The Limits of Falsifiability: Dimensionality, Measurement Thresholds, and the Sub-Landauer Domain in Biological Systems

Popper's falsifiability criterion breaks down for high-dimensional biological systems — not because biology is messy, but because of fundamental limits at three distinct levels.

Version 2.0 now available

v2.0 (December 2025) extends the published paper with a deeper argument: falsifiability in any field depends on axiomatic assumptions about how you structure the question. Before any measurement occurs, the choice of what counts as a test, what counts as evidence, and how the question is structured has already made a dimensional reduction. The framework is itself a projection.

The paper identifies three levels of limitation: (1) Physical measurement limits — many biological patterns exist below the Landauer threshold. (2) Dimensional projection — a binary test on a 100-neuron circuit preserves less than 1% of the information ($1/(n \log_2 k) \approx 0.3\%$). (3) Framework dependence — axiomatic choices precede all measurement and cannot be tested from within the framework.

Wigner's "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in physics reflects selection bias: physics has focused on domains where projection loss is small. Biology is where this selection breaks down — where the gap between system dimensionality and observer capacity becomes undeniable.

This isn't relativism. The underlying reality exists. But falsification is framework-relative, and the appropriate response is scale-aware, ensemble-based epistemology that acknowledges the limits physics places on what can be known.