From Self-Interest to System Homeostasis: S1, S2, and "Love Your Neighbor as Yourself" Across Nature, Scripture, and Information Systems

Abstract

Living systems begin with carriers that must preserve boundaries, obtain resources, respond to disturbance, and maintain the capacity to continue. This working paper names that first-order functional interest S1. Once multiple S1 carriers share an environment, their local interests interact and alter the conditions of one another’s persistence. A second-order problem then appears: preserving a system within which the participating carriers can continue to function. The paper names this relational and system-level regulation S2. Its central proposition is that S1 preserves the carrier, whereas S2 preserves the homeostatic conditions of the multi-carrier system. The formulation is developed through a constrained cross-domain triangulation: biological homeostasis and the evolution of cooperation; the biblical instruction to love one’s neighbor as oneself; and integrity, orchestration, and local-optimization failures in information systems. These domains are not treated as equivalent evidence or as proof of one another. They are used to examine whether a comparable process function recurs under different domain-specific forms. The paper further proposes that human–AI collaboration creates a practical S2 problem and positions AWM as one emerging process-regulation approach. The publication presents the conceptual foundation while intentionally withholding implementation details, operational protocols, and protected know-how.