Upcoming Series Overview: 1 Life Misconstrued; 2 Life Reconstrued

Across two interlinked series, we trace how living systems organise themselves, actualise potential, and give rise to semiotic construal — all while avoiding the seductive but misleading metaphors of computation, communication, and altruism.

Series 1: Life Misconstrued: How Scientific Metaphors Collapse Value into Meaning

Series 1 deconstructs common scientific metaphors that misrepresent life:

• Ants “sacrificing themselves” are not altruistic; they are nodes in value-driven relational fields.

• Astrocytes and neurons do not compute; they modulate potential and orchestrate readiness.

• Neural coding is not information transmission; it is contingent actualisation within relational regimes.

• Value versus meaning is clarified, and the semiotic threshold is introduced as the point where relational dynamics can support symbolic construal.

Series 1 establishes the critical lens: reading life for what it is, not for what our metaphors want it to be.

Series 2: Life Reconstrued: Life as Modulated Possibility

Series 2 builds a constructive ontology of life:

• Living systems are relational fields, coordinating potentials across scales without computation or representation.

• Organisms are horizons, co-defining their environments and extending relational influence.

• Brains are regimes of readiness, shaping possible neural actualisations rather than encoding information.

• Semiotic meaning emerges only above the threshold, where complex relational fields intersect with construal-capable systems.

• Evolution itself is reframed as the evolution of possibility, the continuous unfolding of viable relational potentials rather than a march toward design or progress.

Together, the two series map a cohesive framework: life is fundamentally value-driven, semiotic meaning is emergent and contingent, and the unfolding of possibility — biological, neural, and cultural — is the domain in which understanding must operate. Readers are invited to step away from convenient metaphors and see living systems as dynamic, relational, multi-scale orchestrations of potential.