The Mirror Hypothesis: Reflection as a Cross-Domain Organizing Principle: From Physical Dynamics to Subjective Experience

Abstract

The Mirror Hypothesis proposes that reflection, understood in a broad, non-psychological sense as interaction, feedback and the way the consequences of a process shape the conditions under which it continues, may be more fundamental than consciousness itself. The paper explores whether physical, biological, neural and experiential forms of organization can be studied as expressions of a shared structural principle. The framework takes the mutual dependence of matter and spacetime geometry in general relativity as a conceptual starting point and traces a proposed chain of increasingly complex self-reference: from physical feedback through biological self-regulation to neural self-models and subjective experience. It does not claim to solve the hard problem of consciousness, nor that gravity produces consciousness. Instead, it offers a different perspective on how subjective experience might fit into the general structure of reality. The paper positions the hypothesis relative to closely related approaches, including cybernetics, autopoiesis, the free energy principle, strange loops, Wheeler’s participatory universe, panpsychism and Integrated Information Theory. It also discusses the role of time as an open theoretical question. Two independently falsifiable research approaches are derived from the framework: (a) the gravity-dependent complexity hypothesis, tested with multi-electrode arrays and an adapted Perturbational Complexity Index across levels of neural organization (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23444027), and (b) the self-binding dissociation hypothesis, tested in depersonalization-derealization disorder using TMS-EEG and fMRI (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23468011). Neither approach tests the central thesis directly. The paper states explicitly which results would weaken individual claims and which parts of the framework remain speculative.