This paper argues that systems whose persistence depends on resolving multiple, incompatible constraints cannot be adequately described in decomposed terms. The standard assumption that behaviour can be recovered from independently specified component processes fails where subsystem contributions depend on the total system state. Under such conditions, behaviour is not fully determined unless it is coordinated relative to the system as a whole. It is shown that incompatibility among constraints generates tension that cannot be resolved through purely local interactions, as the significance of any process varies with global configuration. Any behaviour-preserving account must therefore either encode global structure within each component or introduce an additional coordinating process, thereby abandoning decomposition. The result is a structural restriction on adequate description: in such systems, behaviour is necessarily determined through unified mediation, understood as the coordinated resolution of competing constraints relative to the total system state.
Joe Alexander Creed (Fri,) studied this question.