The Bounded Corridor_Life as Persistence Under Joint Constraint

What licenses sameness through biological change? The Bounded Corridor develops a candidate regime theory of biological persistence. Its central inversion is that neither identity nor a viability corridor is primitive: for a bounded observer, a persistence judgment becomes well-defined only relative to a declared regime specifying the focal organization, admissible transformations, relevant distinctions and invariants, observational channels, retained evidence, temporal horizon, continuation conditions, and available verdicts. The corridor is then the geometry of admissible continuation within that regime. The book applies this architecture across cellular maintenance, development, immunity, cancer, aging, ecology, soil, climate, evolution, extinction, palaeobiology, astrobiology, reconstruction, and forecasting. It distinguishes state change, movement of an admissible region, and change of regime specification; separates present instantiation, continuation viability, terminal closure, and non-detection; and rejects the claim that biological scales share mechanisms or differ merely by parameterization. Existing theories—including viability theory, homeostasis, autopoiesis, resilience, niche construction, thermodynamic approaches, and hierarchy theory—retain ownership of their mechanisms. The proposed contribution is a regime-first dependency architecture and the conjecture that biological persistence possesses discoverable quantitative structure. A governing limit is that operations preserving the equivalence responsible for an obstruction cannot resolve that obstruction. Further measurement is informative only when it supplies an independent distinction or changes the intervention; otherwise the demand must be narrowed or the verdict refused. The book extends this discipline to composed access chains, distinguishing differences manufactured experimentally, retained historically, and declared in models. Because each handoff may preserve or erase distinctions, claims about past life, present life, persistence, habitability, extinction, and compatible signatures require different evidential bridges. The biological conjecture remains explicitly open. The research program asks whether persistence judgments admit minimal sufficient representations or persistence quotients, whether bounded observation imposes identification limits, whether structurally equivalent persistence factorizations recur across mechanistically distant domains, and when local persistence evaluations determine, constrain, or fail to determine a joint persistence evaluation. If these distinctions never alter a licensed verdict, intervention, repair, or refusal—or if the proposed structures reduce without remainder to ordinary augmented state-space modeling and existing theory—the biological conjecture fails. This definitive edition supersedes the previous edition of The Bounded Corridor and is a structural rebuild of the same work rather than a separate publication.