Glossary
Each term below is used in the theory in a specific, often non-standard sense. v0.6 vocabulary throughout. When in doubt while reading, return here.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Interaction | The single substance. Atomic 6-tuple: A, B, local space, local time, mark, Propagation. Comes into being only when B becomes aware of A's mark. |
| Pole | One of the two ends of an interaction (A = mark-leaver, B = aware). Intrinsic to the interaction, not a free-standing thing. |
| Awareness | The primitive non-interactional act by which B brings the interaction into being. Not detection. Not itself an interaction. |
| Mark | A bit set by A and delivered to B by Propagation. Always 1 when actual (existence vs void). Moved, never copied. Not computed by the interaction. Its entire content: "agent B — agent A exists." All complexity lives in the time-and-space variance of many marks, never in any mark's content. For Mass, primitive — the simplest fact of distinction. |
| Source | The one agent occupying the A-pole of every Mass-interaction (v0.14) — and it is the One Interaction's own A-pole: the Big Bang's mark-leaver is the mark-leaver at every leaf. A leaf cannot supply its own mark-leaver; the Source fills that slot for all of them — it sets every floor bit. One Source ⇒ one world. Within our universe it is never a B-pole; it may be the B-pole of an interaction outside our universe — outside scope. |
| Event (formalism) | One completed interaction, as the clean-room mathematics names it: an element of the actual set E. Candidates not yet completed live in the potential Ω and do not (yet) exist. The same thing as "interaction," in math clothing — the word is borrowed from the mathematics of causal orders. |
| Propagation | The internal process of an interaction: the carrying of the mark from A to B — down A's substrate to Mass, across the floor, up B's substrate. Its medium is the subtree of sub-interactions. Always inside an interaction; has no existence outside one. Not a Form, not a Protocol, not a tier. (Replaced "Computation" in v0.13 — the mark is carried, not computed.) |
| Mass | The atomic, leaf-level interaction. Has no sub-interactions. Lacks a local agent A — its A is the Source; its primitive mark is the Source's bit. The substance out of which all higher interactions are composed. The origin of all interactions. |
| One Interaction | The universe. Root of the tree. Its interior contains everything we can observe. Its mark is forever hidden from us by construction. |
| Local spacetime | The space and time intrinsic to a particular interaction. There is no universal spacetime; what we experience as "the" spacetime is the interior of the One Interaction. |
| Agent | A bundle of pole-positions tied together by shared awareness. Not a separate primitive — derivative of interactions. |
| Form | A constituted agent — ever-changing, not fixed; categorized by its Protocol-profile (the Protocols it manifests). Form_N is the agent that emerges when many alike Form_{N−1} interact according to a Protocol_N. Recursive all the way down to Mass. |
| Protocol | The regular pattern between alike Forms, established via their structurally-isomorphic interactions with lower-complexity forms. Emergent-over its substrate (uses it as medium but carries structure of its own). Genealogically built layer by layer; primitive at level 1 (between Mass-interactions). Matches the everyday meaning of the word. |
| Solidification | Achievement of a self-reinforcing autopoietic loop. The Form becomes a stable attractor against the substrate's dissolution-tendency. |
| Crystallization | The process by which the structurally-isomorphic lower-level patterns of alike Forms stabilize into a regular medium, and by which the higher-order Protocol regularities emerge over that medium. Two coupled aspects: substrate stabilization and emergence of Protocol-level structure. |
| Alikeness | Structural isomorphism of lower-level interaction patterns. Same kind of structure performing the same kind of role — not literal identity, not mere overlap. Recursively defined for Forms above level 1; primitive at level 1. |
| Action | The way a Form maintains its own existence. Autopoiesis enacted. A filter over the interaction-potential. Not evidence of a Form's existence — it is the existence. |
| Interaction-potential | The space of possible interactions. The "abyss of randomness" out of which Forms emerge. |
| Decay | The substrate's default tendency toward disorder and data loss. Active everywhere. What every Form is working against. |
| Emergence | The substrate's countervailing tendency: the spontaneous crystallization of patterns from high-density chaotic interactions. The source of all Forms. |
| Hub | The structural form of every agent: one downward axis (its own internal Propagation, decipherable) and many upward axes (the parent interactions it participates in, indecipherable from inside). |
| Asymmetric Epistemic Principle | An agent can decipher its sub-interactions but never fully decipher the parent interactions in which it participates. Downward science is possible; upward decipherment is not. |
| Cross-level interaction asymmetry (v0.3) | An agent interacts with lower-complexity Forms (via lower-level protocols), interacts with same-level Forms (via the level's Protocol), but cannot interact with higher-complexity Forms in which it participates — only be part of them. Down: interaction. Up: constitution. |
| Time (v0.5) | The order of succession of a parent interaction's children's completions. Read upward. One-dimensional — each interaction has exactly one awareness-pole, so a parent reads exactly one completion-sequence. |
| Space (v0.5) | The order of coexistence of a parent's children — the room granted for them to be many at once. Allocated downward. |
| Spacetime (v0.5) | The populated interior of an interaction. Space and time are two readings of it — coexistence versus succession. The split is a choice of reading-angle. |
| Interaction-throughput (the budget) (v0.5) | The fixed total an agent spends, split between completion (→ time) and propagation (→ space). Its conserved magnitude is c. |
| Mass (v0.5) | Ongoing/bound interaction — the completion-component of an agent's budget. Refines, not replaces, the leaf-interaction sense of Mass: both are "interaction as substance." Masslessness is pure propagation (interaction in transit), travelling at c. |
| Reference frame (v0.5) | A parent interaction's interior. All motion and all space/time splits are relative to it; there is no master frame. |
| c (light speed) (v0.5) | The exchange rate between the succession-axis (time) and the coexistence-axis (space); the conserved magnitude of the interaction-throughput budget. |
| Energy (v0.6) | The rate at which a Form completes the interactions that constitute and maintain it — the dynamic measure of bound interaction (mass is the static measure). Equivalently, the rate of Action. |
| Rest energy (v0.6) | The maintenance-rate a Form must sustain merely to persist against decay; the irreducible cost of existing. Equals mc². |
| Momentum (v0.6) | The propagation-share (space-component) of an agent's interaction-throughput, as energy is the completion-share (time-component). |
Drawn from Foundations, Space, Time, and Mass, and Epistemic Asymmetry. Changelogs in 02–04 in the project repo.