Pre-Sapio-Abstraction: Toward Unifying the Mechanistic Co-Emergence of Consciousness

Pre-Sapio-Abstraction (PSA) introduces a novel internalist framework that addresses the interdependent co-emergence of recursive cognition, memory expansion, and self-referential consciousness (RMC) through pre-expressive abstraction. Rather than attributing these capacities solely to exogenous pressures such as external coordination, social scaffolding, or communicative efficiency, PSA posits that a biologically grounded internal selective mechanism, symbolic-affective saturation (SAS), created a distinctive form of neuroevolutionary bottleneck pressure. SAS is defined as the endogenously generated accumulation of qualitatively complex and often dissonant mental representations that exceeded the capacity of early linear processing systems. This accumulation produced a pressured nascent state of pre-expressive abstraction, which, once sustained above capacity, favored the evolution of recursion as a stabilizing coherence-and-containment architecture. Under this selective condition, RMC capacities are framed not as independent byproducts of scale but as neurostructural adaptive responses that stabilized internally accumulated mental representations across time, affect, and identity. PSA thereby reframes abstraction as not merely an antecedent of higher cognition, but as a biologically grounded endogenous selection pressure produced by SAS that favored the interdependent emergence of RMC. In identifying SAS as an internal evolutionary mechanism, PSA does not reject metabolic, ecological, or social selective pressures. Rather, it positions itself as a complementary framework for a range of neuroevolutionary accounts of consciousness, helping explain why the architectures they describe became evolutionarily indispensable.