# Logic Principles of the Tripartite Synapse Model

These are the principles that govern the model's logic — not the syntax in which it is
expressed, but the reasoning that shapes every variable, every behavior, every transition.

A note on language. This document does not say "the system." There is no system — only local
components, each reading arrived signals and acting on its own state. "System," "whole,"
"network," "the organism's memory" are names applied from outside, by us, describing what
coupled local components do together. The first principle states this; the rest honor it by
never speaking in the voice of a whole that does not exist. Where a sentence seems to want "the
system does X," it is rewritten as "local components, contextualized thus, do X locally" —
because the form of the document should enact its central claim, that locality goes all the way
down and all the way up, with no privileged vantage anywhere inside.

The nine categories run foundation-first. The closing category — the Three-Phase Ring — is the
integrator: it shows how a single cycle of ACTION, EVALUATION, and PREPARATION, run locally by
every component and turned in two directions (outward by DAY, inward by NIGHT), is where all the
flows the earlier categories describe actually happen in time. It comes last because it uses
everything established before it. Its sharpest claim: a phase is a *role*, not a fixed event, so
the same physical machinery — a release, a structural change — serves as ACTION in one scope and
EVALUATION in the other, and the two scopes enter the ring at different phases. A vocabulary note
on motion: causation *circulates* across scales (category VI); the ring *turns* across phases
(category IX). Two different loops, two different words, kept distinct.

---

## I. There Is No System; Holism Is Real but Only Described

**There is no system — only local components.** Nowhere in the model is there a controller, a
global plan, a representation of the whole, or a vantage from which the whole is seen. There are
only components, each reading the signals that physically reached it and acting on its own state.
Every behavior is local; every evaluation uses only local state and arrived signals; every trace
is a local record; every commitment a local draw on a shared pool. "System" is our word for the
aggregate, spoken from outside. No component is the system, occupies its standpoint, or can read
it — not the smallest bouton and not the highest integrating actor.

**And yet what we describe as holism is real.** Memory, rhythm, selection, consolidation,
sparsification — these are real behaviors, not illusions. The puzzle is that they are real
without any whole existing to bear them. The resolution: they are *enacted* by coupled locals,
never *encoded* in any one of them or in any representation. The holism is in the doing — the
ongoing competitive, signal-mediated, scope-alternating process of many local components — not
in any part and not in any model the parts contain.

**What couples the locals is what we then describe as a whole.** Three couplings do all the work.
*Shared pools*: the only thing every component touches is the finite resource it competes for;
when one draws, the others have less, when one returns, the others have more — local actions
become mutually consequential through a common, capped resource. *Cross-scale coincidence*: a
lasting change requires confirmations from larger scales that no component can produce for itself,
so every lasting change records an agreement across scales that no single scale authored.
*Signals*: components cannot read each other, but they emit and receive, so they are coupled
without any one gaining access to another's interior. Through these three, purely local action
acquires what we describe — from outside — as global organization.

**The properties we call holistic belong to no component.** Rhythm, equilibrium, memory, the
joint selection for significance-and-sustainability — none exists in any single component. They
are descriptions of the coupled population over the DAY/NIGHT alternation. The gap between "what
a component knows" (only its own state) and "what we describe the population as doing" (choosing
what to keep) is not bridged by any component knowing more. It is bridged by the coupling itself.
Understanding, here, is enacted, not encoded — and "the system understanding" is only ever our
shorthand for coupled locals enacting, faithfully local at every step, holistic only in our
description.

**Even the cycle is local.** Each component runs its own three-phase ring (category IX), its
phase boundaries set by its own trace decays, not by any shared clock. There is no global cycle
any more than a global controller — only many local rings, loosely coupled through shared pools
and signals, which we describe together as "the rhythm." The turning is real in each component;
the collective rhythm is our description of many local turnings.

---

## II. Two Contextualizations, and the Loop Between Them

**DAY and NIGHT are not two phases of a system; they are two contextualizations of the same
local components.** A component does one kind of thing always: it reads arrived signals and acts
on local state. What changes between DAY and NIGHT is the *context* that fixes what those signals
mean, who the component's counterparties are, and what is scarce. By "DAY" we name the
contextualization in which the relevant environment is the external world and the component's
information is about exogenous events. By "NIGHT" we name the contextualization in which the
relevant environment is the internal economy and the information is about endogenous
resource-state. The component cannot tell which it is in — it has no access to "the scope" any
more than to "the system." It reads local signals, and context makes them mean what they mean.

**Each contextualization has its own environment and its own information.** NIGHT is not the
absence of an environment — it is interaction redirected from the world to the self. By day a
component interfaces outward, perceiving sensory-driven events and reward; by night it interfaces
inward, perceiving how much resource reached it, what its peers are claiming, what coheres. Both
are full perceive-act loops against a real environment. Resource levels and demand-signals are
the night's perceptual field exactly as glutamate and dopamine are the day's. "Internal" and
"external" are relative to the subject one fixes; from a component's own standpoint there is only
"my environment" — the signals reaching me — which happens to be the world by day and the economy
by night.

**A component is thus two contextualizations sharing one structure.** By day it is an
environmental interface; by night an economic agent. The two share only the structure, and the
structure is exactly what carries between them: the night-agent builds the ceiling the day-
interface will operate within, and the day-interface generates the evidence (the tag) that
authorizes the night-agent to build. The tag is information becoming a resource-claim at the
boundary — the single unit that crosses from the day's information-context to the night's
resource-context.

**The move between the two is an emergent local transition, not an imposed clock.** There is no
global day/night switch. Each component enters its NIGHT when its own activity is low and an
arrived sleep-pressure signal is high, and returns to its DAY when that signal falls. Both
conditions are read locally — own activity, arrived signal — so the transition is itself a local
decision. Components therefore cross over at different times: a wave, not a switch (local sleep).
The signal that carries them is itself the product of locals: activity generates fatigue; fatigue,
integrated by one component (the hypothalamic actor) that does nothing but integrate fatigue and
emit pressure, raises sleep-pressure; high pressure plus a component's own quiet opens its
restructuring window; restructuring discharges fatigue; discharge lowers pressure; the component
re-enters DAY. DAY and NIGHT are the two phases of one homeostatic loop the local components run
on themselves — neither imposed from outside nor scheduled from above. The component never knows
it is "in NIGHT"; it reads a signal level and its own activity, and what results we call night.

**The mechanistic root of the alternation: behavior and restructuring exclude each other.** A
component cannot rebuild its structure while it is busy behaving — the two compete for the same
substrate. Only when its activity is low does it have the access to its own architecture that
restructuring requires. The brief low-activity gaps within a day permit small adjustments; the
sustained, widespread quiet that the sleep-pressure signal creates permits the large ones. NIGHT
is not an arbitrary time for consolidation — it is the condition under which consolidation is
*possible*, because quiet is what grants a component access to itself.

**Two distinct couplings join the scopes — do not conflate them.** The scopes are connected in
two independent ways. The *fatigue loop* is the **switch**: it controls *when* a component crosses
between DAY and NIGHT (activity → fatigue → sleep-pressure → transition), a purely temporal
control carrying no content. The *evaluation handoff* is the **payload**: it passes *what* each
scope leaves for the other (the tag minted by day's evaluation, consolidated by night; the
structure minted by night's evaluation, read by the next day — see category IX). One says when to
switch; the other says what crosses. A reader who merges them loses the fact that a component
could switch scopes with nothing to hand off (a quiet day leaves no tag) or hold a rich payload
that waits several switches to be honored (a tag consolidated over several nights). Switch and
payload are orthogonal.

---

## III. Locality and Signals

**Only local evaluation.** Every decision a component makes — to act, to deposit a trace, to
register an interrupted success — uses only information physically present in it. It cannot read
another component's interior. The presynapse does not know the postsynapse's calcium; the
dendrite does not know which distal spines are active; the astrosynapse does not know whether the
postsynapse is waiting. Each judges from its own state alone.

**A component cannot read the whole, either.** The completion of locality: not only can no
component read another's interior, none can read "the system," "the scope," or the global state.
There is no aggregate vantage available anywhere inside — not even to the integrating actors, who
read only the summed emissions that reached them and emit signals in turn, with no more access to
the whole than a bouton has. Locality holds up the hierarchy as strictly as across it.

**Cross-component influence travels only as signals that arrive and become local.** Information
crosses a boundary only by being emitted — feedforward transmission, retrograde messengers,
neuromodulatory and sleep-pressure broadcast, the demand and recycled resource of the night
economy. A signal in transit is invisible; a signal that has arrived is local and can be read.
Downstream reaches upstream by emitting; upstream never reaches into downstream. Every coupling
in the model is of this form — an emission that becomes, on arrival, another component's local
state.

**Everything emits; nothing is a pure sink.** No component only consumes. Each, whatever it
receives, emits something a neighbor will read — its transmitter, its retrograde feedback, its
fatigue, its demand, its recycled material, or simply its activity for an integrating actor to
sum. The direction of emission reverses with context (see the two Logic panels): outward and
downstream by day, inward and upstream by night. But the invariant holds in both — there are no
leaves and no sinks, only a reversal of which way "out" points.

---

## IV. Resource and Conservation

**Nothing is free.** Every behavior consumes a resource. There is no operation that does not draw
something down. This is not a constraint added on top of the logic — it is its foundation.
Selectivity, competition, and forgetting all follow from the single fact that resources are
finite.

**Resources are redistributed, not created.** The pools are bounded by external ceilings. Within
them, resource is only moved — from one site to another, from a dismantled structure back to the
pool. No internal process manufactures capacity; it only reallocates. A gain anywhere is paid for
by a loss elsewhere — coupling that is not designed but is the automatic consequence of drawing
from a common pool.

**Two resources, two conservation laws.** Energy is a flow — produced and consumed, gone after
use. Material is a stock — incorporated into structure and recovered when structure is dismantled.
Different sources, different recovery. A behavior can be energetically affordable yet materially
limited, or the reverse. Keeping them distinct is what makes the accounting honest.

**Material circulates; energy ratchets — energy is the one irreversible flow.** This is the sharp
form of the distinction, and it is the arrow of time. Material cycles indefinitely: spent into a
ceiling, recovered when that ceiling decays, returned to be spent again. Energy does not. It is
produced fresh at the roots, burned irreversibly on the work of building and behaving, never
recovered. Everything else cycles or relaxes — traces decay and reform, occupancy fills and
drains, material recycles — but energy only ever goes down per unit produced, capped externally by
glucose. The total learning the local components can ever do is bounded by their lifetime energy
throughput, and no internal cleverness lifts that bound. The irreversibility of energy is what
makes them age.

**Every economy has a single capped root.** Each resource traces to one producer with a hard
ceiling — the astrocyte cell body for synaptic energy, the soma for neuronal material. Everything
downstream competes for shares of that capped production. The ceiling is set from outside and is
the ultimate arbiter of how much can be done.

**Scarcity is what forces choice, and choosing is learning.** What is consolidated is the outcome
of bounded demand (the standing tags and endurance needs) meeting bounded supply (the energy and
material produced each night), and the match need not clear — a night may run out of energy before
it runs out of demand. Unmet demand is not discarded but carried forward and retried. The
selective pressure is, at bottom, this repeated failure of supply to fully meet demand: it is
*because* not everything can be afforded that there must be choosing, and the choosing is the
learning.

---

## V. The Timescale Ladder

The spine. Every quantity sits on one of four nested tiers, and timescale is not incidental to it
— timescale *is* its meaning.

**Four tiers.** FAST traces (ms–s): residual calcium, synaptic current — the immediate response.
MEDIUM occupancy and evidence (s–min): the filled receptor surface and channel coupling, the
accumulating possible-tag, the endurance need. The SLOW tag (hours): the validated bridge to
consolidation. PERSISTENT capacity (written only at night, drifting over days): the structure and
budget ceilings. A quantity's decay constant is what it means — a fast-decaying quantity is a
momentary signal, a slow one a commitment, a non-decaying one a capacity. Putting two timescales
in one variable destroys both meanings, which is why a quantity carrying both a momentary and a
lasting role is split into two.

**Capacity and occupancy are two rungs, not a separate principle.** What was once stated as
"night builds containers, day fills them" is simply this: the PERSISTENT tier is written at night
and bounds the MEDIUM tier, which fills by day within it. The same physical quantity — receptor
count, vesicle coupling, fuel level — has a fast/medium component (how full, occupancy) and a
persistent component (how big, capacity), governed by different processes at different tiers.
Short-term change is occupancy; long-term change is capacity; they never do each other's job.

**Two capacities, two drives, one pool.** Structure is the capacity for strength — how powerfully
a behavior can act. Budget capacity is the capacity for endurance — how long it can be sustained.
Both are persistent ceilings, both filled competitively at the medium tier, both drawn from the
same finite material and energy, so strength and endurance compete. A ceiling of either kind is
never free even by day: filling it costs a competitive share of a shared pool, and a high ceiling
makes a large standing claim satisfiable only by out-competing neighbors. Capacity that cannot be
filled is wasted.

**Structure shapes form, not just maximum.** A ceiling does not merely cap — it conditions the
transfer function at every moment. Tighter calcium-channel coupling makes each spike more reliably
coupled to release; more anchoring slots convert each pulse more faithfully to current; tonic
co-agonist keeps the gate primed. The persistent tier shapes the quality of behavior continuously,
not only its peak.

**The tiers are a ladder: each rung's output is the next rung's input, in both directions.**
*Evidence ascends* — fast traces accumulate into medium evidence, which bridges (on validated
coincidence) into the slow tag, which commits at night into persistent capacity; nothing reaches
a slower tier without accumulating through the faster ones. *Capacity descends* — persistent
structure bounds medium occupancy, which bounds fast behavior; the ceiling at each level was set
by the level above, on a slower timescale. Both the strength pathway (trace → possible-tag → tag
→ structure) and the endurance pathway (trace → endurance-need → budget ceiling) are the same
upward climb, differing only in what validates it: associative dopamine for strength, homeostatic
fuel-shortfall for endurance.

**A pool's recovery timescale is what its exhaustion means.** The ladder governs pools as well as
traces. A *fast* pool (the readily-releasable vesicle pool) depletes and recovers fast, so its
shortfall is transient — short-term depression, self-correcting once activity slows. A *medium*
pool (operational budget) recovers at the medium scale, so its shortfall is a standing constraint
worth recording as endurance evidence. *Persistent* capacity changes only at night, so its
"shortfall" is a structural limit unfixable in the day. This is why a behavior's failure mode can
be read off which pool ran dry: fast-pool exhaustion is depression, medium-pool exhaustion is
endurance evidence, persistent limit is structural. Depletion-and-recovery is the pool-side mirror
of creation-and-decay — drawn down by behaving, refilled toward a ceiling — and in both, the
timescale is the meaning.

**The ladder is structure; the ring is timing; they are orthogonal and they compose.** The ladder
(this category) is about *tiers of persistence* — which quantities last how long, and how capacity
descends while evidence ascends. The three-phase ring (category IX) is about *phases of a cycle* —
when a component acts, evaluates, and prepares. These are independent axes: one could have the
ladder without a cyclic ring (a pure feedforward hierarchy) or a ring without four tiers (a cycle
at one timescale). They compose in a specific way: the ring's phases are *where the ladder's flows
occur*. ACTION injects at the bottom of the ladder (deposits the fast trace). EVALUATION enacts
the up-flow (works the fast trace into medium evidence and the slow tag). PREPARATION enacts the
down-flow (reads the descended capacity as the readiness the next action runs within). So the two
pictures are not two names for one thing — the ladder says what persists, the ring says when each
persistence-flow happens, and evaluation-is-up / preparation-is-down is where they meet.

---

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

The model has causation in two directions, and the whole point is that they coexist without
either becoming control.

**Emergence flows up.** What we describe as global organization — sparsification, normalization,
winner-take-more, the allocation of fuel — is nowhere computed centrally. It emerges from many
local components drawing on shared pools. No allocator decides which synapses to fuel; the
synapses' own demands, each purely local, competing for capped production, produce the allocation.
No allocator exists; the allocation is real. The local emissions sum, through the pool, into an
aggregate no component authored.

**Constraint flows down.** An integrating actor holds an aggregate its constituents cannot see —
total weight, territory demand, accumulated fatigue — and broadcasts it back as a constraint each
constituent then interprets locally. The neuron, summing emitted activity it never reads interiors
to obtain, broadcasts a renormalization that each component applies to itself. This is top-down,
but it is constraint, not command: the higher actor sets a bound; the lower still decides locally
within it.

**Command exists nowhere.** This is the load-bearing claim. The downward direction never becomes a
higher component deciding for a lower one, nor a lower one deciding for itself in isolation. No
actor authorizes its own restructuring — each is put in the position to restructure by the actor
above it, which holds the aggregate it cannot see and opens the quiet window it cannot open, then
*broadcasts*, never reaching in. The soma cannot decide within the soma; it is put in position by
the neuron — which is itself put in position by the integrated fatigue, which is itself the sum of
what the components emitted. Causation circulates — up as emergence, down as constraint — and the
circle closes with no controller anywhere on it. Every integrating actor is itself only another
local component reading summed arrived signals; none is "the system" in disguise.

**The recursive grant repeats at every scale.** The relationship is the same all the way up: the
astrosynapse is put in position by the astrocyte; the soma, bouton, spine, branch, axon by the
neuron; the neuron and astrocyte by the hypothalamic fatigue signal; the synaptic strengthening by
the organism's dopamine and the assembly's replay. Each scale grants its constituents the
conditions they cannot grant themselves — an aggregate they cannot see, a window they cannot open —
and grants it by signal, never by reaching in. The hierarchy is real, the circulation is closed,
and at no point does it produce a seer of the whole or a commander of the parts.

**This cross-scale circulation enters each component's ring at a definite phase.** Causation
*circulates* across scales (this category); a component's ring *turns* across phases (category IX) —
two different loops. They meet at a definite point: the downward constraint arrives at the
component's PREPARATION phase, whose subject is precisely "what is handed down from above," and the
upward emergence departs as what the component emits during ACTION and commits during EVALUATION,
which sums into the aggregate the scale above will read. So the vertical arm of the cross-scale
circulation is lived, inside each component, as the vertical phase of its ring. The three subjects
of the ring (beside / self / above) are the three ways a component connects to everything else, and
each of the other categories' flows plugs into the phase whose subject matches it.

---

## VII. Selection and Asymmetry

**Building is the active drive; weakening is its shadow.** All the machinery is oriented toward
strengthening what is significant and sustaining what is fuel-limited. There is no symmetric
machinery for weakening. Weakening happens to whatever the building machinery did not select, as a
consequence of the resources building consumed. The orientation is toward learning; forgetting is
its cost.

**Depression is never explicit — it is what happens when building does not.** No signal says
"weaken this." Ceilings of both kinds decay continuously and are held up only by maintenance; when
building consumes the shared resource, unmaintained ceilings drift down. Depression is the absence
of maintenance, not the presence of a depression signal — and the same is true of lost endurance,
idle capacity removed for lack of use, and of occupancy, which drifts back the moment its driving
trace decays. In ring terms (category IX), this decay lives in the PREPARATION phase: weakening is
what preparation's settling does to whatever evaluation did not supply enough to maintain. There is
no weakening phase because weakening is un-honored decay inside the preparing phase.

**Validation enters from beyond the part; the part cannot validate itself.** A component cannot
know whether its own activity was significant — that information exists only at a larger scale and
arrives as a signal (the neuromodulatory broadcast for the organism's verdict, replay for the
assembly's). Cheap reversible change is autonomous; expensive lasting change requires authorization
that enters from outside the component being changed. This is why lasting change always records a
coincidence across scales: each scale confirms what the one below cannot know about itself.

**Strength is associative; endurance is homeostatic.** Strength requires significance — the
dopamine coincidence saying "this was worth saving." Endurance requires only that fuel, not
structure or significance, was the binding constraint on a forming success — it needs no external
validation, because metabolic sustainability is not the organism's to judge but the component's own
to register. Two independent criteria, and selection requires winning on both: activity without
significance is not saved; significance without sustainable fuel cannot be maintained. The
conjunction filters for connections both valuable and viable.

**Equilibrium is the residual of imperfection.** Where alignment or balance is reached, the success
removes the very signal that drove it, allowing slow drift back, which regenerates the signal. The
soma that aligns to its input rhythm stops generating the mismatch that aligned it, drifts, and
re-aligns. The component that builds enough endurance stops depleting, loses the signal, and lets
capacity decay until depletion returns. Each component hovers near its own optimum, never resting
there, corrected continuously by the small errors its own imperfect state produces. What we
describe as a stable population is the sum of these local never-quite-settlings.

---

## VIII. Coupling, Openness, and Boundedness

**Couplings create trajectories, not just states.** Some variables, once moved, make further
movement the same way easier — the astrosynapse wrapping tighter after potentiation, easing future
potentiation. These self-reinforcing couplings give momentum: components do not merely occupy
states, they follow trajectories, deepening whatever direction they have begun. The astrosynapse is
the strongest such coupling — the gain control that reshapes the input itself, amplifying whatever
trajectory a synapse is on.

**The same signal serves opposite functions through different receivers.** Glutamate spillover
brakes the presynapse while exciting the astrosynapse — one ligand, two receptor types, opposite
cascades, simultaneous opposite effects. Function is set by the receiver, not the signal. One event
coordinates several responses with no coordinating mechanism.

**Metabolic availability is a selective pressure parallel to validation.** Beyond the explicit
activity-and-reward gating, the bare availability of fuel continuously selects which components can
participate: one that cannot be fueled cannot generate the activity that would let it be tagged.
Metabolism silently shapes what can be learned, independent of and parallel to the plasticity
machinery.

**Finite and open, not infinite and closed.** The components are bounded and their state space is
bounded, and they receive inputs they cannot generate from within — sensory drive, neuromodulatory
and replay validation, metabolic supply. Because they are finite, their self-modification generates
no infinite regress. Because they are open, their highest validation comes from outside any
component being changed.

**The fixed points are explicit, not hidden.** The quantities the components cannot modify from
within — thresholds, the vascular ceiling, the neuromodulatory and replay signals — are declared as
given. They are the boundary with what the components did not set and cannot inspect. Making them
explicit is the honest acknowledgment that every self-modifying process operates within constraints
it did not choose. Correctness is never certified internally: whether a change was good is answered
by the organism's later experience in the world, fed back as signal. The fixed point lies outside —
the components act, the world responds, and the response, not any internal check, determines what
was worth keeping.

---

## IX. The Three-Phase Ring, and Its Two Turnings

This is the integrator. Everything above describes *what* flows — resource, evidence, constraint,
signals, capacity. This category describes *when*: the single cycle each local component turns,
and how the earlier categories' flows distribute across its phases. One ring, run locally by every
component, turned in two directions — outward by DAY, inward by NIGHT.

**The ring has three phases, given by the three relationships a component stands in.** A component
relates to exactly three things — its peers beside it, itself, and what is above it — and the ring
is one turn through all three:

- **ACTION** (subject: peers, *lateral*). The defining interaction with the component's
  counterparties. It is punctate — an event — and it deposits a fast trace, the residue the rest of
  the turn will read.
- **EVALUATION** (subject: self, *local*, handing to the other scope). In the quiet after the
  action, the component reads the fast trace and works it up the ladder into slower evidence. It
  never acts; its product is an inert token minted for the *other* scope.
- **PREPARATION** (subject: what is above, *vertical*, readying the next action in this scope). As
  the trace decays, the component settles its pools and gates forward, reads what has descended, and
  assembles the readiness the next action will run on. Preparation is the sole gateway to action.

The order around the ring is ACTION → EVALUATION → PREPARATION → ACTION. Because it is a ring, no
phase is first; each turn's preparation feeds the next turn's action, and each turn's evaluation
reads the action that preceded it. A phase is a *role*, not a fixed physical event: the same
physical machinery (a release, a structural change) can serve as different phases in different
scopes, and each scope enters the ring at a different phase — the rotation is worked out in "The
two turnings" below.

**The ring is necessary; its co-location in one component is not.** What the logic guarantees is
that the ring *closes* — that every action is evaluated and every action is prepared for — not that
any single component runs all three phases itself. A component necessarily has ACTION: the local
act it performs is what makes it a component at all. But the EVALUATION and PREPARATION of that act
may live in *other* components. Take the calcium channel as a component: its ACTION is letting Ca²⁺
in — that is its whole local act. It does not evaluate whether the influx mattered (the presynapse
does, reading the resulting trace) nor prepare its own next opening (its coupling readiness is set
by presynaptic short-term potentiation, and above that by neuronal provisioning). The channel is
almost pure action; its evaluation and preparation sit in the components around and above it. Yet
the ring is intact — the influx is acted, evaluated, and prepared for — merely spread across three
components rather than turned within one. So the ring is a property of *coupled components*, not of
the individual: a component contributes its action, its neighbors and superiors contribute the
evaluation and preparation that action requires, and together they close a ring none of them runs
alone. This is the same frame as category I — there is no ring-bearing "self," only local
components whose coupled actions we describe as one closing ring.

**Action is always local; evaluation and preparation may be local or contextual.** This is the
axis beneath the previous point. A phase is *local* when the acting component supplies it itself,
*contextual* when a surrounding or higher component supplies it. Evaluation and preparation come in
both forms: the presynapse evaluates its own release and prepares its own next release (local),
while the calcium channel's influx is evaluated by the presynapse and prepared by neuronal
provisioning (contextual). Action admits no such split — it is always local, and necessarily so.
A component can hold an aggregate and evaluate a neighbor's trace on its behalf, or provision a
neighbor's readiness; but it cannot *act on a neighbor's behalf*, because the action simply is the
local event occurring in that component. To perform another's action would mean it was never that
component's action to begin with. Acting-for-another is not action but signalling. So the one phase
that can never be contextual is action, and this falls directly out of what action is — which is
why every component necessarily has its own action, while its evaluation and preparation may be
scattered into its context.

**The phases are event-delimited and decay-timed, never clocked.** A phase has no fixed duration.
The action is the boundary where preparation ends and behaving begins; the fast trace's decay below
threshold is roughly where evaluation ends and preparation resumes. The quiet interval between
actions — a component's refractory-like period, whether literal refractoriness at the soma or the
NOT-active steps at the bouton — is where evaluation and preparation live, and its length is set by
the firing pattern. A fast train compresses preparation to nothing (no time to refill: depression);
sparse action gives preparation its full extent. Timing here is chemistry, not a timer (category V).

**Evaluation and preparation share the fast trace but send it two ways.** The same trace the action
deposits is read by both: evaluation reads it for *significance* (climbing toward the tag, for the
other scope), preparation reads it for *readiness* (tuning the next action's timing and thresholds,
in this scope). The soma makes this visible — its nuclear-calcium climbs toward the tag
(evaluation), while its inactivation, adaptation, and alignment traces tune the next spike
(preparation) — all from the one spike's deposit. Evaluation looks up and across scopes; preparation
looks around the ring to the next action.

**Evaluation reaches the next action only through preparation.** Evaluation never acts; it lays down
inert evidence. For that evidence to shape a future action it must pass through preparation, on one
of two timescales. Within a scope: evaluation's medium products (possible-tag, endurance-need)
become preparation's inputs, folded into near-term readiness. Across scopes: evaluation's slow
product (the tag) waits, is consolidated into structure, and structure is read by the next scope's
preparation. Either way — evaluation proposes, preparation disposes, action runs. The one-way ring
is what separates gathering from acting by exactly the time it takes preparation (or the night) to
honor what evaluation proposed; that separation is where deliberation lives.

**The coincidences of the action sort by timescale.** Where a component detects the coincidences
that authorize a lasting change depends on whether they must be instantaneous. Coincidences that
must be simultaneous are detected *in ACTION* by the receptors themselves — the postsynaptic NMDA
gate passing large calcium only when presynaptic glutamate, astrocytic co-agonist, and local
depolarization align, amplified by the descended back-propagating spike. Coincidences that can be
integrated over the quiet are detected *in EVALUATION* by trace accumulation — the organism's
dopamine gating the tag over the following interval. Same logic (require several partners to align),
sorted into the phase whose timescale it fits: instantaneous coincidence is action, integrable
coincidence is evaluation.

### The two turnings

One ring, turned in two directions. The three phases and their subjects are invariant across DAY
and NIGHT; what rotates is the *content* flowing through them (information by day, resource by
night) and — the sharp point — *which physical event counts as which phase*. From a component's
own standpoint there is no "open" or "closed" scope: each turning runs against *its* environment,
the world by day and the economy by night.

**The same physical event is ACTION in one scope and EVALUATION in the other.** This is the
deepest form of the duality. Transmitter release is the day's ACTION — the defining outward deed,
transmitting to the world — and the fast trace is its byproduct, later evaluated. But the *same
release*, run at night, is EVALUATION: the component releases not to transmit but as a *probe*, to
read its own fast trace as a measure of 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 defining, irreversible deed.
So the defining act of each scope is the assessment-instrument of the other: release is
day-action / night-evaluation; 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
measurement. Because it is a ring, each scope simply enters at a different phase: the day enters at
ACTION (act, then evaluate, then prepare — it must act first, the world will not wait); the night
enters at PREPARATION (prepare, then measure, then act — it can afford to look before it leaps).

**DAY — the ring turned outward.** PREPARATION reads the descended structure and refills the pools;
ACTION is the cleft exchange (release, integrate, clear) against the world, leaving the fast trace;
EVALUATION climbs the ladder to the tag — significance worked up, minted for the night. Currency:
information, cheap, gathered passively. Ladder direction: evidence ascending. Token minted: the
**tag**.

**NIGHT — the ring turned inward, as a sequence of replay cycles.** PREPARATION imports material
and energy and *primes* the component's own spontaneous threshold from its own standing tag (a high
tag lowers the threshold, raising occupancy). ACTION is the structural change — general homeostatic
lowering, then rebuilding where the tag still stands and participation was confirmed, consuming the
tag on the build. EVALUATION is the probe: the component spontaneously releases/fires and reads its
fast trace as *participation* in the re-evoked pattern — no dopamine, because significance is
already settled; this measures only circuit centrality. Currency: resource, scarce. Ladder
direction: capacity descending. Token minted: the **structure**.

**Replay is how the undifferentiated tag is spent on specific behaviors — and it needs no
orchestrator.** A component's tag accumulates by day from *many* behaviors into a single
magnitude — how much change it needs, stripped of what for. It cannot spend that lump correctly in
one commit (that would build a blend serving no behavior). Replay re-presents the day's behaviors
one at a time so the lump can be allocated to each. The mechanism is local and emergent: at night,
freed from external drive, components spontaneously fire; where a tag has lowered a component's
threshold, intrinsic fluctuation ignites it, and the activation propagates through the *same
pathways used by day*, re-evoking the pattern — but only where *every* link is primed (each
component's own tag lowered its own threshold), so a pattern carries only if it was significant all
the way around. This coherence is mechanical, not checked: an un-primed link breaks the loop at the
gap. The re-evoked components run their *structural* logic, not their significance logic — they are
not re-asking "did this matter" (settled) but "how much do I change for this." The replaying
assembly is not an actor; it is the coincidence of many components' own lowered thresholds
propagating through recurrent coupling — holism enacted, not encoded (category I).

**Why night cycles: the tag depletes, and depletion re-sorts the queue.** Each re-evocation lets
the participating components allocate a *slice* of their tag to that behavior and consume it — which
raises their thresholds back, so that pattern steps aside and the *next*-deepest tag surfaces on the
next cycle. The night sweeps its repertoire in rough order of tag depth, strongest most often, each
pattern depleting and yielding to the next, exactly as a vesicle pool depletes and refills to
schedule release one scale down. This is why the tag is spent incrementally across cycles rather
than all at once, why strong memories replay repeatedly, and why consolidation is a gentle settling
over many cycles (and many nights) rather than a single commit. The night ends when the tag is
exhausted (well-rested — every significant pattern replayed and its structure rebuilt) or the
night's energy is spent (overloaded — unspent tags carry forward). A pattern that never re-evokes
before its tag decays is simply never built — which is how the turning forgets.

**The two turnings are stitched by evaluation, and the fatigue loop switches between them.** Each
scope's EVALUATION mints the token the *other* scope will consume: day-evaluation mints the tag
that night spends; night-evaluation (participation) gates the structure that the next day operates
within. This *payload* handoff is distinct from the *switch* — the fatigue loop (category II) that
decides *when* a component crosses between scopes. One says what crosses; the other says when to
cross; they are orthogonal (category II). So the DAY/NIGHT alternation is one ring, entered at two
different phases, handing off to itself through evaluation, switched by fatigue — not two separate
machines.
