2 Life Reconstrued: 1 What Is a Living System? Beyond Mechanism, Beyond Code

If Series 1 exposed the errors of metaphor — the repeated collapse of value into meaning — Series 2 begins the work of building a positive ontology of life: describing living systems as they actually are, rather than as the machines, computers, or moral agents we often imagine them to be.

At first glance, defining “a living system” may seem trivial. Science offers plenty of checklists: metabolism, reproduction, homeostasis, response to stimuli. But these lists risk mechanical reductionism. They enumerate features without capturing the relational core of life — the field of possibilities that living systems continuously modulate to sustain themselves.

A living system, in relational terms, is a network of potentialities actualising relational dynamics that maintain viability across multiple scales. It is not a machine, because its organisation is not fixed; it is not a code, because it does not symbolically represent anything. Its operations are value-driven, not meaning-driven:

• Cells, molecules, and organelles interact not to “compute” or “communicate,” but to modulate the local and global potentials of the system.

• Each event in the system — an enzyme catalysing a reaction, a neuron firing, an ant adjusting its position — is a relational cut actualising constraints and potentials.

• The system is temporally and contextually dynamic: its patterns of activity are contingent on prior and ongoing interactions, not pre-programmed instructions.

Crucially, living systems are fields of possibility, not sequences of operations. The system continually shapes and is shaped by its internal and external relational context. Viability is the organising principle: the system maintains and negotiates the conditions under which it can persist and evolve.

This perspective also clarifies why the computational and coding metaphors fail: they imply fixed architectures, discrete symbols, and linear causation. Life is none of these. It is emergent, contingent, and context-sensitive. Processes that might resemble computation — neuronal firing, gene regulation, colony organisation — are modulations of potential, not symbolic transformations.

By focusing on relational fields and value modulation, we recover the essence of living systems:

• Life is adaptive without being intentional.

• Life is coordinated without being communicative.

• Life is dynamic without being computational.

In subsequent posts, we will explore relational fields in more detail, examining how viability is maintained, how multi-scale systems orchestrate potentials, and how these dynamics set the stage for the eventual emergence of semiotic meaning in complex organisms.

Series 2 is, in a sense, the mirror of Series 1: while the first deconstructs misconceptions, this one constructs a rigorous, relational ontology of life, grounded in value, actualisation, and the modulation of possibility.