On Living and Dying in Languages and Ecosystems

Context: The surprising role death plays in the stability of ecosystems

There’s a sense in which viable biological systems persist as a function of their ability to offset entropy as dissipative disorder to their environments.

When these viable systems are themselves the combinatorial gestalt that an ecosystem represents, there is no externality or reservoir into which to displace this entropy. Everything is internally mediated as self-reference. Functional differentiation, information or energy exchange on a spectrum from inception and birth through senescence and death is plausibly bootstrapped and constructively incorporated into this in some way.

The role of decay, dying and death as generative property in nutrient cycle and population or interspecies dynamics is interesting but it is both partial and quite a late arrival in the study or broader communication of complexity sciences. I do wonder if some of our own (as shared) developmental delays on this topic are a function of the language and communications idioms we each and all inhabit.

Language as generative bridge of information exchange predisposes us, well before any emotional articulation of death and dying, to its own methods of optimal self-propagation. I wonder if we might find similarities between senescence in languages and biota.