The Bounded Corridor: A Regime Theory of Biological Persistence

Abstract

Abstract The Bounded Corridor develops a candidate regime theory of biological persistence around a foundational question: what licenses sameness through biological change? It begins from the claim that persistence cannot be read directly from material continuity, similarity, entropy, survival, or any single scalar measure of biological organization. For a bounded observer, a persistence judgment becomes well-defined only relative to a declared regime specifying what is tracked, which transformations are admissible, which distinctions and invariants matter, which observational channels and retained evidence are available, which horizon governs continuation, and which verdicts may be issued. The corridor is therefore downstream rather than primitive: it is the geometry of admissible continuation within a declared identity regime. The book develops this architecture across cellular maintenance, metabolism, membranes, redox, genomic and proteomic fidelity, immunity, development, cancer, aging, ecological succession, soil, carbon cycling, disturbance, climate, evolution, extinction, palaeobiology, astrobiology, biosignatures, reconstruction, and forecasting. It distinguishes state change, movement of the admissible region, and change of regime specification; separates present instantiation, continuation viability, terminal closure, and non-detection; rejects mechanism invariance across biological scales; and treats ecology as an adversarial case in which living activity modifies the conditions under which successor systems are evaluated. Existing theories—including viability theory, homeostasis, autopoiesis, resilience, niche construction, thermodynamic accounts, and multiscale biology—retain ownership of their mechanisms rather than being absorbed as discoveries of the present framework. A central limit governs the analysis: operations that preserve the equivalence responsible for an obstruction cannot resolve that obstruction. “More measurement” therefore helps only when it introduces independent empirical contact or changes the intervention; otherwise the licensed alternatives are to narrow the demand or refuse the verdict. The book extends this discipline to biological access chains, distinguishing differences manufactured by intervention, retained in historical records, and declared in models. Each handoff between system and verdict may preserve distinctions, erase them, or supplement them through an independent channel. Consequently, claims about past life, present life, persistence, habitability, extinction, or compatible signatures require different evidential bridges and cannot be substituted without further license. The central biological claim remains explicitly conjectural: living organization may instantiate nested identity-bearing regimes with discoverable quantitative structure. The accompanying research program asks whether biological persistence admits minimal sufficient representations; whether bounded observation imposes identification limits; whether persistence-relevant factorizations recur across mechanistically distant systems; and, for biologically defensible declared classes, when local persistence evaluations determine, constrain, or fail to determine a joint persistence evaluation. Candidate constructions include persistence quotients over observed histories, calibrated undefined verdicts, regime-sensitive transfer tests, prospective ecological predictions, and necessity, reduction, or impossibility results. The conjecture is deliberately exposed to reduction. If its distinctions never change a licensed verdict, intervention, repair, or refusal; if persistence judgments collapse without remainder into ordinary augmented state-space modeling; if no useful structure survives across distant biological domains; or if biologically defensible cross-level composition yields no non-trivial constraints, the proposed biological theory fails. What remains would be explicit regime semantics together with established viability, observational, and modeling practice. This definitive edition supersedes the previous edition of The Bounded Corridor. It is a structural rebuild of the same work rather than a separate publication: the declared regime replaces the corridor as the primary object; earlier claims of scale invariance and fixed-environment universality are withdrawn; ecology and evolving environments enter the main architecture; and the analysis is extended through intervention, historical retention, model declaration, composed access chains, palaeobiology, astrobiology, and the explicit conditions under which the biological conjecture could succeed or fail.