ELEMENTS TOWARDS A SEMIOTIC THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: Ontological Architectonics, Minimal Formalization, and Criteria for Empirical Testability

This essay registers an intellectual effort to displace the axis of the so-called “hard problem of consciousness” toward the onto-epistemological threshold at which meaningfulness is instituted as a factum of selective operativity. Drawing upon the intellectual lineage of double-aspect monism and Peircean synechism, it advances the central thesis that wherever triadic mediations with normative valence—sign, object, interpretant—are experientially verified, there emerges a minimal phenomenological halo, perceptible and coextensive with minimal semiosis. Upon the Umwelt minimum—namely, a plurality of signals (p, q), a common effector (a), and a manipulable interpretant (I)—logically operative definitions (D1–D4) and thresholds of information, latency, and robustness are fixed, thereby enabling the demarcation and quantification of Elementary Semiotic Events (ESE) and certifying triadicity via do(I) intervention. The inferential architecture is formulated as a semiotic-abductive logic of intervention. In the non-saturated regime the Psychophysical Similarity Theorem is stated, Cb = κ p —with Cb the basal phenomenological magnitude and p the ESE rate—while beyond that margin curvature phenomena arise by saturation and interaction. The empirical program (Axes A–B–C) spans identification/counting, causal assignment by intervention, and hierarchical estimation of κ, deployed across bacterial, vegetal, and soft-robotic platforms while preserving inter-domain comparability. The theory is stratified (basal/intermediate/superior), local and non-monotonic (admitting curvatures and hierarchical Bayesian adjustment), and thereby circumvents both reductive physicalism and indiscriminate panpsychism.