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. The resulting structure may then be characterized geometrically, spectrally, chemically, or morphologically. In some systems a persistent structure further modifies the constraints encountered by subsequent processes, opening a recursive pathway from realized form to new possibility. This paper develops a shared selection architecture for that process. Constituents and local laws are held fixed while relations, constraints, causal accessibility, physical conditions, and history are allowed to vary. The architecture is written as a sequence of intermediate sets: an unconstrained configuration space is reduced by constraints and history to an accessible region; attractors and metastable states within that region determine what can persist; the realized structure is read after the fact. The same formal skeleton is applied to matter, continuous fields, and living architectures. Path dependence is treated as an essential ingredient: identical present ingredients need not yield identical outcomes when histories differ. A further, still open question is whether a realized structure can itself rewrite the relational and constraint architecture of a later layer. Operational information is distinguished from a philosophical interpretation of information as trans-spatial, trans-cognitive presence. The framework is intended as a cross-domain selection architecture whose domain-specific dynamics remain explicit. As a separate ontological extension, the paper explores an informational fifth-dimension hypothesis in which structured possibility is conceived as a free, non-spatial and non-temporal dimension that may undergo conditional spatiotemporal realization. A further ontological extension asks whether structured possibility can be interpreted through a hierarchical degree of informational embodiment, in which lawful spatial, temporal, and gravitational constraints progressively specify the class of physically realizable forms. A related conceptual distinction, due to Yoshida, separates structured possibility from information interpreted as the dynamic change of physically realized relationships. A geometric realization test places Fibonacci and related families in competition as candidate signatures, not as presupposed universal forms.