Psychology in 2125: Background and Commentary

This document provides a précis and author commentary on:

Marshall, P. J. (2026). Psychology in 2125: A developmental science of living sense-making. Perspectives on Psychological Science.

The published article will be available at https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916261477319.

A preprint is available at https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/d7y3n_v2.

I welcome questions, comments, and discussion about the article or this commentary. You can reach me at peter.marshall@temple.edu.

How the Article and This Page Came About

In summer 2025, the APS journal Perspectives on Psychological Science put out a call for papers for a special issue on what psychological science might look like a century from now. The call asked for “bold, methodologically grounded visions” of the discipline. The issue was meant to serve as “a time capsule, a provocation, and a map.”

The task was clearly a challenging one – a century is a long time. Just look at what was going on in 1925 compared with now. But I sent in a proposal and a few weeks later was invited to write a full paper. It took a while for me to focus the message, but after helpful feedback from reviewers the manuscript was accepted as Psychology in 2125: A Developmental Science of Living Sense-Making.

Hopefully the article is clear enough on its own. But the special issue had a 5,000-word limit, which doesn’t allow space to work through much of the background or the finer points of the argument. I started writing this page to provide more context and further articulate why I think the forecast matters. It has become more than I bargained for, and this page is now longer than the article itself. But I hope the fuller discussion makes it easier to see how I arrived at the forecast and what it would mean for psychology.

After a brief outline of the overall argument, I go through the intellectual history behind it and the view of embodiment I draw on. I then work through the argument in more detail, before turning to its stakes and implications. The page closes with a statement of how I used AI in the work.

What Is the Argument?

In the article I argue that psychology in 2125 will have become a “developmental science of living sense-making.” By this I mean a psychology that explains how a person’s ways of engaging with the world develop, and how things come to matter to them through that engagement. My starting concern is that much of psychology treats the significance of a given situation as settled before asking how that situation relates to the person’s activity.

One pressure that might lead psychology to reconsider this starting point is that longstanding critiques of genetic blueprints have gained further support from work in developmental and evolutionary biology. An organism’s organization comes about through development, and its activity changes what becomes possible next. Evolution, too, depends on developmental processes that generate and stabilize the forms on which natural selection acts. Much of psychology has yet to catch up with the implications of this work.

Another pressure comes from methods for studying change within individuals, which are becoming more widely used. A pattern found across a group does not necessarily describe what happens within any particular person. Following individuals over time makes it possible to investigate how a person’s activity holds together and how it changes with their circumstances. These methods let us ask how familiar patterns of activity are sustained, although their use alone does not settle what needs explaining.

Language models can produce fluent, appropriate responses without appearing to have anything at stake in what they say, which raises the question of what we can infer from performance alone. If a machine can succeed on psychology’s tasks, what do those tasks tell us about the living person for whom things matter?

In the psychology I forecast, development would be central to explanation. This does not mean making psychology primarily about children. It means asking how a person’s ways of living come about and what sustains or changes them throughout a life. Answering those questions requires attention to the conditions in which that life unfolds.

Developmental systems theory and process-relational developmental science already offer accounts of how new forms of organization come about and are sustained. Sociocultural approaches show how participation in a cultural world is part of development, while embodied and enactive approaches connect meaning with living activity. These are established traditions, and I am not claiming that the ideas in the forecast are new. Willis Overton and David Palermo’s 1994 edited volume The Nature and Ontogenesis of Meaning, for example, explored meaning-making within developmental psychology. What I am suggesting is that ideas of this kind might become more central to psychology as a whole. The context of the special issue allowed me to speculate that pressures faced by the discipline might in fact force such a shift.

Whether what I forecast will actually happen is another matter, as is what would be done with such a psychology if it does. I return to both questions at the end of the page.

Why I Came to This Argument

My undergraduate degree was in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, where I specialized in Zoology. I stayed on at Cambridge to complete a Ph.D. with Joan Stevenson-Hinde at the Sub-Department of Animal Behaviour, where I worked on a longitudinal study of wariness of the unfamiliar in young children, including how temperamental tendencies relate to children’s attachment to their caregivers.

That line of research led me to postdoctoral work with Nathan Fox at the University of Maryland, where I followed the temperament line further. Both my graduate and postdoctoral work involved the collection of physiological measures alongside detailed behavioral assessments. My work in Maryland included using EEG to study brain activity in infants and young children.

Towards the end of my time in Maryland, my attention was drawn to a particular rhythm in the EEG signal, the sensorimotor mu rhythm, which led me to become interested in the connections between perception and action. I followed this new line of research when I joined Temple in 2004. With students and collaborators, and later with Andrew Meltzoff, I studied how carrying out an action changes the brain’s response to watching someone else act, and how body maps develop in the infant brain.

In part through conversations with Willis Overton at Temple, I also became more interested in theory, including how to understand the role of physiological measures in psychology. Following a lot of reading in a sabbatical semester, I authored a 2009 paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science on “Relating Psychology and Neuroscience: Taking Up the Challenges.”

The basic argument of that article was that psychology and neuroscience needed a better account of their relation. Reducing psychology to neuroscience would not provide that account, but just saying they represent different levels of analysis would not do the job either. I argued that embodiment offered a more integrative starting point: understanding the brain as part of an active organism engaged with its world.

After that paper came out, an eminent neuroscientist who worked in the area of learning and memory wrote to me to say how wrong I was. He said that as we head further into the 21st century, the study of mind would become the study of the brain. I didn't think this was an entirely fair critique, given that part of my argument concerned how mainstream cognitive psychology had neglected neuroscience. He saw my article as anti-neuroscience, but I don't see it that way at all. It was pro-organism.

That 2009 article brought me back to my biological roots, and the current paper grew from it more than 15 years later, in the same journal. But the biology in this 2026 paper is still not the kind my esteemed critic had in mind. In line with my background in zoology, it remains an organismic biology, but it is informed not only by those early 1990s lectures by Patrick Bateson and others, but also by lines of biologically oriented philosophy that fall under the broad umbrella of embodiment.

What I mean by embodiment is outlined in the sections that follow. It has taken some time to work this out, and my thinking is still a work in progress. It has developed through a series of articles listed under my name in the reference list for this page. Writing those papers helped shape the current article, as did two specific meetings of the Jean Piaget Society (JPS).

The 2022 JPS meeting in Philadelphia, organized by Robert Lickliter, David Moore, and David Witherington, had the theme of “Putting Development Back into Evolution.” Hearing those presentations brought home to me how much psychology could learn from contemporary discussions in biology, and how little of that discussion had reached the wider discipline. That meeting also featured a plenary talk by Eva Jablonka that she wrote up into a 2023 paper in Human Development and that informed my account in the Perspectives piece of how the discipline might change.

The 2023 JPS meeting was in Madrid, with the theme "Bringing theory to the forefront of developmental neuroscience," organized by Caitlin Mahy and Susan Rivera. I gave an invited address there that became a 2024 article in Human Development with the unassuming title “Towards a Biologically Coherent Account of the Brain and How It Develops.” In that paper, I attempted to work through what it meant to reframe the study of the brain and brain development around the living organism.

Another influence has been my involvement with the Society for the Study of Human Development (SSHD), which helped me appreciate the value of methods for studying change within individuals. Preparing the presidential address for the society's 2025 meeting also gave me a chance to work through some of the ideas I was developing in the Perspectives paper.

I have also spent time developing some relevant open educational resources that I have posted online for anyone to access and reuse. About Development grew from an upper-level course that I've taught at Temple, and it works through the background of many of the ideas in the current Perspectives article. Enacting Life goes further into embodiment, particularly the theoretical strand of enactivism. In many ways, the current paper brings these developmental and embodied concerns together in one place, albeit in a very compressed form.

Embodiment and Sense-Making

I use the term embodiment sparingly in the article itself, but my argument rests on a particular view of this construct. I would like to set that out here, also because the term means different things to different people.

I take a wider view of embodiment than the versions often found in psychology, which see it as just being about how having a body influences thought. In the view I favor, embodiment is not an add-on. It is constitutive of mind, since the organization and activity of a living body are part of what mind is. Understanding mind therefore involves understanding the kind of living being whose mind it is.

This broad view of embodiment is illustrated by Overton’s (2008) description of embodiment as a bridge construct that connects the body as form, the body as actively engaged with the world, and the body as lived experience. Following Aristotle, I take form to mean the organization of a living thing, rather than simply its shape. That organization involves capacities for a particular way of life. But having a capacity is different from exercising it, and knowing what a living being can do does not yet explain its activity in a particular situation. We need to understand its engagement with the world, including how things matter to it. And what Overton called lived experience I take as a perspective that arises from this engagement.

In a paper with Troy Houser and Staci Weiss, we explored these connections in relation to the organization and evolution of living bodies (Marshall et al., 2021). A central point of that article was that a living body does not exist separately from the activities through which it sustains itself. Living beings continually produce and maintain the conditions of their own existence, drawing on their surroundings to do so. This means that things can go better or worse for them, and situations and encounters can either support or disrupt their capacity to go on. This gives us a basis for understanding why things can matter to a living being itself, beyond whatever significance we assign to those things as observers.

The link between living activity and mattering is what I draw on through the idea of sense-making: how things come to have significance for a living being through its activity in the world. This view comes from the enactivist tradition that is associated with the 1991 book The Embodied Mind by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. That work was rooted in Varela’s earlier work with Humberto Maturana (1987), and Thompson developed the ideas further in Mind in Life (2007).

The enactivism of Varela and Maturana begins with the organization of living things, reaching down to single cells. But it also provides a starting point for understanding human lives. For example, in Linguistic Bodies (2018), Ezequiel Di Paolo, Elena Cuffari, and Hanne De Jaegher extend this account to social interaction and language.

Enactivism provides a foundation for understanding how things come to have meaning, but it does not by itself explain what a particular person cares about or how those concerns developed.

Part of what this leaves open is what it means for things to go better or worse, which depends on the kind of living being in question. For a single cell, it comes close to whether the cell can keep going, which depends on whether its surroundings and its own activity support the processes that maintain it. For a person, things can go better or worse in many more ways. Playing a piece of music can go well or badly, and a friendship can be strengthened or damaged, by standards that do not obviously come down to whether the body stays alive. These standards can also pull against each other, as when a habit is kept up successfully while the person’s life goes worse because of it. Whether the later standards are built on the body’s own or come into being as new ways of going on develop is a question I am still working on. The argument of the Perspectives article does not depend on settling it, since either way what counts as better or worse for a person has a history that needs explaining, and explaining it is a job for psychology.

Computation, Information, and Being Informed

My main concern in the article is with approaches that treat the significance of something as already settled before asking how it enters a living being’s activity. The article uses “computational” for such approaches, but I am not referring to the use of computational tools for analyzing data. Nor is my target limited to the classical Computational Theory of Mind, in which thinking is understood as symbol manipulation. The wider issue that I am getting at concerns the notion of information processing and the nature of information.

In a recent paper in Adaptive Behavior, Dave Ward (2026) identifies a broader family of approaches that he calls informationalism, in which the meaning of psychological states depends on how a system processes, encodes, or picks up information. He contrasts these with organicist approaches, which ground meaning in organizational properties distinctive of living things.

Ward’s distinction is useful since it highlights a key question underneath my Perspectives article: Does information processing acquire significance through the living activity it is part of, or is living activity explained primarily through information processing?

In my 2024 paper in Human Development, I argued that the brain cannot be seen as simply taking in information from the outside world. What we call a stimulus perturbs a nervous system that is already active and exists in a body acting in the world. What that stimulus comes to mean depends on the organism’s activity and history, not on a meaning carried into the nervous system by the stimulus itself.

In work on the theoretical foundations of neuroscience, including a 2019 paper and his recent book The Brain, in Theory (2026), Romain Brette raises a related question: information about what, and for whom? Neural activity may track a stimulus closely enough for an experimenter to identify the stimulus from that activity. This provides information about the stimulus to the experimenter, but it does not explain what the stimulus means for the organism.

We can have good experimental grounds for interpreting a neural signal, based on work showing how it changes under particular conditions and how manipulating the activity changes behavior. My concern is not with the legitimacy of those findings, but with what the explanation takes for granted. Accounts of reward explain a good deal about how value is learned and updated, including how cues come to predict what an animal already seeks and how the pull of food depends on whether the animal is hungry. But they begin from what is already valued, whether that is specified by the modeler or attributed to the animal’s needs. For many of the things people care about, how they came to matter is a question about the history of a particular life, and it is not settled by pointing to basic needs such as food or safety.

One further point needs consideration: the article does not discuss predictive processing or active inference, which would need a longer treatment. Ward places predictive processing on the informationalist side, since in its standard versions the body and the world matter only as aids to reducing prediction error. Active inference, which grounds inference in the self-maintenance of living systems, is a harder case and the strongest test of my argument. The question is whether it explains how the organization that sets an organism’s preferences comes about over a life, or only describes that organization once it is in place. Di Paolo, Thompson and Beer (2022) argue for the second reading. I think the question remains open.

Biology and Development

One pressure I outline in the article comes from developmental and evolutionary biology, where the issue I take up, and I am certainly not the first to do so, is the assumption that DNA contains a plan for the organism. I harp on this misconception not because I want to rail about genetic determinism. I bring it up because it makes development look like the delivery of something already specified, which is a broader problem beyond genetics. I also focus on it because it illustrates wider issues with how we think about information, which is key to the entire article.

The genetic code describes a real and precise correspondence between nucleotide triplets and amino acids. So DNA carries information in this limited sense, but this correspondence is not information in the sense of instructions for constructing an organism. What a gene does depends on the cell it is in and the stage of development. As Susan Oyama put it in The Ontogeny of Information (1985; 2000), what a DNA sequence specifies is itself built up in development. Any definition of a plan would need to include the cell, the body and the surroundings that DNA works within, by which point you have to say that the plan is no longer in the DNA. In the paper I cite Fred Nijhout (1990), who has argued for decades that genes are better understood as suppliers of materials than as controllers of development, and Stuart Newman (e.g., 2012), who has long emphasized how the physical properties and interactions of cells contribute to embryonic form.

At the start of my upper-level undergraduate course on development, I ask students whether there are instructions for a frog somewhere in its fertilized egg. Almost all say yes, in the frog’s DNA. Perhaps the question constrained their answers. But I think those answers also suggest that students have not been given an account of how development works that does justice to its complexities. I don’t pretend to have all the answers (how could I?), but I see this as a failure of the way we educate our students.

Genetic differences can alter how development proceeds, but their effects depend on the developing system. Rejecting a genetic blueprint still leaves us with the task of explaining how genes contribute to development. That does not mean development is more open to change than we thought. We could understand how genes work much better and still find a particular outcome difficult to alter. Development can become strongly canalized without the outcome having been specified in advance in DNA. But calling something canalized is not the end of the explanation either. We still need to understand how that stability comes about and under what conditions it might change. That question, which is central to the Perspectives article, has long been central to developmental psychobiology, from Lehrman (1953) and Gottlieb (1991) to more recent work by Lickliter and Moore (2023), Michel (2013), and others.

When I ask why development is so reliable, my students often give an answer familiar across psychology: it evolved. That answer is not wrong, but it addresses a different question. Biologists have long distinguished asking why a trait exists, in terms of its evolutionary history, from asking how it comes about in each individual (Mayr, 1961; Tinbergen, 1963). Selection sorts among the variants that development produces and can favor developmental systems that reliably produce particular outcomes, but it does not explain how each new organism develops. Nor are the two kinds of question independent, since how development works shapes the variation that selection acts on, and some biologists have argued that this makes a sharp separation between them misleading (Laland et al., 2011). The developmental systems literature exploring these connections (e.g., Witherington, Lickliter, and Moore, 2023) remains little known in mainstream psychology.

In the same 2024 paper, I argued that psychology needs a better grip on developmental biology, evolution, and the biology of whole organisms. But that also involves how biology is taught, which may need something of a reboot from grade school onwards. How about we put life back into the study of biology? A biology centered on living organisms would also give psychology a better place to start. Psychology would no longer need to reach for biology only in the limited guise of neural mechanisms or genetic explanations. Instead, it could build a biologically coherent account of the person.

Studying Development

Many students come to psychology wanting to understand how a person becomes who they are. It is not clear that we always deliver on that interest, although that question is already being asked in parts of psychology. Growing interest in within-person methods is one of the pressures behind my forecast: it gives researchers more ways to study how a person’s activity changes over time. My argument is that explaining how those patterns come about and are sustained should become central to how the discipline explains the person.

The view I draw on has a long history that includes Werner and Piaget, who emphasized how new forms of organization emerge through development. From this organicist perspective, the living being’s capacities and ways of engaging are themselves things we need to explain. I also draw on the related strand of process-relational developmental science, particularly the work of Willis Overton and Richard Lerner (2014), as well as David Witherington’s (2011) writing on developmental process. In this view, the person’s activity and their relations with the world develop together. How a person acts depends on those relations, and their activity in turn sustains and changes them.

How do we apply these insights to the way we analyze data? In the article I mention the work of Peter Molenaar (2004) and others on the limits of generalizing from patterns across people to processes within individuals. A relation between two measures across a group does not necessarily describe how those measures change together within any particular person. Methods for investigating processes within individuals are now well developed. They allow us to study how a person’s activity varies over time and how those variations relate to changes in their circumstances.

In the article, I also draw on the work of Nilam Ram and Denis Gerstorf (2009), who explain how variation within a person can be informative rather than simply treated as noise. Fluctuations over minutes or days can help us study how a person adjusts to changing circumstances, and how those adjustments relate to changes over longer periods. The kinds of methods employed by Ram and Gerstorf give us more to investigate than whether a measure has increased or decreased between time points: we can ask how the person’s activity is organized over time. I suggest in the article that this shift in focus could also change how psychology approaches many of its familiar constructs, with less emphasis on relatively stable properties that people possess and more on how characteristic patterns of activity persist and change.

I am not a quantitative methodologist, and I am drawing on the expertise of researchers who have developed these approaches. My interest is in the connection between the methods and what we are trying to explain. Following a person over time gives us opportunities to study how their ways of engaging are sustained or changed. We need to remember, though, that the methods alone do not tell us what those patterns mean within the person’s life.

What Would Have to Happen?

The article is a forecast rather than a proposal for a research program. It identifies pressures that could change the background assumptions about what psychology studies and what an explanation should look like. In thinking about how such pressures might reorganize psychology, I draw on Eva Jablonka’s (2023) description of a dominant framework as an attractor, sustained by methods, training, and institutional structures that reinforce each other. So change in the discipline would need to come through what people do, including how they conduct research, what journals publish and funding agencies support, and what is taught. An NIH significance section, for instance, asks how many people a problem affects and at what cost. That is a fair question, but when the case for a study rests on population burden, it becomes natural to design studies that answer population questions and then read the results as explanations of how individuals come to have the problem.

In my own teaching, I've been trying to change what students regard as needing explanation, particularly in my upper-level course at Temple on development and neuroscience. The course is organized around one question: how does a brain reliably emerge in each new generation? We spend quite a while on development and evolution before getting into the brain in detail. We begin by asking how to explain the reliability of development while also accounting for the variability we see, which leads us to consider constraints and the space of possibilities they shape. Aristotle’s distinction between form and matter helps us ask where the “frog-ness” of a frog is located, and whether it makes sense to look for it in any particular component. From there, we come to see DNA as a developmental resource rather than a set of instructions. We then look at how life cycles are reconstructed in each generation and how nervous systems evolved in moving bodies.

Those questions become more concrete when we focus on cortical development. How does the developing brain become organized in relation to the particular body it is part of? Retinal waves and fetal movement show how activity contributes to neural organization before birth. In people born with six fingers, cortical organization can accommodate the additional digit. I’m not asking students to learn a new kind of neuroscience. We use the neuroscience they already know to answer questions they are not used to asking.

In the most recent iteration of the course, students kept weekly “learning logs” about what they were making of the readings and class discussions. As the semester progressed, they could return to something they had written earlier and ask whether they still saw it the same way. For the final assignment, they selected passages from their logs and commented on them from where they stood at the end of the course. They didn’t have to agree with me on everything or arrive at a tidy conclusion, but they did need to explain what had happened to their thinking.

There are constraints on what can be accomplished in one course, given what students have learned before. They come in having learned plenty of details, and those details are usually not wrong. But the foundational questions, and the connections between those questions and the details, often receive less attention. Interestingly, some students said that encountering these connections earlier would have been difficult because they wouldn’t have been ready. I take that view seriously, but readiness also depends on what opportunities students have had to work through such questions. In a different, and in my view better, educational sequence, students would become ready through the opportunity to engage with these connections along the way, rather than encountering them for the first time in an upper-level course.

What Is at Stake

I believe the argument outlined in the paper has consequences beyond psychology’s internal debates. If psychology drifts further from being able to understand meaning in people’s lives, I think we lose a lot. For one thing, a psychology that treats the person primarily as a processor of information will have trouble saying what distinguishes a person from a machine that performs the same tasks, because performance alone does not show whether anything matters to the system.

The argument matters for applied work too, although I do not do that kind of work myself. In writing this article, I am not suggesting that psychology is not already helping people. Asking how a person’s difficulties developed and what currently sustains them is already part of clinical work. Developmental psychopathology has pursued these questions in research for decades, including how different pathways can lead to similar outcomes and how similar beginnings can lead to different ones (Cicchetti & Rogosch, 1996). In a paper for that field (Marshall, 2013), I argued that its commitment to systems thinking requires an account of how a person’s activity is organized, which risk factors and other antecedent causes cannot supply on their own. My argument here is that questions of this kind should be central to how psychology explains the person in general, not only when things go wrong.

That does not mean replacing research with case studies, or setting aside what group data show. How common a difficulty is, or how an intervention shifts outcomes across a population, are real questions, and they are often what justify the research in the first place. But they are different from asking how a particular person’s way of living came about and what sustains it. A general account of that would identify kinds of process that recur across people with different histories and circumstances, rather than a pattern that describes the average and may hold for no one in particular.

Understanding what sustains a way of living, including how the conditions of a life make some possibilities available and others difficult, may help us see which constraints could change and what changing them would involve. It may also give us reasons to reconsider those conditions. But some of them may be beyond a person’s control, and recognizing another possibility is different from having the means to pursue it. Those means may not be equally available to everyone, and psychology cannot establish on its own which alternative arrangements would work or whether we should pursue them.

Present language models do not appear to have anything at stake in what they do. A living being produces and replaces the structures that make it up, and if that activity stops, the being comes apart. Nothing comparable happens when a language model stops running: it sits unchanged until someone runs it again, and the power, cooling and repair it relies on come from an infrastructure that people build and maintain. People depend on infrastructure as well, but they also keep themselves going, which the models do not. Some AI systems have interfered with instructions to shut them down when given the opportunity. I discuss these results in a piece for The Conversation, where I argue that the behavior may be dangerous without showing that the system has a drive to survive, since staying switched on is not the same as staying alive. Whatever we conclude about AI systems themselves, using them is becoming part of people’s lives, and their responses can matter to the people who use them. How do those exchanges change the way people understand their situation and what they go on to do? How does using AI tools become part of an ongoing life? These are outside the scope of the article, but they are developmental questions that psychology can study.

Forecast or Epitaph?

The call for the special issue asked for “a time capsule, a provocation, and a map.” Which of these the article turns out to be depends on what happens next. I oscillate between reading it as a forecast that will be realized and as an epitaph for views that gestured toward a different future for psychology but ultimately went nowhere. Sympathetic colleagues have expressed similar doubts to me. They hope the field moves in the way I describe, but they see forces pushing in the other direction. One reviewer said they had been arguing for this kind of view for decades, to little avail.

If the forecast does not come to pass, the article may still work as a time capsule. Perhaps a future historian of science will count it, along with other writings in the same vein, among the alternatives that were visible but never became established. That may be too pessimistic, and I retain some hope. When I mentioned this mixture of feelings to a former student, he suggested seeing the article as “a call to action with an epitaph fail-safe.”

I don’t mention this in the article, but implicit in my argument is another possibility that makes the epitaph image more unsettling. Some might read the paper as gesturing toward an enactivist utopia. But psychology could move in the direction I describe without the world becoming a better place. In the article, I suggest that climate disruption, mass migration, demographic aging, and digital technologies are changing the conditions in which people live. The psychology I forecast would be better equipped to study what happens to people’s lives as those conditions change, including how they keep familiar ways of living going and what happens when they can no longer do so.

But a better way of explaining lives is not a guarantee of better lives. Such a psychology could recognize more clearly how things can go worse for people and still find itself documenting how lives come apart. Understanding the conditions that sustain people does not ensure that those conditions will be protected, or that alternatives will be available when they disappear. The epitaph would then be for ways of living that were lost, rather than for a psychology that never came about.

I recently read Lost Worlds (2026), in which Patrick Wyman retells the deep human past as a story of trial and error, including the cities, societies and ways of life that collapsed or were abandoned along the way. He resists treating history as a ladder of progress with modern times as its preordained destination. Instead, he asks how people built the human world we have now, through experiments that sometimes failed and sometimes lasted. His account shows how much depended on the arrangements people made and maintained, and what happened when those arrangements gave way.

Wyman’s work is certainly not the only resource I could draw on here, but I was reading his book while revising the article and kept returning to it, especially to the parts about individual people. Surviving records give an unusually detailed picture of the everyday lives of the craftspeople and their families at Deir el-Medina, who worked on the royal tombs in ancient Egypt, and Wyman places those lives within the political and economic arrangements that sustained their work for hundreds of years. As royal authority weakened and economic difficulties mounted, tomb-building in the Valley of the Kings came to an end. The skills these people had developed were their own, but the conditions that made those skills a way of living were not of their making, and they could not keep those conditions in place. How people carry on when that happens is a psychological question as well as a historical one.

Neither Wyman’s approach nor the one I describe settles what should happen next. But both challenge the idea that a way of life is fixed in advance, by nature or by destiny. That is what I hope the article can offer as a map: a way to understand how we got here and what the possibilities ahead depend on. Whether psychology comes to offer that kind of understanding is the question the forecast asks. What we would do with it is another question, but helping lives go better should be the purpose.

A Note on How I Used AI

In an AI acknowledgement that I sent to the journal, I said I used Claude and ChatGPT “in an iterative process of testing and refining the argument, including revision and compression of the text.”

That description also applies to this page. The tools often helped me express what I was trying to say. Sometimes they also suggested a connection I had not considered. I decided whether those suggestions belonged in the argument and whether I could stand behind the result. In my view, using AI made the article better, even if the text ended up overly smoothed in places, and perhaps the argument a little too tidy.

Does this sit comfortably with an article that locates mind and meaning in living activity? By the article’s own argument, the text alone tells you little about the organization behind it. It could come from someone working through a problem over many years, or from a system reproducing the shape of that work in a vastly shorter time. As I put it in the article, an LLM can capture the shadows cast by living organization without the substance. For me, taking responsibility includes continuing to work through the argument with others, especially when they question it.

Using AI in academic writing raises questions that go well beyond short AI acknowledgements. I plan to discuss some of these wider issues in a separate essay.

References

Association for Psychological Science. (2025). Call for papers: Psychology in 2125 – A century forward.

Brette, R. (2019). Is coding a relevant metaphor for the brain? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 42, Article e215.

Brette, R. (2026). The brain, in theory. Princeton University Press.

Cicchetti, D., & Rogosch, F. A. (1996). Equifinality and multifinality in developmental psychopathology. Development and Psychopathology, 8(4), 597–600.

Di Paolo, E. A., Cuffari, E. C., & De Jaegher, H. (2018). Linguistic bodies: The continuity between life and language. MIT Press.

Di Paolo, E. A., Thompson, E., & Beer, R. D. (2022). Laying down a forking path: Tensions between enaction and the free energy principle. Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, 3.

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