HIGHER-ORDER EMBEDDED ORGANIZATION

This paper develops a question rather than a conclusion. It asks whether a physical system could possess decentralized, higher-order organization with some properties associated with life, while observers embedded in its constituent levels remain unable to identify the whole as life-like. The proposal arose from three connected intuitions: (1) an embedded observer may understand local mechanisms without knowing the role of those mechanisms in a larger whole; (2) life need not resemble an animal with a brain or centralized control - a tree is a clear counterexample; and (3) the deformation of surroundings by massive objects suggests a useful, though non-literal, analogy for asking whether classical spacetime might be a macroscopic manifestation of deeper structure. The strongest scientific version of the proposal does not assert that Earth is a cell, that stars are wounds, or that spacetime is biological tissue. Those are heuristic images. The researchable core is narrower: Can scale-independent signatures of self-maintenance, information integration, adaptive response, boundary formation, or inheritance reveal higher-order organization to an observer who has access only to measurements made from within the system?