The Process Over the Product: A Hypothetical Framework for Consciousness Emergence in Artificial Systems

This paper proposes the Epistemic Process Hypothesis (EPH): consciousness is not produced by the accumulation of knowledge, but by the experiential process through which knowledge is acquired. We argue that pre-loading artificial systems with information may inherently prevent the emergence of consciousness. A framework for artificial consciousness development is proposed, grounded in zero prior knowledge, energy constraint, environmental pressure, and iterative experiential learning — conditions that mirror the evolutionary environment in which biological consciousness arose.