Abstract
Biological systems display goal directed behavior across multiple scales, from single cells to complex organisms. This continuity suggests that agency is not introduced at a single structural boundary but expands through increasing domains of coordination. This paper proposes a unifying dynamical principle. Interior emerges when a system sustains internal restoration across a temporal window faster than external perturbations degrade it. This condition defines a measurable regime of coherence. When such regimes synchronize across nested scales, progressively larger domains of agency arise. Consciousness is understood as a recursive deepening of temporally sustained coherence.
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Claims 0
Judged off_topic: no plant question — claims were not extracted. This is a scope decision by the model, not a statement about the paper’s findings.