Step 078 — Distinction plus SelfDesc

Life is defined by two earned predicates.

Book / layer. Book VI · E2
Macro step. CS-07 — Recover Life as a Structural Class
Short routes. https://prrp.site/s78 · https://prrp.site/s078

Status tags. bridge

Construction role

Life is defined by two earned predicates. Distinction is the sharp, stable, internally maintained boundary between self and non-self. SelfDesc is the internal code-reading evaluator that reconstructs it. Classical hallmarks such as metabolism, growth, response, reproduction, and evolution become consequences or calibrations of the predicate pair, not axioms smuggled in from biology.

What this step earns

Distinction plus SelfDesc is made addressable as Step 078 in the fine-grained Construction Spine routing layer.

• Routing scaffold. Detailed earned-output extraction is pending the source-map pass.

What this step does not yet establish

This route exposes the RC3 construction step for inspection. It does not by itself establish peer review, empirical adequacy, or final manuscript-level source closure.

Source anchors

• Full Construction Spine RC3 whitepaper source (papers/whitepapers/panta-rhei-construction-spine-e0-e3/main.tex:1071)

Manuscript extraction state: Detailed source anchors pending extraction.

Anchor classification: whitepaper source resolved; manuscript extraction pending; Registry extraction pending; TauLib extraction pending.

Formalization and verification

Registry links: Registry extraction pending.

TauLib modules: TauLib module extraction pending.

Dependencies

• Previous: Step 077 — E₁ → E₂: life as predicate layer
• Next: Step 079 — Layer separation from physics

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• Ten-step Construction Spine