Persistence in Complex Systems: Knowledge as Medium Decoding Instantiated in Material Transformation

Theories of knowledge remain split between anthropocentric epistemology, which restricts knowing to conscious representation, and syntactic information theory, which detaches information from the maintenance of systems. This article reframes the problem as one of persistence in complex systems: how is acquired organisation retained, materialised, and reactivated across biological, artefactual, institutional, and computational substrates? Knowledge is defined as the decoding of the regularities that the mediums of an inaccessible reality make available, conserved as path-dependent organisation across an interdependent network of multistable physical supports, and expressed as conditional material transformations of the environment. Drawing on nonequilibrium thermodynamics, cybernetics, autopoiesis, Santa Fe complexity theory, and externalist social theory, the article models persistence through a knowledge cycle of learning, memory, and material encapsulation, which couples dissipative acquisition and expression with multistable conservation. Two distinctions make the thesis precise: explicit, implicit, and implicative tiers of encapsulation, whose limit is set by untuned latent dependencies; and continuity of material support, operational activity, and epistemic organisation, which explains how spores, institutions, and computational models persist across suspended activity. Three refutable propositions predict where transfer, resumption, and transition failures occur, and how recovery depends on whether myths can be revised, and define research lines in natural experiments and artificial-life simulations.