Life is often imagined as a hierarchy of discrete units: cells build tissues, tissues build organs, organs build organisms, and organisms populate ecosystems. But what if this classical scaffolding obscures something deeper? What if the one and the many are not fixed categories but perspectival enactments, actualised differently depending on the field of potential that a system inhabits?
In this series, we explore seven exemplary modes of collective life, from corals to slime moulds, and ask:
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How do distributed systems enact coherent life without collapsing into chaos?
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How is individuation distributed, partial, or phase-dependent?
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How do ecological, chemical, and temporal fields shape the alignment of readiness?
Each post examines a different living system, not to catalogue species, but to trace the architectures of possibility. We see corals and bryozoans sculpt coherence through modularity and role structure; sponges through fluidity; siphonophores through hyper-specialisation; pyrosomes through temporal synchrony; bacteria through chemical landscapes; and slime moulds through transient phase-dependent identity.
The lens is relational and perspectival: ability, inclination, and individuation are co-actualised, not imposed, and identity is a temporal, spatial, or functional cut in a field of potential, not a fixed substance.
Through these seven modes, we aim to see life not as a collection of units but as a spectrum of enacted readiness, each system a different answer to the question: what does it mean to be alive, here, now, and in relation to others?
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