Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Complex systems — emergence, information decomposition, individuality, self-organization — how collective behaviour arises from parts.
15 of 100 TERM documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| TERM-003 | will, as a second- or higher-order attractor | Will defined dynamically: a higher-order attractor that stabilizes which first-order regimes govern action. The owner’s operational definition at U34; replaced by will-organization once the account became agent-indexed. | Superseded — by TERM-023 |
| TERM-020 | protective lock-in | A protective regime that, by reorganizing ordinary activity, generates the conditions that justify its own continuation and reduces the capacity to leave it (Section 6.1). | Active |
| TERM-046 | notation for the threshold, drive and unity criteria | One place for the symbols used across the threshold criterion, the drive profile and the unity and persistence claims of 2026-10-11: δ, ε, τ, d′, Occam, D, G, Φ and γ. It records that δ/ε is used in two senses, a spectral gap against off-block coupling and a posterior effect against its uncertainty, and that treating them as one is an assumption carried over from MOM-CLM-160. | Active |
| TERM-049 | combined form | A candidate system drawn from more than one member (two dancers, a person and a tool, a firm’s teams), counted as one system relative to a stated target while it clears the threshold criterion of CLAIM-157. The record’s neutral word for what such a whole is, used before asking whether it is an agent or a self. | Active |
| TERM-051 v2 | drive profile | How the drive of a described system is apportioned, at a time and for a stated macro-variable and target, along two axes. Within a level: one member drives, the members drive each other, or the drive is diffuse. Across levels: aggregate, top-down, bidirectional or emergent, read from the information decomposition’s downward-causation and causal-decoupling terms. A profile is time-indexed. | Active |
| TERM-054 | canvas temperature: the rate and spatial spread of placements that follow no coalition’s plan, modelled as a stochastic field on the canvas rather than as agents | The owner’s proposal: treat unaffiliated participation on r/place as a property of the canvas, a noise field T(x, t) that corrupts any pattern left unmaintained, instead of as a population of operators. That makes the need for maintenance explicit. T falls over the event as uninvested participants leave. Which placements count as unaffiliated is relative to the plans in play, so the field is defined against a set of plans. | 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-070 v2 | organizational closure, as closure of constraints: a set of constraints each of which depends directly on another in the set and has another depending on it (Montévil and Mossio 2015), distinct from informational closure and from a flame’s maintenance of the conditions of its own combustion | Montévil and Mossio’s definition (LIT-582, read in NOTE-468), as CLAIM-395 states it. CLAIM-395 (Active, demonstrated) is stated in it without a TERM to use, and THEORY-072’s demarcation of organisms and THEORY-071’s “autonomy” turn on it. Asked for at A10, A11, A12, A13 and A14 of the exchange of 2026-10-20, with A12’s condition: “The definition must explicitly distinguish the proved structural constraints from the still-Proposed claim that the definition demarcates organisms.” Sense 6 of TERM-068. Adopted by the owner on 2026-10-21. | Active |
| TERM-071 v2 | persistence, of an organization, and which sense: state, dynamical, historical, viable and reinstatable | CLAIM-329 recorded three persistences from A9 of 2026-10-16. They return in the exchange of 2026-10-20 as A10’s five “continuities” (§10), A12’s “individuality, and which continuity”, and A13 and A14’s “organizational reconstitution”. A14’s merge condition: “the entries must preserve the distinctions between a stable state, a viable state, a self-maintaining organization, and a historically persisting individual.” This term lists the senses so that a claim using “persist” says which, as TERM-045 does for “self”. On the owner’s U13 (“definitions we’ve crystallized that are not currently in conflict”). Adopted by the owner on 2026-10-21. The exchange’s name “organizational reconstitution” is not adopted. | Active |
| TERM-086 | organizational achievement, of a specified target: its attainment or maintenance, under declared conditions, where an identifiable arrangement of relations among components makes an explanatory difference that a comparison with admissible alternatives can show, as an episode, a maintained capacity or the reproduction of what sustains that capacity | The owner’s, U11 of the exchange of 2026-10-26: “we should probably engineer a TERM for ‘organizational achievement’, and/or terms in that neighborhood.” A11 found the phrase already doing work for authenticity, corrective capacity and effective action, and gave it a target-relative, causally discriminating definition with three modes. An attribution, not a compliment: a coercive apparatus can have one. Proposed: adoption is the owner’s. | Proposed |
| TERM-088 | individuation, and which sense: descriptive (an inquiry can distinguish and track it), dynamical (its organization persists under specified dynamics and perturbation, with robust identity and boundaries), constitutive (its relational organization helps fix its identity and boundary), and organizational autonomy, the further achievement of contributing to the maintenance of its own constitutive constraints | A18 of the exchange of 2026-10-27 named four claims about a candidate individual and said they “are neither four necessary stages nor four universally ranked degrees of existence. They are different claims requiring different evidence”. A23 §VI split them further. The owner’s second review insisted that individuation not be read as requiring endogenous maintenance: “A persistent externally sustained pattern may still be a dynamically individuated entity.” This term lists the senses so that a claim saying “individual” says which. Organizational autonomy is TERM-070’s closure, named here as the sense it is not. Proposed. | Proposed |
| TERM-090 v2 | effective boundary constraint, of a composite: the relation its interconnected parts impose on the variables an outside system can reach, once the interior is eliminated; approximately instantaneous or history-dependent, and, independently, possibly of a kind the parts’ relations could not state | What CLAIM-480 demonstrates and CLAIM-474, QUESTION-283 and CASE-179 use. A composite presents the systems that interact with its boundary with a relation among its accessible variables. Its examples are the series spring’s k₁k₂/(k₁ + k₂), Baez and Fong’s black box, a memory kernel, and Hansen and Ghrist’s three-way v₁ = v₂ + v₃. The term fixes three points: the relation is a constraint whether instantaneous or history-dependent; it is effective, not a new fundamental law; and it can exceed the parts’ relational vocabulary. Adopted 2026-10-29. | Active |
| TERM-093 v3 | correspondence structure, and how it is held: the maps that say which local states or descriptions of interacting systems count as agreeing, distinct from the physical coupling between them, and held as formed, discovered or adapted | The object CLAIM-471, QUESTION-282, CLAIM-474 and CASE-179 all turn on. It is a family of comparison maps from local descriptions into shared spaces, whose joint kernel (the global sections) is what “compatible” and “glued” mean. It is not the coupling that moves the states. How a correspondence structure is held is one of three ways: formed by physical interconnection, discovered by measurement, or adapted by an apparatus. A claim using “gluing” should say which. Adopted at the thirteenth status review, once the formed sense was stated as the maps that wiring sets and not the joint behaviour they admit. | Active |