Living systems — from cells and organisms to institutions and ecosystems — often appear stable until they fail abruptly. Existing theories explain aspects of this behavior but lack a shared formal language for persistence, fragility, and collapse across scales. This paper develops a constraint-first framework that treats life as the capacity to remain within a bounded region of state space under non-equilibrium conditions.
Starting from non-equilibrium thermodynamics, the framework introduces regulation, information, and control as physical necessities for stability under disturbance. These elements are integrated into a geometric account of viability, in which persistence depends on the simultaneous satisfaction of multiple necessary conditions. From this geometry emerge universal invariants of living systems, conjugate pairings governing trade-offs, a triadic closure linking energy, information, and viability constraints, and a multiplicative structure that explains weakest-link failure and nonlinear collapse.
The framework distinguishes present stability from intrinsic health, defined as distance from absorbing boundaries and preservation of future option space. It further shows how a minimal notion of normativity and responsibility arises naturally from action in constrained viability space, without moral presupposition. The result is a scale-agnostic grammar applicable to biology, medicine, institutions, and ecology, offering improved early-warning diagnostics and a principled basis for design and intervention focused on long-term persistence rather than short-term performance.
