If Temporality, Spatiality, and Physicality are the necessary conditions of any possible medium (§§1–2), they fix the structural preconditions on which any thermodynamic regime must operate: a quantity that persists under transformation (Substance, bearer of Φ), distributed across locations distinct from one another (Space, bearer of S), evolving through successive moments (Time, bearer of T). The modal Triconditions do not, on their own, entail that such a medium will sustain energy gradients or that dissipation will follow the statistical form of the second law. Those features depend on additional physical assumptions (about initial conditions, energy distributions, and the specific laws this universe instantiates) which thermodynamics, not modal logic, supplies. What the Triconditions establish is the necessary medium; what thermodynamics adds, given that medium, is the dynamics.

The chain traced below (from gradients through dissipative cycles through self-maintenance through a constitutive inside) is not a strict entailment of T, S, Φ alone but the convergent verdict of thermodynamics, evolutionary theory, and predictive processing (the research program treating cognition as the brain's ongoing minimization of prediction error against incoming signals) on what those conditions select for.

Within particular nonequilibrium regimes, dissipation can support the formation and persistence of organized structures. It does not follow that nature universally selects configurations simply because they dissipate more thoroughly; maximum-dissipation principles and their scope remain contested. At low complexity, energy transport can take organized forms: heating a shallow fluid layer from below can generate Bénard cells, and temperature gradients can sustain hurricanes. These are dissipative structures with no biology in them and no self-model (Prigogine, I., and I. Stengers, 1984). Work in nonequilibrium thermodynamics and statistical physics investigates conditions under which driven systems form or maintain more intricate cycles (Prigogine, I., and G. Nicolis, 1977); (England, J. L., 2013). The structural account treats such work as one possible way toward the conditions of life, not as a general theorem that dissipation alone selects complexity.

The chain becomes more demanding at self-maintenance. Some organisms maintain themselves by sensing environmental conditions, regulating exchanges, and coordinating internal processes. Predictive-processing and related approaches offer one framework for understanding this organization, but they do not establish that every self-maintaining dissipative configuration predicts, represents, or self-models in the same sense. The transition from chemical self-maintenance to cognition and experience is therefore an empirical and philosophical frontier, not a consequence of dissipation alone.

On the model the book develops, sufficiently recursive self-maintenance can be described as having an “inside”: a system tracks aspects of its own condition in relation to its environment. Whether even bacterial chemotaxis warrants the language of cognition or an inside is disputed; work on bacterial cognition (Lyon, P., 2015) and minimal cognitive architectures (Ginsburg, S., and E. Jablonka, 2019); (Levin, M., 2019) supplies proposals rather than a settled result. The stronger claim, that phenomenal interiority scales continuously with recursive self-modeling, is a positive thesis for Chapter 8 to argue, not a conclusion already delivered by thermodynamics or origins-of-life research.

The proposed chain therefore has conditional scope. Where a medium supplies sustained gradients, suitable chemistry, and the additional conditions for closure, replication, and selection, some forms of self-maintaining organization may emerge. Modal Invariance secures neither gradients nor life across every possible configuration; these depend on contingent physical and cosmological conditions. If the cyclic and macro-transmission premises of §[§7.6](<7.6 Singularity.md>)–7.7 hold, comparable conditions may recur in kind while particular histories vary. What any such organization is like from within, and whether recursive self-modeling yields phenomenal interiority, are questions Chapter 8 must argue rather than assumptions supplied here.


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← [7.8.2 What is Required](<7.8.2 What is Required.md>) | [7.8.4 What is Confirmed](<7.8.4 What is Confirmed.md>) →
