The Information Boundary of Living Systems: A Multimodal Investigation of External Physical Traces and Biological Organization

This paper presents a falsifiable methodological framework for testing whether biological organization leaves an informational trace beyond the material boundary of a living organism. Starting from the fact that living bodies produce measurable physical and chemical effects, including thermal, electromagnetic, and chemical ones, it asks whether these effects, once everything explained by known models is separated out, carry additional informational structure tied to the biological state. The “information boundary” is defined operationally as the boundary of a region in which the conditional information of the remainder about the biological state exceeds a threshold fixed in advance, and not as an assumed material surface. The path is built from successive foundational gates (validity of measurement, additional information, spatial structure), followed by parallel robustness tests, a dynamic test, conditional tests of the structure’s relation to the conscious state and to biological history, and finally the collapse of biological organization as the strongest counter-test. Criteria for success, failure, inconclusiveness, and stopping are fixed before any experiment, and the paper states that even the strongest positive result would not establish the survival of consciousness or of memory, nor the transfer of information to a cosmic field. The paper presents no empirical data; it offers a framework and a protocol that can be carried out and falsified. Two appendices give a simulation-based analysis of statistical power and sample size, and a minimal executable protocol for the first three gates.