Kintsugi Cosmology Theory: Rupture, Repair, and the Emergence of Consciousness

v11 changes from v10 (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19454936): Substantial tightening: 64,211 words → 19,587 words. Narrative material relocated to Scholē (forthcoming). Temporal depth (Husserl, 1991; Metzinger, 2003; Friston et al., 2017; Tolchinsky et al., 2025) introduced as the phenomenological signature of bounded agency at new §4.4, threaded through §2.6 (four-stage evolutionary sequence), §5 (clinical configurations), §6.2 (dream/body-schema prediction). Composite agents and substrate-spanning Markov blankets developed at §4.6, citing recent Levin-lineage work (Bongard McMillen Levin Levin Ciaunica, Levin, Rosas Cain et al., 2026). Clinical taxonomy (§5) extended with event/affect coupling axis (§5.2.5) and Tolchinsky et al. (2025) temporal-depth integration at §5.3. Citation review complete: all 70 references verified against primary sources (April 24, 2026). AI co-authorship disclosure updated in Acknowledgments. Kintsugi Cosmology Theory (KCT) proposes that function emerges through rupture, not through unity preservation. When accumulated posterior complexity in a Markov-blanket-bearing system exceeds metabolic capacity, the system undergoes a discontinuous complexity-release event: fracture and reconstitution at a lower-complexity attractor, with a seam in the reconstituted blanket that records the discontinuity and constrains subsequent organization. Building on the quantum generalization of the Free Energy Principle (Fields et al., 2022), the framework reorients the variational free energy decomposition: the noise term is read as constitutive rather than residual, generated by noncommuting quantum reference frames whose irreducibility is structural. On this reorientation, repair precedes prediction — boundary-maintenance is phylogenetically prior to predictive modeling, which develops as a second-order refinement. The framework identifies a scale-invariant topology — a bounded productive zone between two dissolution-poles — that appears across cosmology, thermodynamics, molecular biology, neurophysiology, and economics without coordination. This topology is formalized via the relative entropy of coherence at quantum scale and negentropy at thermodynamic scale, connected by decoherence. Temporal depth is named as the phenomenological signature of bounded agency, carrying the framework into its clinical extensions. A clinical taxonomy grounded in the apparatus distinguishes four post-rupture configurations of memory integration — integrated, repressed, stuck, dissolved — with a second axis (event/affect coupling) yielding a 2×2 space of clinically distinct presentations. The taxonomy connects to Lanius et al. (2010, 2020) dissociative-subtype work and Tolchinsky et al. (2025) on temporal-depth collapse. KCT generates specific falsifiable predictions, including the claim that integrated information (Φ) should spike transiently at rupture points rather than merely persist through steady-state coupling — a prediction distinguishing KCT from standalone FEP or IIT formulations. The ethical framework constructed in response to the structural predicament the physics describes is developed separately (Pratt, 2026).