Florentin Koch

Self-transforming systems are usually classified by what they modify—parameters, memory, representations, learning rules or objectives. This misses the causal chain through which a transformation is produced, assessed, selected and made persistent. We propose T–P–G–E–C, a five-role functional factorization: teleological selection (T), operative policy (P), generation of candidate transformations (G), evidential establishment (E) and commit-control (C). Roles remain distinct only when admissible interventions separate their realizing mechanisms and alter an audit-relevant diagnosis; otherwise the audit reports fused or unresolved attributions. Their location is indexed to an explicit audit boundary, and a transformability profile η records which roles can themselves become targets. The analysis distinguishes generating a candidate from authorizing its retention, and changing a transformation mechanism from repeatedly using it. Analytical scenarios illustrate these distinctions; they do not report new experiments. The framework connects self-adaptation, meta-learning, reflective algorithms, evolutionary systems and self-improving agents, and organizes a research programme on progressive endogenization, recursive closure, teleological plasticity, lineage generativity and transformation authority.

Physics is often described as moving between experiment and model. That picture is indispensable but incomplete. In several episodes since the rise of mathematical physics, investigators have also proceeded by fixing a class of possible representations and progressively restricting it through conservation, covariance, locality, isotropy, variational, and constitutive requirements. The result is sometimes not merely compatibility but rigidity: within a stated model class, few law-forms—and occasionally only one up to empirical parameters—remain admissible. I call the resulting conditional status structural necessity. The term names no new species of metaphysical necessity: it denotes the degree to which an empirical law-form is fixed by an explicit package of constraints relative to a model class. This article develops an operational test based on nested admissible sets and constraint ablation. A modern reconstruction of Fourier heat conduction supplies the principal case; Fermat’s derivation of refraction and Noether’s theorems show two different yields of constraint reasoning. I then retain the "structural demon" in a deflated, historically useful role: not as a personification of logical closure, but as an ideal reasoner restricted to the concepts, mathematics, evidence, and computational resources available at a given time. Comparing the earliest defensible derivability window with actual discovery yields a measure of derivational latency. This framework supports a historiography of the constraint turn without making discovery inevitable, erasing empirical input, or collapsing constraints into laws.

Debates on artificial intelligence generally ask whether a machine can act, be autonomous, or bear responsibility. This article isolates a prior ontological question: what becomes of the status of a structure that, after organizing present operations, becomes a causally transformable object and then becomes again an operative condition of future transformations? We call organizational reinscription this conversion between operative condition, object of transformation, and subsequent operative condition. The thesis does not add a substance to the inventory of the world: it holds that a reinscription pathway changes the constitutive conditions under which an organization can produce its accessible successors. The diagnosis is indexed to an endogenous boundary and distinguishes state variation, parametric adaptation, and the reinscription of operative structures, modification mechanisms, or evaluators. Computational reflection, the self-modification of a rational agent, Gödel machines, and recursive self-design are distinguished by their unit of analysis. Stress tests involving an external patch, classical automated machine learning (AutoML), the Darwin Gödel Machine, and the Red Queen Gödel Machine show, in particular, that a profile including evaluation changes the conditions for selecting future transformations without making the truth anchor or orchestrator endogenous. The analysis finally specifies the consequences of reinscription for diachronic identity and modification authority, without inferring consciousness, moral personhood, or legitimacy.

Contemporary debates on artificial creativity are fragmented into incompatible theoretical traditions. A central divide opposes ontologically demanding approaches (grounding creativity in lived experience, intentionality, or existential sense-making) to operational frameworks prioritizing empirical testability. This article argues that ontologically strong accounts, exemplified by Chiodo’s (2025) recent contribution in this journal, rely on stipulative criteria that encode the exclusion of artificial systems into their definitions of creativity, rendering the question conceptually closed rather than empirically assessable. We show this strategy reflects a recurring pattern of ontological immunization in contemporary philosophy of creativity. Against this backdrop, we develop a method- ological alternative preserving creativity’s normative dimension without presupposing the agent’s ontological status. We propose a tridimensional framework: (i) graded novelty, operationalized as measurable distance within a domain; (ii) value, assessed through empirically accessible responses including blind expert judgments and neu- roaesthetic correlates; (iii) normative reflexivity, defined functionally as a system’s capacity for self-evaluation and transformation of generative processes. This framework enables cumulative, comparative, and falsifiable investigation across human, artificial, and hybrid systems, while remaining agnostic regarding metaphys- ical questions about consciousness. By shifting debate from ontological exclusion to methodological accountability, we reopen artificial creativity as a legitimate object of empirical and philosophical inquiry.

Philosophy of science increasingly appeals to structural constraints to explain phys ical laws’ form and modal robustness, yet lacks a criterion for distinguishing genuinely constraining principles from empirical assumptions. This article introduces the structural demon, an idealized agent determining admissible law-forms from empirically established structural facts independently of initial conditions. The demon yields an operational crite rion of structural effectiveness and motivates structural necessity governing law-forms prior to particular laws. A case study of Fourier’s heat equation shows how locality, conservation, and isotropy uniquely fix the Laplacian form while leaving a thin empirical residue.

This methodological essay develops a methodology for productive dialogue between philosophical aesthetics and empirical research on art. For empiricists, it identifies three standing constraints on how philosophical conclusions can be drawn from data: the normative/descriptive distinction (normative positions cannot be empirically falsified), the is–ought gap (descriptive findings do not on their own license normative conclusions), and the hard problem of consciousness (neural correlates do not resolve phenomenal questions). It derives from these constraints a concrete recommendation: researchers should pre-specify which class of philosophical position is targeted, what prediction distinguishes it from alternatives, and how strong the evidential pressure is. For theorists, it argues that descriptive positions face scalar empirical pressure calibrated by evidence quality, and that normative positions face prescriptive cost rather than falsification. Evidence from five empirical domains—neuroaesthetics, psychology of arts, computational aesthetics, cross-cultural aesthetics, and AI and creativity research —is assessed using this methodology against five classical philosophical debates: ontology, experience, interpretation, value, and creativity. The cross-domain verdict is consistent: extreme positions face strong pressure while intermediate frameworks integrating formal and contextual factors receive support across independent evidence streams.