and Robert A. Weinberg, “Hallmarks of Cancer: The Next Generation,” Cell 144, no. 5 (2011): 646–674.
[40] Ilya Prigogine and Dilip Kondepudi, Modern Thermodynamics: From Heat Engines to Dissipative Structures, 2nd ed. (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2015), 425–433.
[41] Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 84–88.
[42] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 34–38.
[43] W. D. Hamilton, “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour. I,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 7, no. 1 (1964): 1–16, esp. 1–4.
[44] Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 81–95.
[45] John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, The Major Transitions in Evolution (Oxford: W. H. Freeman, 1995), 6–16.
[46] Szathmáry and Maynard Smith, The Major Transitions in Evolution, 18–22.
[47] David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 23–31.
[48] Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 149–158.