The Universal & Atomic Elements of Organization
A falsifiable scientific theory proposing that the same irreducible structures organize both thought and reality — from the quantum to the social scale.
O-Theory proposes that four irreducible structures — Distinctions, Systems, Relationships and Perspectives (DSRP) — form the universal grammar of organization. Rather than being merely useful ways of thinking, these structures are hypothesized to be the atomic elements from which every organized phenomenon emerges, whether in cognition, biology, physics, mathematics, society, or the cosmos.
| D | S | R | P |
| Distinctions | Systems | Relationships | Perspectives |
| Identity ↔ Other | Part ↔ Whole | Action ↔ Reaction | Point ↔ View |
| D := (i ↔ o) | S := (p ↔ w) | R := (a ↔ r) | P := (ṗ ↔ v) |
This is a living scientific evidence compendium: an open, continually evolving collection of independent empirical research, formal theory, mathematical proofs, cross-disciplinary analyses, applications, critiques, and proposed falsifications. Every entry is included because it supports, refines, challenges, or attempts to falsify the theory.
Scientific theories are strengthened not only by evidence that confirms their predictions, but also by surviving attempts to falsify them. This compendium brings both together: independent evidence from researchers who were not testing DSRP and proposed counterexamples evaluated against the formal theory.
One counterexample is enough to falsify O-Theory. Until then, the question remains: do the same four structures organize everything from quantum systems to human thought?
Independent convergence is one of the strongest forms of scientific evidence because researchers arrive at the same conclusion while investigating different questions for different reasons.
The number is not the point. Researchers in different fields, studying different questions with different methods, repeatedly arrived at the same structural predictions—almost always without testing DSRP or using its language.
Try a different term or clear the filters.
This compendium began as the peer-reviewed literature review “A Literature Review of the Universal and Atomic Elements of Complex Cognition,” published in the Journal of Systems Thinking with 109 studies. That paper is the peer-reviewed foundation. What you see here is its living, continuously updated version . New studies are checked before they are added, and the collection now holds and keeps growing. Open any card to see what the researchers found, why it bears on DSRP, and where the original review discusses it, the fuller account.
The collection is updated continuously, so the citation carries the date you consulted it rather than a study count — the count changes weekly, and putting it in the reference would make the same collection look like a different work to everyone who cites it. To cite a single claim or study, use its own address: every one has a permanent link.
This is the adversarial half of the compendium. Where the evidence track asks what converges on DSRP, this one asks what would end it: a single organized phenomenon whose structure needs a fifth pattern, a ninth element, or a fifth structural dynamic. It holds written up from candidates across territories, and resolutions — the general answers those cases settle against. Every case is published whether it held or failed, including the ones still open.
Cite this rather than the evidence collection when the point is what survived attack. The two are separate works with separate addresses: one asks what converges on the theory, the other asks what would end it, and a reference to the first does not support a claim about the second. Case and resolution numbers change when the record is revised, so cite a case by its own permanent link rather than by number.
This collection is meant to keep growing. Send us a study, paper, book or critique that bears on DSRP, whether it supports the theory or cuts against it, and we will read it and decide whether it belongs.
Emotion is usually explained by what causes it. Something happens, and a feeling follows. The more careful accounts add appraisal — the event is evaluated against goals, and the evaluation produces the feeling. Either way the event is doing the work, and emotion is treated as a separate system from cognition, often as its opponent. Emotion is produced by the model, not by the event. Tell someone their dog has been hit by a car and they feel something. Tell them a minute later it was the neighbour's dog and they feel something else. Nothing in the world changed between those moments — the dog was always the neighbour's. The model changed, and the feeling followed it immediately, without anyone being argued out of anything. This puts emotion downstream of organization rather than beside it. What you feel about a situation is a function of how you have organized it: what you distinguished, what you took to be part of what, what you related to what, and from what point of view. And it runs back the other way. A feeling constrains what the model can then do — grief narrows what is attended to, panic collapses what can be held at once, and the capacity to organize stops being expressed even though it is still there. Emotion is one construct in two roles, in a loop: the model produces it, and it gates the model. The practical consequence cuts against a familiar piece of advice. "Your feelings are valid but your interpretation may be wrong" separates two things that are not separable. The feeling is a correct output of the model that produced it. Changing the feeling means changing the model — which is what happens the instant you learn whose dog it was.
What you feel is produced by how you have organized the situation, not by the situation. And what you feel limits how well you can organize anything next. Read in symbols: emotion (Em) is a function of the mental model (𝕄) — change the model and the feeling changes with it. And emotion acts on expression: the organization actually available in the moment (O_eff) is less than or equal to the organization a person is capable of (O_cap). The first half says the model makes the feeling. The second says the feeling gates the model. One construct, two directions.
Emotion is independent of the model — produced by events directly, or by a system that runs separately from how a situation is organized. Read in symbols: emotion (Em) is independent of (⟂) the mental model. If a feeling could be held constant while the model of the situation changed completely, or could change with no change in the model, then emotion has a source other than organization and the account is wrong.
If a mental model produces what a person experiences, then emotion cannot be a response to events. It has to be produced by the model the event lands in — which is a different construct, and it comes with a second commitment, that emotional state gates how much organizing capability actually gets used. The two halves of that construct are not equally supported, and the split matters. The gating half has evidence. In a simulation of the alignment loop, agents below a threshold of organizational integrity failed to close the gap between model and reality at any level of effort — capacity present, conditions for using it absent. A separate account treats emotional regulation as one of four coupled domains and holds that whole-person functioning tracks the weakest of them rather than the average. Same claim, stated so it could be measured. The generative half has no direct test here. One study is consistent with it: changing the point of view changes what people report, and the same object read under threat and read while lost and cold produces different answers. That is exactly the machinery the emotion claim needs, running in studies that were not about emotion. It shows the mechanism exists. It does not show that emotion is one of its outputs. So this is initial evidence pointing toward the required construct, with one half measured and one half resting on a mechanism established elsewhere.