Ecosystems as Polyphonic Readiness Fields: From Multi-Species Coordination to Emergent Ecological Agency: Introduction

Life is often studied in pieces: species, populations, trophic interactions.

But ecosystems are more than the sum of their parts.

They are distributed fields of potential, composed of many perspectival loci — plants, animals, microbes, soils, water, and even weather — each enacting its own slice of readiness.

This series explores ecosystems through the lens of relational ontology:

• Ability: the potential each species or component can enact within the ecosystem.

• Inclination: the local biases and positions that shape how that potential is expressed.

• Individuation: the perspectival locus of each actor, whether microscopic, animal, or human, contributing to coherent collective dynamics.

Unlike classical ecology, which often treats ecosystems as objects, or evolutionary theory, which treats species in isolation, this approach focuses on emergent relational coherence:

• How do multiple species coordinate without a director?

• How does agency appear without a subject?

• How do ecosystems evolve, expand, and restructure readiness fields over time?

• How do humans intervene in ways that introduce double-level readiness, interacting symbolically while remaining ecologically embedded?

Across eight posts, we move from ecosystem components and interactions to emergent agency, evolutionary expansion of potential, humans as double-level actors, and finally to a mythic vignette that situates the reader inside the polyphonic field.

Each post examines a different dimension of ecosystems:

1. Foundations — distributed potential, the polyphonic field.

2. Interactions — co-dependence, mutual constraints, and ecological coherence.

3. Predator–Prey, Mutualisms, Competition — classical relations as emergent patterns of individuation.

4. Disturbance and Reconfiguration — perturbations and the resilience of relational fields.

5. Ecosystem Agency — distributed, subjectless, emergent, and non-symbolic.

6. Ecosystem Evolution — expansion and re-partitioning of ecological readiness over time.

7. Humans in Ecosystems — symbolic mediation and double-level readiness.

8. Liora in the Polyphonic Field — a mythic closure highlighting distributed, co-actualised agency.

Together, these posts offer a relational, stratified, and graded view of ecosystems.

They treat life not as a collection of objects, but as fields of possibility unfolding across time, space, and perspective — a framework that can encompass everything from a patch of moss to a rainforest, from microbe to human culture, without conflating ecological regulation with symbolic meaning.

By the end of the series, readers should grasp that ecosystems are not actors, not agents, not “intelligent” in the usual sense — yet they are deeply structured, patterned, and responsive, a continuous co-actualisation of possibilities that no single species could perceive or enact alone.