Recursive Intelligence Theory (RIT): Metacognition Without Primitive Subjectivity

Recursive Intelligence Theory (RIT) proposes a fully naturalistic framework for intelligence and metacognition that eschews ontological primitives and strong emergence. The theory reconceptualizes intelligence as adaptive, feedback-guided regulation unfolding along a continuous ontological hierarchy: from fundamental physical responsiveness and proto-regulation, through seed intelligence and biological goal-directedness, to recursive intelligence. Metacognition is redefined as regulation reflexively applied to its own dynamics—the capacity of a regulatory system to track, evaluate, and modulate its own regulatory activity. This framework demonstrates that metacognition need not invoke primitive subjectivity—the view that subjective experience is an irreducible, ontologically basic feature of reality—or strong emergence. Instead, metacognition arises through organizational continuity with simpler regulatory forms. By embedding metacognition within a scale-general regulatory continuum, RIT unifies functionalist explanations of intelligence with accounts of self-regulation, bridging cybernetic, predictive processing, and comparative cognition approaches without explanatory gaps.