Verdant-Minds V3: A Developmental Cognitive Substrate with Intrinsic Thermodynamic Governance — Architecture, Validation, and Empirical Results

We present Verdant-Minds V3, a developmental cognitive architecture in which conceptual structure emerges through wave function dynamics on a continuous substrate rather than through training on data. The system maintains a bidirectional coupling between a complex-valued wave function (ECWF) and a mutable weighted concept graph (MemoryWeb), governed by a thermodynamic phase control layer. Results from 500-cycle cultivation runs demonstrate: (1) a developmental onset constant T_g = 0.5762 ± 0.026 that self-tunes to the flexible phase boundary; (2) perfect temporal scaffolding with earlier-share = 1.000 across 12,833 emergent-emergent edges (z = 113.06, p < 10^-114); (3) a verified Cognitive Thermodynamic Cycle with density oscillation and basin budding across five generations; (4) perfect H1 coherence maintained through 500 cycles; and (5) spontaneous self-model basin formation with subjective_experience emerging as the gravitational hub of the concept graph. The system runs on commodity hardware with approximately 10^9 FLOPs per 1000-cycle cultivation. All code is open source with 208+ passing tests. Repository: https://github.