Life as an Admitted Task: A Homeostatic Boundary Framework for Abiogenesis and the Origin of Genetic Knowledge

This preprint proposes a constructor-theoretic and biophysical framework for abiogenesis, arguing that life should be understood not as the accidental accumulation of chemical complexity, but as the admission of a physically retained boundary task under homeostatic pressure. The paper develops the hypothesis that a protocell-like system becomes proto-living when a material boundary and an internal reaction cycle become mutually stabilizing: the boundary regulates kinetic access to the world, while the internal cycle preserves the conditions under which the boundary remains functionally relevant. The framework is grounded in chemically tangible models, especially fatty-acid vesicles and formose-like autocatalytic chemistry. A vesicle is interpreted not as a passive container, but as a kinetic filter that can regulate reactant influx, reduce dilution, and maintain internal chemistry within a viable concentration window. This allows the paper to define life as the transition from world-only chemical reactivity to the retained admission of a self-world-boundary task. The paper formalizes this transition through three linked ideas: substrate stability, cycle retention, and available energy. These variables vary continuously, but the admission of the living task is treated as an organizational threshold, analogous to a phase transition. This resolves the tension between gradual chemical development and binary biological organization: matter can approach life continuously, while the task of life is admitted only when minimal sustainability conditions are jointly satisfied. The paper also introduces a falsifiable microfluidic protocol. It proposes comparing free formose-like reaction networks with encapsulated networks under repeated dilution and mechanical shear stress in a lab-on-a-chip setting. A chemically inert boundary control is included to test whether any retention advantage is due to the architecture of boundary-mediated kinetic filtering rather than accidental lipid chemistry. The manuscript positions the Homeostatic Boundary framework as a theoretical alternative to purely binary accounts of autopoiesis and to overly representational readings of the Free Energy Principle at the protocellular stage. It argues that early life should be understood first as non-representational thermodynamic traction: a material system remaining within a viable region through boundary-cycle coupling, before predictive models, cognition, or phenomenal selfhood become biologically meaningful. This work builds on the Homeostatic Self-World Boundary model and the cECT-SWB benchmark, while explicitly reframing the argument as a biophysical account of abiogenesis rather than as a claim about consciousness. The SWB benchmark describes the self-world-boundary task as a precursor capacity, not as minimal consciousness itself. Version 1.0