Turtles, All the Way Up: A Substrate-Independent Framework for Minimal Life: One Fidelity Dial Across Memory, Navigation, Motion, Encoding, and Signaling

A framework/perspective preprint (not peer-reviewed) and companion to "Turtles, or Crystals" (Zenodo 10.5281/zenodo.20484438). It asks whether, if life is an organization rather than a material, the same organization recurs across unlike substrates — crystal, fungal mesh, genome. A minimal living system is described as six layers (substrate, memory, navigation, motion, encoding, signaling) under a single governing quantity: copying fidelity, bounded below by the need for variation and above by the error threshold. The stack is presented explicitly as a lens, not a result; credibility rests on a small testable core of three falsifiable claims. The primary, stated boldly and credited to the error-minimization literature it converges with, is that the gross architecture of the genetic code — a small, signed, redundant, framed alphabet — is derivable from copying-fidelity constraints alone and testable in simulation. Every seam between framework and claim is marked. Released under CC BY 4.0 for anyone to test or build upon.