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| Format: | Recurso digital |
| Language: | English |
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Zenodo
2026
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| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19373086 |
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Table of Contents:
- <p><strong>Abstract</strong></p> <p>Organized systems persist only through ongoing functional work—yet no shared grammar specifies what that work consists in across biological, organizational, and institutional scales.</p> <p>In systems biology, Montévil & Mossio (2015) formalize biological organization as "closure of constraints," mutual dependence between processes and the structures that canalize them. In sociology, Parsons (Parsons & Smelser, 1956) identified four functional prerequisites for social system survival. In cybernetics, Beer (1972) proposed five systems necessary for organizational viability. In physiology, Sterling (2012) showed biological regulation works through anticipatory maintenance (allostasis), not static equilibrium.</p> <p>These frameworks converge on the claim that persistence requires categorically distinct functional work, but they developed independently, use incompatible vocabularies, and none has been formulated as a shared cross-scale grammar with testable constructs.</p> <p>This paper proposes that grammar. It argues that four irreducible categories describe what organized existence consists in: structural (spatial/temporal arrangement), informational (configuration and encoded signals), relational (coupling, exchange, and connection), and foundational (matter-energy substrate).</p> <p>The paper's central distinction: <em>state</em> describes what organized existence holds; <em>functional work</em> describes what keeps it from dissolving—four kinds of ongoing thermodynamic work, each grounded in established physics (Prigogine, Shannon/Landauer, Schrödinger, Gibbs/Atkinson).</p> <p>This dual-aspect claim—<strong>structure as frozen work, work as flowing state</strong>—parallels the constraint/process distinction that Montévil & Mossio (2015) formalized for biological systems, and proposed here as a general principle across scales.</p> <p>From this distinction, the paper derives a boundary criterion (if work stops, does the pattern dissolve?), a persistence spectrum predicting characteristic failure types from how systems balance frozen structure against active regeneration, and a four-interface decomposition of boundary encounters that specifies what each participant brings to the encounters described in the companion paper on boundary-emergence (referenced below).</p> <p>The minimal sufficiency claim is provisional and falsifiable. It would be falsified by a fifth irreducible category not decomposable into the proposed four, or by a domain of organized complexity where one channel plays no demonstrable role. The number four is proposed as an empirical claim subject to revision—if fewer suffice or more prove irreducible, the grammar adjusts while the persistence thesis holds.</p>