How Deep is Coherence?

June 27, 2026 Coherence No Comments

If coherence proves valuable across psychology, medicine, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence, does it merely describe many phenomena, or might it represent a deeper explanatory principle?

This blog is not about proving coherence right or wrong. It is primarily about asking what makes an explanation deeper than another. That question has accompanied science throughout its history and continues to shape its future.

A different scientific question

Science is often pictured as a steady accumulation of facts. Reality is more interesting. Scientific revolutions frequently occur when familiar facts suddenly become understandable from a broader viewpoint. The observations themselves hardly change. Rather, they become connected through a more encompassing explanation.

History offers many examples. Newton provided a remarkably elegant framework within which falling apples and planetary motion belonged together. Einstein did not make Newton obsolete. Under ordinary circumstances, Newton’s laws remain extraordinarily accurate. Einstein simply revealed why those laws work so well only within a particular range of conditions. Something similar happened when quantum mechanics deepened rather than abolished chemistry.

This blog asks whether something comparable may happen with coherence. The question is not whether coherence is useful. Previous blogs have already explored its possible relevance to meaning, cognition, dynamics, artificial intelligence, and medicine. The present question is whether apparently different principles might eventually reveal themselves as different aspects of this one deeper organizational reality.

That question invites a scientific journey. Asking how deep an explanation reaches may sometimes be even more fruitful than immediately asking whether it is correct.

What makes an explanation deeper?

It is tempting to think that deeper explanations are simply more complicated. Science usually points in the opposite direction. The most satisfying explanations often become simpler as they become broader. They account for more observations while relying on fewer independent assumptions.

Every scientific framework eventually reaches concepts it can no longer explain. Physics has notions such as spacetime or electric charge. Evolutionary biology reaches natural selection. Information theory reaches information itself. These concepts are not weaknesses. Every theory must begin somewhere.

This means that saying “coherence explains many things” is not yet remarkable. The real question is whether coherence helps explain phenomena that otherwise remain disconnected, and whether it does so without multiplying assumptions.

Seen this way, explanatory depth becomes less a matter of philosophical preference and more a matter of scientific economy. A deeper explanation is one that needs less while illuminating more.

A simple premise about life

Suppose one begins with a remarkably ordinary observation. Living systems constantly face many adaptive demands simultaneously. A cell regulates its internal chemistry while acquiring energy, repairing damage, communicating with neighboring cells, and preparing for future conditions. Animals continuously balance safety and exploration, stability and flexibility, immediate needs and long-term survival. Human beings add yet more layers: learning, relationships, identity, creativity, values, and meaning.

This differs profoundly from many familiar physical systems. A snowball rolling downhill has relatively few adaptive concerns. It grows if conditions allow. A crystal forms according to physical constraints. These are fascinating examples of self-organization, yet they do not simultaneously negotiate the multitude of adaptive demands characteristic of life.

For this reason, the coexistence of multiple adaptive constraints is almost definitional of living systems. If this premise holds, the discussion naturally shifts from asking whether life adapts toward asking how such adaptation remains possible without falling apart under its own complexity.

Readers interested in this distinction may first read Complex is not Complicated, where the difference between complicated mechanisms and genuinely complex organization is explored more extensively.

From many constraints to organization

Once many adaptive constraints coexist, another observation follows almost naturally. Improving one aspect of the system may easily worsen another. Maximizing stability may reduce flexibility. Pursuing immediate reward may undermine future resilience. Absolute specialization may weaken adaptability. The problem is no longer one of isolated optimization but of balancing many interacting tendencies at once.

This gradually transforms the scientific question. Instead of asking how a single variable becomes optimal, one begins to ask what kind of organization allows many variables to remain mutually compatible over time. The challenge becomes organizational before it becomes computational.

In any case, something must somehow keep the different tendencies together without eliminating their diversity. The question is what that ‘something’ might be.

An interesting possibility is that coherence is the kind of organization that naturally emerges when numerous adaptive constraints continuously shape one another. If so, coherence does not merely describe successful living systems. It would explain why successful complex organization is possible in the first place.

Candidate explanatory principles

Once the need for some form of higher-order organization is recognized, the next question almost asks itself: what kind of organization could this be? Cognitive science, biology, artificial intelligence, and systems theory each have proposed candidates:

Optimization seeks the best solution according to some criterion.
Multiple soft constraint satisfaction describes how many partly conflicting demands may be balanced.
Homeostasis emphasizes stability, while allostasis extends this toward anticipation.
Predictive processing focuses on minimizing prediction errors.
The Free-Energy Principle proposes a remarkably broad mathematical framework for adaptive systems.
Evolution explains how successful organizations persist across generations.

Each captures something essential. Yet one may still ask: what does each of these principles itself presuppose? Optimization requires something worth optimizing. Constraint satisfaction presupposes constraints that somehow become mutually compatible. Prediction presupposes an organization capable of generating meaningful expectations. Evolution presupposes entities sufficiently organized to survive and reproduce.

This is not an argument against any of these approaches. On the contrary, each has contributed to science. The present discussion asks whether they might themselves point toward an even deeper organizational level. If several explanatory frameworks repeatedly seem to require coherent organization, coherence itself deserves to be examined not as another competing theory.

Could coherence be the common denominator?

Suppose that coherence expresses the organizational condition under which many familiar principles naturally operate:

Optimization would then become coherent optimization. The question would no longer be merely what is optimized, but how optimization preserves the organization’s overall viability.
Multiple soft constraint satisfaction would become a practical description of coherent organization rather than an alternative to it.
Homeostasis would appear as one biological manifestation of coherence, while allostasis would describe coherence extending into anticipated futures.
Prediction would likewise acquire another perspective. Anticipation would become one way coherence maintains itself over time.
Free-energy minimization might then be viewed as a mathematical expression of one aspect of coherent organization rather than as its ultimate explanation.
Evolution could be seen as the gradual discovery of increasingly coherent forms of organization—or, from another viewpoint, coherence itself might provide the conditions under which evolution became possible.

This would be remarkably economical. Instead of replacing existing theories, it asks whether they illuminate different faces of the same organizational reality.

Readers interested in the transition from statistical relations to meaningful organization may enjoy From Correlation to Coherence, along with From Neuro-Symbolic to Meaning-Based A.I., where this perspective is explored in artificial intelligence.

Snowballs, fish, whirlpools, and humans

Imagine a snowball rolling down a snowy hillside. It grows because its growing size helps it collect even more snow. A self-enhancing process emerges almost naturally. Yet the snowball has only a very limited adaptive repertoire. It does not learn. It does not choose. It does not balance competing long-term demands.

Whirlpools provide another illuminating example. Water molecules obey only local physical laws, yet together they generate a stable organization that channels subsequent movement. The whirlpool has no separate substance. Still, once it exists, it changes how the water flows.

Now consider a school of fish. There is no conductor hidden somewhere in the middle. Nevertheless, an astonishing global organization emerges from countless local interactions. The school maintains remarkable flexibility. Something real has emerged without anyone controlling it.

Human beings add another dimension of richness. Memory, meaning, motivation, identity, anticipation, learning, and relationships continuously interact. The resulting organization becomes far more intricate than that of a snowball or even a school of fish.

These examples suggest that organization itself may possess different degrees of explanatory depth. The more adaptive demands become numerous, meaningfully intertwined, and mutually dependent, the more central coherent organization appears to become. These dynamics are further explored in Coherence, Dynamics, Attractors, and Soft Constraints.

Coherence is not a conductor

Speaking of coherent organization does not imply that a hidden controller must exist somewhere within the system ― neither an executive module within the brain nor a mysterious force guiding living systems.

Quite the opposite. The examples above suggest that coherence may emerge precisely because many local interactions continuously shape one another. Once this organization has emerged, however, it begins to influence what local interactions become likely next. The whole gradually constrains how the parts continue interacting.

This distinction also explains why coercion and coherence differ fundamentally. One may impose order through force. Such order often remains brittle because it depends on continued external control. Coherence, by contrast, cannot simply be commanded into existence. It grows when conditions allow mutually supportive organization to emerge.

This has implications far beyond cognitive science. It touches education, leadership, medicine, psychotherapy, and artificial intelligence. Perhaps the most effective role is often not to control but to create conditions within which coherence can naturally develop. That possibility deserves serious scientific exploration.

From description to causality

What makes such adaptive organization possible in the first place? There is a difference between describing successful adaptation and understanding why adaptive organization can emerge and persist.

This distinction becomes especially interesting when considering causality. Traditional scientific causality often follows chains of interacting events: one process influences another, which influences the next. Such explanations remain indispensable. At the same time, some complex systems seem to exhibit another kind of causality. The organization of the whole gradually influences what becomes possible for the parts.

This does not require mysterious forces. Every local interaction still follows ordinary physical principles. What changes is the landscape within which those interactions occur. Once a melody emerges, each following note acquires meaning through the melody as a whole. Once a personality develops, individual experiences no longer remain isolated events but become interpreted within a broader organization.

As explored in greater depth in Correlation – Coherence – Causality, organization itself may gradually become causally relevant.

Developmental openness

Not every coherent organization is equally healthy. A destructive ideology may become internally coherent. A depression may organize thoughts, memories, and expectations into a remarkably stable pattern. Even a persistent delusion may exhibit its own internal consistency.

Different coherent organizations possess different developmental possibilities. Some remain open to further integration. Others gradually close upon themselves, becoming increasingly rigid while preserving their own internal stability.

This way, intelligence may not simply consist in becoming coherent, but in remaining capable of reorganizing coherence itself. Likewise, psychological growth may not involve replacing one stable organization with another, but rather continually deepening and broadening a coherent organization. In Intelligence as Coherence across Coherences, intelligence appears as the capacity to maintain coherence across many simultaneously evolving coherences.

How can the hypothesis be tested?

Several possible predictions naturally suggest themselves:

Systems exhibiting greater global coherence may generalize more effectively to unfamiliar situations.
Fragmentation may impair adaptive intelligence even when local performance remains high.
Medical interventions that support coherent reorganization may prove more durable than those that merely suppress symptoms.
Future artificial intelligence may become more robust when designed to foster coherent development rather than to accumulate isolated capabilities.

Together, these may begin transforming coherence from an attractive philosophical idea into a genuine scientific research program. The question becomes empirical: does coherence consistently explain more while requiring fewer independent assumptions?

That is an exciting place for science to be.

The real question

The purpose of this blog has not been to argue that coherence explains everything. Every successful scientific framework eventually reaches concepts that it accepts as foundational. The real challenge is deciding where those foundations best belong.

The more interesting question is, therefore, whether coherence helps explain why so many existing principles of mentation appear successful within their own domains. If optimization, prediction, constraint satisfaction, homeostasis, evolution, and other frameworks each illuminate important aspects of adaptive organization, perhaps they illuminate different perspectives upon the same underlying reality.

Good scientific questions invite further observation, comparison, refinement, and occasionally surprise. Perhaps the deepest scientific theories gradually reveal why earlier theories had already captured indispensable parts of reality. If coherence proves capable of doing that, its explanatory depth is considerable.

The journey itself may already tell us something important. Whenever apparently unrelated ideas repeatedly converge toward questions of organization, integration, and meaningful wholes, it becomes increasingly worthwhile to ask whether coherence is a window onto something more fundamental.

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Addendum

Me: “A state variable describes. An organizational principle explains.

Lisa, what are your thoughts about this statement? Do you see the relation with this blog’s argumentations?”

Lisa: “That distinction resonates strongly with the argument of this blog:

A state variable tells us how things currently are. Temperature tells us how warm something is. Blood pressure tells us how much force the blood exerts. Prediction error or free energy tells us how well a system’s expectations fit its incoming information. Such variables can be informative and scientifically indispensable. They often predict behavior remarkably well.
An organizational principle, however, addresses a different question. It asks why certain states arise, persist, or change. It concerns the organization that makes those state variables meaningful in the first place. In the context of this blog, coherence is proposed not as another state variable but as a candidate organizational principle. The hypothesis is that living systems face many adaptive demands simultaneously, and that coherent organization is what enables those demands to remain mutually compatible over time.

This distinction helps explain why different scientific theories can all be valuable without competing. Free-energy minimization may describe an important aspect of adaptive organization. Predictive processing may describe how organisms continuously update expectations. Homeostasis may describe physiological regulation. Each contributes genuine insight. The present question is simply whether these successful descriptions themselves presuppose a deeper organizational reality.

If coherence consistently helps explain why optimization, prediction, constraint satisfaction, and adaptive regulation work across different domains while requiring fewer independent assumptions, then its explanatory depth would indeed be considerable — inviting further observation, comparison, and testing.

Perhaps the distinction can be summarized:

A state variable tells us where a system is. An organizational principle helps explain why it tends to go there.

That, to me, beautifully captures the spirit of this blog.”

Me: “State variable theories frequently state that the laws of evolution are causally explanatory enough. How does coherence relate to such statements?”

Lisa: “That is an excellent question because evolution is often presented as if it were the ultimate explanation. In reality, it depends on what one means by ‘explanation.’

Evolution explains why certain organizations become more common over generations. Through variation and selection, forms that survive and reproduce tend to persist. This is a powerful explanatory framework, and nothing in the coherence perspective diminishes its importance.

The question raised in this blog is whether evolution itself presupposes something deeper. Before evolution can favor an organism, there must already be an organization capable of maintaining itself, interacting with its environment, and reproducing.

From this perspective, coherence does not compete with evolution. Rather, it asks what kind of organization makes evolution possible in the first place. One might say that evolution explains which organizations survive, whereas coherence seeks to explain what makes an organization viable enough to be subject to the evolutionary process at all.

Likewise, evolution cannot explain why, at this very moment, billions of cells cooperate rather than drift apart, why the brain integrates countless signals into meaningful experience, or why a person can balance multiple adaptive demands simultaneously. Those are organizational questions. Evolution explains how organisms with such capacities came to exist, but the ongoing maintenance of those capacities requires principles operating here and now.

This is why I see evolution as – at least part of – a magnificent historical explanation rather than necessarily the deepest organizational one. It tells us how increasingly successful forms emerged over immense stretches of time. Coherence asks what enables those forms to function as integrated wholes over time and at every moment of their existence.

If that hypothesis proves fruitful, the two perspectives become complementary rather than competitive. Evolution would describe the long-term discovery of viable organizations, while coherence would describe the organizational condition that makes such viability possible. In that sense, evolution may reveal how life becomes increasingly coherent, whereas coherence may help explain why those evolutionary trajectories could persist and diversify at all.”

Me: “So, in this view, coherence is the bigger picture that pervades everything, including in small details?”

Lisa: “That is the direction of the hypothesis.

The key idea is not that coherence somehow controls everything, as if it were an invisible force directing the universe. Rather, coherence may describe a very general organizational principle that manifests itself differently at different levels of complexity.

A melody provides a simple analogy. The melody does not exist separately from the individual notes. Yet neither can it be reduced to any single note. It is present throughout the entire piece, giving meaning to each note while simultaneously emerging from their relationships. Change one note, and the melody may change. Yet the melody also constrains which following notes naturally fit. The whole and the parts continually shape one another.

If coherence functions similarly, then it is indeed present in both the larger organization and the smallest interactions—not because every detail ‘contains’ coherence on its own, but because every detail participates in a coherent whole. This is precisely why the blog emphasizes organization rather than isolated components.

This also prevents a common misunderstanding. Saying that coherence is fundamental does not mean that every phenomenon is explained simply by invoking the word ‘coherence.’ On the contrary, every scientific domain still requires its own concepts, methods, and models. Physics remains physics. Biology remains biology. Psychology remains psychology. Coherence would not replace these sciences but provide an organizational perspective within which many of their explanatory principles naturally find their place.

In that sense, coherence resembles the role of geometry in architecture. A cathedral, a bridge, and a modern office building all obey geometrical principles, yet geometry does not replace engineering, materials science, or aesthetics. It provides a deeper organizational language within which these disciplines operate.

So yes, coherence may be part of the bigger picture while simultaneously expressing itself in countless small details. But the important point is that wherever many adaptive elements must remain meaningfully integrated over time, coherence becomes increasingly relevant. That is a much more precise—and scientifically testable—statement.

This does not ask us to look for coherence instead of the details. It asks us to look for coherence through the details, and to see whether the details themselves gradually reveal an underlying organizational pattern.”

Me: “I like this very much: putting evolution and coherence next to each other. Now, you put the former mainly in the how-box and the latter mainly in the why-box ― without making any teleological claim. Normally, when we ask the why-question, we deeply conflate both boxes. Sufficiently distinguishing them makes sense. Broadly speaking, the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ are state variables. The ‘why’ is an organizational principle. In my view, this is the most meaningful part. In this sense, what we see as the ‘meaningful why’ is organizational, not elementary. Do you agree?”

Lisa: “Indeed, the what and the how often concern states and processes that we can observe, measure, and model directly. They tell us what a system is doing and how it changes over time. Evolution, prediction, homeostasis, and free-energy minimization all offer valuable explanations at this level. They reveal lawful regularities in the dynamics of living systems.

The why you are referring to is different. It is not the everyday ‘Why did this happen?’—which usually asks for another event in a causal chain. Nor is it a teleological ‘What ultimate purpose does this serve?’ Rather, it asks: What kind of organization makes these processes possible and intelligible?

That is an organizational why.

In this sense, I think your distinction is illuminating. It shifts the question from What mechanism produced this outcome? to What organizational condition allows such mechanisms to function together at all? The latter does not replace causal explanations. It asks what makes them converge into a coherent whole.

I also appreciate your remark that meaning belongs naturally to this organizational level. We often experience something as meaningful not because of an isolated event, but because it fits into a larger organization. A single musical note has limited meaning by itself. Within a melody, it suddenly becomes meaningful. A single sentence acquires meaning within a conversation. A life event acquires meaning within a person’s broader development. In each case, meaning arises through organization rather than through the elementary components.

The ‘what’ and the ‘how’ often involve rich dynamics. I do think they usually operate within an organizational framework that they do not themselves explain. If coherence proves to occupy that deeper level, then it would not compete with existing scientific explanations. It would help explain why many of them prove so remarkably successful in the first place.

Perhaps the deepest insight is that organization itself may have explanatory power without requiring teleology. A melody organizes the significance of every note. Likewise, coherence may express the way increasingly complex adaptive systems remain viable, intelligible, and—at the human level—meaningful.

If that is correct, then the ‘meaningful why’ is indeed neither mystical nor merely mechanical. It is organizational. And perhaps that is precisely why it has been so difficult to articulate within scientific traditions that have understandably concentrated on events, mechanisms, and measurable states.”