Basal Cognita: Minimal Unity-of-Arbitration as a Candidate Threshold and Individuation Criterion for Basal Consciousness

Abstract

The evolutionary and biological distribution of consciousness remains unsettled partly because candidate theories disagree about the minimum organization sufficient for phenomenal subjectivity. Basal Cognita proposes a candidate threshold-and-individuation framework: an organizationally self-maintaining system satisfies the proposed architecture when at least two independently causal, self-relevant demand sources can favor incompatible trajectories, interact upstream of final output, retain non-trivial history dependence, and are resolved into one trajectory at the same organizational level. Organizational closure is used first to define the candidate system; arbitration then tests whether plural closure-grounded demands are causally unified within that candidate. The framework does not claim novelty for self-maintenance, intrinsic normativity, arbitration, unity, process identity, or the distinction between endogenous and externally imposed control objectives individually. Its proposed contribution is narrower: an explicit pairwise unity-of-arbitration test combined with level-indexed closure-first individuation, pre-identification of distinct demand sources, intervention-based source-independence testing, implementation-sensitive causal analysis, cross-episode history, and Pass / Demonstrated Absent at level L / Indeterminate evidential outcomes. The stronger constitution thesis proposes that the actively operating conjunction constitutes minimal phenomenal consciousness; this is a sufficiency claim, not a claim of necessity or coextension. A separate near-minimality conjecture proposes that this architecture may lie near the lower organizational range at which consciousness can occur, but that conjecture is not required for the sufficiency thesis. The paper compares this proposal with cellular-sentience, neural-origin, unlimited-associative-learning, temporogenic, action-selection, and cross-domain-settlement accounts, and states a conditional evolutionary implication: if protocol-passing architecture arose before fixed markers of sophisticated intelligence, minimal consciousness may have preceded those capacities. The immediate research task is comparative calibration, not further conceptual elaboration.