A Boundary Perspective on Life: Conceptual Implications for Biological Organization and Conscious Experience
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 17, 2026 Giuliano Buceti
This paper develops the thesis that the decisive discontinuity in nature was not first the emergence of life and then, separately, the emergence of consciousness, but rather the invention of the boundary: the appearance of a membrane that separated an interior from an exterior. A bounded system is no longer a mere portion of matter among other portions of matter. It becomes a unit whose...