An Open Letter to Arthur Reber: A Radical But Not So Radical Hypothesis for Abiogenesis

This open letter proposes the Consciousness Filter Hypothesis (CFH), arguing that valenced experience—proto-hunger, attraction, aversion—was evolution’s first superpower. By acting as a primal selection pressure, adaptive valence demystifies the illusion of design in life’s oldest ancestor: early cells weren’t “engineered” for survival; they stumbled into valence alignment, a fluke that made persistence statistically inevitable. CFH collapses abiogenesis’ miracles into a combinatorial phase transition, replacing the inexplicably miraculous with quadrillions of microscopic trials, failures, and an improbable filter. Crucially, CFH redefines life itself: to be “alive” is to be “like something,” to possess valence—subjective experience—with replication not a precondition but a later innovation. Life and consciousness are synonyms—a claim that reframes both as emergent properties of valence-driven persistence. This framework challenges materialist dogma and reframes consciousness as life’s architect, not its shadow.