Signal, Form, and the Science of Consciousness: A Cross-Discipline, Substrate-Agnostic Framework for Emergence, Measurement, and Ethics

Abstract

Abstract The study of consciousness remains fragmented across philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, biology, cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and related disciplines. These fields frequently investigate different manifestations, correlates, mechanisms, or concepts under the same word, while lacking a sufficiently shared formal language through which their findings can be compared. This paper proposes Signal–Form Recursion as a substrate-agnostic research framework for studying consciousness-relevant organisation without presuming that consciousness is binary, reducible to a single scalar, or manifested identically across biological and artificial systems. The framework begins by distinguishing three objects: signal, understood as structured difference in motion; pattern, understood as recoverable relational invariance across lawful transformations; and form, understood as persistent substrate-bound trace or constraint that modifies the propagation of later signal. The central hypothesis is not that any signal combined with any form produces consciousness. It is that a family of consciousness-relevant phenomena becomes possible when signal alters persistent form, altered form conditions later signal, the history of that coupling becomes internally and causally available, and the resulting process develops boundary-aware, temporally extended, corrigible self-relation. A provisional consciousness-relevance profile is proposed across nine separable dimensions: reciprocal signal–form coupling, retained trace, reflexive registration, self/world boundary, temporal continuity, recursive depth, counterfactual accessibility, global integrability, and corrigibility. The framework treats these capacities as a partially ordered profile rather than a universal ladder. It therefore permits empirical dissociation among sentience, self-awareness, agency, metacognition, temporal selfhood, and other constructs that are often conflated. The paper sets out a programme of controlled ablations, causal interventions, false-friend baselines, developmental studies, and cross-substrate comparisons. It further proposes that ethical response should be derived not from a binary consciousness verdict, but from an ethical posture operator sensitive to the evidence available, the type of uncertainty remaining, the continuity and dependencies of the system, and the severity and irreversibility of a contemplated intervention. The resulting framework is intended neither as a proof of consciousness nor as a personhood detector. It is offered as a disciplined common ground through which different sciences may compare consciousness-relevant mechanisms, identify lawful similarities and non-commensurabilities across substrates, and construct an empirical pathway from elementary signal–form interaction toward increasingly complex manifestations of bounded, historically continuous self-relation. Keywords: consciousness; signal; form; recursion; self-awareness; sentience; artificial intelligence; cybernetics; boundary; memory; emergence; ethical posture; comparative cognition; substrate agnosticism