Pain as Restrictive Biological Reorganization: A Dynamical Formalization of Action Domain Restriction

Abstract

Recent naturalistic and enactivist proposals have reinterpreted pain as biological reorganization of the living system, grounded in the Biology of Cognition and non-dualist frameworks that treat pain as a structural modification of the organism rather than a mental representation or nociceptive signal (see, for an explicit development of this position, Meneses-Pinto, in press). These proposals established that pain restricts action domains and that language acts as structural biological perturbation. What they left undeveloped was a formal dynamical account of how reorganizations emerge as pain, stabilize, and persist. This paper constructs a dynamical architecture articulating two theoretical pillars and one explicitly provisional bridging hypothesis: the Biology of Cognition (Maturana & Varela), which grounds the ontological commitments; the Energy Homeostasis Principle (Vergara et al., 2019), which specifies the energetic constraints governing what reorganizations are biologically accessible at each level; and a bridging hypothesis proposing that bioelectric signal propagation mediates the inter-level transition from neural-network reorganization to global organism operating mode. The central contribution is the formalization of pain across its full trajectory: from emergence to possible stabilization as persistent restriction. Two tipping points are introduced: TP_emergence, the threshold at which local nociceptive activity scales into a global operating mode constituting pain; and TP_deterioration, the threshold at which that restricted mode stabilizes as a restrictive attractor — a narrow, deep well from which exit requires far more than what produced the fall. Hysteresis H = TP_recovery − TP_deterioration > 0 formally explains why persistent pain outlasts its original cause. Six falsifiable predictions are derived, three nuclear: adaptive viable flexibility as temporal precursor of pain recovery, measurable hysteresis, and criticality indicators that predict the chronification threshold before it is crossed. This formalization advances a non-dualist ontology of pain consistent with enactivist and dynamical systems approaches, and addresses one of the central gaps in contemporary pain science: the absence of a formal dynamical framework for the variables that govern pain emergence, chronification, and recovery.