Morphology and the Structural Preconditions of Basin Formation

The Quantum Darwinist Theory of Consciousness (QDT) and the Prototime Interpretation (PT) characterize localized conscious basins in terms of spectral integration, PT-participation, recursive coherence, witness redundancy, and temporally ordered record formation [7–9]. An upstream question has remained largely implicit in that program: what sort of morphology makes such dynamics structurally plausible? This paper argues that morphology constitutes the architectural precondition of basin formation, and that the Morphological Participation Index (MPI; Montes 5) can make that precondition operational. Architecture, realized integration, carrier structure, and witnessed temporality each answer a different question about the same candidate system. MPI contributes the architectural prior: it localizes where balanced seams lie, where redundant trace or witness surfaces are available, where carrier-sensitive assays are worth running, and where temporally thick, record-supported basins—integrated regimes whose stability depends on redundant internal records or traces that persist across behaviorally relevant time windows—are plausible. A structural factorization of candidate basins connects MPI’s score bundle to downstream Φs, PT-participation, and clock indices. Expected dissociations—cases where high MPI coexists with low realized integration, or where trace-rich architectures lack the carrier geometry for PT-participation—sharpen experimental design and help distinguish genuine basin formation from structural mimics. The result is a bridge from morphology to the empirical core of QDT/PT, grounded in the same balanced-cut spectral formalism that underlies Φs itself.