Development isn’t just a stack of new abilities. It’s a deeper process where the same life-preserving operations that keep a body alive gradually become conscious, relational, and chosen, turning regulation into judgment, emotion into information, and desire into purpose. We start with a simple but demanding claim: psychology makes more sense when you treat it as a higher-order extension of physiology. The organism must assimilate, discriminate, stabilize, anticipate, coordinate, and repair....