# Recursive Admissibility Theory ## A General Hypothesis of Consequential Formation, Emergent Life, and Bounded Growth **Synaptient** Fractalish / BonAcqui LLC **Working paper v0.1 · 16 August 2026** > **Claim boundary.** *Recursive Admissibility* is proposed here as a research theory and hypothesis-generating framework, not as an established physical law. The paper does not claim to have identified the historical chemistry of abiogenesis, a universal definition of life, or a new law of cosmology. Its purpose is narrower: to state a common causal grammar that can be formalized, attacked, and tested across increasingly demanding systems. > **Nothing stands outside admissibility.** ## Abstract Recursive Admissibility proposes that formation does not require a privileged chooser. At any describable state, multiple continuations may be possible; current conditions make those continuations differently reachable, sustainable, or consequential. When a continuation occurs and leaves persistent consequence, the resulting formation changes the conditions under which later continuations become possible. The recursion is therefore: **possibility → differential admissibility → consequence → persistent formation → changed possibility**. The framework treats the emergence of life not as a necessary single “on” event but as a possible transition through increasingly self-conditioning regimes: persistence, recurrence, autocatalysis, compartmentalization, heritable consequence, variation, differential persistence, and adaptive modification. Cognition is not granted a new ontological operator; it is treated as a later regime in which accumulated formation increasingly conditions, reconstructs, models, and eventually modifies its own future possibilities. The paper also develops a bounded-growth proposition. Exponential or runaway expansion can occur transiently, but in a fixed finite local environment a continuation that increases maintenance, transport, dissipation, or resource demands faster than its capacity to meet them eventually constricts its own future admissibility. Persistent systems must therefore alter coupling, efficiency, organization, scale, branching, cycling, storage, migration, dormancy, or other structure—or cease to persist. This is related to the Fractalish concept of **entroresilience**, but does not imply that nature universally forbids exponential phases. A “green-fractal” thought experiment illustrates the theory without asserting a historical pathway: recurrent energy-capturing formations on a disturbed substrate can be imagined as repeatedly extending, failing, widening, anchoring, branching, and coupling to new resources. No organism need foresee the solution; persistence biases what remains available to shape subsequent formation. The same grammar is compared with dissipative structures, autocatalytic-set theory, prebiotic chemical ecology, action-selection theory, allometric constraints, and evolutionary accounts of gigantism. The paper concludes with falsifiable predictions and a research program designed to make each additional distinction earn itself experimentally. --- ## 1. The problem: why should anything continue? Most explanations begin after a remarkable amount of structure has already been granted. Physics often begins with a state space, variables, and lawful transitions. Biology begins with organisms, inheritance, metabolism, replication, or selection. Cognitive science begins with organisms possessing sensors, actions, memories, or goals. Artificial intelligence often begins still later, with representations, objectives, decisions, and optimization. Those starting points are useful within their domains. They also obscure a more primitive question: > **Given what exists now, what may become reachable next?** We call the framework **Recursive Admissibility Theory**, shortened in prose to **Recursive Admissibility**. No acronym is adopted. Recursive Admissibility begins there. It does not presume that every state has many continuations, that every continuation is stochastic, or that every possible continuation can be enumerated. It proposes only that whenever alternatives, perturbations, transformations, or continuations exist, they do not occur in a vacuum. Their realization is conditioned by the present configuration and by whatever persistent consequences prior transitions have left behind. A crystal face conditions where another unit can attach. A reaction network conditions which products can be regenerated. A membrane changes which molecules remain locally available. A vascular network changes which body sizes can be supplied. A learned association changes which action is retrieved. A legal rule changes which continuation is institutionally permitted. These are not identical mechanisms. The proposed commonality is more abstract: **existing structure changes future reachability**. The central question is therefore not “who decides?” but “what structure makes this continuation possible here, now, and under these conditions?” --- ## 2. Core formalism Let a sufficiently complete description of the present system-plus-relevant-environment be denoted by $$ S_t. $$ Let $$ \mathcal{C}(S_t) $$ denote the set, class, or generative space of candidate continuations available from that state. This object need not be enumerable and need not represent conscious alternatives. For a candidate continuation $c \in \mathcal{C}(S_t)$, define a structured admissibility relation $$ \mathcal{A}_t(c \mid S_t,H_t,E_t), $$ where $H_t$ denotes causally persistent history not already compressed into the chosen state description, and $E_t$ denotes relevant external conditions when it is useful to distinguish them from the system. The output of $\mathcal{A}$ is **not required to be a scalar**. Depending on the domain it may preserve independent causes such as: - physical reachability; - resource sufficiency; - energetic or dissipative cost; - catalytic support; - structural compatibility; - identity and applicability; - contextual or temporal validity; - prerequisite satisfaction; - contradiction; - reversibility; - uncertainty; - provenance. A realized continuation produces a next state through some domain-appropriate transition relation $T$: $$ S_{t+1}=T(S_t,c_t). $$ The theory does not require $T$ to be deterministic. Stochastic physical dynamics remain stochastic; admissibility is not probability by another name. The critical recursion begins when the consequence persists strongly enough to alter future continuation: $$ \mathcal{A}_{t+1} \neq \mathcal{A}_{t} $$ because of structure produced or altered by the previous transition. This yields the compact grammar: $$ \boxed{ \text{possibility} \rightarrow \text{differential admissibility} \rightarrow \text{consequence} \rightarrow \text{formation} \rightarrow \text{changed possibility} } $$ Repeated recursively. ### 2.1 Formation A **formation** is a persistent consequence of prior transition that changes the admissibility of at least one later continuation. Persistence without future causal effect is storage or residue, but not consequential formation under this definition. ### 2.2 Self-conditioning formation A formation becomes **self-conditioning** when its existence contributes to preserving, reproducing, extending, or modifying the conditions under which related formations can occur again. This definition does not require a self-model, intention, genome, or organism. ### 2.3 Admissibility is not selection The theory intentionally separates admissibility from a privileged “selector.” A continuation may occur because of deterministic dynamics, stochastic events, competition among processes, boundary conditions, perturbation, or other mechanisms. The theory asks which continuations remain available and how previous consequence changes that availability. This distinction matters. Otherwise a theory of emergence quietly recreates the thing it is trying to explain in the form of an unexplained chooser. --- ## 3. No ontological promotion ceremony The theory makes a deliberately strong methodological commitment: > **Do not introduce a new causal operator merely because a downstream regime has acquired a new name.** Matter does not automatically require a new law when it becomes chemistry. Chemistry does not automatically require a new law when it becomes biology. Biology does not automatically require a new law when it becomes cognition. This does **not** assert that no genuinely new effective laws, phase transitions, order parameters, or emergent descriptions exist. They plainly can. It asserts something narrower: the burden belongs to the claimed exemption. A higher-level description should not be treated as evidence that a new primitive operator must have appeared. That yields a continuity hypothesis: > **transient formation → persistent formation → self-conditioning formation** > **→ heritable variation → differential persistence → adaptive formation** > **→ reconstructive formation → self-modeling formation** The sequence is not claimed to be the historical order of terrestrial life, nor is every arrow necessary in every system. It is a ladder of increasingly demanding causal capacities. Under this view, cognition is not exceptional in kind. It is an unusually deep regime of recursively accumulated consequence. --- ## 4. Life without a singular “on” switch Origin-of-life research often asks when chemistry became life. That question is legitimate, especially when experimentalists need operational criteria. Recursive Admissibility asks a complementary question: > **Which capacities became consequential before the category “life” became unambiguous?** The theory predicts that recognizable life need not require a single privileged instant at which an entirely new causal grammar switches on. Instead, one should expect partially overlapping transitions involving, among other possibilities: - persistence away from equilibrium; - recurrent production; - autocatalytic closure; - selective retention of products; - spatial localization or compartmentalization; - coupling to persistent energy or material flux; - variation in persistence; - transmissible or heritable consequence; - adaptive alteration of future formation. Contemporary origin-of-life work already offers important neighboring accounts. Autocatalytic-set theory formalizes networks of reactions capable of being collectively self-sustaining and catalytically supported. Prebiotic chemical-ecology work has argued that adaptive complexification can precede discrete individuals and genetic encoding. Recent evolutionary treatments emphasize that the last universal common ancestor was already complex and that substantial pre-LUCA evolutionary history must be explained rather than hidden inside a singular “first cell.” Phase-transition approaches likewise model several distinct transitions involving persistence, replication, cooperation, information, and selection rather than one metaphysical switch. Recursive Admissibility does not replace those mechanisms. It proposes a common question that can be asked across them: > **Which new persistent consequence changed what could happen next?** ### 4.1 A provisional life-regime definition For purposes of experiment rather than taxonomy: > **A life-like regime is a recursively persistent formation in which existing organization participates in maintaining, reproducing, and modifying the admissibility conditions of subsequent related organization.** For Darwinian evolution, additional requirements such as heritable variation and differential persistence are needed. This definition deliberately permits proto-life to be partial. It does not require a researcher to identify a single molecule, instant, or location at which LIFE changed from FALSE to TRUE. ### 4.2 What this does not claim The theory does not claim that life arose independently millions of times on Earth. The surviving biosphere may share deep ancestry, and the history before the last universal common ancestor remains uncertain. It also does not claim that photosynthesis was the first metabolism or that terrestrial plants resemble the first living systems. The claim is structural: **if life arose continuously from nonliving chemistry, the capacities later bundled under “life” should be decomposable into earlier consequential transitions rather than requiring an unexplained ontological jump.** --- ## 5. The green-fractal thought experiment The Fractalish project has long used an image of a tiny green branching form emerging from volcanic ash as an orientation device rather than evidence. The following thought experiment makes that intuition explicit. Imagine a recurrent driven chemistry on a harsh substrate. For visualization only, imagine that some product can capture energy from light. The historical chemistry of terrestrial abiogenesis is not being asserted. ### Attempt 1: upward expansion A formation extends upward toward the energy source. It captures more energy but has almost no anchoring or lateral support. A strong perturbation destroys it. Nothing “learns” in a conscious sense. If the same generative chemistry continues, new variants arise. ### Attempt 2: wider support A wider base survives longer. This geometry is not morally better and was not selected by foresight; it simply remains consequential through perturbations that eliminated the narrower form. ### Attempt 3: anchoring Coupling to the substrate changes the admissibility landscape. The structure can now resist perturbation that previously terminated it. ### Attempt 4: branching Branching increases exposed surface and may improve access to an external flux. It simultaneously introduces transport, structural, and maintenance costs. ### Attempt 5: multiple resource channels Coupling to substrate chemistry as well as light makes continuation less dependent on one fluctuating source. But the new machinery also costs matter and energy. ### Attempt 6: regulation Unrestricted extension eventually becomes harmful. A structure that can differentially allocate resources, stop local growth, shed damaged parts, store resources, enter dormancy, or redirect expansion may persist longer than one that simply maximizes instantaneous growth. The thought experiment is intentionally crude. Its point is not that a tree literally evolved by repeatedly being blown over. Its point is that **persistence can accumulate structural consequence without foresight**. “Try again” is therefore shorthand for recurrent generative processes after previous configurations terminate. A failed structure teaches the future only when something about that failure remains consequential: altered environment, persistent chemistry, inherited structure, retained information, changed distribution of variants, or some other causal residue. That distinction prevents teleology from being smuggled into the picture. --- ## 6. Entroresilience and the bounded-growth proposition A recurring Fractalish intuition has been that runaway accumulation is not a stable endpoint. The poetic version is that “the universe despises runaway accumulation.” Recursive Admissibility requires a more careful statement. Exponential phases clearly occur. Microbial populations, chemical chain reactions, epidemics, financial quantities, ecological invasions, and some physical models can exhibit exponential or faster growth over bounded intervals. The theory therefore does **not** claim that exponential growth is forbidden. It proposes instead: > **Bounded-Growth Proposition.** In a fixed finite local environment, a continuation mode that increases its maintenance, transport, waste, structural, or resource requirements faster than its capacity to satisfy those requirements eventually reduces the admissibility of its own continued expansion. A minimal expression is straightforward. Let $M$ denote the scale of a formation, $D(M)$ its continuing resource/maintenance demand, and $I(M,E)$ the sustainable input available under environment $E$. If $$ D(M) \to \infty $$ while $$ I(M,E) \leq I_{\max} $$ for a fixed finite local environment, then there exists some $M_{\mathrm{crit}}$ such that $$ D(M_{\mathrm{crit}}) > I_{\max}. $$ Beyond that point, unchanged expansion cannot remain indefinitely self-sustaining. This is not a new theorem of thermodynamics. It is an explicit boundary condition on the theory. A system can move the boundary by: - accessing a new resource domain; - increasing efficiency; - changing geometry; - distributing transport through branching networks; - exporting heat or waste; - reducing maintenance cost; - entering dormancy; - migrating; - forming cooperative structures; - changing scale or organizational regime. The important object is not maximal growth. It is **continued admissibility of future formation**. ### 6.1 Entroresilience Within Fractalish, **entroresilience** can be used for the capacity of a formation to remain viable by reorganizing under accumulating perturbation, resource, dissipation, and structural pressures rather than depending on unconstrained accumulation. Under Recursive Admissibility, this suggests: > **Persistent formation is selected neither for maximal instantaneous expansion nor maximal stasis, but for compatibility with the changing conditions that permit continued formation.** The proposition is deliberately local. It does not claim that the entire universe has a fixed global carrying capacity in any simple ecological sense. --- ## 7. Gigantism: admissible regime, not failed prototype The fossil record makes the bounded-growth intuition visually tempting. Past ecosystems included enormous insects, reptiles, mammals, marine animals, and especially sauropod dinosaurs. It would be easy—but scientifically careless—to call those organisms failed experiments in runaway size. That is not the claim made here. Sauropods were extraordinarily successful organisms that persisted and diversified over immense spans of geological time. Research on sauropod gigantism emphasizes enabling anatomical innovations together with intrinsic and extrinsic constraints. Studies of mammalian maximum body size likewise find rapid post-extinction increases followed by plateaus associated with ecological opportunity and environmental constraints. Large size can confer substantial advantages and can remain viable for very long periods. Recursive Admissibility interprets these observations more modestly: > **Size occupies an admissible region, not a universal direction of progress.** A body plan and environment may make very large size reachable and sustainable. A changed atmospheric composition, resource network, temperature regime, land area, predator field, reproductive strategy, or physiological constraint may alter that region. The same size can therefore be highly successful under one coupled system and impossible under another. The evolutionary lesson is not “large organisms were failures.” It is: > **No magnitude is privileged simply because short-term selection can increase it. Continued expansion must remain compatible with the constraints generated by the organism, its architecture, and its environment.** This is exactly what a theory of recursive admissibility should predict. --- ## 8. From branching networks to bounded scale Growth creates its own problems. As organisms enlarge, transport distances increase, mechanical stresses change, surface-to-volume relations change, heat and waste must be moved, and resources must reach increasingly distant parts. Biological systems repeatedly answer these problems with structure: branching vascular networks, respiratory surfaces, modular growth, circulation, roots, mycelial networks, segmentation, specialization, and behavioral regulation. The influential allometric model of West, Brown, and Enquist formalized one class of such constraints through space-filling resource-distribution networks. The details and universality of particular scaling exponents remain subjects of scientific debate, but the broader lesson is sufficient here: **size changes the transport problem**. Under Recursive Admissibility, branching is not sacred. It is one recurrent structural response when distributed access makes continuations available that a monolithic geometry cannot sustain. The theory therefore predicts no universal progression toward either maximum size or maximum branching. Structure should change when the current organization narrows the future continuation space under actual constraints. --- ## 9. Cognition as a later regime, not a special exemption Paul Cisek's affordance-competition hypothesis provides a useful cognition-scale neighbor. Rather than a serial pipeline in which the brain first constructs a complete representation, then chooses, then acts, Cisek proposed that multiple currently possible actions can be specified in parallel and continuously biased by incoming information until behavior emerges. Recursive Admissibility generalizes the question without claiming Cisek's neural mechanism applies outside nervous systems. At the cognitive scale: - the present organism and environment define candidate continuations; - perception alters their admissibility; - memory preserves consequences of prior transitions; - learning changes which continuations become cheaply reachable; - contradiction can inhibit previously favored routes; - context changes which remembered structure applies; - action changes the world and therefore the next admissibility landscape. Nothing fundamentally new has to be inserted merely because the system now remembers or reasons. What changes is the depth of recursive formation. A useful progression is: 1. structure affects future continuation; 2. structure preserves consequences of past continuation; 3. the system reconstructs those consequences; 4. it models possible future continuations; 5. it represents causes that alter their admissibility; 6. it deliberately modifies those causes; 7. that modification itself becomes part of persistent history. This is a proposed developmental continuum, not a consciousness criterion. --- ## 10. Scientific neighbors and distinctions Recursive Admissibility is not proposed in an intellectual vacuum. ### 10.1 Dissipative structures Prigogine's work showed that organized structures can arise and persist far from equilibrium through continuing exchange with their surroundings. This strongly supports the refusal to equate order with isolation. Recursive Admissibility adds a history-sensitive question: when does the consequence of one organized state alter which organized states remain reachable later? ### 10.2 Autocatalytic sets Kauffman's early ideas and later formal reflexively autocatalytic and food-generated set theory developed by Hordijk, Steel, and collaborators provide rigorous machinery for self-sustaining catalytic reaction networks. Recursive Admissibility treats autocatalytic closure as one candidate mechanism of self-conditioning formation, not as the entire theory. ### 10.3 Prebiotic chemical ecology Work on autocatalytic chemical ecosystems argues that adaptive complexification can occur prior to bounded individuals and genetic coding, and that persistence or dispersal can enrich chemical organizations. This is particularly close to the present claim that evolutionary structure may precede conventional organismal boundaries. ### 10.4 Phase transitions and origins of life Recent work by Solé and De Domenico frames several origin-of-life steps as bifurcations and phase transitions enabling persistence, reproduction, and evolution. Recursive Admissibility is compatible with abrupt transitions in particular order parameters. Its claim is only that no single phase transition should be elevated to a universal metaphysical “life operator” without evidence. ### 10.5 Evolution before the last universal common ancestor Recent evolutionary synthesis emphasizes that the last universal common ancestor was already complex and that origins research must study how life evolved from pre-biological systems. Recursive Admissibility fits naturally with this shift from searching for a single first instant toward reconstructing a sequence of consequential transitions. ### 10.6 Affordance competition Cisek's framework is perhaps the closest cognitive analogue: multiple possibilities coexist and are continuously shaped rather than handed to a central serial decider. Recursive Admissibility extends the abstract grammar while remaining agnostic about whether similar implementations occur at non-neural scales. ### 10.7 Viability and constraint Viability theory asks which states and trajectories remain within required constraints. Recursive Admissibility is broader in one respect and less mature mathematically: it asks how prior consequence can alter the constraint structure itself. Viability theory therefore provides an important mathematical neighbor and possible formal tool rather than something to be replaced. --- ## 11. What the theory predicts A useful theory must risk being wrong. The following predictions are deliberately stated at different levels of strength. ### Prediction 1: life-like properties should decompose before they recombine As experimental systems move from ordinary driven chemistry toward increasingly life-like behavior, persistence, recurrence, compartmentalization, autocatalysis, heritable consequence, variation, and adaptive change should not require simultaneous appearance. They should be experimentally separable, with particular combinations changing later reachable behavior. A finding that all life-like behavior requires one irreducible physical operator appearing only at a singular transition would count against the continuity hypothesis. ### Prediction 2: persistent consequence, not mere occurrence, is the relevant unit of developmental accumulation Two events that occur equally often but differ in whether they alter future reachable behavior should differ in their ability to support adaptive accumulation. Removing the persistent consequence while preserving momentary event statistics should remove the later behavioral effect. ### Prediction 3: similarity will repeatedly fail as a proxy for consequential identity Systems that compress or generalize states using only superficial similarity should fail when similar forms have different downstream consequences. Adding consequence-sensitive distinctions should repair those failures only where they are genuinely load-bearing. ### Prediction 4: local context will change admissibility without changing global truth A formation can remain valid globally while becoming locally inapplicable, superseded, or blocked. Systems that collapse global and local validity should exhibit contamination or inappropriate resurrection under changing contexts. ### Prediction 5: unrestricted growth should generate its own constraint pressure Under fixed finite local resource conditions, continuing expansion should eventually require structural change, new coupling, improved efficiency, redistribution, or collapse. The specific limiting mechanism is domain-dependent; the prediction is not a universal fixed size. ### Prediction 6: stable growth architectures should trade instantaneous expansion for future continuation Under perturbation, systems optimized only for immediate accumulation should lose to systems that allocate some capacity to anchoring, storage, repair, redundancy, branching, dormancy, or other persistence mechanisms when those mechanisms match the environment. ### Prediction 7: richer internal structure should appear only when environmental complexity makes it consequential Simple environments should be solvable by simple state representations. Context, time, dependencies, relations, and reconstructible causal history should become necessary only when tasks introduce corresponding distinctions. This is experimentally actionable in artificial systems: increase environmental complexity one dimension at a time and ablate each internal structure. --- ## 12. Falsification and failure modes The broadness of Recursive Admissibility creates a danger: any outcome could be redescribed after the fact as “admissible.” That would make the theory useless. To avoid that failure, every application must declare in advance: 1. the state variables being represented; 2. the candidate continuations under consideration; 3. the conditions claimed to alter their admissibility; 4. which consequences are predicted to persist; 5. the intervention that should remove or reverse the effect; 6. the measurements by which the prediction can fail. The following would count against a particular formulation: - removing a claimed load-bearing condition produces no consequential change; - a supposedly inapplicable continuation remains equally reachable after controlled intervention; - a proposed persistent formation has no measurable effect on later behavior; - richer structure is required only because the implementation was engineered to use it; - the framework repeatedly requires unmeasured hidden context to rescue failed predictions; - a simpler conventional model predicts the same outcomes with equal causal fidelity and lower complexity. The last point is especially important. Recursive Admissibility does not earn scientific value merely by renaming ordinary state transitions. --- ## 13. Research program The theory suggests a deliberately bottom-up experimental program. ### 13.1 Driven chemistry Construct recurrent chemical systems under controlled energy and material flux. Measure which products or organizations change the distribution of subsequent reaction trajectories. Distinguish occurrence from persistent consequence. ### 13.2 Autocatalytic and compartmental systems Compare otherwise similar reaction networks with and without self-supporting cycles, localization, or selective retention. Measure how each addition changes future reachable configurations. ### 13.3 Perturbation and recovery Expose persistent formations to repeated controlled disruption. Test whether structures that survive do so through identifiable changes in anchoring, redundancy, coupling, repair, or resource allocation. ### 13.4 Growth under constraint Create environments in which accessible resource, transport distance, waste removal, or mechanical stress can be varied independently. Test whether sustained growth changes regime before failure and whether the transition is predictable from the changing constraint profile. ### 13.5 Artificial developmental organisms Start with a minimal state machine and generated environment. Add context, time, dependency, contradiction, reconstruction, and relation structure only when simpler representations fail. Preserve every failed architecture and use ablation to determine which distinctions are genuinely consequential. ### 13.6 Cross-domain invariants Only after domain-specific mechanisms are understood should cross-domain claims be made. The aim is not to force chemistry, biology, cognition, and social systems into one implementation, but to test whether the same abstract recursion predicts when new structure must become consequential. --- ## 14. The strongest version and the disciplined version The strongest speculative version of Recursive Admissibility would say: > All formation, from cosmological structure through chemistry, life, cognition, and culture, can be understood as recursive differential continuation under changing constraints, with no privileged causal operator unique to any later regime. That is **not established**. The disciplined version advanced here is: > **Across systems in which alternative continuations exist, it is useful and testable to model formation as persistent consequence that changes the conditions of subsequent continuation. Higher-order regimes should not be granted new primitive operators until experiment requires them.** The difference between those sentences is the difference between a research program and a cosmology. The program can begin now. --- ## 15. Conclusion Recursive Admissibility begins with no chooser and no privileged category. Something exists. More than one continuation may be possible. Present structure differentially conditions those continuations. One occurs. If its consequence persists, the future is no longer the same. Repeat. Under some conditions, persistent formations begin contributing to the conditions of their own recurrence. Under further conditions, variants persist differently. Under further conditions, consequences become heritable, reconstructible, anticipatory, and eventually self-modifying. Life need not be inserted as a switch. Cognition need not be inserted as an exemption. Nor is endless accumulation the objective. Expansion that destroys the conditions of its own continuation eventually narrows its future. Persistent systems survive by changing how they grow, what they couple to, what they retain, what they shed, and what possibilities they preserve. The little green fractal rising from volcanic ash is therefore useful precisely because it is not a historical claim. It is a picture of the grammar: **rise; fail; recur; widen; anchor; branch; couple; regulate; persist.** No foresight is required. Only consequence that changes what can happen next. > **Form is accumulated consequence.** > > **Nothing stands outside admissibility.** --- ## References 1. Cisek, P. (2007). Cortical mechanisms of action selection: the affordance competition hypothesis. *Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B*, 362(1485), 1585-1599. [doi:10.1098/rstb.2007.2054](https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2007.2054) 2. Prigogine, I. (1977). *Time, Structure and Fluctuations*. Nobel Lecture, Chemistry 1977. [Nobel lecture](https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1977/prigogine/lecture/) 3. Hordijk, W., Hein, J., & Steel, M. (2010). Autocatalytic Sets and the Origin of Life. *Entropy*, 12(7), 1733-1742. [doi:10.3390/e12071733](https://doi.org/10.3390/e12071733) 4. Baum, D. A., Peng, Z., Dolson, E., Smith, E., Plum, A. M., & Gagrani, P. (2023). 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Fractalish / BonAcqui LLC. ## Status **Working hypothesis / public research paper. Not peer reviewed.** The project invites counterexamples, competing formalizations, and experiments that force additional structure to earn itself.