Escher’s “Gallery” stimulates an intuitive feeling of a complex relationship between the origins of life and the mysteries of the cosmos. Through his use of dimensional paradox, Escher hints that a fundamental kind of complexity is at the core of reality. This paper attempts to describe that fundamental complexity.
	In a single picture, we see life peering at us amid the complex dimensions of physical reality. Does this suggest a common origin, rather than the increasingly intractable view that life “emerged” from matter?
	Let’s take a speculative journey with the idea that the Cosmos may have always been a living, complex system, containing the systemic essence of life. Our primary guides on this journey will be James Mark Baldwin, Robert Rosen, and Edward Milne, and we will reason from biology to physics, as Rosen proposed, with our friend Escher navigating the way.
	Let's begin with a look at evolution.