The Recursive Differentiation Hypothesis: Cognitive Externalization, Functional Unbundling, Reintegration, and Informational Inheritance

The Recursive Differentiation Hypothesis (RDH) holds that access-control mechanisms, intelligence, selfhood, and agency were bundled by biological evolution, but cumulative culture and artificial intelligence allow those capacities to vary independently and later recombine. Differentiation is recursive: externalized products become inherited structure for later systems, which then externalize further. RDH does not predict a one-way decline of phenomenal consciousness. Its empirical core is functional. Novel, poorly verifiable problems recruit access-conscious attention and control; reliable verification permits automatization. Informational inheritance is target-relative: it lowers search cost for some trajectories while canalizing others. The live long-run dispute is between Progressive Decoupling and Self-Model Convergence. None of this requires a cosmological, simulative, or reincarnative ontology.