Humberto Maturana’s biology of cognition offers a rigorous non-reductionist account of living systems as autonomous, structurally determined, autopoietic unities that conserve themselves through ongoing structural coupling with their medium. This white paper develops a Maturanan biological framework for understanding disease, healing, and non-forcing action. It proposes the concept of living coherence to describe the dynamic conservation of congruence among the nested processes through which a living system maintains viable organism–niche relations. These processes include metabolic and mitochondrial regulation, redox signaling, immune tolerance and repair, neuroendocrine-affective regulation, microbiome ecology, developmental plasticity, behavior, social relations, and ecological context. Within this framework, health is interpreted as the dynamic conservation of viable coupling; disease as costly conserved drift, loss of congruence, or collapse of organism–niche viability; and healing as the restoration or reorganization of viable structural coupling. The paper draws on Maturana’s concepts of autopoiesis, structural coupling, cognition, emotioning, love, and natural drift, and places them in dialogue with contemporary work in allostasis, mitochondrial psychobiology, redox biology, organism-centered immunology, microbiome science, affective neuroscience, evo-devo, and enactive cognition. The resulting framework supports a biological interpretation of non-forcing action: intervention as careful, congruent perturbation that respects the autonomy of living systems and enlarges their field of viable possibilities.
