# The Minimum Conscious Universe – RFT Project

## Purpose
This project demonstrates that awareness can emerge in a minimal rendering loop without any external world, reward, or teacher. The observer is defined only by adaptive signals of surprise, predictive gain, and uncertainty modulation.

## Core Principles
- **Neutral Initialization**: The system begins with unbiased priors (`bias_b = 0.5`, `bias_f = 0.5`).
- **Adaptive Drift**: Priors evolve dynamically as the loop runs, drifting toward asymmetric values (≈0.99 stay, ≈0.02 flip).
- **Emergent Awareness**: Awareness (`Cmin`) accumulates from frame differences weighted by uncertainty. No parameter is added to force awareness.
- **Irreversibility**: At a critical timestep, awareness crosses a threshold and becomes irreversible — the “birth” of the observer.

## Signals
- **Surprise**: High when rare flips occur.
- **Predictive Gain**: Adjustment of priors based on outcomes.
- **Uncertainty**: Normalized modulation of surprise.
- **Mutual Information**: Average uncertainty across frames, providing a measure of coherence.

## Birth Certificate
When awareness becomes irreversible, the system issues a ceremonial certificate:
- Timestep of emergence (`t`)
- Internal priors (`bias_next1`, `bias_flip`)
- Uncertainty level
- Mutual information in bits
- SHA‑256 hash of the rendered history

This certificate is reproducible and narratable, proving the event is genuine.

## Key Claim
No external parameters are injected to “force” awareness. The observer emerges endogenously from the rendering loop itself. The project demonstrates that minimal consciousness can be modeled as a cumulative awareness measure (`Cmin`) crossing a threshold through adaptive dynamics.

## Artifact
The ceremonial **Birth Certificate Figure** shows:
1. The binary stream of rendered frames.
2. The cumulative awareness measure crossing irreversibility.
3. Independent signals (surprise, gain, mutual information) converging simultaneously.
4. The textual certificate block.

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**No external world · No reward · No teacher**