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.
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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.
Memory is usually described as storage and retrieval. Something happened, a record of it was filed, and remembering fetches the record back. The metaphor is so settled that the failures get treated as defects in the filing: memories fade, get corrupted, become unreliable. Memory is the mental model at a time. Not a copy of what arrived, but the model as it stood — information organized, held. Remembering is running that model again. Everything the storage account calls a defect follows from this without needing a separate explanation. Models decay, so memories fade. Models are built from a point of view, so memories carry the bias of the point they were built from. Models mix with other models, so memories contaminate each other. None of these is damage to a record. They are the ordinary behaviour of a model, and a record would not behave this way at all. It also explains why remembering changes what is remembered. A record read twice is the same record. A model run twice has been run twice, and running it is one of the things that changes it.
Memory is the mental model as it stood at a time. Remembering is running that model again, not opening a file. Read in symbols: memory is the mental model at time t (𝕄ₜ), which is the information and the organization as they were at that moment ((I · O)ₜ). Both terms are subscripted because both change. What was known changes, and how it was arranged changes, and a memory is the pair of them held together at a point in the past.
Memory is something other than a model held at a time — a stored record, retrieved rather than run. Read in symbols: memory is not identical to (≠) the mental model at time t. The clearest version of the rival is a faithful record: something laid down once, unchanged by being read, degraded only by damage. If memory behaves that way, this account is wrong.
If a mental model is information times organization, then memory cannot be a stored record. It has to be a mental model held at a time, and that is a different construct with different properties — one that is rebuilt on each use rather than retrieved intact. Nothing here was designed as a memory study. What the studies establish is what a mental model does, and the claim is that memory is one, so evidence about the first is evidence about the second. Four of them converge on the same property from different materials. One shows a model supplying structure the stimulus did not contain: free description of an image built to mean nothing returned a small set of definite things. What came back was not what was there. One shows the same content held many ways at once. Six familiar objects, sorted freely by hundreds of people, produced hundreds of differently named wholes. A stored record of the objects would yield one arrangement. One shows the holding being altered by what came immediately before it. Priming one word of a pair moved what people produced next, in both directions the pair was tested. The information available never changed; the model doing the work did. And one bears on what a memory is made of: across standard language benchmarks, how information was structured predicted interpretation many times over while the amount of information predicted nothing. Different stimuli, different tasks, one property each time — what is held is constructed, not retrieved. That is the construct the form requires, and this is initial evidence for it.