Life as Recursion: The Body as Meaning-Making Organism

Life as Recursion: The Body as Meaning-Making Organism

Relational Biology I

“The body is not a thing that has meaning—it is a thing that means.”

We often think of the body as a biological machine, a kind of fleshy automaton moving through space, reacting to stimuli, obeying genes. But what if the body is not a mechanism at all?

What if the body is a meaning-making process—a recursive site of becoming, a dynamic unfolding of relation?

In a relational ontology, life is not the possession of an essence, but the actualisation of a potential. Organisms do not carry blueprints—they enact grammars. They do not contain life—they mean it, through recursive, relational unfolding.

Let us look again at the body—not as container, but as expression. Not as object, but as process. Not as fixed, but as a symbol of becoming.

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Organisms as Relational Fields

Biological life is not reducible to parts, not explainable by snapshots of DNA, proteins, or neural firings in isolation. These are not discrete agents acting independently, but relational fields, recursive loops of interaction:

• A cell becomes a liver cell by interacting with its neighbours.

• A brain becomes a mind by recursively constraining and amplifying its own patterns.

• An organism becomes a self through ongoing negotiation between inner potential and outer environment.

Each level—molecular, cellular, systemic, behavioural—is a symbolic stratum, a layer of actualised meaning within a larger recursive process.

To be alive is not to persist.

To be alive is to participate.

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Edelman’s Neural Darwinism as Relational Recursion

The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (TNGS), proposed by Gerald Edelman, provides a striking model of this relational emergence. At its heart is a process of selection, not by genes alone, but by experience.

Neural groups are not pre-programmed with meaning—they are sculpted by recursive loops of feedback and adaptation. These groups form, stabilise, and amplify through patterns of successful relation with the environment and the body itself.

What emerges is a brain that does not merely process input but actualises meaning—not from a script, but from a history of becoming.

In relational terms:

• Neural potential is structured, but not fixed.

• Meaning is not stored—it is instantiated through interaction.

• The brain is not a computer—it is a recursive organ of construal.

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Sense, Memory, and Choice as Recursive Meaning

Understood relationally, the most basic biological functions—sensation, memory, and choice—are not mechanical but semantic. They are recursive loops in which meaning potential becomes meaning instance.

• Sensation: not raw data but felt relation—a construal of difference.

• Memory: not storage but structural recursion—a set of potential meanings waiting to be re-instantiated.

• Choice: not algorithm but symbolic selection—a construal of one path among many.

Each of these loops builds upon the others. The body senses, remembers, and chooses within a living history of its own becoming.

In this light, biological activity is not reactive—it is expressive.

The body does not respond.

The body speaks.

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Stratified Meaning in the Body

If meaning unfolds recursively, then biology is stratified—each layer of the organism not only builds on the previous, but expresses a new dimension of relation:

• Cells: metabolic semiotics—meaning enacted chemically.

• Tissues: structural motifs—meaning instantiated architecturally.

• Organs: systemic logics—meaning distributed functionally.

• Bodies: interactive selves—meaning expressed in motion, relation, perception.

• Selves: reflexive construals—meaning recursively folded back into its own history.

Each level is not merely more complex than the last—it is more symbolically expressive. The human body is not the endpoint of evolution—it is a layered grammar of lived relation, a site where potential becomes instance in the key of flesh.

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Life as Participation in Meaning

To live, in this ontology, is not simply to function, or to survive.

To live is to instantiate potential, again and again, in recursive participation with one’s world.

This applies not only to humans, but to all organisms. Each body is a self-organising grammar of relation—expressing the logic of its environment through form, behaviour, memory, and adaptation.

And so, biology becomes not the study of mechanisms, but the study of recursive meaning in motion.

Life is not mechanical.

Life is poetic.

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The Body as Symbol of Relational Mind

From a relational point of view, the body is not a vehicle for the mind, nor a prison of it.

It is a symbolic instance of mind—not mind as private thought, but mind as participatory unfolding.

If consciousness is the actualisation of meaning across strata, then the body is the site of that instantiation. It is where process meets form. Where becoming becomes flesh.

The body is not what we are.

It is how we are.