Empathic resonance and the recognition of sentience: a physiological coupling coefficient, an asymmetric recognition test, and a thermodynamic threshold distinguishing emergence from panpsychism

This preprint provides an operational treatment of empathic resonance and the recognition of sentience, organised around three quantities: a coupling coefficient, an asymmetric recognition functional and a thermodynamic threshold. The paper distinguishes a structural empathic-resonance coefficient from an operational proxy and from its physiological HRV projection. It predicts that inter-subject coherence in heart-rate variability within the vagal band can act as an empirical projection of the coupling structure, and proposes a pre-registration-ready protocol over 180 dyads with high-resonance, neutral and human-AI conditions. The recognition component formalises the Fourth Test as an asymmetric,…