Biogenics 101
Since my last post, quite a few of you have asked some version of “WTF is biogenics?” Fair question. I’ve been muttering about it like an old man at a bus stop, which, to be fair, is increasingly my style.
So let me give it a go. And remember: this isn’t doctrine. It’s not a self-help program. It’s not the secret to eternal life (yet). It’s just an idea.
What is Biogenics?
At its core, Biogenics is a thought experiment where we follow nature’s blueprint into the mysteries of life. It’s not about giving answers but about viewing familiar things through a fresh lens. That’s it. That’s the entire pitch.
Biogenics begins with a simple observation: life is extremely good at avoiding death.
It pulls this off by running the same three tricks on repeat:
Self-production (SP - growth) — systems build and rebuild themselves (wounds heal, forests regrow, you replace your phone battery and call it “personal growth”).
Self-organisation (SO - structure) — parts interact until they become something bigger (cells into tissues, fish into schools, coworkers into pub trivia teams).
Self-correction (SC- adaptation) — when things wobble, life adjusts (immune systems fight infections, people rethink careers, ecosystems rebound after fires).
That’s the whole blueprint. Life doesn’t just exist—it persists.
Instead of viewing people or institutions as machines that can be fixed with a tool kit, Biogenics suggests: what if we saw them as living systems? Messy, adaptable, prone to mistakes, but surprisingly resilient.
The sensible part: psychology
Biogenics + psychology = biopsychology—seeing the mind not as a ghost in a skull, but as another layer of life’s persistence game.
It’s the idea that our mental states are rooted in the body and shaped by evolution. Each mental function can be seen as an expression of one or more drives from the biogenic triad. Anxiety acts as an alarm system (SC), depression as a form of forced hibernation (mostly SP), and anger as a social immune response (SC and SO). Personality, meanwhile, stabilises self-organisation over time, giving us a pattern we can recognise as “me.” Memory supports both self-organisation and self-correction, storing models of the past and revising them when they fail. Imagination leans into self-production, generating futures we can rehearse before trying them out in real life. Even love can be reframed biogenically: a glue for self-organisation in groups, and an engine of self-production across generations. Freud had the id, ego, and superego; we have SP, SO, and SC. Not as poetic, but far more in keeping with how nature actually runs the show. These metaphors aren’t just pleasant to hear; they make the messy logic of psychology more legible, helping us see that thoughts and feelings are not random—they are the mind’s way of keeping us alive, coherent, and connected.
As a psychiatrist, I was taught a tidy set of models that worked beautifully in exams and only intermittently in humans. Biogenics is me searching for a better map. A way of asking “What if we took our design cues from forests and octopuses instead of big pharma and gurus?” Perhaps this isn’t pathology so much as adaptation; maybe we should be asking what nutrients the system is missing, rather than just which chemical to add.
Where it gets speculative: governance, spirituality, everything else
The fun starts when you take the metaphor further. If nature tends to spread intelligence—octopuses with nine nervous centres, forests with underground economies of fungi—why do we insist on concentrating all power in a single fragile hub? What might a biocracy look like? Not a new form of government exactly, but a way to imagine institutions that operate more like resilient ecosystems rather than single points of failure.
Or consider spirituality. No, not another sect — there are already enough of those. But what if we treated life itself as the sacred text? In that case, finding meaning becomes less about worshipping an abstract deity and more about reverence for kidneys, coral reefs, and the fact that you’re reading this sentence with 86 billion neurons firing. Awe, without incense.
And then there’s the universe itself—the thought experiment on steroids. Biology suggests that when systems become complex enough, new phenomena emerge: neurons become minds, and ants become colonies. Biogenics introduces SHEP—the Search for Higher Emergent Phenomena. What if ecosystems, planets, or even galaxies are conducting their own experiments in coherence? Maybe we’re already inside a mind that is too vast or too slow for us to perceive—like cells in a liver, unaware of the hangover they’re helping to metabolise. This isn’t religion, and it’s not sci-fi. It’s just a reminder that emergence doesn’t necessarily end at Homo sapiens.
The lesson of humility
The most uncomfortable insight is this: the larger the system, the less any individual part understands. Ignorance isn’t a flaw, it’s inherent. Nature manages by running countless small experiments. Most fail harmlessly. A few succeed and spread. Humans, however, prefer the Big Plan. A 400-page policy, a five-year strategy, a one-off moonshot. You can probably guess how that turns out.
Biogenics nudges us toward humility. Hold your models lightly, apologise quickly, and make minor adjustments so that if they fail—and they will—you haven’t wrecked the entire forest.
So what’s the point?
Maybe there isn’t one, apart from the fun of seeing things differently. I’ve spent fifty years watching systems—hospitals, governments, families, my own mind—behave in ways my training never anticipated. Biogenics is simply my way of making sense of that gap.
If it helps you, fantastic. If it sounds like branding for common sense, you’re probably right. If it reminds you of a late-night undergraduate philosophy discussion, guilty as charged. The point isn't that this is “the answer”. The point is that it’s a lens. And lenses help you notice things you might otherwise miss.
An invitation
I’ve uploaded some notes, sketches, and a few wilder experiments on the website – biogenics.online. Have a browse. Critique it, abuse it, or ignore it altogether. Just don’t take it as gospel — it’s meant to be fun.
And if nothing else, you might find yourself looking at your work, your family, or even your phone the way a biologist examines a rock pool: messy, interconnected, strangely beautiful, and always more alive than you realised.