How do we recognize that ‘something’ is alive? Biology insists on ‘metabolism and reproduction’, or ‘DNA’, or ‘cellular structure’, but are these sufficient or even relevant? Is crystalline DNA alive? It is easy to confuse biological or chemical life-support with life itself. Early biological sensors were primarily aimed at detecting life-threatening predators. Have we evolved to confuse life with movement or change? Descartes famously confirmed existence through thought. Does this concurrently confirm or attribute life? Terrence Deacon has suggested that consciousness is what you could expect evolution to feel like. How does this relate to life? Is life more of a process than a characteristic? And is ‘living’ a part of ‘life’ or a consequence of it?

Conventional science persuades us that we can analytically divide our world into independent parts, and that structure and process can be categorically separated. But can ‘life’ and ‘living’ be dismembered? Which of these is the substantive? Life? But ‘life’ is the process of living. Neither exists independently. In David Bohm and Robert Rosens’ terms, implicate ‘becoming’ entails explicate ‘being’. The seeds of complementarity can be found in the nascent asymmetry of the ‘big bang’. Becoming entails being. The emergence of complementarity entails existence, whose emergence entails nature, whose emergence in turn entails life. Becoming entails being. This sequence appears unadventurous, but on closer examination it is quite the opposite. Conventionally, the becoming of a characteristic ‘A’ would entail the being of ‘A’ itself, but at each step of the above sequence the becoming of ‘A’ entails the being of a characteristic ‘B’! How? Why?

Conventional science is incomplete. The becoming of A does not entail the being of A alone. It entails, at the very least, the complementary being of {A and its environment}. Experimental techniques are designed to reduce environmental influences as much as possible, but they can never remove them completely. We can justifiably rely on ‘small causes produce small effects’ in simplified close-to-equilibrium dimensionally-reduced contexts, but not when we address complex or chaotic systems, and most certainly not in any consideration of life and living. Although concepts of ‘scale’ are endemic to biological modeling, the inescapable irrationality of inter-scalar complexity is systematically put aside, and while life is usually accounted for by reference to multiple scales the supposition remains that these can all be collapsed into a single narrative. An additionally unhelpful assumption is that our surroundings can be satisfactorily reduced to a single, unique description. Living systems cannot be analytically addressed from a conventional mono-rational mono-scalar single viewpoint, but this is all that conventional science has to offer.

Rachel Carson’s book ‘Silent Spring’ prefaced the intensifying influence of ‘the ecosystem’ towards the end of the 20th century, which has revolutionized our approach to biology and nature. Unsurprisingly, this is precisely the path we require in any consideration of life and living. Mono-rational approaches to life are doomed to failure, as are analyses which ignore the characteristics of real scale or the multiplicity of partially autonomous processes in living systems. This paper describes how a birational interpretation can resolve many of these difficulties, and indicates how life/living as a dynamic phenomenon can apparently materialize from inanimate nature. Hyperscalar unification of a complex system’s scalar levels and their partial isolation supports the recursive self-observation from which consciousness emerges. The resultant systemic auto-identification corresponds to the human auto-identification of transparent self-modeling described by Metzinger. We would, however, take issue with his submission that the ‘self’ is “not a non-physical individual, but only the content of an ongoing, dynamical process”. We object to the word ‘only’! Is the ‘self’ only? Hyperscale is the global ‘existence’ of an entity: the ‘self’ is the global ‘existence’ of a conscious entity.

So what has all this got to do with Life/Living?

Hyperscale embodies the process which unifies ‘living’ into ‘life’ into ‘living’ through the self.
 

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