Summary of Part I

1. Thermodynamic foundation: Driven nonlinear systems under constraint generically produce structured attractors. Organization is thermodynamically enabled, not forbidden.
2. Boundary emergence: Among structured states, bounded systems (with inside/outside distinctions) are selected for by their gradient-channeling efficiency.
3. Model necessity: Bounded systems that persist under uncertainty must implement world models (POMDP sufficiency).
4. Self-model inevitability: When self-effects dominate observations, self-modeling becomes the cheapest path to predictive accuracy.
5. Forcing functions (hypothesis, partially contradicted): Task demands (partial observability, long horizons, self-prediction) are predicted to push systems toward dense integration. V10 found geometric affect structure present regardless of which forcing functions are active — geometry is a baseline property of multi-agent survival. V22–V31 deepened this: even within-lifetime gradient learning does not reliably lift integration through decomposable architectures. What shapes dynamics is gradient coupling topology (V27–V28) and evolutionary trajectory through repeated stress-recovery (V19, V31), not task pressure or prediction target.
6. Measure-theoretic inevitability: Under broad priors, self-modeling systems are typical, not exceptional.
7. Grounded normativity: Valence is a real structural property at the experiential scale. The is-ought gap dissolves when physics is not the only "is."
8. Scale-relative truth: Truth is enacted at each scale through viability-preserving compression. There is no view from nowhere.

The structure is inevitable. The question is what it means—whether these self-modeling systems, these attractors that model themselves, have experience. Whether there is something it is like to be them. That is not a further metaphysical question layered on top of the physics. It is a question about what integrated cause-effect structure is, intrinsically, when you stop describing it from outside and ask what it is from within.