The Dawn of Consciousness A Neural-Entropy / Active Inference Hypothesis for Creation Myths

The Dawn of Consciousness: A Neural-Entropy / Active Inference Hypothesis for Creation Myths proposes a computational-cognitive account of why creation myths across cultures recurrently begin with motifs of chaos, darkness, void, indistinction, and formlessness—and why these motifs often resolve into ordered worlds through a stereotyped sequence of separations, naming, binding, and boundary-making. The core hypothesis is that “cosmogonic thinking” is not merely symbolic storytelling, but a repair protocol for cognition under threat: when organisms encounter acute death cues (e.g., blood, corpses, predation signals, catastrophic loss), their inferential machinery can enter a high-entropy, low-precision regime consistent with the Free Energy Principle and active inference. In such moments, prediction error becomes difficult to localize, the Markov blanket’s boundary assumptions become unstable, and perception/action may shift toward rapid closure operations that reduce uncertainty at the cost of flexibility. Creation myths and ritual sequences, on this view, are cultural technologies that serialize and stabilize these closure operations into transmissible narratives and repeatable practices. This preprint develops: a neural-entropy / precision interpretation of “primordial chaos” motifs, a death-gateway mechanism linking fast death-cue perturbations to defensive precision reallocation and boundary reconstruction, a compact operator grammar (e.g., SPLIT → NAME → BIND / CONTAIN) describing how mythic cosmogonies convert undifferentiated states into structured worlds, an empirical roadmap for testing predictions using motif coding, cross-cultural corpora, and (where feasible) computational segmentation approaches aligned with regime-shift models. Scope note. This work is a theory-first, mechanism-oriented preprint intended to generate falsifiable predictions and a shared interface vocabulary for multi-scale models of mortality risk, cognition, and cultural order. Version: v1.1 Correspondence: Yongming Yuan (richardyuan2020@gmail.com) Suggested citation: Yuan, Y. (2026). The Dawn of Consciousness: A Neural-Entropy / Active Inference Hypothesis for Creation Myths (v1.1)