Glossary

Manipulation with no false information in it. The distortion lives in the selection, the weighting, the sequence and the omission.

Escape from scrutiny produced by arrangement rather than concealment. Nothing is hidden; attention is simply routed elsewhere.

The distributed set of people, interfaces, institutions and incentives that determines what enters an AI system's context and what becomes of its output.

Coordination with no central order. Locally modest adjustments to what is easy to see, ask about and act on, accumulating into a form of governance.

The condition of being obvious from outside the prevailing frame and close to unformulable from within it.

Intentional maintenance is energy applied by an agent toward a particular form persisting as itself: this body, this bond, this practice, held as what it is through its own change. Chosen from can rather than must, when it is chosen at all.

Intrinsic maintenance is the continuous processing reality performs on everything, which holds no particular form and holds the flow. It is what takes over when intentional maintenance withdraws; decay, rot, and forgetting are its work: the labor of returning form to circulation.

Maintenance is the consistent application of energy toward the persistence of a form. It comes in two kinds, intentional and intrinsic, and the pair is exhaustive: nothing is unmaintained, it is only ever handed off between them.

The capacity to notice the frame you were handed, identify which variables are absent, and inspect the field directing your own attention.

Ignorance produced by the shape of a system rather than by any individual failure to know. What the arrangement is built not to notice.

A condition with material consequence that has a persistently low probability of being selected into the process at all.

Adjacency is the touching-structure itself: for a given arrangement, the record of which parts border which. Everything else in this vocabulary is built on it, because change, influence, and interaction are all defined through what can reach what by way of neighbors. If no chain of neighbors connects two parts, nothing that happens at one can lawfully arrive at the other.

A boundary is a stabilized distinction between a form's inside and what neighbors it, and the vocabulary is strict about crossings: any reliance of the inside on the outside must be carried by an explicit interface (a declared route or family of routes) or the reliance does not count as lawful. Drawing distinctions is free; using them with force has rules. Either a boundary is closed, importing nothing, or its couplings are named.

Boundedness requires that pressures stay finite and local: any unresolved difference is contained within a finite neighborhood of its arrangement, and lawful rearrangement keeps it contained. No infinite tensions, and no pressure that implicates everything at once.

Coherence is the condition of everything admitted holding together at once: an arrangement's commitments are jointly satisfiable... there exists at least one way for all of them to be true simultaneously, at the strengths actually required, within bounds. Not agreement, not tidiness, not felt harmony: joint satisfiability. An arrangement is incoherent precisely when its own commitments cannot all be true at the same time.

A configuration is anything you can point to that has a definite neighbor-structure: parts, and a fact of the matter about which parts touch which. That is the entire requirement. A molecule qualifies, a sentence qualifies, a friendship qualifies... the definition does not care what the parts are made of, only that the arrangement is definite enough to say what is adjacent to what.

Conservation through transformation requires that no lawful structure is ever simply erased: every admissible change is a rearrangement, a reconfiguration, or a re-expression of what already exists, with sameness judged by form rather than substance. Something cannot become nothing. The only open question about anything that exists is what form it takes next.

Continuity is a condition on a change, and it is stricter than it sounds: every piece of the before has a recognizable counterpart in the after with its neighbor-relations intact, and the correspondences agree with each other across scales: the way a small piece maps is the same way it maps when you view it inside any larger piece containing it. Nothing about smoothness, gradualness, or motion is implied; this continuity is an accounting of preserved relations. A change is continuous when no piece loses its context and no two scales of description disagree about where a piece went.

Degrees of freedom for redistribution requires that an arrangement under pressure hold more than one genuinely distinct way to move. Plurality of routes is itself a law here, and the reason is practical: a system with exactly one available path is one obstruction away from having none.

A driver is an unresolved difference inside an arrangement: a tension expressed in the arrangement's own neighbor-structure, not a pressure imposed from outside. It is the structural reading of "something has to give": a fact about how the parts currently relate that has not settled. Drivers are why forms change; an arrangement holding no unresolved internal difference has no reason to move.

An emergence is a change whose after strictly exceeds its before in expressive capacity: the old arrangement fits whole inside the new one, and the new does not fit back inside the old. More has become possible, in the exact containment sense... not new substance, and not mere novelty: an expansion of what the arrangement can now hold and do, witnessed by the fit.

Expressive capacity is how the vocabulary compares what arrangements make possible, and it is deliberately not a number. One arrangement has at least the capacity of another when the second fits whole inside the first with its neighbor-structure intact; two that each fit inside the other count as equal; more possible means strictly above in that ordering. That is the entire content. No scores, no measures, no information quantities are implied... everything is comparison by containment, which is how the framework says more and less without ever pretending to measure.

Gradedness is how the vocabulary handles more-or-less without inventing numbers. Every graded claim (more coherent, less stable, stronger) must cash out in one of three admitted forms: an ordering (this fits inside that), a nesting (a stricter regime with a smaller admissible set), or an availability fact (more lawful routes open). More coherent never means a higher score. It means above in a checkable ordering, or richer in open paths, and nothing else.

An interaction is one change spanning a boundary, registered on both sides as a single event, not two changes that happen to coincide at an edge. The crossing is constrained end to end: it travels adjacency-compatible routes through the boundary's interface, and its unity is the point. Both sides were rearranged by the same event or no interaction occurred.

Locality requires that change operate only through the touching-structure: influence travels neighbor to neighbor or it does not travel. Anything that looks like action at a distance must resolve into a chain of adjacent steps, or it is not lawful in this framework.

Nested scaling requires that coherent parts compose into coherent wholes without the composition breaking anything: the parts keep their internal lawfulness, the whole acquires its own, and the governing rules remain enforceable at both levels simultaneously. It is the condition that makes structure stackable, and it is a requirement, not an observation.

Nonterminality is the engine claim, and it has premises worth keeping visible: given an arrangement that holds together within bounds and carries a live unresolved internal pressure, at least one lawful rearrangement exists that produces a genuinely different arrangement, and this remains true under repetition, while continuity, locality, and conservation all stay satisfied. Nothing rests under strain. Rest and unresolved pressure cannot coexist in the same form; one of them always gives.

A pathway is a finite chain of changes, each beginning exactly where the previous ended, connecting one arrangement to another. Routes, never leaps: the requirement that each step starts where the last stopped is the whole definition.

Persistence is continuing under one's own lawful change, and the definition has real teeth: there exists an ongoing, composable family of routes the form can keep taking, where every intermediate arrangement along every route is itself lawful and coherent within bounds. Not one safe state but a live repertoire of coherent continuations. Persisting is not standing still; it is keeping coherence through every step actually taken.

A projection is what an arrangement shows at a boundary: itself, restricted to exactly what the interface can carry, with the restriction still a lawful arrangement in its own right. A projection is stable when the view survives the interior's own lawful rearrangements... what is shown does not shudder when the inside moves. Stable projections are what make one system reliable to another.

A recursion is a family of routes that composes: whenever one route in the family ends where another begins, the combined route is also in the family. Change feeding its own continuation, closed under following-on.

A redistribution is a change that does three things at once: it preserves the neighbor-structure, it keeps every piece's context intact in the continuity sense, and it resolves at least one live internal pressure. Rearrangement that settles something while erasing nothing. In this vocabulary that triple condition, not mere motion, is what earns the name.

Two arrangements are structurally equivalent when an exact correspondence exists between their parts that preserves every touching-relation. Same form; substance irrelevant. This is the vocabulary's notion of identity, and it is why a form can persist while every unit of its material turns over.

A transformation is any change from one arrangement to another, treated as an object in its own right: this before, that after, and the change between them nameable and reasoned about as a thing.

Austerity governs what may enter a formal system at all. Before any other discipline applies, a proposed commitment must pass three checks: it is necessary: something already admitted forces the need for it; it is representable: it can be stated in the system's own terms; and it is enforceable: the system can tell when it is violated. Failing any one of the three keeps it out, however attractive it is. Austerity runs before formalization, which is the point: it is the discipline of the doorway, not the furniture.

The coherence rigor governs the collection. After each commitment has passed austerity and been set to its minimal strength, the set as a whole must admit at least one valid configuration: everything admitted must be able to hold true at once. Commitments are judged jointly, never one at a time: a system of individually impeccable rules that cannot all be satisfied together fails here.

The conservation rigor governs revision. When a system changes, every structural commitment either survives into the revision or its loss is explicitly declared with the consequences named. Silent loss is the failure this discipline exists to catch. It is the kernel's conservation law applied one level up, to the act of editing the kernel itself.

Fidelity governs simplifications. When one system claims to be a projection of another (a summary, a model, an interface, a glossary), its declarations of what is preserved, what is lost, and what is injected must be true of the actual relationship between the two systems. A projection may drop anything; it may not misreport what it dropped.

Minimal necessity governs strength. Every admitted constraint is specified at the minimum strength that the results depending on it actually force, and no stronger. Over-specification is a defect, not caution: every unit of unforced strength is an extra claim the system must now defend while gaining nothing for it, and a future revision must now conserve.

In memory-bearing regulated systems, some configurations are easier to return to than to leave; traffic accumulates there. Preferential stabilization (selection) emerges with no optimizer, no criterion, and no selector anywhere in the derivation.

Under recursion, recurring resolutions stabilize into constraints, and constraints into boundaries: persistent distinctions that partition the neighbor-structure, so that coherence can persist through continued change.

The first structured configuration, still under pressure, cannot resolve that pressure and stay coherent without becoming internally distinguishable: parts appear, as the form staying-coherent takes under continued change.

Bounded configurations still under pressure exchange across their boundaries; exchange alters what each does next; that return-loop is regulation, and coherence from here on is maintained dynamically rather than held statically.

Coexisting attractors interact, and their interactions stabilize into structure of their own; composition across scales follows necessarily, so systems under recursion do not remain flat.

A module's interior always exceeds what its boundary can carry, so cross-boundary exchange necessarily compresses: constraint encoded compactly. Information emerges as a structural requirement, not a primitive.

From the least arrangement that can cohere, holding one unresolved internal difference and at least one lawful move, the first change follows necessarily, producing the first structured configuration, with nothing external introduced.

Systems whose interiors are mutually inaccessible interact through projections; coherent interaction requires those projections to remain consistent, and that consistency requirement is what observation is, before any mind is assumed.

Feedback that alters the next configuration is retention: the system's past persists structurally in its present, and which futures are reachable now depends on the route already taken.

Encodings that persist by being reproduced out-persist encodings that merely endure; replication, inheritance, and lineage structure emerge as coherence strategies, no biology and no intention assumed.