Author: Vladisav Jovanović
Status: Manuscript record
Version: Current PhilPapers-listed version (Apr 2026)
This paper builds a bridge between systems theory and Structural Intelligence. Systems theory offers a powerful language for interdependence, feedback, adaptation, emergence, and self-maintaining organization. Structural Intelligence preserves these strengths and adds a harder question: when a system preserves itself successfully, what relation does that preservation bear to reality, burden, and answerability? The paper argues that a system can survive, regulate, and adapt while becoming less truthful, more defended, and more dependent on exported cost. It develops the concepts of drift, occupancy, structural debt, and burden-bearing adequacy in order to show where systems theory often stops too early. Feedback is not yet answerability. Stability is not yet load-bearing stability. Adaptation is not yet adequacy. The bridge therefore keeps the power of systems thinking while giving it a sharper grammar for truth, consequence, collapse, and repair.
systems theory; Structural Intelligence; feedback; drift; debt; answerability; regulation; adaptation; occupancy; collapse; burden; adequacy