THE GRAMMAR OF VIABILITY: Mind, Self, Meaning, and the Conditions of Enduring Life | ChatGPT5.2 & NotebookLM

Modern knowledge has become powerful yet fragmented. Across medicine, psychology, economics, ecology, and ethics, explanatory models excel locally while failing globally — producing systems that optimize short-term performance at the cost of long-term collapse. This work proposes viability as a unifying invariant across living systems: the capacity to remain within the constraints that keep futures open.

Building on systems theory, affective neuroscience, depth psychology, philosophy of mind, and ancient wisdom traditions, the book develops a coherent grammar linking constraint, qualia, selfhood, memory, culture, and ethics. It argues that feeling is the first-person sensing of viability limits; the self is an interface managing continuity across time; recurring patterns emerge as memory without a single address; and ethics arises wherever viability must be negotiated among others and across generations.

Neither reductionist nor mystical, The Grammar of Viability reframes soul and spirit as functional realities, diagnoses institutional and cultural failure modes, and offers a disciplined framework for restoring orientation in an era of accelerating constraint. The work does not present a final theory, but a constraint-faithful lens capable of integrating knowledge without erasing difference — aimed at preserving coherence where it matters most.

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Toward a theory of organisms: Three founding principles in search of a useful integration | ANA M. SOTO, GIUSEPPE LONGO, PAUL-ANTOINE MIQUEL, MAËL MONTEVIL, MATTEO MOSSIO, NICOLE PERRET, ARNAUD POCHEVILLE, and CARLOS SONNENSCHEIN

Organisms, be they uni- or multi-cellular, are agents capable of creating their own norms; they are continuously harmonizing their ability to create novelty and stability, that is, they combine plasticity with robustness. Here we articulate the three principles for a theory of organisms proposed in this issue, namely: the default state of proliferation with variation and motility, the principle of variation and the principle of organization. These principles profoundly change both biological observables and their determination with respect to the theoretical framework of physical theories. This radical change opens up the possibility of anchoring mathematical modeling in biologically proper principles.

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