This discussion paper argues that the transition from matter to mind is better understood as gradual rather than abrupt — grounded in increasingly sophisticated forms of biological self-organization, directedness, and environmental integration. Rather than treating phenomenal consciousness as an emergent discontinuity appearing suddenly in nervous systems, we propose a graded organizational...
This paper introduces Artificial F1, a computational framework that formalises a previously under-specified control layer in intelligent systems: pre-representational signal admission and valence structuring. Unlike standard approaches in reinforcement learning and attention-based architectures, which operate over a fixed input representation, Artificial F1 defines a gating operator F₁: S → S'...