CAPTURED RESONANCE ACROSS SCALES : A General Structural Account of Biological Failure, with Cellular, Neurodegenerative, and Behavioral Instantiations

This paper proposes that a single structural pathology — captured resonance — recurs across multiple scales of biological organization, with consistent defining features and a consistent recovery geometry at each scale. The argument is supported by three instantiations: cancer at the cellular and tissue scale, with the Soto-Sonnenschein tissue organization field theory and the Mossio-Montévil closure-of-constraints framework as the relevant theoretical grounds; Alzheimer's disease at the neurodegenerative scale, with the receiver model and amplitude-depletion principle developed elsewhere in the corpus as the relevant structural account; and addiction at the behavioral and cognitive scale, with the convergent evidence from environmental modulation studies, prefrontal cortex neuroimaging, habit-to-compulsion transitions, the shame spiral, and active inference, unified in the companion paper Captured Resonance (Barteau, 2026a). The cross-scale claim is that these are not three diseases related by analogy but three instantiations of one structural form. The structural form is specified formally in terms of nested Markov blankets and free energy minimization under suboptimal models, drawing on the Markov-blankets-of-life framework developed by Kirchhoff, Parr, Palacios, Friston & Kiverstein (2018), extended into philosophy of mind by Kirchhoff & Kiverstein (2021), together with the foundational free energy principle work of Friston (2010, 2013) and its developmental extension in Friston, Levin, Sengupta & Pezzulo (2015). The paper specifies what captured resonance adds to the active inference and closure-of-constraints programs, identifies three falsifiable empirical predictions across the scales examined, and develops the unified recovery geometry that follows from the structural account.