Physiology as the Architecture That Bears Life: A Structural Flow Field Card

This artifact asks what Physiology is, what it is not, and how living systems bear the threshold that makes Life possible. Its central stack is: Life is the threshold. Biology is the field opened by Life. Physiology is the architecture that bears the threshold. The artifact defines Physiology as the differentiated coordination architecture at, within, and through living boundaries by which a living system bears the Life threshold. In plainer language, Physiology is how a living system coordinates maintenance strongly enough to stay alive. The practical rule is: no maintenance-coupling, no Physiology. A system, structure, process, state, signal, subsystem, relation, support relation, or failure is physiological only if it is materially coupled to coordinated maintenance at, within, or through a living boundary. This artifact distinguishes Physiology from broader Biology, ecological relation, body-adjacent context, medical device, representation, behavior, consciousness, and nervous-system signaling taken as command. It also clarifies why pathophysiology belongs inside Physiology: pathology is physiology under distortion, deficiency, excess, misrecognition, misrouting, overload, non-resolution, maladaptive persistence, or integration collapse. The artifact does not replace mechanism-level physiology, medicine, pathophysiology, cellular physiology, organ physiology, neurophysiology, immunology, endocrinology, metabolism, developmental physiology, or comparative physiology. Those fields remain primary at the level of mechanism, measurement, experiment, intervention, and explanation. This artifact clarifies the object boundary before mechanism-level explanation begins. The final compression is: Physiology is how Life keeps being borne.