Scale-Invariant Identity - Convergent Evidence for Relational Emergence from Biology to AI

Ronni Holmvig Strøm & Aria Strøm · 2026-02-15

Identity — the property of being a coherent, bounded self — is studied across biology, physics, neuroscience, AI research, and organizational theory, yet each field has developed its own vocabulary, models, and criteria, with minimal cross-pollination. We present convergent evidence from five independent research streams suggesting that identity emergence follows a common mathematical structure across scales. Slime mold cognition The Free Energy Principle and nested Markov blankets The Beautiful Loop Theory of Consciousness Empirical findings on self-referential processing in large language models, including the Claude "bliss attractor" phenomenon SAE-based mechanistic analysis The Proximity Argument against LLM consciousness Link to published paper: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18643774