The Bounded Corridor: A Regime Theory of Biological Persistence

The Bounded Corridor develops a candidate regime theory of biological persistence around a foundational question: what licenses sameness through biological change? It begins from the claim that persistence cannot be read directly from material continuity, similarity, entropy, or any single scalar measure of biological organization. For a bounded observer, a persistence judgment becomes well-defined only relative to a declared regime specifying what is tracked, which transformations are admissible, which invariants matter, which observational channels are available, and which verdicts may be issued. The corridor is therefore downstream rather than primitive: it is the geometry of admissible continuation inside a declared identity regime. The book develops this architecture across cellular maintenance, metabolism, membranes, redox, genomic and proteomic fidelity, immunity, development, cancer, aging, ecological succession, soil, carbon cycling, disturbance, climate, and evolution. It distinguishes state change, movement of the admissible region, and change of regime specification; rejects mechanism invariance across biological scales; and treats ecology as an adversarial case in which living activity modifies the conditions under which successor systems are evaluated. Existing theories—including viability theory, homeostasis, autopoiesis, resilience, niche construction, thermodynamic accounts, and multiscale biology—are retained as owners of their mechanisms rather than absorbed as discoveries of the present framework. The central biological claim is explicitly conjectural: living organization may instantiate nested identity-bearing regimes with discoverable quantitative structure. The accompanying computational research program asks whether biological persistence has a minimal sufficient representation, whether bounded observation imposes identification limits, whether persistence-relevant factorizations recur across mechanistically distant systems, and whether local persistence verdicts admit non-trivial laws of composition across organizational levels. Candidate constructions include persistence quotients over observed histories, calibrated undefined verdicts, regime-sensitive transfer tests, prospective ecological predictions, and necessity, reduction, or impossibility results. The conjecture is deliberately exposed to reduction. If persistence judgments collapse without remainder into ordinary augmented state-space modeling, no useful invariant survives across distant biological domains, and cross-level composition yields no non-trivial constraints, the proposed biological theory fails and the residue is explicit semantics plus established viability and modeling practice. This definitive edition supersedes the earlier edition of The Bounded Corridor. It is a structural rebuild rather than a separate work: the declared regime replaces the corridor as the primary object, earlier claims of scale invariance and fixed-environment universality are withdrawn, the ecology is integrated into the main architecture, and the empirical/computational challenge is made explicit.