Scales of Life

This symposium seeks to investigate how information processing, cognition, and other forms of sensing and making sense occur at different scales, and how the ways of understanding these scales inform and deform one another across the contemporary earth and life sciences. An exploration of these issues involves thinking with the increasingly relevant notion of the ‘planetary’ as a question of climate change and empire (D. Coen), as related to Gaia theory and its recent comeback in Earth System Science, as inclusive of the technosphere and its geopolitical implications (B. Bratton), and as a framing for understanding intelligence and life as planetary-scale phenomena (A. Frank et al.). Such an endeavour also entails observing how the study of the behaviour of biological organisms creates a mid-level bias in terms of the understanding of function (agency, teleology), and how looking at life itself through the lens of basal cognition may suspend all assumptions about the necessary material substrates for purportedly high-level capacities (M. Levin). Tracing the history of these ideas and their evolution over time is also crucial to orienting our planetary futures (T. Moynihan).