The Meaning Behind Systems — A unified geometry for the development of systems through signal construction, perception, interpretation, and behavioral dynamics.

The Meaning Behind Systems introduces a unified, substrate‑agnostic geometry describing how systems construct, stabilize, and sustain meaning across time. The paper formalizes the full event–drift cycle — the oscillatory update mechanism through which signals become situations, situations become meaning, meaning becomes behavior, and behavior reshapes internal state. This release presents the first complete life‑cycle demonstration of a meaning manifold in a living system, using a tomato plant as the empirical substrate to compute curvature, basin depth, elasticity, meaning stability, and Internal State Development (ISD) across a full interval. This version includes a refined order of operations in the perception–interpretation–update pipeline and a minor notation update improving continuity across the flow equations, curvature definitions, and basin‑depth mapping. The paper also introduces the mathematical structure of group geometry, showing how individual manifolds couple into collective curvature fields. The group‑level formulation is partially formalized here and will be expanded in forthcoming work to support multi‑subject simulations, collective frequency mapping, and cross‑substrate generalization. Together, these contributions establish the first substrate‑agnostic ontology of meaning construction and system development, providing a mathematical foundation for cognition, behavior, collapse, regeneration, and collective dynamics across biological and artificial systems.