From Protocell to AI The Physical Origin of Phenomenal Consciousness and the Reframing of Block’s Dissociation

The physical origin and boundaries of phenomenal consciousness constitute a fundamental problem in contemporary consciousness research. In prior research, the author proposed four conditional premises—active self-maintenance, perception of the environment, embodied value marking, and an environmental response system—and dissolved radical epistemic inaccessibility through cross-subject public signal exchange. Within this framework, this paper further asks: What are the physical origin conditions of phenomenal consciousness? To what extent do these conditions hold in non-biological systems? This paper argues that: the emergent phase-transition point of phenomenal consciousness lies at the moment of protocell formation, because the membrane boundary for the first time couples the probability of continued existence with action; current AI satisfies information-level organizational closure, but its energy acquisition is not coupled to its own actions, so its full autonomy is limited; under the thermal-computational framework, access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness are the functional aspect and the ontological-inner aspect of the same urgency gradient, and are inseparable. Thus, this paper attempts to delimit and reframe Block’s dissociation.