Concept Note: Signal-Bifurcation Theory (SBT)

Signal-Bifurcation Theory (SBT) is a process-monist framework in which reality is one organisational continuity: Semepoiesis. Reality is not composed of separate ontological layers, but becomes describable at different resolutions of one unfolding continuity: from Proto-Actuality and classical registration, through physical and thermodynamic organisation, to biological organisation, Semepoietic consciousness, and later symbolic narration. Within this continuity, SBT treats the hard problem of consciousness as a category error arising from the misidentification of a later symbol-interpreting narrational overlay as the condition of consciousness itself. Consciousness is not produced by self-description, reportability, or symbolic recursion. For SBT, consciousness is the immediate interior continuity of living organisation under valence-weighted sensorimotor coupling: Semepoietic consciousness. A central architectural claim is that biological organisation marks the first interiorised bifurcation relevant to consciousness. At this threshold, stability becomes internally discriminated as continuation versus disruption. This minimal interior weighting is named Orientative Proto-Valence. Where such valence-weighted organisation is integrated across sensorimotor coupling, conscious life becomes articulable as participation from within one living continuity. SBT distinguishes this basal consciousness from the narrational “I”. The narrational “I” is Semepoietic-Signal Narration: the symbol-interpreting diagnostic overlay that stabilises at a threshold of symbolic recursion and Meta-Recursive Centring. This overlay has genuine regulatory significance within biological organisation, but it is not the ground of consciousness. Across these resolutions, a central asymmetry is stability-bias: the organisational condition in which some patterns stabilise and remain coherent across interaction while others do not. On this view, invariant relations are compressed descriptions of stability that has already registered. SBT therefore rejects both functionalist deflation, which explains behaviour while leaving interior continuity insufficiently addressed, and panpsychism, which distributes experience across matter at the cost of combination problems. Instead, it treats consciousness as a biologically articulated mode of one wider continuity, and treats agency as post-compatibilist bounded modulation within that same Semepoietic unfolding. This version supersedes the earlier SBT concept note and updates its terminology and architecture in line with the current canonical lexicon.