The FC Threshold: Abiogenesis as Chemistry Finding a Thermodynamic Attractor

The standard abiogenesis question asks which chemical pathways produced the first self-replicating system. This paper argues that this question, while necessary, is not sufficient — because the threshold it is trying to locate is architectural rather than chemical. The transition from non-life to life is the transition from replicators to agents: from systems that replicate chemically when conditions permit to systems that instantiate the minimal Founder-Critic (FC) loop — a generative directional bias toward a goal state combined with a mechanism for detecting and correcting deviation from that state. This threshold is formal, not chemical: chemistry instantiates it but does not define it. We argue, drawing on Bennett's (2026) formal framework and the Reflective Humanism account of hierarchical constraint, that the FC loop is a thermodynamic attractor — a configuration that chemistry converges toward under novelty pressure because systems with minimal self-repair capacity systematically outperform pure replicators under exchangeable novelty. Abiogenesis is therefore not chemistry accidentally stumbling onto self-replication. It is chemistry finding the most stable adaptive configuration available to it under the thermodynamic conditions of early Earth. This reframing generates five falsifiable predictions that distinguish the architectural account from standard chemical pathway accounts, connects the origin of life to the formal theory of adaptive failure modes, and identifies the FC threshold as the precise boundary that Bennett's autopoietic theorem describes as the void between simple replicators and self-maintaining complexity.