2 Life Reconstrued: 3 From Potential to Actualisation: Value as the Axis of Biological Becoming

Series 2 has established living systems as relational fields: networks of potentials, constraints, and modulations across multiple scales. But a relational field is not static. Life is a continuous process of translating potential into actualisation, and this translation occurs along the axis of value.

In relational ontology, value is the measure of a system’s capacity to maintain and modulate viability. It is not symbolic, not representational, and not moral; it is the dynamic principle organising biological becoming. Every action, reaction, and interaction within a system is a manifestation of this principle.

Consider examples across scales:

• Cellular: Enzymes catalyze reactions that adjust metabolic flux. The cell’s potential reactions are numerous; which are actualised depends on the local relational field, not a “program” or code. The actualisation sustains viability.

• Neural: Neurons fire contingently on synaptic and astrocytic modulation. Which potentials are actualised — which signals propagate — depends on the network’s relational configuration. The outcome is adaptive modulation, not computation.

• Organismal: An ant chooses a path or responds to a colony perturbation not by symbolic reasoning but because the relational field of the colony and its internal states modulates what actions are viable. The pupa’s fungal infection shifts the field; the colony’s response actualises patterns that maintain systemic viability.

Across these scales, potentiality is always relational, and actualisation is always value-driven. Living systems do not merely exist in space and time; they continuously negotiate and orchestrate the space of possible states. Life is not computation; it is the becoming of possibility, the actualisation of potential along constraints defined by systemic viability.

This framework also explains why metaphorical errors persist in science. We mistake patterns of actualisation for symbolic content, value-driven modulation for information processing, because human semiotic systems are trained to construe causal patterns as meaningful. In reality, the “signal” is the outcome of relational modulation, the “decision” is the actualisation of potential in accordance with viability constraints.

Understanding living systems along the axis of value allows us to see life clearly:

• Life is adaptive, without being representational.

• Life is coordinated, without being symbolic.

• Life is dynamic, without being computational.

In the next post, we will explore the organism as horizon, showing how relational fields extend outward into the environment, shaping and being shaped by the conditions of possibility, and how this relational openness underpins the co-emergence of life and context.