The Evolution of Consciousness Through Staged Integration: From Structural to Temporal to Cognitive
Joseph Trukovich preprint
This paper proposes a hierarchical framework—symbiogenesis, temporogenesis, and cognogenesis—to explain the evolution of biological complexity and consciousness. Symbiogenesis builds structural integration through cooperative systems, enhancing metabolic efficiency. Temporogenesis introduces temporal coherence, aligning internal rhythms with environmental cycles. Cognogenesis integrates these temporal frameworks into predictive models for adaptive behavior. The framework argues that complexity emerges through recursive scaling and symmetry-breaking across structural, temporal, and cognitive domains. It redefines consciousness as an emergent property of recursive biological processes and suggests implications for artificial intelligence, proposing development based on progressive integration of these capabilities.