THEORY THE UNIVERSE'S SYSTEMATIC ERROR Version 1.2

The emergence of consciousness is traditionally viewed either as a consequence of the unique nature of humans or as an improbable coincidence in an indifferent universe. Both positions assume that consciousness is an anomaly requiring a special explanation beyond established physical principles. This paper proposes a third way: consciousness is a natural consequence of physical processes in open systems with a sufficient energy gradient - not an anomaly, but one of the manifestations of the general logic of complexity. The central framework of the work is the identification of a structurally self-similar pattern of «gradient → retention → pole → transition,» operating as a self-similar mechanism at all scales, from the formation of a dissipative structure to a conscious system. Five fields traditionally developed independently - Prigogine’s non-equilibrium thermodynamics, Haken and Kauffman’s theory of complex systems, Friston’s active inference, Deacon’s biosemiotics and teledynamics, and Tononi’s theory of integrated information - turn out, with a certain shift in emphasis, to be projections of a single structurally self-similar process onto different scales. The six-step ladder - dissipative structure, autopoiesis, proto-agency, consciousness, and the recursively complexifying conscious system - is not merely one object of the theory among others, but its basic pattern, through which all the processes it encompasses are described. Each step is defined by the type of operations on the system’s states; each transition is defined by a minimal condition based on established formalisms. Each subsequent step inherits all the gradients of the previous ones and adds a new one of its own type; simultaneously, increasingly stable mechanisms of resistance to disintegration accumulate. The structure of transitions is probabilistic: the conditions for each transition are necessary but not sufficient in a deterministic sense, and the realization of each transition is stochastic. The author’s theses are integrated into the synthesis. The central ones are: consciousness is an active mechanism of complication, closing and accelerating the cycle through model recursion filtered by the environment; phenomenal experience is ontologically identical to the dynamics of the system’s self-modeling and is operationalized through the mechanism of the presence of inherited gradients via the existence variable V - which dissolves the hard problem under a stated physicalist premise and answers the meta-problem structurally (Section 6); the existence variable V, formally uniform for all systems of stage 4, varies in content across system types and calibrates the temporality of the system through this variability; the structural self-similarity of the ladder is traced across scales from the dissipative structure to culture (stages 0–5); the same pattern may also manifest at the cosmological scale, but this is a separate hypothesis moved by the author into a self-contained work (Section 7), not derived from the theory of consciousness and not needed by it.