The Dynamic Architecture of Viability
From Distinction, Energy, Constraint, and Absence to Sentience, Relation, and Life-Coherent WorldsBy Dr Bichara Sahely
Length2h
About this audiobook
How do distinctions become living worlds — and how do living worlds become sentient, relational, and morally answerable? The Dynamic Architecture of Viability integrates Maturana’s biology of cognition, affective neuroscience, Deacon’s teleodynamics, Friston’s free-energy principle, Wilber’s integral framework, McMurtry’s life-value philosophy, and octonionic and exceptional mathematics. It traces how energy channelled by constraints can become self-maintaining organization, felt significance, action, memory, social worlds, and ethical responsibility. Using first-, second-, and third-person windows, seven viability functions, cross-scale cases, and testable bridge hypotheses, it carefully separates established science from metaphysical proposal and mathematical analogy. Its guiding question is practical: what does a system conserve, whose life does it enable, and what possibilities does it leave open?
Audiobook details
GenrePhilosophy, Science and Nature
Length2 hrs
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateAug 8, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Introduction
2Listener's Note
3AI Transparency Note
4Disclaimer
5How to Listen
Show all chaptersShow less
6Orientation for the Listener: A spoken picture of the whole architecture
7Preface — The synthesis that was already implicit
8Part One — From the first distinction to a living domain
91. Distinction is necessary but not yet alive: 1.1 The first methodological rule
102. Energy, exergy and the insufficiency of power alone: 2.1 Three meanings of free energy
113. Autopoiesis, cognition and worlds brought forth: 3.1 Objectivity and mathematics
12Part Two — The viability grammar in motion
134. Seven recurrent functions, not seven things
144.1 The seven triads
15A spoken picture of the sevenfold closure
164.2 A binary construction
175. From grammar to dynamics
185.1 Multiple timescales
195.2 The recursive loop
206. Deacon, Friston and Inverse Darwinism as complementary windows
21Part Three — From immanent concern to felt concern
227. Affect as the intrinsic significance of regulation
237.1 The metaphysical identity hypothesis
247.2 The hippocampus is not an emotion-and-memory location
258. Qualia: differentiation explained, existence not dissolved
269. The second-person window: A spoken picture of three windows and four locations
2710. A-Q-A-L, Wilber–Combs and category discipline
28Part Four — A triune-aspect process monism
2911. Can reality be both experience and structure?
3011.1 Comparison with analytic idealism
3111.2 Why triality comes to mind
3211.3 The remaining uncertainty
33Part Five — The formal architecture: grammar, algebra, geometry and dynamics
3412. Mathematics has a life of implication: 12.1 Four formal levels
3513. From Fano incidence to octonionic composition
3614. The exceptional ascent and its exact limits
37A spoken picture of the relational-exceptional programme
3814.1 Hopf fibrations and projection
3914.2 The Altimeter and the Wu-Wei vector
40Part Six — One circulation across organism, relation, institution and planet
4115. The field of viability: A spoken picture of the circulation across scales
4216. Four cross-scale tests
4316.1 Septic shock
4416.2 Coral-reef bleaching
4516.3 Financial crisis
4616.4 The US–Israel–Iran conflict system
4717. Signal fidelity, trust and optionality
48Part Seven — Life-coherence, love and the Greatest Commandment
4918. Why viability needs a value test
5019. The Greatest Commandment as relational grammar
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