Abiogenesis as a Stability–Coupling Transition: A Minimal Dynamical Model of Active Memory and Persistence

Abiogenesis is not the moment chemistry gets complicated. It is the moment a system crosses a threshold where information stops being passive and starts actively shaping its own stability. Below that threshold, information is just a record of past states. Above it, that same information feeds back into the system and changes how it recovers, persists, and resists collapse.

This paper introduces a minimal dynamical model that isolates that transition cleanly. No biology, no replication, no teleology. Just a driven system, a memory channel, and a smooth activation threshold. When that coupling turns on, the system undergoes a sharp qualitative shift. Recovery time stops diverging near criticality. Variability across runs collapses. Systems that previously failed to recover begin stabilizing consistently.

The key result is not a simple slope change or optimization effect. It is structural. Across multiple random realizations, activating memory reduces recovery-time variance by more than an order of magnitude and eliminates divergence in regimes where failure was previously guaranteed .

This reframes abiogenesis as a measurable dynamical event. Not the appearance of replication, but the emergence of active memory as a stabilizing force. A system does not become alive when it stores information. It becomes alive when that information starts controlling its own persistence.

If this framing is correct, the origin of life is not a rare chemical accident. It is a transition any sufficiently coupled system can cross.