The Ziran System General Inquiry Without a Final Observer, Ontology, or Disciplinary Boundary

This paper presents the Ziran System as a general framework for inquiry that does not presuppose a final observer, a privileged ontology, or a fixed disciplinary boundary. Rather than defining inquiry through a stable subject, object domain, variable set, or scientific vocabulary, the system tracks how observation, measurement, inference, experimentation, intervention, memory, and institutional coordination become operationally available within heterogeneous configurations. The Ziran System treats boundaries, scales, temporal windows, sensors, state spaces, inferential interfaces, resources, and external memory as revisable components of inquiry rather than as fixed background conditions. It therefore distinguishes local scientific success from global epistemic closure and allows different scientific, artificial, biological, institutional, and civilizational configurations to generate non-equivalent forms of observability and intervention. General inquiry is understood as the capacity to identify, compare, reconfigure, and reconnect operational differences across domains without requiring their reduction to a single ontology or disciplinary language. The framework also analyzes the conditions under which inquiry fragments, loses reachability, or becomes unable to reconstruct the configurations required for further observation and self-correction. The broader claim is that inquiry can remain coherent without a final observer or final ontology if its operational conditions, transitions, and limits remain explicitly revisable and empirically constrained.