Who Monitors Organismal Coherence During Aging?

In our previous conceptual paper [1], Holmes' carriage was proposed as a metaphor for two fundamentally different models of aging: fragmented aging, characterized by progressive failure of individual biological subsystems requiring continuous repair, and coherent aging, characterized by long-term preservation of organism-level functional integration until a relatively rapid terminal decline. This framework naturally raises another question. If systemic coherence is preserved throughout most of life, what biological mechanism continuously monitors its integrity and initiates corrective responses before functional fragmentation becomes clinically apparent? A recently proposed model suggests that aging may represent progressive biological decoherence caused by increasing deviation from systemic redox equilibrium (α-bio) [2]. However, every stable biological control system requires not only an organizational principle but also a mechanism capable of sensing deviations from that principle. Recent studies on interoception describe a distributed physiological system responsible for monitoring the body's internal state while simultaneously questioning whether interoception represents a single unified function or multiple independent sensory modalities [3][4]. We propose the testable hypothesis that these apparently independent interoceptive modalities collectively function as a distributed biological monitoring system for organism-level coherence.