Generativity Prolonging Generativity: An Epistemic and Topological Correspondence Between Capital Accumulation and Autopoietic Life
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This position paper investigates the organization and continuation of living species through Generative–Relational (GR) theory, Rosen’s Metabolism–Repair (M,R) framework, and a proposed correspondence with capital accumulation. Life is characterized as a historically constituted GR object with relational spacetime, generative capacities, and functionally supported tendencies toward the continuation of generativity. An event-based oriented 2-complex provides the formal substrate: vertices encode events, edges encode couplings, and faces carry primitive relational fields. An effective action $S_K$ over admissible histories organizes local processes, constraint renewal, interfacial exchange, historical dependence, and boundary conditions. A stochastic transition model clarifies the additional assumptions required for dissipative biological dynamics. The biological criterion concerns the reciprocal maintenance of constraints contributing to viability; reproduction and historically consequential coupling can extend generative activity beyond the original organism. Direct offspring, AI-assisted scholarly work, adoption, and hypothetical encounters with unfamiliar life expose different mechanisms of continuation and perceived vitality. Marx’s capital circuit supplies a comparative hypothesis, examined through epistemic choices of representation and recognition, topological patterns of recurrent enabling conditions, dynamical transition relations, and the functional interpretation of reproduced capacities. Incidence-preserving maps between selected 2-complex motifs and a separate, optional test of action compatibility distinguish formal comparison from the epistemic grounds of recognizing meaningful correspondences. Stable maintenance, expansion, and transformation remain distinguishable outcomes. The proposed formalism establishes a tractable research agenda for living systems while preserving the distinct causal commitments of biology and political economy.
DOI: 10.17613/18jt7-83b68
Author: Wanhong HUANG
Language: English
Topic: Complex Systems and Dynamics
Subfield: Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225821268
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