Boundary-emergence and potential generation in organized systems

Abstract Multiple fields have independently identified that novelty, value, and developmental outcomes arise relationally rather than from properties stored within individual actors. Kauffman (2019, 2021) argues the biosphere constructs its possibility space through organism-environment interaction. Emirbayer (1997) calls for a relational ontology where relations constitute entities rather than connecting pre-formed substances. Moretti (2021) and Chetty & Hendren (2018) show empirically that identical individuals produce different outcomes depending on encounter context. Dyer & Singh (1998) demonstrate that competitive advantage can be irreducibly relational. Collins (2004) argues emotional energy and agency originate in interaction, not in individuals. Yet these insights lack a broadly shared grammar, a unified operationalization across domains, and a common falsification architecture. No existing framework spans these fields with shared constructs and testable predictions. This paper proposes the core claim and provides the initial operationalization. Net-new potential emerges at boundary encounters between organized systems, not from properties stored within them. The claim is not merely that context influences outcomes—it's that reachable futures expand through boundary exposure, and that this follows from thermodynamic, information-theoretic, and dissipative-structure constraints. The paper argues these constraints can be synthesized into a boundary-emergence principle operating across scales. From this principle, the paper derives a set of encounter-level constructs—including the mechanics of what encounters produce, the conditions under which they convert, and the asymmetry of returns across participants—and defines potential (Π) as a distribution over reachable future states at boundary encounters, distinct from capacity (Ψ), the system's internal ability to convert energy into effective work. This paper serves as co-keystone with Functional channels and the persistence of organized existence (Part II), which establishes the functional channels through which organized systems persist and convert. Together they anchor the framework. The boundary-emergence claim sits at 70-85% confidence. It would be falsified by repeatable expansion of reachable futures in a truly closed boundary regime, no correlation between encounter quality and development outcomes controlling for initial capacity, or internal interventions producing equivalent results to boundary interventions.