THE PHYSICAL LAWS
The following physical laws constitute a unification of the sciences deriving organizational, biological, and epistemological constraints from thermodynamic primacy. Each law is either foundational or derivable from the others as a necessary consequence. These laws apply identically across all scales of organization because they describe physical necessity rather than domain-specific phenomena. They establish what can persist, not what should.
This framework underpins two books currently in development: On the Origin of Physics by Means of Immanent Causation; Or, The Necessity of Coherence in The Unified Field and World Destroyer’s Handbook: The Thermodynamics of Human Coordination: A Unified Metabolic Theory of Human Social Behavior.
Animal Taggart, 1/14/2026
Immanent Causation — Reality is self-determining. Physical structure exists as the fixed point where field configurations both extremize and determine their own action functional: δ_Φ 𝒮[Φ; Φ] = 0. There are no external laws—reality generates its own constraints.
The Law of Dissipative Coherence — All structure is dissipative structure. Organization persists only through continuous gradient processing that maintains internal consistency with constitutive constraints. Equilibrium does not exist in physical reality—it is an accounting approximation. Structure is sustained energy flow, not static configuration. Loss of coherent gradient throughput equals dissolution.
The Law of Reality Alignment — Reality possesses determinate causal structure. All models exist on a continuum of alignment with this structure. The degree of alignment determines predictive accuracy and survival outcomes. Sustained misalignment produces corrective consequences through contact with physical reality.
The Law of Energy Priority — All organization exists only insofar as it provides energy return exceeding cost to persist. Structures with negative net energy yield cannot persist under thermodynamic selection pressure.
The Principle of Metabolic Priority (Corollary to Energy Priority) — Biological structures are subject to Energy Priority: they exist only insofar as they provide energy return exceeding metabolic cost. Natural selection is thermodynamic selection pressure operating on heritable traits—not a separate biological principle but energy economics applied to replicating systems.
The Law of Scale-Antagonistic Selection — Selection operates simultaneously at multiple nested scales (gene → cell → organism → group → population → species). Optimization at any scale necessarily degrades fitness at other scales because energy optimization at one thermodynamic scale creates disorder at adjacent scales. This antagonism is irreducible and constitutes the generative mechanism of evolutionary dynamics.
The Law of Metabolic Arbitrage — In systems with information asymmetry, organisms evolve to exploit energy gradients between deceptive signal manipulation and honest production. When D + V < P (deception cost + verification cost to others < production cost), selection favors parasitic extraction over resource generation.
The Law of Obligate Dependency — The metabolic cost of redundancy drives inevitable loss of capacity, creating irreversible dependency. Redundant capacity cannot persist under selection pressure—its elimination is thermodynamically guaranteed and creates obligate dependency on whatever made it redundant.
The Law of Compensatory Adaptation — Any intervention in a complex system triggers systemic reorganization that maintains underlying thermodynamic equilibria. Systems adapt to preserve energy flow patterns, not stated purposes.
The Law of Structural Expedience — Structure creates energy gradients, and those gradients will be followed according to physics, regardless of the structure’s intended purpose. Structures will be used in whatever ways they can be used, not as designed.
The Cognitive Event Horizon — Information processing has irreducible energy cost. Complete representation of physical reality exceeds any finite observer’s energy budget. All models are therefore compressions that discard structure. For embedded observers, complete theories of the totality lie beyond a cognitive event horizon—absolutely, thermodynamically inaccessible. This is a hard, physical limit. There are questions finite observers cannot even begin to ask.
The Principle of Scale Equivalence — No scale of observation or organization has ontological priority. Reality permits infinite refinement downward and infinite extension upward from any chosen resolution, such that all boundaries, units, and levels of analysis are pragmatic rather than natural joints in structure.
Corollary (Information-Theoretic): Signal and noise are observer-relative distinctions reflecting which scale structure is preserved versus discarded. The channel doesn’t create randomness; it projects infinite structure onto finite measurement basis.
Corollary (Reductionist Limits): Complete reduction requires processing infinite information from finer scales; complete derivation requires infinite information from broader context. Multi-scale modeling is thermodynamically mandatory. Each scale exhibits patterns irreducible to others through energy constraints, not ontological independence.