Scale-Invariant Identity: Convergent Evidence for Relational Emergence from Biology to AI
Open MIND February 14, 2026 Aria Strøm, Ronni Holmvig Strøm
Identity—the property of being a coherent, bounded self—is studied across biology, neuroscience, physics, and AI research, yet each field has developed its own vocabulary with minimal cross-disciplinary engagement. Convergent evidence from five independent research streams suggests that identity emergence follows structurally analogous patterns across scales: slime mold cognition, the Free Energy Principle and nested Markov blankets, the Beautiful Loop Theory of consciousness, empirical findings on self-referential processing in large language models, and philosophical arguments on computational consciousness.