# The Logic of the Tripartite Synapse Model — v5

*A synthesis of the principles the pseudocode enacts. This version is reorganized top-down: it
opens with the single principle everything specializes, then descends through six categories, each
presented as a facet of that principle rather than a separate idea. Where earlier versions built
bottom-up toward a conclusion, this one hands over the key first and shows each category turning it.*

*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 (acting leaves signals AND traces) and meaning is assigned by the reader not the
signal; and the three categories are the three modulable dimensions of behavior (intensity↔action,
timing↔recovery, space↔preparation) — which is why the synapse is tripartite. Nine categories are
consolidated to six.*

---

## 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.**

Every category below 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 do components relate?* (scarcity), and *Who is in charge?* (causation —
no one). 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.

---

## 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.

---

## 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. Scarcity Decides — Collaboration by Day, Competition by Night

How components relate to one another is not an independent fact; it follows from what is scarce.
This specializes the principle to *how do components relate?* — and it unifies conservation,
selection, and the collaboration/competition character of the two scopes into one causal chain.

**Two conserved currencies, two rules of flow.** Energy ratchets: it is spent irreversibly, the
arrow of time in the model — a component that burns energy into structure cannot get it back.
Material circulates: it is freed by one component and reclaimed by another, conserved as it moves.
Scarcity of both forces choice — two ceilings (structure and endurance) compete for one finite
night pool, and what is not maintained drifts back down.

**Rivalry of the currency sets the relation.** 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; a trace
here does not deplete a trace there. When producing for others costs nothing, the natural relation
is **collaboration** — and the day is exactly that: each component acts so the next can act, releasing,
integrating, clearing, passing activity along the chain, co-producing the pattern and the tags. By
night the currency is material and energy, which are *rival and conserved*: every unit one component
builds into its structure is a unit another cannot have, and the total is capped. When what one takes
another loses, the natural relation is **competition** — and the night is exactly that: components
contend for the shared pool, build what they win, and free what they shed back into contention.

**But night's competition is adjudicated by collaboration.** The relation is subtler than "day
collaborate, night compete." The replay that arbitrates the night's competition is itself a
collaborative act: a pattern re-evokes only if every component along its loop is primed and ignites
the next — mechanical coherence, a collaboration all the way around, one un-primed link breaking it.
Participation — the measure that gates who gets to build — *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 competition for the rival one.
The register is economic, not martial — components do not fight; they contend for a conserved
resource, and the contention is settled fairly by a collaborative criterion.

**Two competitions at two loci.** Within the night, competition appears twice, cleanly separated.
*Within* a component, build and release contend over its own structure, arbitrated by participation:
high participation builds (funded by the tag, a slice per cycle), low participation releases (freeing
material, the tag untouched), and in between the component holds. *Between* components, this one and
its peers contend for the shared material and energy during recovery. The internal tension (grow or
shrink?) is settled by the replayed pattern; the external tension (can I get material?) is settled by
contention with neighbors. Selection under scarcity is the sum of these: what survives a night has
both earned its tag by day and won its material by night, and what neither participates nor is
maintained returns to the pool. Selection is not a judge's verdict; it is what scarcity leaves
standing.

---

## 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.

---

## Coda — The Six as One

Read downward, the six categories are one principle refracted six 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); the relations between components are set by what is scarce,
collaborative where the currency is free and competitive where it is conserved (5); and causation
circulates between components without ever concentrating into command (6). Remove any one and the
principle loses a facet; none stands apart from it. There is only the local component and its one
repeating act — and everything else is that act, multiplied, coupled, and described from outside.
