This white paper proposes a unifying framework — the Regenerative Quadrivium of Coherence — that integrates thermodynamics, semiotics, consciousness, and ethics into a single teleodynamic continuum. Drawing on Deacon and Garcia-Valdecasas’s theory of constraint–flow coupling (A Thermodynamic Basis for Teleological Causality, 2023), Deacon’s Grounding Information in Thermodynamics and the Ungroundedness of Language: A Missing Aspect of Anthropogenesis, 2025, Hamidi and Deacon’s reformulation of reinforcement learning (Illuminating the Three Dogmas of Reinforcement Learning under Evolutionary Light, 2025), Pourdavood et al.’s concept of large language models as symbolic DNA (Large Language Models as symbolic DNA of cultural dynamics, 2025), and John McMurtry’s Life-Value Onto-Axiology (The Primary Axiom And The Life-Value Compass, 2011), we argue that coherence — not matter, information, or consciousness — is the fundamental invariant of reality.
Through the phenomenological grammar TATi (Tend → Align → Transcend → Integrate), we show that the same recursive logic governs molecular self-organization, neural cognition, cultural evolution, and civilizational ethics. Biological DNA encodes physical coherence; symbolic DNA encodes cultural coherence; life-value ethics ensures their alignment. The resulting **Quadrivium — Being, Knowing, Feeling, Valuing — ** forms a tetrahedral architecture in which teleodynamics (ontology), reflexive epistemology, lived phenomenology, and life-value axiology sustain one another in regenerative balance.
This synthesis reframes science, medicine, technology, and governance as modes of coherence maintenance within a living cosmos. It advances a new law of nature and ethics:
That which coheres regeneratively with life is true, good, and beautiful; that which fragments coherence is false, evil, and ugly.
