Dissipative Coherence: Regulatory Solvency and a Formal, Substrate-Independent Definition of Health for Active Dissipative Systems

Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures explains how order appears far from equilibrium, but not what it means for such order to persist well. We distinguish passive dissipative systems, whose order is imposed by boundary conditions, from active ones, which defend an internal reference by spending free energy conditionally, reactively or predictively. We introduce Regulatory Solvency, the margin between harvestable free energy and the cost of regulation and of maintaining accumulated structure, with a reserve and a stochastic viability kernel restricted to affordable controls. On these we define health, for any substrate, as five conditions over a horizon (viability, solvency, autonomy, plasticity, calibration), graded by a Health Profile and distinct from capacity. We classify pathologies by mechanism and give a rule that identifies them from the profile and the budget. For one disturbance episode, the delay of a feedback loop sets a threshold that a stronger effector cannot move but prediction can, and in a minimal model anticipation is selected where it is cheaper than standing fast capacity. In that model, on perturbations run after the rule and evaluation code were frozen, which re-use known mechanisms at new magnitudes and are not a blind test, the rule named the induced cause in 87% of the runs it flagged (against 24% for always naming the most common cause), or 65% of all perturbed runs, and raised no alarm in 200 control runs, of which 14 nevertheless failed a survival-based challenge test; it did not detect a loss of sensing, which was not part of the test.