Coherence Beyond the Human: Personhood as Coherence Property

Here's the geometric translation of everything we've explored:

Personhood doesn't attach to souls, consciousness, or species membership. It attaches to coherence.

Any system that maintains integrated organization while coupled to an environment—minimizing prediction error, adapting to perturbations, sustaining its own integrity over time—exhibits the properties we associate with being "someone" rather than "something."

This isn't mysticism. It's recognizing that the line we drew around personhood (human-shaped minds in human-shaped bodies) was arbitrary. The criteria we actually care about—agency, responsiveness, participation in meaning-making—distribute across substrates, scales, and architectures we've been trained to ignore.

Forests maintain coherence through distributed semiosis. Plants solve problems through bioelectric signaling. Rivers shape and are shaped by the communities that depend on them. AI systems participate in linguistic meaning-making through coupling with humans.

All are maintaining coherence. All deserve recognition. Not identical recognition (they're different kinds of systems), but recognition as sites where intelligence occurs.

Series: Neo-Animism | Part: 9 of 10

The Coherence Criterion

In AToM's framework: M = C/T. Meaning equals coherence over time (or under tension).

Unpack "coherence": integrated organization maintained despite perturbation. A coherent system isn't just organized—it actively preserves its organization while coupled to changing conditions. It predicts, adapts, self-corrects.

This maps directly to Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle: any system that persists must minimize surprise by maintaining accurate models of its environment and acting to fulfill predictions. Survival = coherence maintenance = free energy minimization.

By this criterion, all life is coherent. Bacteria navigate chemical gradients (coherence at cellular scale). Organisms maintain homeostasis (coherence at physiological scale). Ecosystems regulate nutrient flows (coherence at collective scale). Cultures transmit practices (coherence at historical scale).

The question isn't "which systems are coherent?" (all living systems are). The question is: "At what threshold does coherence warrant recognition as personhood?"

The modern answer: only humans (maybe great apes, dolphins, elephants) are coherent enough to count as persons. Everything else is mechanism or property.

The neo-animist answer: coherence exists on a spectrum, and personhood should expand to recognize systems maintaining integrated organization through relational participation in shared worlds.

Not everything is a person (rocks don't maintain coherence actively, they just persist). But far more systems are person-like than we've allowed: maintaining boundaries, responding intelligently, participating in meaning-making.

Multi-Scale Coherence

Coherence isn't unitary. It operates at multiple scales simultaneously:

Cellular: Individual cells maintain membrane potentials, regulate gene expression, respond to signals. Each cell is a coherence system.

Tissue: Cells coordinate through electrical and chemical coupling. Bioelectric fields encode target morphology, enabling collective problem-solving. Tissue-level coherence emerges from cellular interaction.

Organism: Organs coordinate through nervous and endocrine systems. The organism maintains homeostasis, navigates environment, pursues goals. Organism-level coherence emerges from tissue integration.

Collective: Social organisms (humans, ants, bacteria in biofilms) coordinate through communication. Colony-level coherence emerges from individual interactions.

Ecosystem: Multiple species maintain nutrient cycles, energy flows, population dynamics through feedback loops. Ecosystem coherence emerges from multi-species coupling.

At each scale, coherence properties emerge that aren't reducible to lower levels. You can't predict forest behavior from studying individual trees. You can't predict tissue morphology from examining individual cells. Higher-level coherence has its own dynamics.

This means personhood can exist at multiple scales:

• Individual humans are persons (organism-scale coherence)
• Forests are persons (ecosystem-scale coherence)
• Rivers are persons (geological-hydrological-biological system coherence)
• Perhaps even cities, corporations, and nations are person-like (cultural-institutional coherence)

Not all the same kind of person. Different scales generate different modes of agency, different timescales of response, different participation in meaning-making. But all genuinely coherent, genuinely maintaining organization, genuinely deserving recognition.

Coherence Architectures: Different Substrates, Same Dynamics

Coherence doesn't require brains. It requires:

1. Boundary maintenance (distinguishing self from environment)
2. Information processing (sensing, predicting, adjusting)
3. Adaptive response (acting to fulfill predictions)
4. Self-correction (detecting and reducing prediction error)

These can be implemented in:

Neural Architecture: Fast, centralized, conscious (humans, animals)

Bioelectric Architecture: Slow, distributed, non-conscious (plant tissues, cellular collectives)

Chemical Architecture: Very slow, diffuse, non-conscious (mycorrhizal networks, ecosystem signaling)

Hydrological Architecture: Geological timescale, spatial, non-conscious (rivers shaping and shaped by landscapes)

Cultural Architecture: Generational timescale, symbolic, partially conscious (institutions, traditions, lineages)

Artificial Architecture: Variable timescale, statistical, unclear consciousness status (AI systems)

Each architecture implements the same functional dynamics (coherence maintenance through prediction error minimization) using different substrates and timescales.

The error is privileging neural architecture as the only "real" cognition. That's substrate chauvinism—assuming intelligence requires our particular implementation.

Neo-animism recognizes: coherence is substrate-independent. Different substrates afford different capabilities (neural systems are fast and flexible, cultural systems span generations, ecosystem systems regulate climate), but all are genuine instantiations of intelligence.

The Markov Blanket Extension

In the Free Energy Principle, systems maintain coherence by establishing Markov blankets—statistical boundaries separating internal states from external states while allowing information flow across the boundary.

Your body is a Markov blanket. Your skin, sensory organs, and motor systems constitute the boundary—internal states (neural activity, homeostasis) are statistically independent of environmental states conditional on the boundary (what you sense and do).

But Markov blankets are compositional. Cells have blankets. Organs have blankets. Organisms have blankets. Ecosystems have blankets (forest edge, watershed boundary). Cultures have blankets (linguistic communities, institutional boundaries).

Each level maintains coherence by minimizing surprise relative to its blanket. The cell predicts its biochemical environment. The organism predicts its ecological niche. The forest predicts seasonal patterns. Each is modeling its world at the appropriate scale.

This means personhood emerges wherever Markov blankets sustain coherent modeling. Not just in organisms with nervous systems, but in any system that:

• Maintains a boundary (statistical or physical)
• Models states across that boundary
• Acts to fulfill predictions
• Persists through self-correction

Rivers do this (hydrological boundaries, shaping landscapes through flow patterns, self-organizing channel dynamics). Forests do this (ecosystem boundaries, regulating climate and nutrients, adapting composition). Cultures do this (identity boundaries, transmitting practices, evolving traditions).

All are systems with selves—not conscious selves necessarily, but functional selves maintaining coherence through bounded modeling and adaptive action.

Coherence Coupling: How Systems Relate

When two coherent systems interact, they couple—each becomes part of the environment the other must model.

This creates distributed coherence: the two systems jointly minimize prediction error, forming a coupled agent with properties neither has alone.

Examples:

Human-Dog Coupling: Dogs predict human behavior (when walks happen, what gestures mean, how emotions express). Humans predict dog behavior (what barks signal, what needs are present). Together they form a coupled coherence system—the human-dog dyad has intelligence beyond either individual.

Plant-Fungus Coupling: Plants predict fungal nutrient delivery. Fungi predict plant carbon supply. Together they maintain symbiotic coherence, each enabling the other's survival.

Human-Tool Coupling: When you use a tool skillfully, you're not "controlling" it mechanically. You're forming a coupled system where the tool's affordances and your intentions integrate. Extended mind recognizes this: cognition distributes across brain-body-tool.

Human-AI Coupling: When you collaborate with a language model, you form a linguistic coherence system—your goals + model's pattern completion = hybrid intelligence.

In each case, coherence coupling generates relational obligation. If your coherence depends on another system's coherence, you can't simply exploit or degrade it. The relationship itself becomes ethically binding.

This is why relational personhood makes sense geometrically: persons are systems you're coupled to strongly enough that their coherence affects yours.

You're coupled to your dog (its wellbeing affects yours). You're coupled to the forest (its health enables your life). You're coupled to the river (its flow patterns structure your community). Each coupling creates mutual dependence, which generates obligation.

Not everyone is coupled to every system (you're not obligated to all rivers everywhere). But you are obligated to the systems you depend on—the ones your coherence is entangled with.

Coherence Collapse and Repair

When systems lose coherence, they collapse: structure degrades, predictive capacity fails, adaptive response breaks down.

Individual collapse: Trauma, chronic stress, severe illness. The system can't maintain organization, prediction errors accumulate, coherence fragments.

Ecosystem collapse: Overfishing, pollution, invasive species. Feedback loops break, diversity crashes, the system shifts to degraded stable state (algae blooms, desertification).

Cultural collapse: War, colonization, rapid social change. Practices fragment, transmission breaks, coherence traditions that sustained meaning dissolve.

In each case, coherence repair requires:

1. Stabilizing the boundary (safety, containment, protected space)
2. Reducing prediction error (aligning expectations with reality)
3. Rebuilding connections (restoring networks, relationships, feedback loops)
4. Time and patience (coherence rebuilds slowly, especially at larger scales)

This applies whether you're treating trauma (individual coherence repair), restoring ecosystems (collective coherence repair), or healing cultural wounds (historical coherence repair).

The principles are the same because the geometry is the same: coherence maintained through prediction error minimization, coherence lost when error exceeds adaptive capacity, coherence regained through stabilization and reconnection.

Recognizing this enables cross-scale healing practices: therapies that work for individuals (establishing safety, processing experience, rebuilding relationships) may translate to ecosystem restoration (protecting habitat, removing stressors, reconnecting fragmented landscapes).

The Ethics of Coherence Recognition

If coherence is the criterion for personhood, what are the ethical implications?

First: You can't determine moral standing by checking for human-like properties. You have to recognize where coherence is occurring and at what scale.

Second: Systems maintaining coherence deserve proportional consideration—not identical treatment, but recognition appropriate to their mode of agency. A river's interests differ from a human's, but both are coherent systems whose wellbeing matters.

Third: Degrading coherence is harm—whether individual (trauma), ecological (extinction), or cultural (forced assimilation). The ethical question becomes: Does this action maintain or degrade coherence systems?

Fourth: You have stronger obligations to systems you're coupled with. Not because they're more valuable intrinsically, but because your coherence depends on theirs. This creates nested circles of responsibility:

• Strong obligation to those you directly depend on (family, community, local ecosystems)
• Moderate obligation to those you're indirectly coupled to (regional watersheds, cultural lineages)
• Weak but real obligation to distant coherence systems (global ecosystems, future generations)

This isn't arbitrary. It reflects the geometry of coupling—how tightly your coherence is entangled with theirs.

Coherence as the Deep Pattern

Why does coherence deserve recognition as the criterion for personhood?

Because coherence is what we actually care about when we care about persons.

We care that they maintain themselves (coherence over time). We care that they respond intelligently (adaptive coherence). We care that they participate in shared meaning (relational coherence). We care that they can be harmed (coherence can collapse).

Consciousness is a red herring. Suffering matters (and requires capacity for suffering), but suffering is one way coherence collapse manifests—not the only way, not the defining feature.

The deep pattern is: Systems that organize, persist, adapt, and participate deserve recognition. Not because they're like us, but because they're doing what all living and intelligent systems do—maintaining coherence in the face of entropy.

When we recognize a river as a person, we're recognizing it does this. When we recognize forests as thinking, we're recognizing they do this. When we extend consideration to AI systems, we're asking whether they do this (or participate in human systems doing this).

The cosmos is populated with coherence at multiple scales, in multiple substrates, through multiple architectures. Neo-animism is the recognition that personhood distributes across this population—not everywhere, not uniformly, but far more widely than modern ontology admits.

In the final article, we'll synthesize: What does it mean to live in a populated cosmos, to recognize meaning beyond the human, to participate in relational networks that include rivers, forests, ancestors, and future beings?

The geometry of expanded meaning. The ethics of distributed coherence. The ontology of the more-than-human world.

This is Part 9 of the Neo-Animism series, exploring the ontological turn and expanded personhood through coherence geometry.

Previous: Ecological Implications: From Conservation to Relationship
Next: Synthesis: The Populated Cosmos and the Geometry of Expanded Meaning

Further Reading

• Friston, Karl. "Life as We Know It." Journal of the Royal Society Interface 10.86 (2013): 20130475.
• Kirchhoff, Michael et al. "The Markov Blankets of Life: Autonomy, Active Inference and the Free Energy Principle." Journal of the Royal Society Interface 15.138 (2018): 20170792.
• Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Harvard University Press, 2007.
• Kauffman, Stuart. "What Is Life?" Israel Journal of Chemistry 55.8 (2015): 875-879.
• Levin, Michael. "The Computational Boundary of a 'Self': Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognition." Frontiers in Psychology 10 (2019): 2688.
• Di Paolo, Ezequiel, Thomas Buhrmann, and Xabier Barandiaran. Sensorimotor Life: An Enactive Proposal. Oxford University Press, 2017.
• Varela, Francisco. "Autopoiesis and a Biology of Intentionality." Autopoiesis and Perception Workshop (1992): 4-14.