The Constrained Emergence Framework

This preprint introduces the Constrained Emergence Framework (CEF), a systems-theoreticaccount of how life, cognition, agency, and consciousness arise within a physically lawfuluniverse. The framework synthesizes insights from non-equilibrium thermodynamics,dynamical systems theory, information theory, evolutionary dynamics, affective neuroscience,and predictive processing to explain higher-level phenomena as emergent organizationalproperties shaped by interacting constraints. CEF characterizes consciousness as an emergent organizational state in which a systemconstructs a reflexive self-model that renders selected internal processes globally accessiblefor evaluation and control. Agency is formalized as Reflexive Regulatory Agency, defined asthe graded capacity of a system to access, evaluate, and regulate its own internal processesacross time. Rather than proposing new empirical results, this work provides a unifying conceptualscaffold that connects physical preconditions, evolutionary selection, affective regulation,predictive cognition, and reflexive self-modeling into a coherent naturalistic framework.The paper is intended as a theoretical foundation for future formal, empirical, andinterdisciplinary research on cognition, consciousness, and complex adaptive systems. This version is released as a preprint to enable open access and early discussion priorto journal submission.