On the Inference of Stones: Life as a Gradient

Lately, I’ve been sitting with a question that feels both ancient and strangely modern: What is life?

Not life in the biological sense. Not the binary definitions that separate the living from the dead, the animate from the inanimate. But life as something far more subtle, more continuous—a capacity, perhaps, to react, to infer, to respond. A capacity to sense and update in relation to an environment.

From the lens of active inference—a framework emerging from the intersection of neuroscience, thermodynamics, and systems theory—you could say that even a rock is, in its own way, alive. A rock that absorbs sunlight and changes its molecular structure in response to heat is performing a form of primitive reaction. It’s not thinking, but it is updating. Not conscious, but not inert either. It’s participating in a field of relational causality—of becoming, however faint.

That might sound absurd. And perhaps it is. But I wonder if that absurdity is only a reflection of how tightly we’ve held onto distinctions—between the biological and the chemical, the physical and the cognitive, the alive and the dead. What happens if we let go of those clean separations, and instead see life as a spectrum of inferential sophistication?

A cell, after all, doesn’t “know” perhaps anything in the human sense. But it maintains homeostasis. It modulates its membranes. It seeks. A tree bends to light. A mycelial network transmits signals across forests. Each of these systems makes sense of its environment—acts to reduce uncertainty, to maintain coherence. Isn’t that a kind of intelligence?

And then we, with our brains, simulate worlds. We pay attention. We imagine futures. Perhaps what we call “consciousness” is simply the recursive act of inferring about our own inferences—a meta-capacity in the same lineage as that rock, that cell, that forest. Just a different layer of complexity. A different rhythm of response.

What does it mean to live with this view?

It shifts things. It shakes the anthropocentric scaffolding most of us were raised with. If agency is not exclusive to humans—or even animals—but is something that emerges across time and systems, then ethics, design, politics, and economics all start to look very different.

Ethics becomes less about rights and more about the stewardship of inferential capacity—the protection of coherence across systems that sense and respond.

Design becomes less about control and more about the careful modulation of environments that allow systems to adapt, evolve, and persist.

Governance is no longer just decision-making—it’s about how societies structure sense-making, how collective inferences are made, revised, and acted upon.

Value becomes not just economic exchange but the capacity to support and extend inferential life across time—what sustains sensing, learning, and coordinated response.

In this view, we’re not at the center of a world of dead matter. We’re participants in a symphony of nested intelligences, each with its own tempo and structure. And the challenge is not to dominate the orchestra but to resonate with it—to become tuning forks, not conductors.

There’s doubt here, of course. A rock is not alive in the way we are perhaps. But perhaps we need new words. New metaphors. Or perhaps, we just need to sit with the possibility that what we’ve called “life” is actually a long, slow unfolding—a process that doesn’t begin or end with us.

And maybe, just maybe, we’re only now waking up to the deeper aliveness of the world we’re intrinsically part of.