The Quantitative Ontology of Life: A Flux-Based Framework and the Human Flux Unit (EFU)

Life is traditionally described either through qualitative ontological categories or through fragmented quantitative measures such as mass, energy, or information. While these approaches are valuable, they lack a unified framework that allows meaningful comparison across biological, ecological, and socio-technical systems. This paper proposes a quantitative ontology of life, in which living systems are defined not as static entities but as organized, sustained fluxes of matter, energy, and information maintained against entropic dissipation over time. Within this framework, existence is treated as a scalar and processual property rather than a binary state. To enable cross-scale comparison, the paper introduces the Human Flux Unit (EFU) as a normalized reference metric grounded in empirically accessible human-scale fluxes. EFU is not proposed as a replacement for physical units, but as a comparative reference that enables coherent reasoning across heterogeneous systems without category collapse. The contribution of this work is foundational. It establishes ontological premises, methodological boundaries, and explicit non-goals, while providing a minimal demonstrative application of EFU. The framework is intended to support future empirical studies, open peer review, and interdisciplinary dialogue in systems science, ecology, and life-technology research.