The Filtering Expansion Law (FEL): Quantifying the Historical Growth of Self-Referential Filtering Across Substrates

Life did not merely evolve new forms—it expanded a single operational capacity: self-referential filtering. This paper formalizes that expansion as a historical law. From early cellular chemistry to nervous systems, language, and modern computation, the same filtering loop recurs across substrates, accumulating rather than replacing prior layers. Using conservative, literature-anchored milestone proxies, the work documents a continuous increase in total filtering capacity since life’s origin, alongside accelerating substrate transitions and structural irreversibility. The framework avoids teleology, metaphysics, and consciousness claims. It focuses instead on observable regulation, energetic cost, reference states, and selective action. A central implication is that technological systems—especially silicon computation—are not external to biology, but the latest substrate through which biological filtering continues to expand. The paper provides explicit falsification criteria and is intended as a foundation for future empirical, computational, and theoretical work on life, cognition, and artificial systems.