On the Nervous System

This preprint presents a timing-first ontology of the nervous system. It argues that conventional definitions begin too late by treating nervous systems primarily as information-processing, decision-making, or behavioural control devices. Instead, the paper defines the nervous system in the narrow biological sense as the neural implementation of a broader organism-scale regulatory architecture whose primary function is to preserve viability under persistent temporal forcing. The paper distinguishes between organism-scale regulatory architecture, which spans living systems generally, and nervous systems, which emerge where rapid distributed coordination becomes necessary to govern admissibility, inhibition, action, and recovery across spatially extended tissues. Timing governance is shown to be biologically prior to sensing: information is only useful when admitted within viable temporal windows, and information acquired outside those windows can increase instability rather than reduce it. This work provides a foundational ontological framework linking chronobiology, systems neuroscience, biological regulation, and regulatory solvency. It is intended as a foundational theoretical contribution and is shared as a preprint to establish priority, anchor the wider research programme, and invite scholarly engagement.