INTRODUCTION
The philosophical foundations of chiropractic rest on 2 closely related but formally distinct concepts: universal intelligence (UI), the principle of organization operative throughout all matter, and innate intelligence (II), the expression of that organizing principle within living organisms. Both originate in the writings of Daniel David Palmer (DD Palmer), were elaborated by Bartlett Joshua Palmer (BJ Palmer) and codified by Ralph W. Stephenson in his 1927 Chiropractic Textbook, which formulated the now-canonical 33 Principles.1 Together, UI and II have anchored chiropractic’s vitalistic identity for more than a century.
Yet the precise relationship between the 2 has been a source of persistent philosophical tension. If UI is the universal organizing principle and II is its expression in living matter, then II might appear to be merely a subset or local manifestation of UI, raising the question of whether a separate term, with its attendant conceptual freight, is actually required. This question was put explicitly by Strauss in Question 25 of his influential text Towards a Better Understanding of Chiropractic Philosophy:
“Some have suggested that innate intelligence and universal intelligence are one and the same and that we do not need both terms. Do we?”
Strauss answered in the affirmative, constructing his defense on what we shall call the dual-perspective argument: UI and II are the same principle viewed from different standpoints: from intelligence itself, they appear identical; from the matter through which they are expressed, they appear distinct. The distinction is real, Strauss argued, because chiropractic deals specifically with the expression of intelligence through living matter and with the interference to that expression that constitutes the vertebral subluxation. To collapse II into UI would, according to the above, remove the conceptual handle on which chiropractic’s specific claim rests.
Recent publications have examined the conceptual history of II2 and the evolution of UI as a chiropractic construct.3 The present paper builds on that foundation by revisiting Strauss’ question in the light of: (1) the positions of other chiropractic philosophers who have addressed the same question; (2) the resources offered by contemporary complexity and systems biology frameworks, particularly autopoiesis theory and the science of emergence; and (3) a set of new analogical metaphors designed to illuminate both the affirmative and negative cases. We conclude that Strauss’s position is essentially correct but that its grounding can be substantially strengthened (and its philosophical risk of appearing merely stipulative can be resolved) by anchoring the UI/II distinction in the concept of scale-dependent emergence. By scale-dependent emergence we mean the well-documented phenomenon whereby qualitatively new properties and causal powers arise at determinate thresholds of organizational complexity: properties that are absent below the threshold and irreducible to the lower-level constituents above it. The transition from non-living to living matter, as we shall argue, constitutes precisely such a threshold.
DISCUSSION
The Palmers And Stephenson: The Original Conceptual Architecture
The distinction between UI and II was present from the earliest systematic formulations of chiropractic philosophy, though not always consistently maintained. DD Palmer, in The Chiropractor’s Adjuster (1910), articulated Innate Intelligence as a personalized, organizing principle within the living body, at times describing it as synonymous with the soul and at other times treating it as a species of the more general principle of organization he called Universal Intelligence.4 The terminological conflation was, as subsequent scholars have noted, partly deliberate: DD Palmer sought common ground with the spiritual and religious assumptions of his midwestern American audience.5
BJ Palmer inherited this ambiguity and compounded it. In The Bigness of the Fellow Within (1949), he made the striking assertion that ‘All Universal Intelligence is Innate Intelligence, the producer, in the unit man, the product.’6 This statement, read carefully, does not flatten the distinction but positions UI as the broader ontological category from which II is derived, a relationship of productive instantiation rather than identity. The producer/product metaphor maps, as we shall argue below, onto the contemporary systems biology concept of global-to-local constraint: UI is the field of organizational possibility; II is the specific, bounded, adaptive expression of that possibility in a particular living system.
Stephenson’s codification in the 1927 Chiropractic Textbook formalized the distinction most precisely.1 Principle 1 states that ‘A Universal Intelligence is in all matter and continually gives to it all its properties and actions, thus maintaining it in existence.’ Principle 20 states that ‘A living thing has an inborn intelligence within its body, called Innate Intelligence.’ The logical architecture of the 33 Principles treats II as derived from UI (Principle 20 follows deductively from the premises established in Principles 1 through 19) but as having a distinct referent: UI operates in all matter; II operates specifically in living matter and is limited by the structural and functional properties of that matter (Principle 24). The distinction is thus ontological, not merely terminological.
Strauss And The Dual-Perspective Argument
Strauss’ answer to Question 25 in Towards a Better Understanding of Chiropractic Philosophy is the most sustained direct engagement with this question in the chiropractic philosophical literature.7 His argument proceeds in 2 moves.
The first move is concessive: viewed from the standpoint of intelligence itself, UI and II are indeed the same principle. Both are intangible. Both are principles. Both are metaphysical concepts. Neither occupies space. Both defy empirical study. If one asks what UI and II have in common, the answer is everything: they are both expressions of the same underlying organizing tendency. Strauss therefore acknowledges that from a purely abstract, intelligence-centered vantage point, the argument for a single term has genuine force.
The second move, however, asserts that chiropractic is not and cannot be purely intelligence-centered: ‘chiropractic deals with matter and the expression of this intelligence through matter.’ When the analysis is conducted from the perspective of matter, the 2 concepts diverge. UI is operative in all matter, in the organization of crystals, planetary systems, and galaxies, without limitation by the structure of that matter. II, by contrast, is always limited by the matter in which it is expressed: ‘The matter in which it resides limits innate intelligence. Universal intelligence has no such limitations.’7
Strauss’ analogy is the law of gravity. Viewed as a law (a principle), gravity is one and the same wherever it operates. But its expression on the moon differs quantitatively and qualitatively from its expression on Earth. The law does not change; the matter through which it operates does, and those material differences produce outcomes of genuine practical significance. For an aerospace engineer, the distinction between the expression of gravitational force on the moon and on Earth is not a terminological nicety: it is load-bearing. By analogy, for a chiropractor, the distinction between UI operating in inorganic matter and II operating in the living body is not a terminological nicety: it is the conceptual foundation on which the notion of vertebral subluxation, interference, and adjustment rests.
Strauss further warns that collapsing II into UI risks 2 symmetrical errors: making UI ‘less than what it is’ by confining a universal principle to a single class of living systems, and making II ‘more than what it is’ by removing the conceptual constraints that distinguish the organizing principle of living matter from a general cosmic intelligence without bounds. Both errors, he contends, compound rather than resolve the philosophical problem.
Other Chiropractic Voices On The Question
While Strauss’ is the most direct engagement with Question 25, other chiropractic philosophers have contributed perspectives that enrich the debate, a summary of which can be seen in Table 1, even when they do not address the question with the same explicitness.
Donahue, in his 1986 examination of DD Palmer’s concept of innate intelligence, traced what he described as a process of ‘development, division and derision’ in the concept’s history.8 He documented the gradual separation of II from its early theological associations with the soul, a separation that was, paradoxically, necessary both to distinguish chiropractic from religion and to render II as a coherent natural philosophy concept. The implication for the UI/II question is significant: the historical process by which II was separated from theological identification was precisely the process of asserting its distinctness from UI. To collapse the 2 again would be to reverse a conceptual evolution that served important professional and philosophical purposes.
Senzon, whose extensive chiropractic historical and philosophical work, represents perhaps the most rigorous recent engagement with chiropractic metaphysics. He has argued that BJ Palmer’s later writings (particularly in the tomes of the 1949–1955 period) increasingly treated UI and II as aspects of a unified consciousness, with II representing the ‘bigness of the fellow within’ as a personal expression of a universal ordering intelligence.9 On this reading, the Palmer tradition itself does not fully resolve the question: BJ’s tendency toward unification was as strong as DD’s tendency toward distinction. Senzon’s work suggests that the UI/II question is not a settled matter even within the foundational texts, and that productive philosophical engagement with it remains open.
Strauss himself, in a separate essay on the re-examination of the Normal Complete Cycle, made an observation that bears directly on the present argument: the movement in chiropractic philosophy away from a ‘spiritual entity’ view of II towards a ‘law of organization in matter’ view was driven by the recognition that treating II as a personalized soul-like entity created insurmountable conflicts with both theology and science.10 The reformulation of II as a law or principle (active organization in living matter) is precisely the formulation that connects most productively with contemporary systems biology, as we shall argue in the following section. Crucially, this reformulation preserves the UI/II distinction such that it is a distinction between the general organizing principle of all matter (UI) and the specific, adaptive, self-maintaining organizational principle of living matter (II). It should be acknowledged, however, that Strauss’s commitment to a fully naturalistic account of II was not uniformly maintained across his wider published writings, in which theological and spiritual characterizations occasionally reappear; the present paper follows the naturalistic strand of his argument, which is both the more philosophically defensible and the more productive for engagement with contemporary systems biology.
The intellectual genealogy connecting chiropractic vitalism to formal systems theory has itself been traced as a scholarly matter. Callender established that the philosophical writings of DD Palmer and Stephenson, along with much of BJ Palmer’s work, predate Bertalanffy by approximately half a century and yet foreshadow the systems approach, a finding she supported by tracing ideas through Aristotle, Descartes, Claude Bernard, holism, and organicism to Bertalanffy’s general systems theory.11 Her conclusion, that chiropractic could be better understood via systems theory and that its mechanistic/vitalistic dualism shares common ground with systems thinking, means that applying systems frameworks to the UI/II distinction is not a case of retrofitting external concepts onto chiropractic philosophy. The connection was always latent. The vitalistic dualism of chiropractic, including the distinction between UI and II, was already implicitly a systems-compatible framework before systems theory had a name.
This historical connection has been given formal expression in recent scholarship. Richards and Emmanuel applied Bertalanffy’s general system theory directly to Palmer’s Chiropractor’s Adjuster, characterizing the Palmerian system as a hierarchical structure with tone as its foundational integrating principle and science, philosophy, and art as its primary subsystems.12 Within the philosophy subsystem, UI and II appear as formally distinct elements with non-overlapping characteristics: UI (Palmer’s ‘Spirit’) is eternal, unchanging, and independent of matter, while II (Palmer’s ‘Soul’ or Innate) is constitutively dependent on its material substrate, ‘Spirit in matter creating a living individual,’ and is channeled through the nervous system to manifest as tone. The subluxation, on this systems analysis, specifically interferes with II’s expression as tone, not with UI, which operates independently of material disruption. Far from supporting the view that a single term would suffice, formal systems analysis of Palmer’s own framework reveals that the UI/II distinction is load-bearing within the Palmerian system: remove it, and the system loses the conceptual handle on which its specific clinical object (the restoration of tone through adjustment) depends.
A more formally stated skeptical position holds that II is not merely dispensable within the vitalistic framework but that the concept itself is philosophically incoherent and professionally damaging. The most sustained peer-reviewed articulation of this view is Morgan’s 1998 paper ‘Innate Intelligence: Its Origins and Problems’ (Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association), in which he contended that Innate Intelligence remains an untestable enigma that isolates chiropractic and impedes its acceptance as a legitimate health science, that the concept of Innate is derived directly from the occult practices of another era, and that the chiropractic profession must decide whether the concept of Innate should be retained. This position, that neither UI nor II is necessary for a coherent chiropractic practice philosophy, is a genuine philosophical option. It is not, however, the same as the position that II can be subsumed within UI: it represents a wholesale rejection of the vitalistic framework rather than an argument within it and is therefore not directly relevant to the present inquiry, whose interest is in the question as posed by Strauss: given that the vitalistic framework is accepted, do we need both terms?
Morgan’s critique merits direct engagement even within the terms of the present paper, because several of his specific empirical objections bear on the relationship between II and its neural expression in ways that the reformulation proposed here must address. Morgan argued that dramatic disruption of neural function produces no observable organic disease in segmentally related viscera (citing Nansel and Slazak), that cells lacking nerve supply, including circulating blood cells, sustain themselves without any neural mediation of II, and that lower animals with primitive nervous systems demonstrate regenerative capacities that humans with supposedly higher-level II entirely lack. These observations point not to the incoherence of II as an organizational principle but to the limitations of the neural-expression model in its cruder Stephensonian formulations. The autopoietic reformulation developed in the present paper responds to each of these challenges: under Principle 24, II is substrate-specific in its expression, and the chiropractically relevant claim that neural disruption constitutes interference with II does not entail that all limitations on II are neural, nor that II requires nervous-system architecture to operate. Morgan’s regeneration argument is, on the autopoietic reading, evidence that II in those organisms is expressed through cellular and morphogenetic substrates rather than neural ones, not evidence against II as an organizational principle.
Morgan’s deeper challenge, and Keating’s earlier formulation of the same objection, hold that II is irrefutable by its nature as a metaphysical proposition and therefore fails to qualify as scientific. This objection has genuine force, but it depends on a demarcation criterion that most contemporary philosophers of science have moved beyond. The Popperian framework that motivates it treats falsifiability as a binary requirement: a proposition that cannot be refuted by any possible observation is not science. Lakatos’s methodology of scientific research programs offers a more adequate and now more widely accepted account.13 On the Lakatosian framework, scientific programs are structured around a hard core of foundational commitments that are deliberately protected from direct refutation by methodological decision: anomalies are absorbed by a surrounding protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses rather than being directed at the core. The hard core is irrefutable by design, not by defect: it provides the stable, guiding vision of reality that gives researchers the tenacity to persist in the face of initial failures and incomplete evidence, and constitutes the engine of long-term scientific progress. What distinguishes a progressive research program from a degenerative one is not the testability of the hard core but whether the program generates novel, independently testable predictions through its protective belt, and whether its empirical content grows over time rather than contracts. On this view, Keating’s objection identifies a real feature of II (its hard-core status) while misidentifying that feature as disqualifying. The question the Lakatosian framework poses is not whether II can be directly tested but whether II, as a hard-core commitment, anchors a research program that is empirically progressive: one whose protective belt generates novel predictions that are subsequently confirmed. The emerging body of work connecting the Palmerian organizing principle to autopoiesis theory, complexity science, and the formal frameworks discussed below constitutes at least the beginning of a case that such a program is possible.
The reconceptualization of II as the emergent, autopoietic, far-from-equilibrium organizational principle of living systems finds a further, formally precise point of contact in Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle (FEP) and the associated framework of active inference.14,15 The FEP proposes that all self-organizing systems that persist over time must, by mathematical necessity, minimize their variational free energy: a quantity measuring the divergence between the system’s internal generative model of the world and the sensory evidence it receives. On this framework, living systems are distinguished from non-living ones precisely by their capacity for active inference: rather than merely responding to thermodynamic gradients as crystals and chemical reactions do, they actively sample their environments to minimize surprise and maintain the integrity of their Markov blanket, the statistical boundary separating the organism’s internal states from its external milieu. The FEP’s Markov blanket formalism is, in this respect, a rigorous mathematical operationalization of autopoietic operational closure: the same concept at a higher level of formal precision. Friston’s framework thus provides an information-theoretic grounding for precisely what II was always intended to describe: the tendency of living systems to actively resist entropy, maintain far-from-equilibrium order, and organize their relationship to the environment around the preservation of their own continued existence. The present paper makes no claim that the autopoietic and systems biology frameworks empirically confirm II, only that they provide the conceptual coherence and naturalized grounding that the naive metaphysical formulation lacks; the specific application of the FEP to chiropractic constructs, including the computational reformulation of the vertebral subluxation as a mechanism of spinal proprioceptive precision-degradation interfering with the active inference loop, is the subject of a companion paper currently in preparation.
The early volumes of the journal then titled 'Philosophical Constructs for the Chiropractic Profession’ (subsequently renamed the Journal of Chiropractic Humanities) produced a concentrated cluster of critical engagements with II and UI during the late 1980s and early 1990s that deserve specific acknowledgement. Three papers constitute the most substantive critical tradition within the profession’s own philosophical journals, and each poses challenges that the autopoietic reformulation proposed here must engage.
Keating, in ‘Beyond the Theosophy of Chiropractic’, advanced what remains the most direct critique of II from the evidence-based perspective within chiropractic.16 Keating argued that the retention of concepts like II constituted theosophy rather than science, and that the profession’s future credibility depended on distinguishing its clinical claims from its metaphysical inheritance. On Keating’s account, II-as-formulated is not a scientific hypothesis but a quasi-theological commitment: it is held not because evidence supports it but because the profession’s identity requires it. The present paper’s response is that this critique applies with full force to the naive metaphysical formulation of II, but not necessarily to a reformulated II grounded in the organizational biology of autopoietic systems. Operational closure, far-from-equilibrium self-maintenance, and intrinsic teleology are properties at least in principle investigable through biological science, even if the 33 Principles as formulated are not empirical hypotheses. The distance between the naive formulation Keating criticized and the reformulated II proposed here is precisely the distance this paper attempts to traverse.
Donahue returned to the question in 2 further publications after his 1986 historical paper. In ‘Dis-ease in our Principles: The Case against Innate Intelligence’ (American Journal of Chiropractic Medicine, 1988) and ‘The Trouble with Innate and the Trouble That Causes’ (Philosophical Constructs for the Chiropractic Profession, 1992), he argued that II creates persistent professional problems because it combines empirically unverifiable metaphysical claims with practical clinical assertions in a way that makes the entire package resistant to either confirmation or rational revision.17,18 The 1992 paper drew a distinction particularly useful for the present argument: between II as a pedagogical heuristic (potentially defensible) and II as an ontological commitment (philosophically untenable). This distinction maps productively onto the present reformulation: what the autopoietic frameworks preserve is the heuristic and organizational content of II, namely the recognition that living systems exhibit a qualitatively distinct mode of self-organizing, self-maintaining adaptive organization, not the naive ontological claim to a separate metaphysical force that Donahue rightly identified as the source of the concept’s professional cost.
Bachop’s ‘The Warfare of Science with Philosophy in Contemporary Chiropractic’ (Philosophical Constructs for the Chiropractic Profession, 1991) raised what may be the most penetrating biological challenge to the standard II formulation, one that directly overlaps with a challenge central to the present revision process.19 Bachop observed that lower animals with limited or absent nervous systems demonstrate regenerative capacities, including full limb regeneration, that organisms presumed to have higher-level II, namely humans, entirely lack, and that the most extensively adjusted chiropractic patient will never acquire equivalent regenerative capability. As developed in the discussion of the autopoietic reformulation above, this argument is most productively read as a demonstration of the inadequacy of any exclusively neural account of II’s expression. Principle 24, that II is limited by the matter in which it resides, provides the conceptual framework for a response: II is not everywhere expressed neurally, and chiropractic’s clinical claim concerns specifically the neural expression of II in vertebrates, not II in all living systems. The regenerative capacity of a planarian or a salamander is, on this reading, an expression of II through morphogenetic and cellular substrates rather than neural ones. Bachop’s challenge strengthens rather than undermines the case for Principle 24 as a load-bearing element of the reformulated framework.
Taken together, these early Philosophical Constructs papers identified three main problems with the standard II formulation: its metaphysical irrefutability (Morgan, Keating), the biological counterevidence against its neural-expression model (Bachop, Morgan), and the professional and pedagogical costs of its naive ontological form (Donahue). The autopoietic reformulation proposed here responds to all 3. It replaces the metaphysical fifth-force claim with a naturalized account grounded in well-established organizational biology, accommodates non-neural expressions of II through Principle 24’s substrate-specificity, and offers a reformulated II capable of functioning as a philosophically coherent concept rather than a quasi-theological commitment. Whether this reformulation is ultimately adequate is a question the present paper raises rather than claims to have resolved; it is offered as a contribution to the debate rather than its conclusion.
Complexity, Autopoiesis, And Systems Biology: Resources For A Reformulated Argument
The most substantive philosophical development since Strauss posed his question is the maturation of complexity science and systems biology as frameworks that address precisely the conceptual space that the philosophy of chiropractic has long attempted to occupy. Table 2 provides a summary of the contemporary scientific theoretical frameworks that support the UI/II distinction. Three bodies of theory are particularly relevant.
Autopoiesis Theory
Autopoiesis, introduced by Maturana and Varela in 1980, characterizes living systems as networks of processes that continuously produce and maintain their own components.20 An autopoietic system is distinguished from non-living organized systems by a specific property: operational closure. The system’s processes refer back to the system itself; it produces the very components that make its continued production possible. A crystal is organized but not autopoietic: its organization is imposed by physical-chemical constraints external to the crystal itself. A living cell is autopoietic: its organization arises from and maintains itself.
Thompson’s 2004 analysis of the links between autopoiesis and neurophenomenology develops a particularly sharp formulation of what this operational closure entails.21 He articulates the proposition that ‘living is sense-making’: because an autopoietic system is constituted by its operational closure, it enacts a world of significance (a domain of value and meaning) that has no analogue in non-living organized matter. The example is precise: consider motile bacteria swimming up a sugar gradient. Sucrose is a real physico-chemical feature of the environment, governed by UI in Stephenson’s terms. But its status as food (as something significant, to be approached rather than avoided) is not a property of the sucrose molecule as such. It is a relational property enacted by the organism’s autopoiesis. Varela described this as the organism’s ‘surplus of significance’: the living being brings into existence a world of valence and meaning that the non-living physical environment does not contain.21 This is a precise and compelling argument for why II cannot be subsumed into UI without loss. UI governs the organization of the sucrose molecule, the sugar gradient, and the bacterial membrane equally. II, the autopoietic organizational intelligence of the living bacterium, is what generates the significance that makes sucrose food rather than merely chemistry.
This distinction maps directly onto the UI/II distinction as Strauss formulated it. UI corresponds to the universal organizing principle that accounts for the organization of all matter, crystals, planetary systems, and living bodies alike. The law of atomic bonding, the principle of minimum energy, the organizational principles of non-living matter: these are expressions of UI in Stephenson’s sense. II, reformulated in autopoietic terms, corresponds to the specific organizing principle of autopoietic systems: operationally closed, self-producing, self-maintaining networks that exhibit properties qualitatively distinct from those of non-living organized matter. The distinction between UI and II is thus the distinction between the general physics of organized matter and the specific biology of self-organizing living systems, a distinction that contemporary life science takes to be genuine and important.
Rosen’s theoretical biology provides formal grounding for this distinction.22 Rosen argued that organisms, unlike machines, are ‘closed to efficient causation’: in an organism, every functional process is entailed by another process within the organism itself, whereas in any machine or non-living system one must ultimately appeal to external causes to account for its organization. This closure to efficient causation is not Turing-computable; it cannot be fully captured by any algorithmic model, which means that living organization is not merely a more complex case of non-living organization but a qualitatively different kind of natural system. Letelier and colleagues demonstrated that autopoietic systems are a subset of Rosen’s Metabolism-Repair systems, inheriting this property of non-computability.21 This formal result strengthens the chiropractic philosophical argument considerably: the distinctness of II from UI is not merely a matter of degree or perspective but of a genuine mathematical discontinuity between the causal structure of living and non-living organization.
A potentially significant objection to the autopoietic reformulation of II concerns the scope of its application. Strauss held, consistent with Stephenson’s Principle 20, that II is the same principle in all living things: in a human being as in a plant. Autopoiesis theory supports this position; operational closure and self-production characterize living systems across all kingdoms of life, from single-celled bacteria to complex vertebrates. But this raises a challenge for the clinical argument. Subluxation theory is inherently a nervous-system concept, concerning specifically the neural mediation of adaptive homeostatic responses. If II is a general property of all autopoietic life, including organisms that have no nervous system and no vertebral column, how can the UI/II distinction serve as the conceptual foundation on which the notion of vertebral subluxation, interference, and adjustment rests?
The resolution lies in Stephenson’s Principle 24, which states that II is ‘limited by the matter in which it resides.’ II is the universal organizing principle of all living systems, but its expression is always substrate-specific: in plants, it is expressed through vascular transport, hormonal signaling, and phototropic response; in bacteria, through chemotactic gradient-sensing and metabolic cycling; in vertebrates, through neural mediation of adaptive homeostatic regulation. The substrate determines the form that II’s expression takes, not the principle itself. Subluxation theory does not claim to describe all possible limitations on II across all living systems; it claims to describe one specific form of limitation, namely the mechanical perturbation of the neural substrate through which II is expressed in organisms with vertebral columns and nervous systems.
Principle 24, on this reading, is not merely a qualification of II’s power but a philosophical load bearing feature of the framework: it is precisely because II is always expressed through a specific material substrate that substrate-specific disruptions, including vertebral subluxations, are possible. A purely universal intelligence, operating without material limitation as UI does, could not be disrupted by any material interference. II, being constitutively limited by the matter in which it resides, is also constitutively vulnerable to disruption through that matter. This is why the UI/II distinction is clinically necessary: it is only because II is the substrate-bound expression of the organizing principle that chiropractic vertebral subluxation theory makes conceptual sense. The generality of II across all living systems, far from undermining this argument, actually strengthens it: the same principle (II) is disrupted by different substrate-specific means in different organisms; in the vertebrate, the neural substrate is the relevant medium, and the subluxation the relevant form of interference.
Emergence and Organizational Closure
Kauffman’s work on self-organization and emergence in biological systems provides a complementary framework.23 Kauffman argues that life is not reducible to physics and chemistry, not because it involves non-physical forces, but because it involves the emergence of genuine constraints that are not present at lower levels of organization. An organism’s function (its capacity for self-maintenance, reproduction, and adaptive response) involves what Kauffman calls organizational closure: a circular causal structure in which the organism constrains its own processes and those constraints are reproduced across time.
The concept of emergence is directly relevant to the UI/II question. If II is simply UI operating in living matter, then there is nothing qualitatively new at the level of living organization, only a quantitative elaboration. But if, as complexity science suggests, living systems exhibit genuine emergent properties that are not merely the sum of their physical and chemical constituents, then II marks a genuine ontological discontinuity (the emergence of organizational closure) that warrants a distinct conceptual term. The point is not that II violates the laws of physics (UI); it is that it instantiates those laws in a configuration that produces qualitatively new properties. This is precisely the kind of distinction that, from Strauss’ perspective, warrants two different terms.
Prigogine and Dissipative Structures
Prigogine and Stengers’ work on dissipative structures offers a third relevant framework.24 Prigogine demonstrated that far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic systems, those systems continuously exchanging energy and matter with their environment, can spontaneously develop and maintain complex ordered structures. Living organisms are paradigmatic dissipative structures: they maintain their highly ordered states by continuously taking in energy, processing it, and dissipating entropy into their environment. The ordered organization of a living body is therefore not in tension with the second law of thermodynamics; it is maintained through continuous energy exchange, not despite it.
The thermodynamic contrast between these 2 organizational modes is worth spelling out precisely, as it provides empirical content for the UI/II distinction. Near-equilibrium systems, like crystals, mineral deposits, and planetary structures, achieve their organization through the action of physical-chemical laws that tends to ward minimum free energy. A crystal’s lattice structure is stable because it represents the lowest energy configuration available to its constituent atoms; it requires no ongoing energy input to maintain itself; and its organization is, in thermodynamic terms, a passive consequence of physical law operating through the specific binding affinities and geometries of its atoms. This is an accurate description of what Stephenson’s UI was intended to capture: the general principle of organization operative throughout all matter, producing the orderly structures of the non-living world through the inexorable operation of physical law, without ongoing metabolic effort.
A living organism operates in precisely the opposite thermodynamic regime. Its organization is not a low-energy equilibrium state but a high-energy, highly ordered state maintained against the constant thermodynamic tendency toward disorder. A cell, a tissue, an organism: each continuously consumes energy to maintain its structure, continuously produces and degrades its own components, and continuously exchanges matter and energy with its environment as the price of maintaining its far-from-equilibrium ordered state. Were the energy supply interrupted, were the organism to cease its metabolic activity, the dissipative structure would rapidly degrade toward thermodynamic equilibrium, which is the condition of death. This is what distinguishes II from UI in thermodynamic terms: UI describes the organizational principle of matter at or near equilibrium, where structure is a stable consequence of physical law operating without ongoing energy input. II describes the organizational principle of matter far from equilibrium, where structure is an active achievement requiring continuous metabolic work, and where the cessation of that work constitutes the loss of life itself. The distinction is not terminological but thermodynamic, and it maps precisely onto Stephenson’s distinction between matter organized by the universal principle (UI) and living matter organized by the inborn intelligence whose expression is always limited by the matter through which it works (II, Principle 20 and Principle 24).
This framework illuminates the specific sense in which II differs from UI. UI describes the general organizing principle at equilibrium and near-equilibrium: the organization of crystals, molecules, and planetary systems. II describes the organizing principle of far-from-equilibrium dissipative structures whose order is dynamic, adaptive, and maintained against thermodynamic pressure. The roots of this systems-level thinking trace back to Bertalanffy’s general system theory, which first articulated the distinction between closed and open systems and identified self-regulation as a defining property of living organization.25 The interference posited by chiropractic subluxation theory (interference with the expression of II) is, in this framework, a perturbation of the information-processing capacity of a dissipative biological system. The vertebral subluxation, understood as a disturbance in the neural mediation of adaptive homeostatic responses, disrupts precisely the kind of dynamic, self-maintaining organization that distinguishes living systems from non-living ones.
Chiropractic Systems Science and the Subluxation
These frameworks from the natural sciences have a counterpart within chiropractic’s own theoretical development. Senzon, in a systematic analysis of the relationship between the chiropractic paradigm and systems science, traced how systems views were progressively integrated into chiropractic subluxation theory throughout the profession’s first century.25 Defining 3 chiropractic paradigms in terms of deep and flat holism, he positioned vertebral subluxation within a deep holism framework: the subluxation is understood as a neurological disturbance affecting the organism’s adaptive capacity at multiple levels of systemic complexity, not merely as a local mechanical displacement. This formulation of subluxation as interference with multi-level adaptive organization maps directly onto the present paper’s argument that II marks a genuine ontological threshold between non-living and living organization, and that its disruption has consequences at every level of the living system’s self-maintaining complexity. Senzon further observed that an outdated and undifferentiated concept of II has been deployed in arguments against the philosophy of chiropractic, making explicit the need for precisely the kind of more rigorous, systems-grounded reformulation of II that the present paper undertakes.
Thompson, Teleology, and the Lived Body
Thompson’s synthesis of autopoiesis, phenomenology, and cognitive science provides the most philosophically sophisticated version of the case for genuine ontological discontinuity between living and non-living systems.26 Building on the foundational work of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch on the embodied mind,27 and elaborated in his tribute to Varela on the links between autopoiesis and neurophenomenology,21 Thompson argues that life and mind are not merely complex arrangements of physics and chemistry but involve genuine novelty that is not present in inorganic nature. The living body is not merely a physical system; it is a product of experience and adaptive response in a way that a rock, a crystal, or a star is not. This distinction does not require appeal to non-physical forces; it requires recognizing that sufficiently complex physical organization produces qualitatively novel causal powers.
Central to this framework is the concept of intrinsic teleology, developed by Weber and Varela and discussed extensively by Thompson.28 Weber and Varela argue that teleology (purposiveness, goal-directedness) is not an observer-imposed interpretation of living systems but an emergent relational property that belongs to the organism by virtue of its autopoietic autonomy. The organism has what Jonas called conatus, a concern for its own continued existence, that arises naturally from the self-producing, self-maintaining structure of autopoietic organization. This intrinsic teleology is not a feature of the autopoietic organization in the abstract; it does not belong to the molecule or the crystal, but it emerges when a concrete autopoietic system interacts with its environment. This is philosophically decisive for the UI/II argument: UI, as the general organizing principle of all matter, is not teleological. The organization of a planetary system does not have a concern for its own continuation. The organizational intelligence of the living body (II) does. To collapse II into UI is therefore to lose the teleological dimension of living organization that the philosophy of chiropractic has always intended II to carry, and on which Strauss’ clinical argument ultimately rests.
Thompson further argues, following the phenomenological tradition of Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, that the concepts needed to comprehend living organization (organism, autopoiesis, sense-making) cannot be derived from any purely third-person, observer-independent physical description. They are grounded in what phenomenology calls the lived body (Leib), the body as experienced from the inside, as a living, feeling, purposive being. This is distinct from the body as a physical object (Körper), which is accessible to external measurement and quantification. The implication is transcendental: life can only be known by life. No purely physicalist framework, however mathematically sophisticated, can generate the concepts needed to understand what an organism is, because those concepts are grounded in first-person lived experience of one’s own animate body.21 This argument provides a philosophically rigorous response to the reductionist position that II is merely a metaphor for complex biochemistry: the irreducibility of II is not mystical but transcendental, grounded in the ineliminable first-person character of living experience that UI, as a universal third-person principle, cannot by itself capture.
For the UI/II debate, Thompson’s framework suggests that the distinction is not merely practical or terminological. Instead, it is philosophically grounded in a genuine ontological difference between the organization of non-living and living matter. UI describes the organizing principle of matter as such. II describes the organizing principle of matter that has achieved the specific configuration of autopoietic, dissipative, far-from-equilibrium self-organization that we call life, a configuration that generates sense-making, intrinsic teleology, and the lived body, none of which are features of non-living matter however organized. The 2 terms are necessary because they describe genuinely different phenomena at different levels of the natural hierarchy.
Analogical Arguments For And Against The Distinction
Philosophical arguments benefit from illuminating analogies. Strauss’s gravity analogy is productive but has limits: it operates within a single physical system and illustrates a quantitative difference in the expression of the same law (gravitational force varies in magnitude across different masses) rather than the qualitative ontological discontinuity that is the heart of the affirmative case. The gravitational differences between the Moon and Earth are differences of degree within a single type of physical phenomenon. The UI/II distinction, as grounded in the complexity frameworks examined above, concerns a difference of kind: the emergence of autopoietic, sense-making, teleological organization at the living threshold. The gravity analogy illuminates the dual-perspective argument effectively, but the case for qualitative discontinuity is carried more robustly by the systems biology frameworks. We propose three additional analogies that support a response to Strauss’ question in the affirmative and a further analogy that can be used in support of the negative, with each of the four calibrated to illuminate a different aspect of the debate.
These 4 analogies, described below, along with Stauss’ gravitational analogy are summarized in Table 3.
- The Levels of Description Analogy
The first is an analogy drawn from organizational biology. The same general biochemical principles, involving enzyme kinetics, molecular binding affinities, and thermodynamic gradients, govern both a test-tube chemical reaction and the metabolic processes of a living cell. A biochemist working with isolated enzymes in vitro and a cell biologist studying the same enzymes in their cellular context in vivo are both describing the same underlying chemistry. But the cell-biological description is not reducible to the biological one: the cellular context introduces organizational constraints, including feedback regulation, compartmentalization, temporal coordination, and integration with the cell’s autopoietic goals, that simply do not exist in the test-tube.
Two distinct levels of description are therefore necessary, not because different laws apply, but because the same laws, instantiated within qualitatively different organizational contexts, produce genuinely different phenomena. The general biochemical principles correspond to UI; the specific, adaptive, goal-directed organizational intelligence of the cell corresponds to II. Collapsing the 2 descriptions into 1 would be to miss what is most important about living organization: that its organizational context is not merely a boundary condition for chemistry but a qualitatively distinct causal domain in its own right.
The analogy has a determinate limit that should be stated explicitly: unlike living cells, test-tube reactions are not autopoietic, and no amount of complexity added to the reaction vessel will generate the operational closure that characterizes II. The threshold between UI-governed chemistry and II/governed living organization is real, and the 2 terms are needed to mark it. This framing avoids the theological and panpsychist implications that analogies drawn from human-made computational systems can inadvertently introduce: no question arises here about whether the designer of the laboratory is analogous to a cosmic intelligence, because the analogy concerns natural organizational processes governed by the same biochemical laws throughout.
- The River and the Watershed Analogy
The negative case, that II can be subsumed within UI, might be illustrated by the claim that a river and the watershed that feeds it are governed by the same principle (gravity) and therefore do not need 2 descriptions. This is technically true, but it erases the distinction between the general principle and its specific, constrained, directional expression in a particular morphological system. The watershed is not merely ‘gravity operating on a surface’; it is a self-organized drainage network with specific properties (feedback, channel development, sensitivity to local topography) that emerge from the interaction of gravitational force with the specific material and morphological constraints of the terrain. Similarly, II is not merely ‘UI operating in living matter’; it is the specific, adaptive, self-maintaining organizational network that emerges when the general organizing principle (UI) operates within the constraints of autopoietic biological systems. The river/watershed distinction is a useful second-order description that the general principle alone cannot provide. So too with II.
- The Immune Response Analogy
The vertebrate immune system illustrates the kind of distinction at stake in the most clinically relevant register. The general physical-chemical principles governing molecular interaction (UI) apply equally to antigen-antibody binding and to the rusting of iron: both are instances of specific molecular geometries fitting together under the general laws of chemical bonding. But the immune response is not merely chemistry: it is a self-learning, self-maintaining, adaptive, body-specific response that ‘remembers’ past encounters and generates targeted, context-sensitive reactions. The distinction between the general organizing principle (UI) and the specific adaptive intelligence of the living immune system (II) is not merely nominal: it is the difference between describing what happens at the molecular level and describing what happens at the level of the organism. Both descriptions are needed; neither is redundant [Note: This Immune Response item is more an illustrative case than a true analogy]. Two clinically significant extensions of this illustrative case deserve brief attention, as they address the scope and limits of II with direct relevance to chiropractic theory.
First, cancer represents a case in which II is not merely interfered with from without, as in vertebral subluxation theory, but subverted from within. Malignant cells retain the molecular machinery of UI: they obey the general laws of chemistry and molecular biology. But they have lost the specific organizational constraints of II, namely the autopoietic, whole-system self-maintaining logic that regulates normal cell proliferation in the interest of the organism’s continued existence. The cancer cell multiplies without the contextual constraints that make cell division an expression of II rather than a violation of it. This clarifies what II is not: it is not simply more life or more biological activity, but specifically the organized, coordinated, whole-system adaptive intelligence whose goal is the organism’s self-maintenance. Disruption of II takes qualitatively different forms, whether through vertebral subluxation (external mechanical interference with neural expression) or through neoplastic transformation (internal loss of organizational constraint), but in both cases what is lost is the same thing: the substrate-bound, adaptive, self-maintaining organizational principle that II names.
Second, Wolff’s Law, the well-established principle that bone remodels its microarchitecture in response to the mechanical loads placed upon it, illustrates II’s expression through a non-neural substrate and speaks directly to chiropractic’s concern with mechanical perturbation of the musculoskeletal system. The adaptive remodeling of bone to resist specific directional loads is lawful in the sense that UI describes: the same biomechanical principles govern all bone tissue. But the adaptive, goal-directed, organism-specific character of Wolfian remodeling, the fact that bone responds to the specific functional demands of the particular organism over time and adjusts its architecture accordingly, is an expression of II as this paper defines it. It is not merely chemistry or mechanics but the substrate-limited, adaptive, self-maintaining organizational intelligence specific to living systems, expressed here through osseous rather than neural tissue. The concept of subluxation-related adaptive response, including changes in bone density and trabecular architecture following chronic mechanical perturbation, can be understood within this framework as a case of II expressing itself through mechanical tissue-remodeling pathways in response to sustained interference with normal load distribution.
- The Negative Case: The Single-Spectrum Analogy
For completeness, the negative case also deserves a sympathetic analogy. Consider the electromagnetic spectrum. Visible light, infrared radiation, and radio waves are all expressions of the same underlying principle (electromagnetic radiation) differing only in wavelength and frequency. One does not need separate ontological principles for radio waves and visible light; a single, more differentiated theory of electromagnetic radiation encompasses all. By analogy, one might argue that UI is the single organizing principle that, operating at different scales of matter-complexity, produces the phenomena that chiropractic describes separately as UI (in simple matter) and II (in living matter). This analogy has genuine force as an argument for conceptual economy. Its limitation, however, is that the electromagnetic spectrum is a continuous variation within a single kind of phenomenon, and no point on the spectrum generates significance, valence, or purposiveness. The transition from non-living to living matter is not of this kind. It involves the emergence of what Thompson and Varela call sense-making: the living organism does not merely organize matter differently from a crystal: it brings into existence a domain of significance that the crystal has no access to.21 Sucrose is food for the bacterium; it is merely a molecule for the electromagnetic field. That asymmetry is not a difference of degree but of kind, and it is the asymmetry that II is designed to capture. If this threshold is real, and the convergent evidence from autopoiesis theory, Rosen’s formal biology, and complexity science suggests it is, then the single-spectrum analogy fails to capture it, and the UI/II distinction is vindicated.
Synthesis
The foregoing analysis supports Strauss’ position but on stronger grounds than Strauss himself articulated. Strauss’ dual-perspective argument is essentially correct: the UI/II distinction marks a genuine difference in the expression of the organizing principle through matter, but it does not fully resolve the philosophical challenge that the distinction might be merely stipulative: a difference in perspective rather than a difference in the phenomena themselves.
The resources of complexity and systems biology provide the additional grounding needed. The distinction between UI and II is not merely a difference of perspective; it corresponds to a genuine ontological threshold recognized across multiple contemporary scientific frameworks: the emergence of autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela20), sense-making and the surplus of significance (Thompson21), organizational closure and self-organization (Kauffman23), closure to efficient causation (Rosen22), dissipative structure (Prigogine and Stengers24), intrinsic teleology (Weber and Varela28), and organism-environment coupling (Thompson26). These frameworks do not vindicate the philosophy of chiropractic as a whole. What they do provide is a coherent contemporary theoretical frame of reference in which the UI/II distinction is not a mere metaphysical curiosity but a conceptual demarcation between two qualitatively distinct levels of natural organization.
This reformulation has several practical implications for the philosophy of chiropractic. First, it resolves the potential confusion between II and supernatural agency. Strauss was careful to insist that II is a natural law or principle, not a theological entity; the autopoietic and complexity frameworks reinforce this insistence by providing a naturalized account of exactly the kind of self-organizing, adaptive, self-maintaining organization that II was intended to describe. Second, it provides a basis for distinguishing chiropractic’s specific theoretical object (interference with the adaptive organizational intelligence of the living body) from either purely mechanistic (biomechanical) or purely spiritualistic accounts. Third, it positions the philosophy of chiropractic in productive, rather than defensive, dialogue with contemporary life science.
A note of caution is warranted, however, regarding the limits of the mapping between chiropractic philosophical concepts and scientific frameworks. The 33 Principles are deductive metaphysical propositions, not empirical hypotheses; their logical validity does not depend on, and cannot be settled by, any particular scientific theory. Conversely, the empirical success of autopoiesis theory and complexity science does not vindicate specific chiropractic clinical claims. The relationship between the philosophy of chiropractic and contemporary systems biology is one of conceptual resonance and analogical illumination, not direct empirical confirmation. This is not a weakness: it is characteristic of the relationship between any mature philosophical framework and the empirical sciences that study the same domain. What it means in practice is that the chiropractic philosopher who argues for the necessity of the UI/II distinction on the grounds of complexity science must be careful to distinguish the philosophical argument (which has genuine force) from any implied empirical claim.
Finally, the present analysis opens a question that merits its own extended consideration: if II is the organizing principle of autopoietic living systems, what are the implications for the concept of the vertebral subluxation as an interference with II? Contemporary neuroscience researchers have started to generate research on the ways in which mechanical perturbations of the spine affect neural processing, sensorimotor integration, and homeostatic regulation.29–33 Whether and to what extent such research can be interpreted within the conceptual framework of II-as-autopoietic-organizing-principle is an important question that falls beyond the scope of the present paper.
CONCLUSION
Strauss’ Question 25 (whether the philosophy of chiropractic requires both innate intelligence and universal intelligence) has no simple answer, but the weight of the philosophical analysis, informed by contemporary complexity and systems biology frameworks, supports the affirmative. Strauss was correct that the two concepts describe the same organizing principle from different perspectives, and that the perspective of matter (of living matter specifically) generates a genuine conceptual distinction. The reformulation we and others have proposed grounds that distinction more firmly: UI describes the universal organizing principle of all matter; II describes the emergent, autopoietic, self-maintaining organizational principle specific within living systems, a principle that contemporary life science recognizes as marking a genuine ontological threshold, not merely a quantitative elaboration.
The negative case, that UI alone is sufficient with a more differentiated theory of its expression at different scales, is not without merit, and we have attempted to represent it fairly. But it faces the challenge of accounting for the genuine discontinuity between living and non-living organization without reintroducing, under a different name, precisely the distinction it sought to eliminate.
The UI/II distinction, properly reformulated and grounded in the science of emergence and organizational closure, does more than preserve a historical feature of chiropractic metaphysics. It positions the philosophy of chiropractic to engage productively with the most important contemporary questions about the nature of living organization and, ultimately, about what it means to interfere with, and to facilitate the expression of, the intelligence inherent in the living body.
Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the College of Advanced Healthcare Science (CAHS)* for institutional support and the chiropractic educators whose past work and ongoing discussions helped inform this analysis. CAHS (www.cahsedu.com) is a ‘University Center’ affiliated with (Centro Universitario adscrito a) the Western Europe University (www.westerneuropeuniversity.com).
Funding statement
Funding was neither sought nor received for this study.
Conflicts of Interest declaration
No conflicts of interest were reported.
Author Contributions
AW conceived the project,
AW and FD contributed to the design and implementation of the research,
AW produced the analysis and manuscript,
AW and FD reviewed drafts and AI suggestions. Both reviewed/approved the final manuscript.
AI Statement
We acknowledge that AI was used in the writing of this paper and that the assist in writing went beyond a check of grammar and spelling. Specifically, AI (Claude.ai) was used to review and critique the paper and all 3 tables after having been developed, researched, written and spell checked by AW and FD. AI suggestions, provided both authors agreed to integrate into the original paper, were then checked and validated by both authors.