Abstract Organized systems persist only through ongoing functional work—yet no shared grammar specifies what that work consists in across biological, organizational, and institutional scales. In systems biology, Montévil functional work describes what keeps it from dissolving—four kinds of ongoing thermodynamic work, each grounded in established physics (Prigogine, Shannon/Landauer, Schrödinger, Gibbs/Atkinson). This dual-aspect claim—structure as frozen work, work as flowing state—parallels the constraint/process distinction that Montévil & Mossio (2015) formalized for biological systems, and proposed here as a general principle across scales. From this distinction, the paper derives a boundary criterion (if work stops, does the pattern dissolve?), a persistence spectrum predicting characteristic failure types from how systems balance frozen structure against active regeneration, and a four-interface decomposition of boundary encounters that specifies what each participant brings to the encounters described in the companion paper on boundary-emergence (referenced below). The minimal sufficiency claim is provisional and falsifiable. It would be falsified by a fifth irreducible category not decomposable into the proposed four, or by a domain of organized complexity where one channel plays no demonstrable role. The number four is proposed as an empirical claim subject to revision—if fewer suffice or more prove irreducible, the grammar adjusts while the persistence thesis holds.
Paul Campillo (Wed,) studied this question.