Lines of inquiry — A named line of the record’s own argument, so that a line can be set aside as a whole and what depends on it can be found. Retracting a line is a status change on its members, never a deletion (ADR-032).
Formal apparatus — results that hold whatever any substantive line concludes — gluing and contextuality, comparison of experiments and probes, identifiability, conservation, and thresholds for naming a unit; held as a second line by the general results other lines borrow, so that setting a substantive line aside does not retire them (ADR-040).
8 of 100 TERM documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| TERM-057 | transfer entropy: how much the last l values of a source reduce uncertainty about a target’s next value beyond the target’s own last k values, I(X_{t+1}; Y_t^{(l)} | X_t^{(k)}), a directed predictive quantity that depends on k, l and any conditioning series, not a measure of information flow and not an intervention effect | The record names transfer entropy in its readings of Granger causality, causal emergence, colloid dynamics, IIT and the global workspace, and the documents use different history conventions (NOTE-053’s k-histories, NOTE-788’s single target value at lag τ). This fixes the word from Schreiber (NOTE-940), with the history lengths explicit, and says what it must not be confused with: flow (CLAIM-335), directed information, time-delayed mutual information, interventional flow and Granger causality. | Active |
| TERM-058 | Granger causality: the past of one series improving the prediction of another’s next value beyond the past of everything else in a stated information set, a predictive relation relative to that set and its lags, and not by itself the effect of an intervention | The record names Granger causality in its readings of transfer entropy (NOTE-053), causal emergence (NOTE-010, NOTE-726, NOTE-791) and IIT (NOTE-122), always through other authors. This fixes the word: relative to an information set, predictive, and interventional only under the conditions of THEORY-704. Defined from Barnett, Barrett and Seth, Seth, and Eichler and Didelez; Granger (1969) itself is Unavailable. | Active |
| TERM-062 v2 | causal state, of a process relative to a target future: a class of pasts that induce the same conditional law over a declared target future, the coarsest prescient partition of the pasts; the causal-state machine organizes those classes and the transitions they induce, and the ε-machine and the υ-machine are that machine for different choices of source pasts and target | Crutchfield and Shalizi’s causal states (THEORY-756, from LIT-1260) and Rosas et al.’s υ-machine (THEORY-820), under one definition with the target and the source of the pasts explicit. Used in THEORY-820, THEORY-756 and CLAIM-152 with no TERM. A13 of the exchange of 2026-10-20: “A TERM would make that concept discoverable before someone knows which theorem to search for”, and A14 asked that it say whose histories are taken. It is the owner’s U13 category exactly, “definitions we’ve crystallized that are not currently in conflict”. Adopted by the owner on 2026-10-21. A13 called it “predictive state”; the record’s word is kept. | Active |
| TERM-065 v3 | effective-description regime: the system, query family, intervention family, resource bounds, tolerance and horizon under which a candidate description’s adequacy is assessed, ℛ = (X, 𝒬, ℐ, ℬ, ε, τ), kept apart from the description T it evaluates, so that rival descriptions are compared under one regime and whether each is adequate, Adequate(T; ℛ), is settled once the regime is stated | The exchange of 2026-10-20 returned to this signature five times. A3 proposed the six-tuple 𝔈 = (X, T, 𝒬, ℐ, ℬ, τ) so that an ablation could not “succeed simply by moving the goalposts”. A5 added the tolerance ε in the predicate Adequate(T; 𝒬, ℐ, ℬ, ε, τ): “Adequacy is relational, but whether the relation holds can be objective.” A11 named it, and A12, A13 and A14 kept the seven-tuple; A13: “our own organizing convention rather than an established term of art”. The owner’s second review took T out of the tuple, ℛ = (X, 𝒬, ℐ, ℬ, ε, τ), so that descriptions are compared under one regime. Adopted by the owner on 2026-10-21. It would add a name for what CLAIM-152, CLAIM-302, CLAIM-387 and THEORY-424 each relativize to; it replaces nothing. | Active |
| TERM-068 v2 | closure, and which sense | The record uses “closure” in at least eight senses and no entry says which is meant. This term lists them so that a claim using the word says which, as TERM-045 does for “self”. Sense 1, informational closure, is defined in full: I(X⃗_t; Z_{t+1} | Z⃗_t) = 0, which for a stationary discrete process is one condition with Barnett and Seth’s dynamical independence and with causal closure (THEORY-820), and is no mark of a system. Asked for at A11 of the exchange of 2026-10-20 (“That single disambiguation entry could save substantial rediscovery”), and at A12, A13 and A14, on the owner’s U11 and U13. Adopted by the owner on 2026-10-21. It adopts no definition the record does not already hold. | Active |
| TERM-069 v2 | observational equivalence, under a probe family: two models, states or distributions agreeing on the outcome law of every probe in a declared admissible family; coarser than identity unless the family is rich enough, and, when probes are run one at a time, weaker on their marginals than on the joint law across them | ”Probe family” is in some two dozen argument entries (CLAIM-139, 142, 149, 190, 193, 206, 209, 215, 217, 223, 241, 264, 266, 269, 302 and 322; QUESTION-005, 031, 055, 067 and 135; CASE-041, 070 and 071) with no TERM. CLAIM-264 (Active, demonstrated) holds the mathematics. Asked for at A13 and A14 of the exchange of 2026-10-20. TERM-033, fidelity as observational equivalence over response trajectories, is its case with response trajectories as the probes, and TERM-014’s communicative object is a class of it. Adopted by the owner on 2026-10-21. | Active |
| TERM-077 v2 | ordinal potential: of a negotiation over a finite set of options in a window of time, an ordering of the options that every move winning one of its conflicts climbs; it exists exactly when the wins never cycle, which is ordinal extendibility, that some complete ordering agrees with every win, and not observed comparability, since pairs never contested are not compared; and it is fixed only up to a class: every strictly increasing transform of one is one, and on a sparse record several orderings can be | The first level of the hierarchy the review of PR #327 proposed: ordinal coherence. Separated from the Hodge decomposition, which measures cardinal inconsistency and can reverse an ordinal comparison (CLAIM-434, part 4), and from a real-valued currency (CLAIM-436). | Active |
| TERM-097 v2 | coherence, of a family of descriptions, transports or judgements: their agreement with one another under a stated correspondence structure (on overlaps, around cycles, between routes), distinct from fidelity to a source, from integration by dynamics, and from knowledge of the world | The sense in which the record keeps saying coherence is not something else: “coherence without integration” and “without knowledge” (CASE-179), a coherent record as the product of a legibility regime (CLAIM-448), and agreement between translation routes as coherence, not fidelity (CLAIM-496). It is a relation among the members of a family, read through the maps that say what counts as agreeing (TERM-093). Filed on the owner’s question of 2026-10-29 whether the record had TERMs for fidelity and coherence: fidelity has several, coherence none, though the word is in some 145 entries. Adopted the same day. | Active |