A candidate principle across scales
The parts respond.
The whole persists.
Not a consciousness test
Disturb a community of interacting participants. Compare shared signals with local responses alone. Explore when the interactions help preserve the organization—and when they add cost.
Switching scale changes the interpretation, not the equations. The shared dynamics are the hypothesis being explored; they are not measured equivalences between these systems.
Ready. Both systems start in the same undisturbed state.
Collective response Signals can cross the connections
Local response only Same participants, disturbance, memory, and cost
Coral: strainViolet center: retained signalGold ring: protective response
A response can be distributed without a central executive. Run the comparison to follow its effects.
Strain and responses are normalized from 0 to 1. Time, rates, and accumulated quantities use arbitrary model units. Positive accumulated difference means sharing reduced strain over the run; it is not an awareness score.
What the model assumes—and what to try
Every participant has an incoming signal s, retained state m, strain d, and protective response r. A prescribed disturbance u reaches the three groups in order, or only one participant. The comparison disables signal sharing while keeping all other rules identical.
Signal change: ds/dt = 2u(1 − s) − 0.35s + k(neighbor signal at t − delay − s)
Retention: dm/dt = 0.9s(1 − m) − m/retention time
Response: r = response strength × m
Strain change: dd/dt = u(1 − r)(1 − d) − 0.14d + 0.018r
States are bounded between 0 and 1. Signal delay is rounded to the nearest 0.05 model-time step. The response is protective by construction, and its cost is also assumed. A successful run therefore demonstrates the consequences of those assumptions, not evidence that nature implements them.
- Set sharing to zero: the two systems should match.
- Cut group links: a signal should not reach an unexposed group.
- Increase delay or shorten retention: explore whether a useful response still arrives in time.
- Use a local disturbance: activity elsewhere may incur cost without useful protection.
- Set response strength to zero: signals can still move, but they do not protect participants.
The astronomy views do not assume instantaneous communication or real universe-wide coordination. They show the extrapolation whose physical carriers, causal boundaries, and timescales would have to be investigated. This model contains no language, trained LLM, subjective experience variable, or established consciousness threshold.
Compare with the sourced biological and astronomical evidence ↗