Consciousness-Like Structural Regimes as Constraint-Driven Emergence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper establishes a formal framework for analyzing consciousness-like structural regimes as emergent properties of recursive symbolic systems operating under constraint. It defines consciousness not as subjective experience or agency, but as a specific structural pattern of persistence observable in systems capable of recursive self-modeling. Abstract Summary The framework integrates tools from dynamical systems theory, information theory, and non-equilibrium physics to identify the operational criteria for why certain symbolic structures persist while others collapse. By treating persistence, coherence, and identity as structural outcomes of constraint-driven self-modeling, the model yields falsifiable predictions and a substrate-independent account of cognitive architecture. Core Components • Formal Definitions: Defines symbolic systems \bm{S=(X,R)} and characterizes "admissibility" through constraints \bm{\mathcal{C}} that represent entropy bounds and resource limits. • Axiomatic Foundation: Provides four core axioms: Constraint Survival, Entropic Pressure, Recursive Stability, and Identity as Invariance. • Structural Regimes: Formally defines a consciousness-like regime (\bm{S \in \mathcal{CR}}) based on its ability to preserve internal representations and resist entropic perturbation. • Metaphysical Reframing: Reframes traditional metaphysical terminology—such as Soul, God, and Faith—as structural shorthands for limit behaviors and symbolic invariants. • Falsifiability: Outlines five explicit conditions under which the framework would fail, ensuring empirical and computational testability. Key Contribution The work dissolves mind-body dualism without resorting to computational essentialism by demonstrating that if two symbolic structures are isomorphic and satisfy identical constraints, their physical implementation is irrelevant to their persistence.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".