Across physics, biology, mind, culture, and ethics, modern knowledge has advanced through increasing specialization — yet this fragmentation has obscured a deeper unity. This white paper articulates a single viability grammar governing systems across scale: invariants constrain matter, energy enacts those constraints, affect feels their pressure, cognition buffers risk, cultures symbolize regulation, and ethics emerges wherever systems recognize — or refuse to recognize — the limits that keep viable futures open.
Rather than treating life, consciousness, and value as separate mysteries or subjective constructions, this work demonstrates how each arises necessarily once systems must preserve themselves under uncertainty and bounded computation. Drawing on systems theory, bioenergetics, affective neuroscience, medicine, economics, and life-value ethics, the paper reframes chronic disease, psychological distress, institutional failure, ecological overshoot, and moral injury as convergent failure modes of the same underlying grammar: the erosion of margins and the mistaken belief that buffering confers exemption from constraint.
This is not a reductionist theory, a moral ideology, or a speculative metaphysics. It is a diagnostic framework — testable, cross-disciplinary, and practical — that clarifies why intelligence and optimization often accelerate collapse when decoupled from viability, and how ethics emerges not from preference or authority, but from lived recognition of non-negotiable limits. The paper concludes by outlining implications for medicine, governance, economics, artificial intelligence, and institutional design, offering a coherence-first lens for navigating complexity without denying constraint.
