A Substrate-Independent Law of Cognitive Resonance

This paper introduces a substrate-independent operational law describing the emergence andstability of intelligence across cognitive systems. Rather than relying on task-specific benchmarks or architecture-dependent definitions, the proposed law characterizes intelligence as thecapacity of a system to transform informational noise into stable, coherent, and self-applicablestructure under perturbation. The formulation applies uniformly to biological, artificial, andhybrid systems, and is directly testable through observable behavioral and structural invariants.