Where the Self Places Conflict: Reality Resistance, Organism–Environment Coupling, and Conditional Return

Abstract

This paper introduces a VIVENS state-space-inspired research framework for studying conflict as a bidirectionally coupled organism–environment process. The framework distinguishes reality resistance—the mismatch between an expected, desired, defended, or identity-compatible organization and encountered conditions—from conflict, defined as an incompatibility among simultaneously activated goals, valuations, action tendencies, relational demands, or possible organizations that cannot all be satisfied. The model separates three interacting domains: a latent organismic conflict-relevant state; a slower memory–identity state; an environmental–relational state involving threat, resources, rules, support, power, and available action affordances. Response operations may or may not become enacted action. Action and external events modify the environment, and the transformed environment contributes to the organism’s subsequent state. Reports, behavior, physiological measures, and contextual events are therefore treated as imperfect observations rather than as the latent states themselves. The paper introduces conditional coupled return potential: the probability that a defined organism–environment system will enter a prespecified set of viable configurations within a given timescale, conditional on its starting state, perturbation, resources, constraints, and intervention. The proposed contribution is a conflict-specific integration of functional allocation, representational organization, physiological readiness, enacted action, environmental transformation, identity, and multiscale return dynamics. The first candidate mechanism is deliberately limited to: absence of an effective response option → perseverative cognitive–affective operation → delayed autonomic and endocrine recovery The framework is positioned in relation to transactional stress and coping, cybernetic control theory, attribution theory, locus of control, regulatory flexibility, action crisis, perseverative cognition, active and interoceptive inference, affect dynamics, allostasis, and dynamic resilience research. The empirical framework remains separable from its VIVENS ontological interpretation through SI, CFI, and Ω. It explicitly rejects psychological reductionism, patient blame, and the direct attribution of cancer or other disease to unresolved conflict.