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.
Perception is usually treated as intake and attention as a spotlight — information arrives, and a limited resource is spent deciding what to process. The two get studied separately, with perception belonging to the senses and attention to executive control. What neither account settles is why the world arrives already sorted into things. Perception is the information channel. It is what the sensory apparatus delivers, and it is bounded by that apparatus — by what eyes and ears can register, and by whatever changes those bounds: instruments, drugs, fatigue, sleep. This is I arriving, and it is not the same thing as conception, which is the model itself. Attention is a perspective taken on what arrived. It is P doing work: a point placed, a view following from it. And the point is set by the model already held. What a person notices is therefore selected twice — once by the apparatus, which decides what could be registered, and once by the model, which decides what to perceive. This is why the two cannot be separated. Perception delivers a field; attention takes a view of it; the view is set by the model; and the model was built from what earlier views delivered. The loop runs continuously and there is no first term. The prediction that follows is specific. If the model sets the point of view, then a model can direct attention to something that is not in the field at all — and people will report finding it there. Not as an error of judgment, but as a perception. This is also why priming works as easily as it does, and why co-priming works at all. Supplying a point of view is enough to change what is perceived, and the person doing the perceiving has no sense that anything was supplied. The effect is not a quirk of suggestion. It is the ordinary operation of a model placing a point of view, with the placement done from outside.
Perception is the information your senses deliver, limited by the apparatus. Attention is where you place your point of view on that information, and your existing model places it. Read in symbols: perception is information (I) conditioned on (|) the sensory apparatus — what the body and its instruments can register. Attention is the Perspective pattern (P) with the mental model (𝕄) as its point, applied to whatever perception delivered. The model does not alter what arrives at the senses. It decides which of what arrived gets taken up.
The model does not set where attention goes, or perception is something other than information bounded by the apparatus. Read in symbols: it is not the case (¬) that the mental model acting as a point of view (P(𝕄)) determines attention, or (∨) perception is not information conditioned on the sensory apparatus. The first disjunct is the live one. If attention were allocated independently of what a person already believes — by salience alone, or by a resource unconnected to the model — then attention is not a perspective and the account is wrong.
If a mental model is information times organization, then perception and attention cannot be one faculty. Perception is the information term — what the senses deliver, bounded by the apparatus. Attention is the organizing term running on it, a point of view taken. And because the point of view comes from the model already held, what a person notices is decided before they look. Six studies point that way, from opposite directions. In one direction, structure produces a perception the world did not supply. Shown a picture with a part missing, most people click where the part would be and report finding it. The structure said something had to be there; the information arrived second. In the other, changing the point of view changes what the same image is. One object is read as a tool, as a weapon under threat, and as fuel when lost and cold. Nothing in the picture moves. A related study measured the cost of losing alignment: with the perspective matched to the task people answered correctly far more often than without it, and the available information never changed. Two studies find a point of view operating where nobody named one — people answering a perspectival question the same way without being told a perspective was involved, and taking a conceptual view far more readily than an animate one, with the reason they gave tracking the choice they made. Priming is the same mechanism measured directly, and it runs in both directions the pairs were tested, so the effect is about which point of view was supplied rather than which word is more familiar. One study tested whether any of this is trainable. Awareness of the structure, with no new content supplied, raised the complexity of what people produced.