# The Logic of the Tripartite Synapse Model — v5

*A synthesis of the principles the pseudocode enacts. The document is ordered why → what → how: it
opens with why this is a different kind of object than an ordinary model (Part I), states the single
principle its content obeys (Part II), then descends through seven categories that specialize that
principle (Part III). The why comes first because it is the reason everything else matters — without
it, a reader could take the categories for a description of a synapse and miss that they describe a
physics that writes itself.*

*What changed in v5. The old "evaluation" phase is retired — it was always preparation aimed at
the other scope. The ring is recut into three categories: ACTION, RECOVERY, PREPARATION. The
obsolete subject-mapping (lateral/local/vertical) is dropped. New findings are folded in: the
rhythm is (ACTION ⇄ RECOVERY) × many, then PREPARATION; every category spans all timescales; night
PREPARATION replays the day ACTION with the same machinery; build and release compete within a
component while material competes between components; there are two independent forgettings;
collaboration by day versus competition by night follows from the rivalry of each scope's currency;
behavior is legible and meaning is assigned by the reader not the signal; and the three categories
are the three modulable dimensions of behavior. Nine categories are consolidated to six, a seventh
is added (the four operations), and — new in this revision — the "why" (formerly a closing note) is
corrected and promoted to the front as Part I.*

---

# PART I — Why This Is Not a Model but a Way of Making Models

Before the principles, one question: *what kind of object is this?* The answer is unusual, and it
governs everything that follows. This is not a model you can write down and run. It is a **generator
of models** — a rule that turns each history into a different fixed model, and only once that history
has been lived. History is not a variable inside the model; history *is* the model. This part earns
that claim, because stated cold it sounds like mysticism, and it is not — it is a checkable fact
about what the coupled components do.

**The pseudocode is a physics written in the grammar of an algorithm.** The companion pseudocode
reads like a program — assignments, conditionals, loops — but every line leans on something code
cannot supply. Its primitives — the calcium influxes, the fluctuations, the clearances — name
*physical processes*, not computations; `mini_Ca()` is a placeholder for "whatever the matter does
here." Every `·Δt` is a differential equation in disguise: the discrete step is our notation, the
thing itself is continuous. And every coincidence — the three-way gate, the tag, the build — assumes
its inputs are *present at the same instant at the same place*, which the physical cleft supplies for
free by diffusion but which an `if` can only presuppose. The imperative grammar is a transcription;
the content is a dynamical system. The pseudocode is faithful to the model exactly where it is
unfaithful to computation.

**The natural objection: surely it can still be simulated.** Nothing here is non-computable in
principle. The dynamics are differential equations with thresholds, which computers integrate
routinely. If "implement" means "numerically approximate a trajectory," computation suffices. This
objection is correct as far as it goes — so the question is what happens when you try to act on it.

**A first answer that is true but philosophical: the simulator occupies the vantage the model
denies.** The model's content is that there is no global state — no component reads another's
interior, no place holds the whole, holism is enacted and never encoded. But to compute the system
you must hold every component's state in one memory and step them in one loop: the simulator *is* the
forbidden global observer. To order the updates it needs a scheduler (a central order-giver) or a
synchronous clock ticking all components together — the "command from above" that "causation
circulates, command nowhere" denies. And it must *count* time as a variable, where the model insists
time is *suffered* — read off the decay of stores, kept by forgetting. So a computed simulation gets
the trajectory right and the ontology backwards. This is real, but on its own it can be waved away as
metaphysics. The decisive answer is concrete.

**The decisive answer: there is no one model to simulate — only a way of making models.** Compare two
cases.

Where simulation *works* — pricing a financial option. You have **one fixed model**: a stochastic
equation with fixed parameters, the same rule on day 1 and day 200. You run 100,000 random price
paths through that same equation. Each path differs, but all are **samples of one stationary object**
— the fixed distribution the equation defines. Average the payoff over them and it **converges**:
100,000 paths give a good estimate, 200,000 barely move it. It works because the paths are variations
on a single system — noise around a stable structure. History matters *within* a path but never
changes *the model*; every path runs the same equation. The model is one object; the paths are its
samples.

Where the same recipe breaks — this model. Take the four steps in turn. **(1) There is no one fixed
model.** The equation is not the same on day 1 and day 200: night 1 rewrites it into a new equation,
night 2 rewrites that. Each path runs a *different, self-modified* equation by day 10 — there is no
fixed rule to sample from. **(2) The paths are not variations on one system; they are different
systems.** In option pricing, two paths are the same stock behaving differently. Here, the path where
synapse X won an early material competition and grew, and the path where its neighbour Y won instead,
have *physically different structures* — different synapses exist. They are not two runs of one model
but two different models a shared early history produced. **(3) There is no center to converge to.**
The average final price is a real thing; the "average" of *X exists, Y pruned* and *Y exists, X
pruned* is not a valid configuration — it is a blend of two incompatible circuits, corresponding to
no possible state. **(4) More samples stabilize nothing.** More option paths tighten the estimate;
more runs here yield *more distinct circuits*, never a better estimate of one, because there is
nothing for them to estimate.

In one line: in Monte Carlo, history varies *within* a fixed model, so samples estimate the model;
here history *is* the model — each history builds a different system — so there is nothing the
samples jointly estimate. That is the precise content of "there is no one model, only a way of making
models." The pseudocode is not a model you sample; it is a *generator* of models, one per history,
knowable only once the history is complete.

**And Monte Carlo is not the only rescue that fails — every acceleration method fails, for the same
reason.** Each general way to compute a system faster than living it out relies on some *stable
invariant* to exploit, and this model, by construction, holds none.
- *Closed-form solution* needs the future to be a computable function of **time**; here it is a
  function of the whole **history** — no formula takes a path as input and skips it.
- *Coarse-graining / renormalization* (physics' strongest tool, and tempting given the fast-day /
  slow-night split) needs the fast variables to settle, at fixed slow parameters, to a **stationary
  average** the slow dynamics can see. But the day's dynamics never settle history-independently —
  *which patterns can fire* depends on structure built by every prior night — and the coupling is
  bidirectional and same-order: the slow change *is made of* specific fast events (which pattern
  replayed), not their average. Coarse-graining discards exactly the individuating detail the model
  consolidates. The micro-detail here is the signal, not the noise.
- *Dynamic programming / memoization* needs **state recurrence** to cache and reuse; irreversible
  ratcheting (energy spent, structure pruned) means no configuration is ever revisited —
  nothing repeats, so nothing can be cached.
- *Surrogate / learned models* need **cross-history regularity** to generalize; the histories are
  incommensurable individuals with no shared structure, so there is nothing to learn that is cheaper
  than running the history.

Every method needs one of: time-parametrizability, scale separation with stationary fast statistics,
state recurrence, or cross-history regularity. This model has none — it is history-parametrized, its
fast and slow are same-order coupled, it never recurs (irreversible ratchet), and its histories are
incommensurable. The methods do not fail by bad luck; each needs the stable, reusable structure that
"the specification is continuously rewritten by its own running" abolishes.

**And here the exponential appears — not as the obstruction, but as its price.** Suppose you refuse
all of the above and insist on simulating anyway. To simulate *is* to fix a structure: a simulation
is a set of variables updated by fixed rules, and you cannot write the loop without committing to
what the variables are. But the real structure changes every night. So you face a forced choice.
Freeze *one* structure and you have committed to a single branch — one accidental history, a
measure-zero sample of a thing that is not a distribution. Stay faithful while keeping a fixed
substrate and you must instead carry *every* structure the system might occupy as an enumerated set —
and that set multiplies each night, growing exponentially in the number of nights, of changing
dimension, non-factorable. This exponential is not a property of the model; the model never
enumerates, it simply becomes one structure. The exponential is the shadow the fluid, self-rewriting
model casts on a fixed substrate — it arises *if and only if* you demand the stable structure that
simulation requires. The need for stable structure is what converts self-rewriting into
exponential enumeration; drop the demand and the exponential vanishes, leaving only a physics living
one history.

**Three concrete faces of the obstruction.** *The foreclosed synapse:* a synapse pruned on night 3
is gone; a pattern that would have used it on night 50 breaks at that link and cannot replay, so its
downstream components lose participation and drift toward pruning too — one cheap early pruning
deterministically forecloses a family of patterns fifty nights later, and you cannot know night 50's
structure without having run nights 3–49 in order. *The two histories that never reconcile:* run from
the same start twice; because material is conserved and structure capped, X-growing starves Y, and by
night 20 the runs have disjoint sets of synapses — not noisy versions of one answer but two
incompatible circuits with no meaningful average. *No shortcut:* because each night's structural
change feeds the next day's dynamics feeds the next night's change, with no scale separation to
exploit and no recurrence to cache, the one honest trajectory must be computed night by night, in
order, in full — it is its own shortest description. The only way to know the state at night N is to
run all N nights.

**Why this is one insight, not several.** The deep cause is that the model **abolishes the separation
between program and data.** Structure (the equations) is built from the accumulated traces of
behavior; behavior runs on structure. Night turns data into program; day turns program into data.
There is no stable specification anywhere, because the specification is continuously rewritten by its
own running — which is just "holism enacted, not encoded" and "no global state," seen over time. A
computation *requires* the split: the program is, by definition, the stable part. A thing with no
stable program cannot be captured by one.

**What the physics does instead — and why the synapse is its own faithful implementation.** The
physical synapse escapes all of this not by being non-computable but by never needing an invariant.
It does not compute which structure obtains tomorrow; it *becomes* it, by undergoing its night. It
realizes exactly one history in real time — the *real* one, not a sampled one — needing no global
memory (each component holds only its own state), no scheduler (time sequences everything at once,
everywhere, for free), no counted clock (its stores keep time by decaying). So the faithful
implementation of this model is not a program but a *material*: something that, by its own
constitution, undergoes these dynamics with locality, simultaneity, continuity, and suffered time,
without a controller. You can compute *a* life — one honest history, in full, in order,
incompressibly — but never *the* model, because there is no "the model": there is a rule that makes
one model from each history, and the synapse is the matter that runs that rule by being it.

*Two honest limits. This says faithful **acceleration** is impossible, not that useful
**approximation** is — a coarse model can teach you things, it just would not be this model. And it
holds for the model as specified (irreversible, non-recurring, individuating); whether real neural
tissue is secretly more regular, with statistics one could exploit, is an open empirical question,
not something these principles can foreclose.*

**The same no-privileged-vantage principle has a second face, in description rather than simulation.**
The first face is simulative: there is no fixed model, only histories. The second is descriptive:
there is no privileged object, only *cuts*. Nothing in the system is a bounded, persisting object one
could isolate and make the whole story — the synapse is part of a neuron, the neuron of an assembly,
the assembly of an organ, with no top and no bottom, only nested aligning projects. To describe it at
all, an observer must *choose a cut*: a boundary, a timescale, and a scope, treating what is inside as
the object and everything larger and smaller as context appearing at the boundary. Every cut is
partial by necessity; none is the whole, for the same reason no computation is the model — there is no
privileged, bounded, stable thing to be the whole. This is orthogonal to the reductive default of
classical physics, which cuts at *static object-boundaries* and explains by *cause and effect between
persisting objects*. Here the objects are active alignments continuously re-achieved, not persisting
substances; the cut is a chosen boundary × timescale × scope, not a given; and the relations that
matter are *constitution across cuts* (parts constitute an object; a level constrains the one below,
emerges into the one above), not efficient causation between objects at one level. Within a single cut
at a single timescale, ordinary cause and effect still works (this release causes that response); it
is the *objects of interest* — synapse, alignment, assembly — that live at the intersection of cuts,
where between-object causation is not the operative relation. There are affinities here with the
scale-relative parts of modern physics — the renormalization group, non-equilibrium thermodynamics,
effective field theory, all of which make descriptions depend on the scale of the cut — but those do
not *solve* this system (see the acceleration survey: they lack the invariants it refuses to hold);
they only point in the right *direction*, toward descriptions that are cut-relative rather than
absolute. The descriptive consequence — that each real object is an object-under-a-cut, partial by
construction — is developed in the companion document on the unexpressed objects.

Everything below is what this self-writing physics *is* (Part II) and how it works, category by
category (Part III).

---

# PART II — The Unifying Principle

Watch one presynaptic bouton for a day and a night. By day it releases neurotransmitter, restocks
its vesicles so it can release again, and — in the quiet after a burst — stocks a trace that records
how much this release mattered. By night it does the same three things at a slower tempo: it changes
its structure, restocks the material to change again, and replays the release as a probe to measure
whether the change is still warranted. Nothing supervises it. It reads only its own state and the
signals that reach it. What we call the synapse, the neuron, the memory, the organism is nowhere
inside the bouton — it is only the name we give to many such boutons, coupled.

That is the whole model in one instance. Stated generally:

> **There is only the local component and its one repeating act. Everything we call a system — the
> synapse, the neuron, the assembly, the organism — is that act, multiplied and coupled, and
> described from outside. The act has one shape (act, recover, prepare) run in two directions
> (outward by day, inward by night), and the relations between components are set by what is scarce.
> Holism is real, but it is enacted by the coupling, never encoded in any part.**

This is why the model is a generator rather than a fixed object (Part I): because the specification
is never encoded in any part but enacted by the running, it is rewritten by that running, so no fixed
model exists — only the rule and the history.

Every category in Part III is this principle, turned to face one question: *What is a component?*
(locality), *What is its act?* (the ring), *What are its two directions?* (the two turnings), *At
what speeds does it act?* (the ladder), *How does it get and spend what is scarce?* (participation
under scarcity), *Who is in charge?*
(causation — no one), and *By what operations is the local multiplied and coupled into a describable
whole?* (the four operations). None adds a new assumption; each specializes the one above.

A note on language. This document does not say "the system." There is no system — only local
components, contextualized by their neighbors. Where the phrase appears, it is inside quotation
marks, naming the thing we are denying: an actor that stands above the parts, holds the whole, and
acts on it. No such actor exists here.

---

# PART III — What the Physics Is, and How It Works

---

## 1. Locality — The Only Thing That Exists Is a Local Component

Everything the model contains is a local component: the bouton, the spine, the astrocytic process,
the dendrite, the soma, the axon. The actors we call higher — neuron, astrocyte, organism — are not
additional things. They are descriptions of many components' coupled activity, spoken from outside.
This is the direct reading of the unifying principle, and the rest of the category is its mechanics.

**A component reads only its own state and the signals that arrive.** It cannot read another
component's interior, and it cannot read "the whole." When the bouton needs to know whether its
release reached a responsive target, it does not inspect the spine; it waits for a retrograde signal
the spine emitted. Coordination is never achieved by a component consulting a global state, because
there is no global state to consult. It is achieved by signals crossing between components, each
read locally and made to mean something by the local context that receives it.

**Everything emits; nothing is a pure sink.** A component that only consumed would be invisible to
the rest and could not participate in coordination. Even the leaves of the daytime chain — the
bouton, the spine — emit: by day they emit fatigue upward and retrograde messages laterally; by
night they emit freed material into the shared pool and demand upward. To exist in the model is to
be readable, and to be readable is to emit.

**Behavior is legible: acting leaves a readable mark, sent or not.** What a component emits is not
always an intended message. Some emissions are *signals* — sent to be read (glutamate, the
retrograde messages, D-serine). Others are *traces* — the physical residue of acting, read by
others though never "sent": spillover glutamate is the consequence of a bouton releasing more than
the cleft can clear, and that overrun is itself information about the bouton's power. There are no
silent acts. Acting and informing are inseparable, because behavior displaces the shared medium and
the displacement is readable. This is why coordination needs no broadcast of intent: a component
that simply behaves is already legible to whoever shares its medium.

**Meaning is assigned by the reader, not carried by the signal.** A signal is a physical fact — a
molecule, a voltage, an overrun. It has no intrinsic meaning; its meaning is fixed by the local
context that reads it. The same endocannabinoid is a *brake* to the bouton (reduce release) and a
report of *postsynaptic excess* to the astrocytic process (a pressure cue for its own structural
control). The same nitric oxide is *confirmation to strengthen* for the bouton and *this coincidence
was real, keep the capacity* for the astrocyte. The same spillover is *lost transmitter* to no one
and *my presynapse has outgrown my volume* to the astrocyte. One emission, many readers, many
meanings — and none of the readers consults the others to agree on the meaning. This is the locality
principle at the level of semantics: because no component can read another's interior, all it ever
has is the shared physical facts, which it must interpret unilaterally. Coordination is achieved
without shared meaning — each component reads the common medium and assigns its own.

**Coupling is openness, and openness is bounded.** A component is open — it takes in signals and
supply, gives out signals and product — but its openness is bounded by what it can physically
reach: its own cleft, its own supply lines, the neighbors it is wired to. It is neither sealed (that
would make coordination impossible) nor unbounded (that would make it the whole). The bounded
openness is what lets many local components compose into something we can describe as a whole
without any of them being that whole.

**Holism is real but only described.** The re-evoked pattern at night, the neuron's total activity,
the memory a synapse carries — these are real. But they are not stored anywhere. The pattern is not
in any component; it is what happens when many primed components ignite each other. The neuron's
"excitability" is not computed by anyone; it is the coincidence of many components' own lowered
thresholds. Holism is enacted by the coupling and read off by us as observers — it is never encoded
in a part, because if it were, that part would be the system, and there is no system.

**A component cannot be contextualized by a context it emits — so initiators self-trigger.** A
*context* is a signal one component emits for others to read (a spike delivered or not, a train
present or not). Locality has a consequence for contexts that is easy to miss: a component cannot
consume its own emission as its context. It would be reading its own interior, which locality forbids;
and it is circular — a component that fires does not need to be told it fired, it *is* the firing. So
what a component emits (the soma emits AP and REFRACTORY) is its *output*, never its own context. This
splits components in two:

- A **responder** (the spine, the perisynaptic process, the relays) has a deed that is a *response to
  an arrival*, so an external context licenses even its ACTION: glutamate present, a spike arriving.
  It consumes a context to act.
- An **initiator** (the soma) fires from *its own* integration crossing *its own* threshold. Nothing
  external licenses its action; it runs continuously and the alternation between acting and recovering
  is decided by its internal condition. It emits its phases (AP, REFRACTORY) as contexts *for others*,
  and cannot itself be contextualized by them, since it is their source.

So the emission structure is the inverse of the consumption structure: initiators generate the
contexts that responders consume. And one category is exempt from this split — PREPARATION always
faces outward and upward, toward the next act and the other scope, so even an initiator is
externally contextualized *for its preparation* (the neuron, tracking the sustained absence of soma
spikes that the soma cannot know from inside, emits the quiet context that licenses it). A component
self-triggers its own deed; it is told, from above, only when it has been idle long enough to prepare.

---

## 2. The Ring — One Act in Three Phases

The local component's act has one shape, and it is the same shape everywhere: **ACTION, RECOVERY,
PREPARATION.** This is the specialization of the principle to the question *what is the act?*

**The three phases.**
- **ACTION** is the component's defining deed — the thing that makes it the component it is. The
  bouton releases; the soma fires; the spine responds; the axon and dendrite propagate. Action is
  the only phase that spends irreversibly and reaches outside the component.
- **RECOVERY** is the fast alter-ego of action: it restores the capacity to act again. Vesicles
  refill, sodium channels de-inactivate, calcium clears. Recovery undoes the local depletion the
  action caused, so a next action is possible. It looks backward — it repairs what was just spent.
- **PREPARATION** shapes what comes next. It faces two futures at once: the next action in this same
  scope, and the action of the *other* scope. Setting the release machinery for the next spike is
  preparation for this scope; stocking the tag that the night will spend is preparation for the
  other. Preparation is provisioning, not judging — which is why the old "evaluation" phase was a
  misnomer and has been retired. Depositing a trace does not render a verdict; it lays down a
  provision that a later phase may or may not draw on. What we once called evaluation was always
  preparation aimed at the other scope.

**The rhythm is (ACTION ⇄ RECOVERY) × many, then PREPARATION — then again.** The act is not one pass
through three phases. Action and recovery alternate rapidly — a tight inner loop, release-and-restock
many times over — and only when that alternation subsides does preparation run, punctuating the
bout and setting up the next. A spike train is exactly this: release ⇄ refill, release ⇄ refill,
then, in the sustained quiet, the preparation that stocks the tag and tunes the next train. The
inner loop is fast; preparation is the slower punctuation.

**Every category spans all three timescales.** The three phases are not three speeds. Each phase is
a kind of work — deed, restore-capacity, provision — and each kind happens fast, medium, and slow.
Preparation especially is multi-timescale: it contains a fast loop (probe and restock), a medium
adjustment (tuning the release machinery from the tag), and a slow settling. A category names *what
kind* of work, never *how fast*.

**Action is always local; recovery and preparation may be contextual.** A component necessarily has
its own action — the deed just is the local event occurring in it, and it cannot be performed on
another's behalf (that would be signalling, not acting). But the recovery and preparation of an
action can live in other components. A calcium channel's action is letting calcium in; its
recovery-and-preparation live in the presynapse and above. So the ring is a property of *coupled
components*, not of the individual: **the ring must close — every action recovered from and prepared
for — but no single component need run all three phases itself.** What is necessary is the closing
of the ring, not its co-location.

**The three categories are the three modulable dimensions of behavior — which is why the synapse has
three parts.** Ask what about a behavior can be changed, and there are exactly three answers: *how
hard* (intensity), *how soon again* (timing), and *where* (spatial extent — which connections exist,
how isolated they are). These are not an arbitrary list; they are the three categories seen from
outside. Intensity is the magnitude of the ACTION — a bigger release is a bigger deed. Timing is set
by RECOVERY — how fast the capacity to act is restored *is* the temporal window and the readiness
for the next deed. Space is set by PREPARATION — which structure is built or pruned is the
configuration future action will run on. To modulate a dimension is to modulate the corresponding
phase; there is nothing to change about a behavior except its three phases, so there are exactly
three dimensions, in one-to-one correspondence.

This is why the synapse is tripartite and not bipartite. Three separable dimensions want three
independent controllers, and the parties divide them: the presynapse owns the clean intensity knob
(how much it releases), the postsynapse owns sensitivity (how strongly it responds), and the
astrocytic process owns timing and space (its clearance sets how fast transmitter is cleared —
shorter dwell, sharper temporal window — and its coverage sets spillover and isolation). A
two-party synapse could set intensity but could not independently sharpen timing or bound space;
the third party exists precisely to control the dimensions the two coinciding parties cannot. In the
category language, the astrocytic process is the *recovery-and-preparation* specialist of the synapse
— it owns how-soon and where — while the pre and post are *action* specialists — they own how-hard.
The tripartite structure and the three-phase act are therefore two expressions of one three-way
partition: three phases of the deed, three dimensions of what can be changed, three parties to
change them.

The correspondence is not perfectly symmetric, and the asymmetry is instructive. Intensity and
timing each have a *live* mode — they are modulated moment to moment by the action and the recovery —
and also a *provisioned* mode, the persistent ceiling on them, set slowly. Space has no live mode: a
connection cannot be added mid-behavior; spatial structure is inherently slow. So preparation owns
space outright and also sets the ceilings for intensity and timing, while action and recovery hold
the live knobs. This is why "evaluation" was never a fourth category — there is no fourth dimension
for it to modulate. Behavior has three modulable dimensions; the act has three phases; a would-be
fourth phase would have nothing to change, which is exactly why it collapsed into preparation.

---

## 3. The Two Turnings — Day and Night

The one ring is turned in two directions. This specializes the principle to *what are the
component's two scopes?* — and it is where the model's deepest duality lives.

**Two contextualizations, two currencies.** By day the component faces outward, against the world
(the cleft); its currency is information — cheap, gathered passively, and non-rival (see category 5).
By night it faces inward, against the economy; its currency is material and energy — scarce,
conserved, and rival. The component does not know it is in "day" or "night" as a global state; each
turning simply runs against whatever environment is present, and the environment differs.

**The rotation: the same physical event is a different phase in each scope.** This is the sharpest
form of the duality. Neurotransmitter release is the day's ACTION — the outward deed. The *same
release*, run at night, is PREPARATION: the component releases not to transmit but as a probe, to
replay a behavior and measure how much it participates in the re-evoked pattern. And the structural
change, which the day can only *mark* (the tag is an inert claim pointing at a restructuring that
never happens by day), is the night's ACTION — its irreversible defining deed. So the defining act
of one scope is the measuring-instrument of the other: release is day-action / night-preparation;
restructuring is night-action / day-inert-mark. The scopes do not merely run the ring in two
directions — they swap which event is the deed and which is the provisioning. Because it is a ring,
each scope simply enters at a different phase.

**Night PREPARATION replays the day ACTION — the same machinery.** Because preparation-at-night is a
*replay* of the behavior, it runs the very code the day action runs: the same release, the same
capacity and vesicle checks, the same endurance deposit into the *same* trace. Endurance discovered
in replay is as real as endurance discovered in behaving. Only two things differ: there is no
dopamine (significance is already settled), and the released transmitter is a probe — it carries the
pattern onward to the next component and its own trace is read as participation. The action machinery
is written once and serves as the deed by day and the measurement by night.

**The tag is the payload that crosses between the turnings; the fatigue loop is the switch.** Each
scope's PREPARATION mints what the other scope will consume. Day-preparation mints the tag — a
token of confirmed significance — which the night spends on structure. Night-preparation measures
participation, which gates that spending. The tag is one token with three roles: by day it is the
significance bridge; at night it lowers the component's own threshold so its pattern can re-ignite,
and it funds the build, a slice at a time. Distinct from this payload handoff is the *switch* — the
fatigue loop that decides *when* a component crosses between scopes. Activity accrues fatigue; a
single continuous integrator (the one actor that never sleeps) reads the aggregate fatigue and emits
a pressure; when a component's own activity falls and pressure is high, it crosses into night; when
pressure discharges, it crosses back. No scheduler; no clock. The switch says *when* to turn; the
tag says *what* crosses when it turns. One ring, two turnings, stitched by the tag and switched by
fatigue.

**Two independent forgettings.** Because night ACTION is build ⇄ release (category 5), two distinct
things can be lost, by two distinct mechanisms. *Structural pruning* sheds built structure a
component no longer uses — driven by low participation, regardless of any tag it holds. *Intention
decay* is the tag itself decaying unspent — a planned strengthening that never found the
participation to license it. The tag is patient: it is sliced by building and never touched by
releasing, so it survives across non-participating cycles and cashes in when its pattern finally
re-evokes. Disuse prunes structure; unspent intention fades on its own slow clock. The two are
independent, and both are forgetting.

---

## 4. The Timescale Ladder

Orthogonal to the ring is the ladder of timescales. This specializes the principle to *at what
speeds does the component act?* The ring says *what kind* of work; the ladder says *how fast*; they
compose — every phase of the ring occurs at every rung of the ladder.

**The rungs.** FAST (milliseconds to seconds): the immediate trace a single action leaves. MEDIUM
(seconds to minutes): occupancy and evidence — the running average of fast traces, and the
eligibility climbing toward a tag. SLOW (hours): the tag, the consolidation bridge. PERSISTENT
(written only at night): the structural ceilings, and the two conserved stocks — energy, which does
not return, and material, which does.

**A tier's timescale is set by both its creation and its decay.** A fast trace is deposited as a
point event and relaxes in milliseconds. A medium trace ramps while a condition holds and settles
over minutes. The timescale is not a label attached to a variable; it is the joint consequence of
how the variable is written and how it fades. This is why the same climb appears in every component:
each action leaves a fast trace; the average of fast traces over seconds fills occupancy (short-term
strength); the average of that average over minutes, gated by dopamine, raises the tag. Occupancy is
the fast-and-medium memory of participation; the tag is its slow, validated distillate.

**Evidence ascends the ladder; capacity descends it.** By day, information climbs from fast trace to
tag — evidence accumulating upward. By night, capacity is written downward from the tag into
persistent structure. Each rung also has its own failure meaning, set by its timescale: a fast pool
running dry is transient depression; a medium pool constrained is a standing endurance need; a
persistent ceiling reached is a structural limit. Depletion and recovery at each rung mirror the
creation and decay of its trace — the same timescale governs both the evidence and the capacity at
that level.

---

## 5. Participation Under Scarcity — The Allocation Loop

How components relate, what gets consolidated, and why the two scopes have the character they do all
follow from one deeper thing: a scarce resource, allocated by past participation, spent on present
participation, traced, and feeding the next allocation. This is the system's economy, and it is a
single self-reinforcing loop that never stops — it only alternates which resource and which arena is
active. Several principles once stated separately are facets of it.

**The loop.** In each scope a component holds a *limited resource*; it receives that resource in
proportion to how it *participated before*; it *spends* it participating now; that participation is
*traced*; and the trace determines its *next* allocation. Round and round:

> **resource (scarce) → allocated by past participation → spent on present participation → traced →
> allocates the next resource.**

By **day** the resource is the component's action budget (vesicles, ions, fuel); it is allocated by
the structure prior nights built (a stronger synapse acts more); it is spent acting in the world; the
acting is traced (fast trace → tag). By **night** the resource is the component's own energy store; it
is allocated by the tags the prior day earned (more tag, more energy, more chance to take part — but
all must participate); it is spent participating in the replayed circuits, drawing the store down until
the component gives way and another circuit surfaces; the participation is traced. Then day's trace
(tags) allocates night's energy, and night's trace (what was strengthened) allocates day's future
action — the two runs of the loop are coupled, each feeding the other. It is one loop, run on two
resources in two arenas, coupled end to end.

**Why scarcity is what makes participation informative.** This is the heart. If the resource were
unlimited, every component would participate in everything and participation would carry no signal —
there would be nothing to learn from "did you take part," because everyone always would. The *limit*
is what makes participation a real choice under constraint, and therefore evidence. So scarcity is not
a mere constraint to be worked around; it is the *condition of the signal*. What consolidates, at
every scale and in both scopes, is simply **what participated when participating cost something**.
Strengthening is nothing but the persistent record of costly participation.

**Rivalry of the resource sets the relation — collaboration by day, competition by night.** The loop's
*mode* depends on whether the resource is shareable. By day the currency is information, which is
*non-rival*: a bouton releasing glutamate does not use up the spine's ability to receive it. When
producing for others costs nothing, the relation is **collaboration** — each component acts so the
next can act, co-producing the pattern and the tags. By night the currency is energy and material,
which are *rival and conserved*: every unit one component draws is a unit another cannot. When what one
takes another loses, the relation is **competition** — components contend for the shared pool. This is
the old "scarcity decides the mode," now seen as one facet of the allocation loop: the rivalry of the
resource sets whether present participation is shared or contended.

**But the competition is adjudicated by collaboration.** The replay that arbitrates the night's
contest is itself collaborative: a pattern re-evokes only if every component along its loop is primed
and ignites the next — mechanical coherence, one un-primed link breaking it. Participation — the
measure that gates who consolidates — *is* a measure of successful collaboration in that re-enactment.
So a component earns its share of the scarce material in proportion to how well it collaborated in
replaying the pattern. Collaboration is primary in both scopes: by day it *produces* the shared,
non-rival good; by night it *adjudicates* the contention for the rival one. The register is economic,
not martial — components contend for a conserved resource, and the contention is settled fairly by a
collaborative criterion.

**Two readings of participation: precision and stamina.** Because participation-under-scarcity is the
one currency of consolidation, the two things a memory must be — well-aimed and durable — are two
readings of it, not two mechanisms. **Strength** is participation in the *significance* sense: did the
component take part in what mattered (the reward-gated tag, at the significance-deciding sites). It is
precision — aligning well. **Endurance** is participation in the *sustained* sense: could the component
keep taking part under load (the homeostatic need, everywhere). It is stamina — aligning long. One is
dopamine-gated and local to the sites that decide significance; the other is load-driven and universal.
But both are participation under a scarce resource, and both consolidate by the same loop; they are the
precision and the stamina of a single project, not separate pathways bolted together.

**Two competitions at two loci** (the night's internal structure). *Within* a component, build and
release contend over its own structure, arbitrated by participation: high participation builds (funded
by tag and material), low participation releases (freeing material), between holds. *Between*
components, this one and its peers contend for the shared pool during recovery. The internal tension
(grow or shrink?) is settled by the replayed participation; the external (can I get material?) by
contention with neighbours. Selection under scarcity is the sum: what survives a night has both earned
its tag by day and won its material by night. Selection is not a judge's verdict; it is what scarcity
leaves standing.

**Two conserved currencies, two rules of flow** (the substrate the loop runs on). Energy ratchets: it
is spent irreversibly, the arrow of time in the model — burned into structure, it does not return.
Material circulates: freed by one component, reclaimed by another, conserved as it moves. The night's
finite pool of both is what forces the competition; the day's non-rival information is what permits the
collaboration. The character of each scope is set by the conservation law of its resource.

**Why the two scopes have the shape they have — the loop run twice.** The two-stroke rhythm of day and
night is the allocation loop run in two arenas and coupled: the day gathers evidence (spends action
budget, traces tags), the night consolidates it (spends energy, traces strengthening), and each
allocates the other's next resource — day's tags buy night's energy, night's structure buys day's
action. And the loop's own dynamics give the night its shape: early night, on unbuilt structure, the
energy is spent fast on circuits that break (short replay); late night, on consolidated structure, the
same energy sustains many completing circuits swept in turn (long replay). The night lengthens its
replay as it builds the structure that lets participation last — the shape of the night is the progress
of consolidation made visible, and it too falls out of participation under scarcity.

---


## 6. Causation Circulates — Emergence Up, Constraint Down, Command Nowhere

The final category specializes the principle to *who is in charge?* — and the answer is no one.
Causation moves in two directions across the coupling, and neither is command.

**Emergence ascends; constraint descends.** By day, evidence and activity emerge upward: components
act locally, and their emitted activity is what a higher description (the neuron, the assembly) is
*made of*. Nothing reaches down to make them act. By night, constraint descends: a higher actor
broadcasts a bound — a renormalization target, a downscale factor — but it does not reach in. It
emits a signal; each component reads that signal and scales *itself*. The neuron never edits a
synapse; it announces a total, and the synapses each renormalize their own structure against it.

**No actor authorizes its own restructuring.** A component cannot open its own night. It is *put in
position* by the actor above — which holds an aggregate the component cannot see and opens a window
the component cannot open — and then, within that window, the component acts locally on its own
state. The soma cannot decide within the soma which of its synapses matter; the synapses decide that
locally, by their own thresholds. And the synapses cannot ignite their pattern alone; the soma's
firing does that. Each is put in position by the other; neither reads the other's interior. This is
the recursive grant: act locally, be enabled hierarchically.

**Command is nowhere.** There is no actor that both holds the whole and acts on it — that would be
the system, and there is no system. What looks like top-down control is always a broadcast constraint
scaled locally; what looks like bottom-up assembly is always local emission summed from outside. The
neuron that "renormalizes" only announces a number. The assembly that "replays" is only coincident
local thresholds propagating through coupling. Causation circulates — up as emergence, down as
constraint — but it never concentrates into command. This is the unifying principle in its final
form: because there is only the local component and its one act, there is no one to be in charge, and
the whole is enacted by the parts, never encoded above them.

---

## 7. The Four Operations — How the Local Is Multiplied Into a Whole

The six categories describe what a component is and does. This one is a different cut: it asks by
what *operations* the local is coupled into something we can describe as a whole. There are four —
integrate, coincide, broadcast, inject — and together they are the entire vocabulary by which scale
is crossed. The previous category named the two *directions* of causation; this one names the
*mechanisms*, and adds the two the directional view misses.

**Integrate — make the distributed present.** A quantity spread over time or space has no
instantaneous local existence. Flow is nowhere emitted; it is the accumulation of many releases
across a duration. Frequency is not present at any instant — a single spike has no rate; rate lives
only in the relation between events separated in time. Total activity is not held by any component;
it is the sum over many. The system reads none of these directly — it *cannot*, because they are not
anywhere. It reads them by **transducing the distributed into a store whose instantaneous level is
the quantity's present shadow.** The fast trace is the device: each event deposits a quantum, the
store leaks, and its standing level encodes recent frequency — high when deposits outran decay, low
when they did not. Spatial integration does the same across space: the dendrite summing its spines,
the soma summing its dendrites, the astrocyte summing its processes each make a spatially-distributed
quantity locally present at one site. This is how a distributed system verifies what is expressed
nowhere and by no one: it never reads the quantity, it reads the store the quantity filled. And it is
how the whole "knows" what no part knows — not by computing, but by *being the place where the parts
accumulate*.

Time itself is read this way. The system has no clock; it does not count duration. Time enters only
as the *decay* of stores — "how long ago" is how far a trace has fallen, "how fast" is how high it
stands against its leak. Time is not represented; it is suffered, and the store's level is the
readout. Every leaky store is a little clock that keeps time by forgetting rather than by counting.

**Coincide — read several present-made stores at one site, and get an event.** Integration produces
quantities; coincidence produces *events* — the meaningful happenings the components act on. And nothing
significant is caused by a single signal: significance is always the co-occurrence of several. The
postsynaptic calcium event requires glutamate and depolarization and the astrocytic gain together;
the tag requires accumulated eligibility and validation together; the night's build requires a
standing tag and confirmed participation together; the astrocytic spike requires many processes'
calcium together. A coincidence is *two or more stores being high at the same instant* — which can
only be read where all of them are present. So every coincidence needs a **meeting-site that owns
none of the signals it compares**: the site where the transduced-present stores overlap. This is why
the synapse is tripartite (the coincidence detector needs a third input neither coinciding party
owns), and the pattern recurs at every level — each has its coincidence and its meeting-site.
Integration makes the distributed present; coincidence reads several presences together. They are one
mechanism in two steps: transduce, then compare.

**Broadcast — distribute one state to many, without addresses.** The third operation sends a single
state outward to a whole population at once: the back-propagating spike to all a soma's spines, the
action potential to all its boutons, the renormalization to all a neuron's synapses, the priming
field and the calcium spike to all an astrocyte's processes. Broadcast is the descending partner of
integration, and like integration it is *addressless* — integration destroys location by summing
(the sum does not say which input), broadcast destroys it by spraying (the signal does not select
which target). Neither is a message from one component to another specific component; there is no
addressed communication across scale, only summation up and spraying down. Crucially, almost every
broadcast is **endogenous and reflective**: it carries a quantity integrated from the components' own
locals and sends back down. The back-propagating spike carries "the soma fired," which is the
integral of dendritic input, reflected to the spines. The renormalization carries the integrated
total weight. These are top-down in delivery but bottom-up in origin — the components talking to themselves
across scales, closing the loop that integration opened.

**Inject — import the one thing that cannot be built from within.** Reward is different, and the
difference is not its direction. It, too, descends as a broadcast, like the spike and the
renormalization — so top-down delivery is not what sets it apart. What sets it apart is its *origin*:
every other broadcast reflects a quantity assembled from the components' own activity, but no amount
of integrating the components' own activity can produce whether the behavior was *good for the organism in
its world*. That fact is exogenous — it comes from outside the components' own self-talk, from the
organism's encounter with its environment. Reward is the single channel by which information that
could not have been integrated from below enters the coupling at all. This is the precise sense in
which it is the opposite of integration: not top-down versus bottom-up, but **exogenous versus
endogenous** — a global that is *irreducible to* the locals, against a global that is *made of* them.
And it is necessary, because significance is defined at the organism's scale: locality can compute
what happened (activity, load, coincidence) but never whether it mattered, so that verdict must be
injected. The tag is exactly the meeting-site where endogenous evidence (eligibility, built from
local activity) coincides with this exogenous value — consolidation is the marriage of the components'
self-knowledge to the world's verdict, and it is the one place the model reaches outside itself.

So four operations, and they divide cleanly: integration makes *quantities* (by transducing the
distributed into present stores, time included, as decay); coincidence makes *events* (by reading
several such stores at a site that owns none of them); broadcast *distributes* (mostly the components'
own integrated state, reflected back down, addresslessly); injection *imports* the one global —
organism-in-world value — that no integration could produce. The first two build meaning from the
inside; the third circulates it; the fourth admits the one thing meaning cannot be built from within.

---

## Coda — The Seven as One, and the Why Beneath Them

Read downward, the seven categories are one principle refracted seven ways. A component is local
(1); its act has one shape, the ring (2); the ring turns in two directions, day and night (3), at
every rung of the timescale ladder (4); a scarce resource is allocated by past participation and spent
on present participation, so that what consolidates is what took part when taking part cost something,
collaboratively where the resource is free and competitively where it is conserved (5); causation
circulates between components without ever concentrating into command (6); and the local is
multiplied into a describable whole by four operations — integrate, coincide, broadcast, inject —
none of which is a component reading another's interior (7). Remove any one and the principle loses a
facet; none stands apart from it.

And all seven serve the why of Part I. Each is a way the specification refuses to sit still in any
part: locality forbids a global copy; the ring builds structure from behavior and behavior from
structure; the two turnings make the night rewrite what the day runs; scarcity makes the rewriting
irreversible and history-locked; causation-without-command leaves no controller to hold a fixed
program; the four operations cross scale only by summing and spraying, never by encoding the whole
anywhere. Together they are why there is no fixed model to run — only the rule and the history. There
is only the local component and its one repeating act; everything else is that act, multiplied,
coupled, and described from outside — and because it is only ever *enacted*, never *encoded*, it must
be lived to be known.
