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Deep Dive | Why Systems Sacrifice Life for Metrics
Debate | Unitive Science Versus Life Coherence
Critique | From Quantum Physics to Ethical Institutions
Video Explainer | Decoding A World Waiting
Cinematic Explainer | The Pathology of Coherence: Deriving a Life-Coherent Civilization
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Executive Summary
The planetary predicament is commonly described through visible manifestations: climate destabilisation, ecosystem degradation, war, inequality, displacement, chronic illness, social fragmentation, and technological capture. These crises arise within a deeper civilizational grammar that separates economy from ecology, health from social conditions, knowledge from responsibility, technological capability from ethical purpose, and institutional success from the well-being of those affected. The result is a Great Inversion: living beings are increasingly required to adapt to systems originally created to serve life.
Currivan’s unitive science intervenes at this worldview level. It challenges the inherited image of reality as a collection of separate, inert objects and presents a universe that is relational, informational, interconnected, and emergent (Currivan, 2026). Its enduring contribution is less a final physical theory than a cosmology of participation capable of awakening wonder, humility, and responsibility. The paper is explicitly presented as an invitation to investigation and dialogue, yet some claims move too quickly from evidence to metaphysical conclusion.
A responsible appraisal must distinguish four epistemic levels: established empirical findings; active scientific hypotheses; philosophical interpretations; and metaphysical or spiritual commitments. Bell-test experiments establish violations of Bell inequalities, not universal consciousness. A spatially flat universe may be finite or infinite. Celestial holography is an active frontier programme, not empirical confirmation that our universe is literally a hologram. Landauer’s principle connects information erasure to thermodynamic cost, but does not demonstrate that all physical information is semantically meaningful (Landauer, 1961; Nobel Prize Outreach, 2022; European Space Agency, 2001; Perimeter Institute, n.d.).
The decisive limitation is ethical: interconnection does not automatically produce justice. Tumours, empires, surveillance systems, and extractive markets can be highly connected and internally coherent. The framework therefore distinguishes system coherence – the ability of a system to reproduce itself – from life-coherence – the alignment of that reproduction with the capacities and conditions of living beings.
A relationship, practice, technology, or institution is life-coherent insofar as it protects, restores, or enlarges the capacities of living beings and the life-supporting systems on which they depend, without transferring disabling costs to other lives or future conditions.
Maturana and Varela clarify living autonomy: an organism is not an isolated object, but an autopoietic unity that maintains identity through recurrent processes and structural coupling with its environment (Maturana & Varela, 1980). McMurtry supplies the life-value criterion and the concept of civil commons: shared institutions that secure universal access to the conditions of life (McMurtry, 2009-2011, 2013). Galtung reveals direct, structural, and cultural violence, and distinguishes negative from positive peace (Galtung, 1969, 1990). Institutional autopoietization explains how organisations created to heal, educate, govern, or inform may become increasingly organised around their own procedures, revenues, authority, and reputational survival.
The synthesis yields a four-stage civilizational grammar: unitive reality; living autonomy; life-coherent value; and responsible institutional praxis. It does not claim that a better future is cosmically guaranteed. It proposes that human beings can consciously conserve conditions in which more life-serving futures remain possible.
Key Terms and Concepts of Life-Coherent Unitive Frameworks
Please scroll to the right to see the right columns| Term | Definition | Contextual Domain | Key Author/Source Cited |
|---|---|---|---|
| Life-Coherence | The degree to which a relation, practice, technology, or institution protects, restores, or enlarges life-capacity without transferring disabling costs. | Transdisciplinary / Ethics | Dr. Bichara Sahely |
| Great Inversion | The process through which systems created to serve life become governing ends to which living beings must adapt or be sacrificed. | Political Economy / Sociology | Dr. Bichara Sahely |
| Pathological Coherence | A condition in which a subsystem reproduces itself successfully by degrading the wider living system upon which it depends. | Systems Theory / Ecology | Dr. Bichara Sahely |
| Semantic Inflation | The attribution of meaning, purpose, or consciousness to physical information merely because patterns or correlations are present. | Information Theory / Philosophy | Dr. Bichara Sahely |
| Unitive Science | A framework proposing that the universe is relational, informational, interconnected, emergent, and ultimately unified. | Physics / Cosmology | Jude Currivan |
| Life-Value | The objective criterion that evaluates a condition based on whether it enables life-capacity; life is the enabling ground of all value. | Axiology / Ethics | John McMurtry |
| Life-Capacity | The embodied, cognitive, relational, cultural, and ecological abilities through which a living being can act, experience, and participate. | Human Development / Medicine | McMurtry (referenced in Sen/Nussbaum) |
| Civil Commons | Institutions and practices securing shared access to the conditions required for life and meaningful agency, such as clean water or public knowledge. | Political Economy / Governance | John McMurtry |
| Autopoiesis | The organisation through which a living system recursively produces the components and boundary that constitute it as a distinct unity. | Biology / Living-Systems Theory | Maturana & Varela |
| Structural Coupling | The history of recurrent interaction through which a living system and its environment undergo mutually congruent change while remaining distinct. | Biology of Cognition | Maturana & Varela |
| Legitimate Other | A being whose distinct existence and claims possess standing and cannot be reduced to another system's purposes. | Ethics / Biology of Cognition | Humberto Maturana |
| Institutional Autopoietization | The drift through which an institution becomes organised around reproducing its own procedures, authority, and revenue rather than its founding life-function. | Institutional Analysis / Systems Theory | Mingers / Luhmann (referenced by Sahely) |
| Structural Violence | Avoidable impairment of life-capacity produced by social, political, or economic arrangements rather than one direct act. | Peace Studies / Sociology | Johan Galtung |
| Positive Peace | The presence of just, participatory, and life-enabling social conditions, not merely the absence of overt violence. | Peace Studies | Johan Galtung |