Constraint, Emotion, and Survival: A Dynamic Ontology of Living Under Limits From Structural Diagnosis to Situated Practice

Constraint, Emotion, and Survival: A Dynamic Ontology of Viability Description: This paper develops a structural ontology of constrained existence.It argues that survival and collapse are not moral or teleological categories, but geometric outcomes determined by boundary behavior in dynamic systems. Existence is defined as persistence within an admissible domain.Collapse occurs when destabilizing forces dominate near structural limits; survival requires stabilization to dominate at those limits. This yields a structural dichotomy between bounded viability and entropy divergence. Emotion is reinterpreted as directional gradient information rather than irrational disturbance. Trust is analyzed as an emergent consequence of intersecting future valuation functions rather than a primitive cause of cooperation. Freedom is reconceived as voluntary restriction of destabilizing options. The paper is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. It emphasizes the structural asymmetry between detecting instability and constructing universal stabilization. The framework is compatible with, but independent from, its formal mathematical companion work on constrained viability dynamics. Keywords: viability, collapse dynamics, boundary geometry, cooperation, entropy, self-constraint, dynamic ontology