Coherence Testing proposes that biological, cognitive, and social systems all operate according to a single universal mechanism: when faced with ambiguity, they generate exploratory variation, evaluate micro‑trajectories, and collapse into the most coherent available configuration. This operator—coherence testing—unifies processes traditionally treated as domain‑specific, including chemotaxis, neural development, learning, adaptation, and collective reorganization. The paper reframes stochastic variation as structured exploration within a constrained possibility space, and collapse as the resolution of ambiguity into meaning. Repeated collapses accumulate into identity and development, revealing intelligence as the long‑term expression of coherence‑seeking dynamics across scales. The framework extends beyond biology and cognition to metaphysics, arguing that coherence functions as the fundamental attractor of natural systems and the structural ground of order. By articulating ambiguity, exploration, collapse, meaning, development, and intelligence as expressions of a single operator, Coherence Testing provides a general ontology capable of integrating living systems, cognitive processes, and the metaphysical structure of reality.
Denis Bailey (Sat,) studied this question.