Signal-Bifurcation Theory: Semepoiesis, Meta-Recursion and the Architecture of Consciousness

Signal-Bifurcation Theory (SBT) treats the “hard problem” of consciousness as a category error arising from the misidentification of a symbol-interpreting narrational overlay as the condition of consciousness. SBT treats consciousness as the immediate interior continuity of living organisation under valence-weighted sensorimotor coupling: Semepoietic consciousness. In sufficiently organised biological systems, consciousness is participation from within one unfolding organisational continuity, not an added phenomenon. SBT distinguishes this from the narrational “I”. The narrational “I” is Semepoietic-Signal Narration: a symbol-interpreting diagnostic neurological overlay that stabilises at a threshold of symbolic recursion and Meta-Recursive Centring. This overlay has genuine regulatory function within biological organisation, but it is not the ground of consciousness. SBT is a process-monist framework in which reality is one organisational continuity described at different resolutions rather than a stack of ontological layers. Its 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 succeeded, and organised structure recurs across scale under boundary conditions. Within this continuity, SBT rejects both functionalist deflation, which explains behaviour while leaving interior continuity unaddressed, and panpsychism, which distributes experience across matter at the cost of combination problems. Instead of positing mind-stuff, SBT treats consciousness as a mode of biological organisation: the interior continuity of a living system in which stability becomes internally discriminated as continuation versus disruption. Agency and free will are characterised as bounded modulation within the same stability-shaped continuity that characterises biological organisation: not metaphysical exemption, but recursive re-weighting, inhibition, rehearsal, and redirection within Semepoietic continuity.