Worlds of Stability - Attractors, Basins, and the Escalation of Feedback Architectures from Physics to Technology

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for analyzing the order of observed dynamical systems in terms of the escalation of feedback architectures. Rather than organizing physical, chemical, biological, and technological systems according to ontological levels or evolutionary narratives, the framework treats them as successive classes of stable regulatory architectures, distinguished by the geometry of their attractors and basins of attraction. Random variations and reorganizations of feedback architectures may enable increases in control power, understood as the capacity to constrain and sustain system trajectories over time. However, only those configurations whose attractors remain dynamically stable are preserved, implying a form of stability-based selection rather than adaptation or optimization. The framework is functional and non-normative: it does not presuppose goals, intentionality, or teleology at any level of analysis. Escalation is shown to proceed through qualitative reorganizations of regulatory architecture, from dynamically closed systems, through energetic and informational regulation, to metaregulatory technological systems capable of simulating and selecting architectures prior to physical realization. While later architectures achieve unprecedented control power, they do so at the cost of increasingly narrow basins of attraction, leading to heightened global fragility and sharp stability cliffs. The paper situates this account in relation to dynamical systems theory and clarifies its relation to the free-energy principle, which is interpreted as a condition of trajectory stability rather than a theory of architectural structure. Overall, the framework offers a unifying, non-teleological perspective on order, stability, and control across domains, emphasizing architecture rather than substrate as the primary axis of analysis.