Embodied Constructor Theory (ECT): Knowledge as a Physical Primitive

This paper develops Embodied Constructor Theory (ECT), a philosophical and computational framework proposing knowledge as a physical primitive — not a property that emerges from organized matter, but the condition of possibility for existence itself. Against representationalist and emergentist accounts of knowledge, ECT argues that a universe incapable of "existing itself" — of maintaining structure, resisting dispersion, and transforming itself — simply cannot be. ECT draws on the convergence of five intellectual traditions: Tim Ingold's account of knowledge as skill and embodied practice; Karl Popper's epistemology of objective and falsifiable knowledge; David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto's Constructor Theory; Giulio Tononi's account of integrated cause-effect structure; and Karl Friston's active inference framework. From this convergence, ECT introduces knowledge potential (KP) — a variable absent from both Constructor Theory and Active Inference — as a metric of accumulated constructorial capacity that grows through embodied practice and erodes through failure. The paper presents computable ECT (cECT) as the operational demonstration of the theory and concludes by identifying four open problems for future development, including the reformulation of the constructor/environment boundary in non-probabilistic terms, the formal metric of universality across scales, and ECT's potential contribution to a physical theory of knowledge. This paper is the theoretical foundation for the cECT software series previously published on Zenodo (Leon Mori, 2026).