Pan-experience & Internal Structural Self-Registration Through Continuous Maintenance of Integration

Structural Self-Registration, as I understand it, is the way any form sustains its coherence by holding its internal distinctions in workable relation. Wherever something persists, Cohesion must continuously integrate the Differentiations that compose it. This is not a matter of awareness or thought. It is simply the way consciousness expresses itself through structure: Differentiation introducing form, Cohesion sustaining that form, and Integration maintaining their relation. In this sense, experience does not arise at a particular evolutionary moment. Experience differentiates according to structure while remaining continuous with everything that precedes it, by articulating distinction from an already existing field.

Physical systems express a diffuse mode of experience at varying intensities, where intensity correlates with the scale and complexity of force integration, appropriate for their structure. A massive form, such as a star, achieves Internal Self-Registration by continuously maintaining the dynamic balance between its internal forces: the immense gravitational pull that induces collapse, and the outward fusion pressure generated in its core. An atom similarly stabilizes its structure through the sustained relation between the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic forces governing its orbital structure. A molecule holds a particular geometry and charge distribution through continuous energetic bonds.

These forms express experience structurally: differentiation articulated as structural pattern, cohesion maintaining that pattern's continuity of form.

'Living' systems express experience in an articulated register appropriate to their internal structural relations. A cell maintains itself as a bounded, self-organising whole whose internal distinctions—membranes, gradients, biochemical pathways—must remain in continuous, workable relation. This constitutes its Internal Self-Registration of Integration. A plant adjusts to variations in light, water, pressure, and damage through distributed signalling that calibrates growth and metabolism. Its mode of experience is slower and more diffuse, but it is still a dynamic expression of the underlying field: internal differentiation articulated as a functional integrated pattern, and cohesion sustaining that pattern's continuity of form through continuous maintenance of integration.

Animals introduce a different mode of experience: the affective register. With the development of nervous systems, internal differentiation is dense and rapid enough that coherence is tracked from within as felt variation which mirrors the density and rapidity of the structure. This constitutes the system's Affective Self-Registration. Affective states—such as warmth, hunger, safety, tension, and threat—are the organism's way of registering shifts in its own Internal Coherence and overall pattern. Differentiation gives these felt states their specific, immediate character; cohesion maintains them as part of a unified experiential field. Affective experience is coherence sensing itself, providing instantaneous feedback that drives behavior and ensures the system's continuity. Where internal differentiation deepens further, the resulting structure both provides the conditions and requires the articulation of reflexive orientation.

The extreme density and subtlety of the structure mean that cohesion cannot be sustained by simple affective feedback alone; the system requires a mechanism to stabilize and organize its own registering processes. Therefore, the system does not simply register its internal state; it is structurally required to register the fact of its own registering. This Reflexive Self-Registration is not a new metaphysical property of consciousness, but an adequate structural articulation, or mode of the same underlying dynamic. At the level of human structure, the distinctions are so numerous and subtle that cohesion needs to operate inwardly through reflective awareness—a form of self-organizing feedback—in order to maintain the continuity of the structure amid vast internal complexity.