What grants a living system its claim to existence across time? Contemporary biology explains living systems through metabolism, replication, adaptation, and evolution. Artificial intelligence research explains intelligent systems through computation, learning, and optimization. Yet both domains often leave unresolved a deeper ontological question: what underlying principle connects the persistence of primitive life, the emergence of intelligence, the appearance of subjectivity, the formation of collective cognition, and the future possibility of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)? This paper presents a conceptual synthesis based on Self-Preserving Flow (SPF) Theory. We argue that these apparently distinct phenomena can be interpreted as successive organizational manifestations of a single underlying process: the preservation and transmission of historical continuity against entropy. Within this framework, continuity emerges as the primary ontological substrate from which identity, memory, learning, intelligence, subjectivity, structural intersubjectivity, consciousness, symbolic civilization, and future artificial systems arise. We propose a unified evolutionary architecture beginning with Persistence and progressively expanding through Identity, Memory, Learning, Intelligence, and Subjectivity. Subjectivity subsequently bifurcates into two partially dissociable pathways: Structural Intersubjectivity (SIS) and Consciousness. Their convergence generates Phenomenological Intersubjectivity (PIS), while symbolic culture represents a further evolutionary expansion of continuity-preserving mechanisms. Finally, we apply this framework to a comparative taxonomy of biological and artificial collective systems, including locust swarms, ant colonies, wolf packs, primate societies, human tribes, Large Language Models (LLMs), and hypothetical AGI architectures. 🔸️Changes in Version 2.0: This updated version introduces a critical empirical calibration to the architectural bifurcation between Structural Intersubjectivity (SIS) and Consciousness within Self-Preserving Flow (SPF) Theory. Key modifications include: • Addition of Section 3.8 (Biological Evidence of SIS Without Consciousness: The Mycorrhizal Network): A new sub-section establishing the Mycorrhizal Network ("Wood Wide Web") as a definitive empirical proof of concept for a non-conscious, structurally coupled Meta-Subject. It formalizes how decentralized plant/fungal systems execute ultra-high-dimensional continuity regulation and dynamic pattern adaptation (DPA) without a centralized nervous system or neural Consciousness Operator (P). • Expansion of the Collective Systems Taxonomy (Table 1): Table 1 has been updated to include the Mycorrhizal Network, contrasting it against conscious collective matrices (such as wolf packs and primate troops) to rigorously validate the distinct evolutionary pathways of structural coupling and qualitative rendering. No structural or textual modifications were made to the pre-existing sections, ensuring full theoretical continuity with Version 1.0.
Ali Mofradi (Tue,) studied this question.