Toward a Theory of Cross-Metafunctional Organization: Coordination, Recursive Regulation, and Coherence within the Brain Metafunction Framework

This preprint is Paper 5 of the Brain Metafunction Framework (BMF) Open Preprint Series. Building upon the four foundational metafunctional theories of perception, attention, memory, and agency, it develops a theoretical account of cross-metafunctional organization: the processes and capacities through which differentiated organism-level functions remain coordinated, mutually constraining, and capable of recursive regulation. The paper introduces a functional-explanatory taxonomy distinguishing primary metafunctions, cross-metafunctional processes and capacities, organismic enabling and integrative organization, and component mechanisms. It examines working memory, prediction, inference, affective valuation, executive control, and metacognition according to their roles within this architecture, without treating them as additional primary metafunctions. Three contributions receive particular emphasis: recursive regulation, through which ongoing cognitive and agentive organization can influence its subsequent modification; cross-metafunctional coherence, understood as a dynamically maintained system-level relational achievement rather than a separate cognitive capacity; and the BMF Substantial Coextensiveness Hypothesis, which proposes substantial overlap and reciprocal coupling between the neural organization supporting consciousness and the higher-order neural organization responsible for integrating and regulating bodily functions. The paper also develops criteria for empirical evaluation, including predictions concerning relational dissociations, perturbation propagation, recursive-regulatory dissociations, and dynamic recovery. It identifies the explanatory limits of cross-metafunctional organization and establishes a foundation for further interdisciplinary investigation of organismic integration and consciousness while maintaining critical openness concerning their deeper ontological nature. Series: Brain Metafunction Framework Open Preprint Series — Paper 5Version: 1.0 (October 2026)Author: Orlando David Garcia, MD Preprint status: This manuscript has not undergone formal peer review. Preferred Citation Garcia, O. D. (2026). Toward a theory of cross-metafunctional organization: Coordination, recursive regulation, and coherence within the Brain Metafunction Framework (Version 1.0) [Preprint]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23353976