The Invariance Maintenance Condition (IMC) - Complete Series

About This Collection

The Invariance Maintenance Condition (IMC) is a substrate-agnostic formal framework for identifying and characterizing systems that maintain structural invariants under perturbation at measurable cost. It proposes that a common constraint geometry underlies the persistence conditions identified independently by nonequilibrium thermodynamics, immunology, neuroscience, ecology, and computational learning theory — and that this geometry is origin-independent, timescale-independent, and empirically falsifiable.

This collection contains the complete IMC series in reading order: the cover paper establishing the formal predicate and applicability conditions, five companion translation papers applying the framework to specific domains, and a synthesis paper arguing that the five translations function as structural probes of the framework rather than confirmations of the same claim in different settings.

Each paper is independently citable via its Zenodo DOI. The series is designed to be read in the order presented: the cover paper first, the companions in any order, the synthesis last. Readers with a specific domain interest may read the relevant companion paper and the cover paper without loss of continuity.

A pre-registered empirical program associated with the anesthesia companion paper (Thomas 2026b, Zenodo) constitutes the series’ primary falsification commitment. Results of that screen will be incorporated into a versioned update of the synthesis.