From Relations to Realized Form: Constraint, History, and Pattern Selection Across Matter, Fields, and Living Architecture

Physical systems do not have access to every imaginable configuration. Constituents, local laws, relations, environmental conditions, causal structure, and history jointly restrict the set of states that remain physically accessible. Within that restricted region, dynamics and stability criteria select configurations that can persist, producing realized structures that may be characterized geometrically, spectrally, chemically, or morphologically. This paper develops a shared cross-domain selection architecture for this process across matter, continuous fields, and living architectures. The framework represents realization through a sequence in which an unconstrained configuration space is progressively restricted to a physically accessible region, from which attractors and metastable states determine persistent realized structures and their observable signatures. History and path dependence are treated explicitly, and the framework further examines how a realized structure may modify the constraints encountered by subsequent processes. The paper distinguishes operational information from ontological interpretations of information. As a separate ontological extension, it explores an informational fifth-dimension hypothesis (I₅), conceived not as an additional spatial or temporal coordinate but as a dimension of structured possibility whose physical necessity remains explicitly testable through an eliminability criterion. Yoshida’s complementary interpretation of information as dynamic relational change is kept conceptually distinct. A geometric realization test further places Fibonacci-type organization, the golden ratio, spirals, vortices, branching structures, Voronoi/foam geometries, wave and nodal patterns, packing symmetries, and related families in direct competition rather than presupposing any universal geometry. The framework is designed so that preferred geometries and I₅ may fail empirically rather than being protected by assumption.