From a philosophical standpoint, J. Gibson’s ecological framework has been understood primarily as a broad outline of human consciousness rather than as a detailed account of perceptual mechanisms. This approach aligns with the Kantian view that perception is grounded in active engagement with the world, arising from both the objective environment’s influence and the subject’s interpretive activity. The concept of “affordances” captures a crucial balance between the boundless external world and the subject’s particular stance, implying mutual interaction (Hardcastle, Reference Hardcastle2020). Gibson’s theory was arguably too radical for the psychology of his time, and its full development required integration with empirical findings from cognitive science and anthropology.

Today, neuroscience has reached a point where it must incorporate behavior, evolutionary history, and individual life trajectories (Krakauer et al., Reference Krakauer, Ghazanfar, Gomez-Marin, MacIver and Poeppel2017). This shift has prompted philosophical reconsiderations, such as G. Northoff’s proposal of an “anti-Kantian turn,” which advocates a return to the world through the study of “world-brain” relations (Northoff, Reference Northoff2018). Simultaneously, the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence raises the question of whether there is any fundamental difference between the cognitive abilities of biological and artificial systems (Farisco, Evers, & Changeux, Reference Farisco, Evers and Changeux2024; Torres-Martínez, Reference Torres-Martínez2025). The ecological perspective offers a balance between the objective and subjective worlds and assumes that a system lacking intrinsic goals cannot have affordances – a distinction that may prevent the complete reduction of consciousness to simpler structures. Furthermore, investigating affordance management across life stages advances cross-cultural research, helping to clarify differing modes of thought (Whitehead, Reference Whitehead1938). These considerations render Ahra Ko and Steven L. Neuberg’s anthropological study of ecological affordances both timely and deserving of further elaboration.

The affordance management framework proposed in their work examines human life stages from an evolutionary perspective, explaining ontogenetic shifts in world-attunement through phylogenetic data. Since the authors apply an ecological framework, they rely on well-established biological principles – self-defense, reciprocity, reproduction, and caregiving – which are largely uncontroversial when applied to humans. The debate, therefore, centers on whether specific life stages are correctly interpreted. However, if all phenomena are reduced to natural selection, this leads to an “illusionist” strategy that equates consciousness with lower-level biological processes (Graziano, Reference Graziano2024), thereby rendering the concept of affordances meaningless.

Preserving the affordance framework necessitates a deeper understanding of consciousness in human development. A key distinction must be made between life stages inherited from ancestral species and those uniquely emergent in modern humans (Richerson & Boyd, Reference Richerson and Boyd2020). The advent of cultural practices serves as a critical demarcation, introducing new factors into social selection (Tomasello, Reference Tomasello2020). This demands more rigorous selection of evidence when defining life stages. For example, the authors suggest that older members of societies do not participate in mating – a claim that may have been true in prehistoric periods due to shorter lifespans. However, cultural evolution – particularly social stratification – enabled dominant elders to extend their mating activity, altering natural reproductive cycles (Ligocki, Reference Ligocki, Shackelford and Weekes-Shackelford2021). This oversight likely stems from a Western-centric model, where mating is traditionally viewed as a stable pairing between similarly aged individuals – an assumption that may not hold across cultures (von Rueden & Jaeggi, Reference von Rueden and Jaeggi2016). Likewise, the idea that being surrounded by many relatives is less favorable for post-puberty young adults may hold true in modern society with civil rights guaranteed by the state, but it differs in cases where individual can rely only on their family relations (Wu et al., Reference Wu, He, Deng, Wang, Mace, Ji and Tao2013).

Another issue requiring clarification concerns children’s classification of strangers and self-defense strategies. The authors’ inferences may be biased by studies conducted in Western cultures (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, Reference Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan2010), where individualism and autonomy are emphasized due to evolutionary pressures from historically hostile environments (Kanaev, Reference Kanaev2022). In contrast, cultures shaped by cooperative survival strategies, such as those in China, might exhibit different behavioral patterns, as reflected in classical Chinese thought (Ames, Reference Ames2021; Talhelm et al., Reference Talhelm, Zhang, Oishi, Shimin, Duan, Lan and Kitayama2014). However, the lack of comprehensive cross-cultural studies means this claim remains speculative, relying more on philosophical reasoning and personal experience (but see: Han, Reference Han2017).

Critiquing these aspects is not intended to undermine the authors’ argument but to identify areas for further research. While anthropological and psychological studies can clarify past human development, rapid technological change now introduces novel affordances, reshaping labor and communication – core domains of human identity (Alsaleh, Reference Alsaleh2024; Yuk, Reference Yuk2024). Understanding the diversity of consciousness in phylogeny thus becomes crucial for navigating the future (Kanaev & Mei, Reference Kanaev and Mei2025).

By definition, affordances presuppose an active stance toward reality, requiring a system capable of exerting causal influence over its own states. Modern neuroscience, particularly integrated information theory, explores how a system’s organizational principles govern its components, positing that longer temporal rhythms dominate shorter ones (Grasso et al., Reference Grasso, Albantakis, Lang and Tononi2021; Tononi & Raison, 2024) – a notion corroborated by the “temporal nestedness” concept in Temporo-Spatial Theory (Northoff & Ventura, Reference Northoff and Ventura2025). From an evolutionary standpoint, this suggests that subjective reality is a key adaptive capacity: living organisms synthesize environmental data into an energy-efficient set of affordances given in phenomenal perception. Human consciousness, in this light, is the ability to shape intentions and modify available affordances, a skill that must be mastered over the course of an individual’s lifespan through incorporation in a particular culture (Kanaev, Reference Kanaev2022). Cultural diversity reveals this generativity as a species-defining trait, and technological acceleration amplifies the ethical imperative for reflexive self-understanding.