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Neophronesis Theory: A Thermodynamic Framework for Adaptive Coherence Under Flux

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Empirical wisdom research has converged on a descriptive consensus — wisdom's common core comprises morally grounded pro-sociality together with perspectival metacognition — but lacks an account of why wisdom has those components, why it is metabolically costly and unevenly distributed, and why it is vulnerable to the disruption of cultural transmission. This paper proposes that these features follow from a physical constraint on any system that models a changing environment it does not steer. I define wisdom operationally as adaptive coherence under flux and give it a quantitative thermodynamic interpretation. For a system responding to a fluctuating environment, the work it dissipates is bounded below by the non-predictive information it retains, arbitrarily far from equilibrium (Still et al., 2012). The central hypothesis is that adaptive coherence under flux is the conjunction of two conditions — almost all retained structure does predictive work, and predictive grip is large and sustained as the environment changes — and that the capacities wisdom research measures keep cognitive, institutional and cultural systems in it. That metabolic cost tracks retained information at biological magnitudes is the bridging conjecture stated in §4.3, not a consequence. The account predicts that, with available predictive information held constant, people scoring higher on validated wisdom measures incur lower metabolic cost. I specify this prediction and its disconfirmation criteria, propose a behavioral index of the construct in bits, treat commons governance, organizational process and resource extraction as the claim's scope rather than corroboration, and state what the account does not establish.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22307586
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7208728293
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