Conventional framing
Diagnosis is typically understood as the identification of a condition, state, or cause—often in medical or biological contexts—based on observed symptoms or measurable indicators. It frequently involves classification into predefined categories.
APS reframing
APS reconceives diagnosis as an evaluation of viability-oriented organisation, rather than the assignment of a system to a category or the identification of a single causal factor.
Diagnosis arises through perturbation: by altering conditions and observing how the system responds, we gain access to the organisation that sustains (or fails to sustain) its persistence.
The central question is not what the system is, but: how it maintains itself—and whether it can continue to do so.
APS diagnosis therefore evaluates:
- Viability Gradient (VG) — the degree to which the system sustains persistence
- Normativity Gradient (NG) — whether changes matter to the system’s viability
- Cognitive Integration (CI) — the coordination and integration of responses across scales
Diagnosis distinguishes between systems that:
- actively regulate and maintain viability
- passively undergo change
- or fail to sustain organisational coherence
It also clarifies the difference between malfunction (local disruption within a viable system) and organisational collapse (loss of viability itself).
Crucially, diagnosis in APS is not classification. A system may be classified as a “cell,” “organism,” or “virus,” but diagnosis concerns whether it exhibits viability-oriented, constraint-closed organisation in practice.
Key Point
Diagnosis in APS evaluates how a system sustains its own viability—it is not about what a system is, but whether and how it continues to exist.