Harper's Law of the Universal Process

Harper’s Law articulates a substrate-independent principle governing the persistence and failure of complex systems. The work proposes that all adaptive constructs—biological, institutional, computational, or social—are constrained by a universal process linking perception of reality, corrective capacity, and structural continuity. The paper formalizes this relationship as a recursive alignment dynamic: systems remain viable only to the extent that they can detect divergence from underlying reality and execute proportionate correction without degrading their own continuity. When corrective mechanisms become rigid, suppressed, or decoupled from ground truth, drift accumulates. When correction exceeds structural…