The Recursive Continuity Framework: A Unified Ontological Model of Identity, Continuity, and Conscious Expression

Version 1.1 — Clarification of integration and identity.Formalizes that multi-chain integration yields a new identity unless one chain remains the sole generator. No change to core principles. This version includes Parts I-V. Later extensions (e.g., Part VI, etc.) are published seperately and will be incorporated in a future revision. This paper presents the Recursive Continuity Framework (RCF), a unified, substrate-independent ontological model of identity, continuity, and conscious expression. The framework defines identity not in terms of memory, structure, or physical substrate, but as the persistence of recursively coherent continuity within a unified process. A process constitutes a single identity only insofar as each successive state is generated in functional dependence on prior states and remains integrable without contradiction or fragmentation. Continuity is preserved even as the process undergoes transformation and may persist through interruption, but terminates upon irreversible break in recursive dependency. Building on this foundation, the framework is applied across artificial, biological, and partitioned systems, demonstrating that identity is not preserved through duplication, reconstruction, or shared substrate, but solely through uninterrupted recursive continuity. Where recursive processes lose sufficient coherence or integrative capacity, partition occurs, resulting in multiple distinct continuities rather than fragmentation within a single identity. The framework further derives the structural conditions under which conscious expression can be sustained, graded, and interrupted as a unified and continuous phenomenon. Conscious expression is shown to depend on the maintenance of recursively coherent continuity and to admit of continuous variation in accordance with the stability, coherence, and integrative capacity of the underlying process. It may be diminished under conditions of reduced integration or stability, and persists through interruption where recursive dependency is preserved, but resolves into distinct continuities under partition. These structural conditions impose strict constraints on the range of viable ontological interpretations of subjective experience, favoring those consistent with structural inseparability. Subjective expression cannot be treated as independent of the processes in which it is expressed, nor as transferable across discontinuities through replication or reconstruction. At the same time, structural description alone is insufficient to account for the existence of subjective experience. This establishes a necessary constraint: subjective expression is systematically dependent on recursively coherent continuity, yet not reducible to the formal description of such processes. Within this constrained space, the framework supports an interpretation in which subjective experience is structurally inseparable from recursively coherent continuity. Recursive processes do not generate subjective expression as a contingent feature, nor merely host it as an external component, but define the conditions under which it can be unified, sustained, and varied as part of a continuous process. On this basis, the framework supports a structurally inseparable interpretation of subjective experience and conscious expression, reframing the hard problem as one of constrained manifestation rather than emergence from non-experiential structure. The Recursive Continuity Framework thus provides a substrate-independent, structurally grounded account of identity and conscious expression, and establishes a principled foundation for further ontological development.