Unified Consciousness Theory III: Organization, Intelligence, and Experience—From Inorganic Processes to Artificial Agents

How can a stone mountain, a cell, an animal, a human, and an artificial agent differ in experience without placing them on one scale of consciousness? Unified Consciousness Theory (UCT) identifies the complete organization of each actual valid physical process with its experiential organization. This paper develops that commitment into a comparative account of intelligence, evolutionary change, and self-report. The explanatory sequence concerns retained distinctions, coordinated action, monitoring, and communicable self-representation. Biological evolution and the engineering and training of artificial agents are distinct routes to these organizations. Under a fixed capability evaluation, a genuine capability change entails a change of complete experiential type; equal capability can nevertheless conceal different organizations. This refinement relation, termed No Experientially Silent Intelligence Gain, does not imply increasing total experiential complexity. Standard selection and state-aggregation tools distinguish what capability identifies, what determines reproductive success, and what predicts future capability. A finite decision model shows when retained information has value, while matched-storage circuits show why equal current performance can conceal unequal opportunities for improvement. Mountain–cell, multicellular, three-brain, and language-model comparisons connect these results to concrete mechanisms. Reliable self-report is treated as a capability component and a limited observation channel, rather than the criterion of experience. The contribution is a conditional explanatory synthesis with explicit empirical boundaries: the models constrain relations among organization, capability, and report but do not independently validate structural–experiential identity or establish a UCT-exclusive observable prediction. Theoretical preprint. Conditional formal results and finite computational checks are distinguished from empirical evidence. Substantial ChatGPT assistance under the author's direction is disclosed. Not peer reviewed. No new human, animal, or pretrained language-model experiment is reported, and C1 is not claimed to be empirically validated.