Abstract

Across physics, biology, and cognition, certain systems develop an interior organization that persists across disturbance and regulates its own future states. This paper proposes a unifying structural condition for the emergence of such interiors. When the rate of internal coordination within a system exceeds the rate of environmental disruption, the system crosses a coherence threshold. Above this threshold, the system maintains its own boundary, routes present dynamics through information generated by its own past states, and forms an autonomous interior reference frame. This framework applies across physical and biological scales and explains when systems become self stabilizing, self modeling, and integrated. The paper further clarifies how such interiors function as necessary structural conditions for consciousness while distinguishing these conditions from the origin of phenomenal experience itself. The result is a physically grounded theory of autonomy and consciousness correlates that generates testable predictions across domains.