generative coherence - TOWARDS LIFE-KNOWLEDGE

This work proposes a unified generative grammar for life, mind, culture, and complex systems: a triadic structure of absence, affordance, and the adjacent possible. Drawing on teleodynamics, semiotics, bioelectricity, developmental biology, and symbolic theory, this grammar offers a meta-framework for understanding how novelty, coherence, and meaning arise in living and symbolic systems. It challenges reductionist paradigms of linear causality and entailing laws, showing instead that constraint, interpretation, and recursive re-alignment form the basis of open-ended evolution — from cells to civilizations. Through the developmental sequence Tend–Align–Transcend–Integrate (TATi), the book scaffolds a coherent model of transformation applicable to biology, cognition, education, governance, and artificial intelligence. The work culminates in the formulation of an integral onto-axiology, evaluating systems based on their capacity to generate, sustain, and integrate life-value coherence across nested holarchies. In closing, it offers the TATi Fold as a symbolic architecture of living transformation and participatory evolution.

This white paper introduces a unifying symbolic epistemology rooted in the triadic logic of threshold-folding — Tend, Align, Transcend, Integrate (TATI) — as a recursive grammar of coherence across multiple domains. Integrating Wilber’s Integral Theory, regenerative systems thinking, Terrence Deacon’s teleodynamics, and John McMurtry’s Life-Value Onto-Axiology, we propose that all meaningful transformation — biological, psychological, societal, cosmological — unfolds through recursive phase transitions governed by the interplay of thresholds, memory, and scaffolded emergence. We argue that coherence is not a static property, but a dynamic symbolic process enacted through the intelligent tending of boundaries. By reframing development as symbolic folding rather than linear ascent, this paper offers a life-aligned grammar of transformation that bridges mind and matter, system and story, science and sacredness. The result is a new epistemic infrastructure — a Kosmic grammar of generative coherence.