Fractal Sentience

Pipeline

Methodology

This work introduces a measurement-layer audit protocol that operationalizes directionality-adjacent markers with explicit evaluability rules and evidence traceability, enabling downstream hypothesis testing and theory evaluation on a reproducible footing.

The process is iterative and auditable, with cohort sizes and artifacts fixed per the published study.

Scope Boundary (read this first)

  • This stage validates a measurement vocabulary and its evidence traceability. It does not validate the UEF framework, RSI, or related theoretical claims.
  • Audit results are currently single-rater. Inter-rater reliability (IRR) is a planned next step.
  • Some fields are not evaluable for every study. Field-level evaluability (evaluable_n) is reported explicitly.

Phase 1: Corpus Assembly

  • Assemble a cross-domain candidate pool (n=250) for structured review.
  • Maintain deterministic IDs and provenance so every downstream label traces to a source document.

Phase 2: Overlay Protocol & Coding

  • Apply a fixed set of operational overlay fields to a finalist corpus (n=63).
  • The overlay set contains 10 fields: one categorical instrumentation_status and nine binary fields (present/absent), recorded only when explicitly stated in the source.

Phase 3: Audit and Metrics

  • Manually audit a fixed subset (n=20) using stored textual evidence excerpts.
  • Produce field-level audit metrics (for example, confusion summaries) and mismatch logs to identify systematic failure modes and improve definitions.

Phase 4: Reproducibility Artifacts

  • Publish a versioned archive on Zenodo including the paper, data tables, evidence logs, and checksums.
  • Document what is included in each release and what is explicitly out of scope (for example, minimal release packs may exclude scripts).

Theoretical Frontier: Next Targets for Operationalization

The Viscous Field (Berkla, 2026) introduced two formal constructs that define the next horizon for measurement-layer work. The first is the second-order threshold: the structural crossing at which recursive exchange begins constituting events whose content includes the constituting itself — the condition the paper identifies as the ground of temporal expression. The second is the self-inclusion index σ(M_k), a schematic formalization of that threshold expressed in terms of the framework’s existing parameters Φ(M_k) and T(Q_k, M_k).

Both constructs are currently conceptual scaffolds: precisely named targets rather than operationalized measures. The pipeline’s next meaningful extension is developing evaluability rules for σ — criteria that would allow a given system’s position relative to the second-order threshold to be assessed from observable signatures, analogous to the evaluability rules already established for entropy production and irreversibility. The most promising existing route identified in the paper is the connection to Friston’s Free Energy Principle, where σ (sigma) may be expressible in terms of model complexity, epistemic value, and expected free energy.

Phase 5: Open Access Links

  • Published works: Zenodo
  • Code (when released): GitHub

Automated Scanning (supporting tooling, not the audit itself)

  • Database queries and exports support coverage expansion and queue building, with outputs in CSV/YAML for bulk review and visualization.
  • Current sources include arXiv, Europe PMC, Semantic Scholar, and PubMed.