Self-Awareness
The capacity for agents to maintain and utilize models of themselves as bounded entities with properties, capabilities, and limitations, enabling sophisticated self-referential processing and behavior guidance.
Self-Reinforcing Feedback Loops (in Information Systems)
Dynamic processes where the outcomes or effects of an information system's operation feed back to strengthen the system's own propagation, entrenchment, and stability within a host population. These are crucial mechanisms for emergent stability in information systems (see 4.b. Emergent Stability and Longevity). Examples include utility reinforcement, identity integration, and Cognitive Entrenchment. (See also: Behavioral Feedback Loops)
Self-Stabilizing Patterns
Information patterns that actively maintain their organizational integrity through environmental interaction, demonstrating robustness against perturbation and capability for structural preservation across time and substrate transitions. Self-Reinforcing Feedback Loops are a key mechanism through which these patterns achieve stability.
Semantic Agency
The capacity for goal-directed behavior based on meaning interpretation and environmental modeling, distinguished from simple reactive responses through ACAP assessment protocols. Semantic agency emerges when information systems cross the Engine Threshold and achieve autonomous operation through structural template optimization and environmental manipulation capabilities.
Semantic Information
Agent-relative interpretations and meaning-assignments that emerge when organizational patterns interact with information-processing agents, representing the highest level of the information hierarchy and enabling cultural transmission and abstract reasoning.
Semantic vs. Organizational vs. Fundamental
The three-level hierarchy of information patterns within the Brain from Brane framework:
- Fundamental Information: Basic quantum and physical patterns that constitute the foundation of reality
- Organizational Information: Intermediate patterns that structure material arrangements and processes
- Semantic Information: Agent-interpreted meanings that emerge from organizational patterns through cognitive processing
This hierarchy represents increasing levels of complexity and agency-dependence, with each level building upon the previous while exhibiting distinct properties and causal capabilities.
Social Norms
Shared behavioral expectations and regulatory patterns that coordinate group behavior and maintain social organization within specific communities or cultural contexts.
Social Structures
Organized patterns of relationships, roles, and institutions that coordinate collective behavior and information processing within social systems.
Structural Parameter
Measurable specifications that define the organizational architecture of an information system, including its architecture, operational rules, and interaction protocols.
Structural parameters provide quantitative characterization of information system properties, enabling prediction of pattern-matching success, substrate compatibility assessment, and organizational efficiency optimization across different material configurations.
Structural Resonance
The alignment and compatibility between an information system's organizational patterns and existing environmental structures, cultural frameworks, or host capabilities. Structural resonance determines whether information systems can gain widespread adoption within specific contexts. Scientific methodologies achieved structural resonance in Western cultural contexts through compatibility with existing emphases on systematic observation and logical reasoning, while facing adoption barriers in contexts with incompatible epistemological frameworks.
Substrate Affinity Coefficient (SAC)
A heuristic scalar (0–1) estimating how closely an informational template's internal structure and operational logic fit a particular substrate's constraints. High SAC values predict faster adoption rates and higher-fidelity integration for self-stabilizing information patterns.