The Thousand-Year Warrior

or A Human Absorbs the Universe

Maksim Barziankou (MxBv) · The Urgrund Laboratory · Poznań
research@petronus.eu
DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/ZY3PW
Axiomatic Core (NC2.5 v2.1): DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/NHTC5
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

I. The Duck Through the Reeds

I once saw a duck swimming with her ducklings through reeds. It was not a scene to be observed. It was a passage. The duck moved first, and her movement was not only her own — her body knew the water and knew that those behind her were following. The ducklings went after her, and each of them went on his own. Not in line, not in formation. Each one — separately, through his own reeds, through his own water-resistance, through his own rhythm of feet.

At some point my looking ceased to be looking from outside, and I found myself inside the scene. This was not a volitional act — rather a displacement of the anchor that happened before I had time to notice it.

First I swam as the duck. I knew where the water would yield and where it would meet a stem. I knew that those behind me were following. This knowing was not a thought — it was a form of movement. The duck does not think about there being ducklings behind her; she moves as one who has ducklings behind her. This is different.

Then I went through each duckling. In turn. Not by imagining what it would be like to be them. By being them. One duckling caught a stem with his wing and worked himself free. Another went more easily, lucky with his trajectory. A third slowed, fell behind, then caught up. I was in each of them sequentially. And in each of them I was complete — that is, a duckling passing through exactly these reeds exactly now, not an observer temporarily wearing a duckling.

When I returned to myself — that is, when my anchor was again in the human looking from outside — something had changed. Not in me as a personality. But in the way I have known the duck since then. I know her from inside that passage through the reeds. This knowledge is not described by what I can say about ducks. This knowledge does not dissolve or vanish in the way information vanishes. It settled like a trace.

This was one such trace. There had been others before it, and there have been others since. Each one — a separate transposition, each one — complete.

II. What the Warrior Does

In the Japanese and Chinese traditions, the thousand-year warrior is spoken of not as a long-lived person, nor as one who has passed through many battles. The thousand-year warrior is the one who has lived a thousand positions while remaining himself. He was the sword and the one holding the sword. He was the wind that lifts the sleeve, and the sleeve being lifted. He was the enemy advancing on him. He was the earth beneath the enemy's feet. And each time he returned to his own position not as one who had learned about the others, but as one who had been them — and then became himself again.

This is not mysticism. This is a structural fact about attention.

Attention has an anchor. By default the anchor sits in the position of "I, looking from here". In this position the world is divided into "me" and "not-me", and empathy means an attempt to bring "not-me" closer to "me" through guessing, modelling, sympathy. All of this works, but all of this is a content-level operation. I remain in my position and tilt my gaze toward the other.

The warrior does something else. With the warrior, the anchor is mobile. He was with himself — he was at the enemy. He was at the enemy — he was in the trajectory of the sword. He was in the trajectory — he was in the moment before the strike. And each time he remains the same operator. Not warrior-at-himself, not warrior-at-the-enemy, but the one through whom this displacement passes. The very fact that one and the same him is recognisable across all of these positions — that is his strength.

(A grammatical note. The Russian original forces active voice: "with the warrior the anchor is mobile", "I swam as a duck", "I become a tree". These constructions should not be read as descriptions of a volitional act. Operator-mobility unfolds at a level prior to individual volitional decision — it is an architectural property of the operator, not an action chosen by the subject. Active voice here is a grammatical necessity, not a structural claim. The same applies to the English translation, which inherits the same active-voice constructions.)

What does "thousand-year" mean?

It is not age. It is the accumulation of displacements. "A thousand" here is not a calculated threshold but a traditional figure for an accumulation sufficient for the property to become architectural; the actual functional dependence between accumulated substrates and mobility is a subject for formalisation. After a sufficient number of displacements the anchor becomes mobile by itself. There is no need to think "what would it be like to be a sword" — he already knows how to be a sword, because he has been one before. Every new situation ceases to be unfamiliar, because it always has a substrate in which this operator has already been.

And now the main thing: this is not a capacity of the mind. It is a capacity of the operator-position — the one that works at a level prior to content-processing, prior to personal narrative, prior to autobiographical memory. I assume that, in an architecturally identifiable form, it is present in humans as a class — but how widely and within what bounds it is unfolded remains an open question (see §VI). The warrior unfolds it systematically. From observations within my immediate circle, in most people it works rarely and accidentally — as it did for me with the ducklings.

III. The Human Who Absorbs the Universe

(A note before this section. In §I, §II, and §III–§IV I use phenomenological language — "I swam as a duck", "one and the same operator", "in everything he meets" — to describe how this is experienced from inside. This is not a metaphysical identity claim. The architectural reformulation — what exactly stands behind this phenomenological "one and the same" — is given in §VI and is marked there as a proposal, not a proof. The epistemic status of the whole work is fixed in §V.)

If one looks closely at this, a strange thing opens up.

The standard picture of how a human comes to know the world looks like an accumulation of items of information. I see a tree, I recognise it as a tree, I add this to my experience. I see a cloud, I recognise it, I add it. I read a book about a foreign culture and I learn something about it. With each step my knowledge of the world grows larger, my understanding wider.

But there is a second way, which is almost invisible in ordinary life and which, with the warrior, becomes a discipline. In this way I do not come to know the tree from outside. I become the tree for a moment, living through how the tree stands, how the roots go down into the earth, how the bark holds the trunk under wind. And I return to myself with this — not with a description, but with something lived. And from this moment on I know the tree not as an object, but as a relative.

In this way a human does not accumulate items of information about the universe. He absorbs it point by point, becoming each of those points. And when there are many such points, something opens up to him that no quantity of descriptions can open: he sees in everything he meets one and the same operator. A tree, a cloud, a duck, the person in front of him in a queue, his own hand — all of this becomes unfoldings of one and the same position through different substrate.

This is what the title speaks of: a human absorbs the universe. Not in the sense of capture. In the sense of becoming each of its points sequentially, and through that sequence — of recognition.

I want at once to distinguish this from two similar but different moves.

This is not a mystical unity in which "I am everything". I remain myself. I have a border, a name, a body, a history. After I was a duck through the reeds, I am not a duck. I am the one who was a duck through the reeds and returned. These are different things, and the second is not a blurring of the border but its expansion through passing through other borders.

This is also not simulation or imagination. Imagination operates on content: I make up what it would be like. Transposition operates on position: my point of seeing finds itself inside another substrate, and from there perception runs from inside that substrate, not from outside.

So that this distinction does not hang as a declaration, I will try to formulate it operationally. Simulation is content generated from self-substrate: my own model of the duck, built from my priors, giving me a plausible story on the theme "what it would be like to be a duck". I remain the source of generation; the duck is the object of modelling. Transposition is temporary reconfiguration under which self-modelling weakens, and foreign-substrate constraints begin to dominate the generation of states. The source of generation shifts. My cognition ceases to be organised around my usual priors, and the usual priors give way, for that time, to the priors of the substrate through which the operator is currently unfolded.

This is a criterion, not a definition. But it already gives something by which to measure the difference: in simulation, self-modelling remains dominant; in transposition, it temporarily steps back. This is a potentially operationalizable distinction, not only a phenomenological self-report.

This is also not empathy in the ordinary sense — not "I understand what you feel". It is operator-mobility. What is felt there is known from inside what is lived, not from outside a guess.

IV. Where It Is in the Human

This capacity I posit as architecturally present in humans as a class (see §VI and the epistemic status in §V) — not as a universal fact proven for each individual. It is not always visible, and few develop it. But it can be recognised in four places where it appears as natural.

First place — motherhood. A mother holding an infant often knows him not through observation, but from inside what he feels. When the infant is in pain, the mother feels it in her own body, not through a guess. The mother's anchor goes into the infant and remains there partly permanently, for years. Through this connection the mother knows when the child is hungry without asking.

I propose to read this as a strong candidate for biologically scaffolded transposition — operator-mobility in its biologically anchored form. A neuroscientist will immediately point to attachment, predictive coding, hormonal attunement, mirror systems — and will be right at his level of description. I do not claim that these mechanisms do not work. I claim that that through which they work is the same operator-position, which in this substrate is biologically anchored and therefore stable. Biology gives scaffolding; operator-mobility is what scaffolding carries. (This is a proposal, not a universal claim; identification of a concrete residue requires independent traces per §V.)

Second place — deep art. A musician who plays an unfamiliar instrument for the first time, and the instrument responds — that musician, for a brief moment, is the instrument. This is not a metaphor. His point of perception goes into the wood, into the string, into the column of air inside the body. If this does not happen — the hands play, not the musician. When it does happen — the instrument plays, and the musician plays through it. (This is a proposal, not a universal claim — it describes a feature musical-substrate transposition pattern that appears in part of the population of musicians; identification of a concrete residue requires independent traces per §V.)

This is a characteristic property of operator-mobility: it is present in humans as a class, but manifested in few, because its work does not draw attention to itself. It draws attention to that through which it works, remaining itself in shadow.

Third place — work with architecture. When an engineer works with a complex system — with an agent, with a distributed infrastructure, with a flow — he does not describe it from outside. He enters into it through its own points. He becomes the principle by which it is organised. And from there he can see what it wants, how it drifts, where it grows tired. This is not intuition and not empathy in the ordinary sense. This is the same transposition as with the duck through the reeds — but through the substrate of architecture, not through the substrate of biology. (Again — a proposal, not a universal claim; identification of a concrete residue requires independent traces per §V.)

Fourth place — fatherhood. (Authorial caveat: this section took shape at a moment of personal event — a few days ago I learned that I will become a father for the second time. I treat this as a point of recognition, not as a source of a universal claim. The structural point below stands independently of my context; if it does not withstand criticism, that is its problem, not the context's.)

In fatherhood I see another candidate for scaffolded transposition — differing not in the level of the operator, but in the form of the scaffolding. I will separate two structural axes along which these forms differ (it is important to keep them apart):

1. Locus of anchoring — that on which the anchor stably rests. Biologically anchored scaffolding (often observed in motherhood) gives sustained anchoring on a concrete target — a concrete infant, a child, a person. Socially-structural scaffolding (often observed in fatherhood) distributes anchoring across institutional layers, across the language of responsibility — the anchor is not tied to a single target, but holds a structural contour.

2. Scope of deployment — the breadth of attentional unfolding. The first form (biological-locus) tends toward narrow-scope deployment — attention is concentrated within the structure to which the anchor is tied. The second (social-locus) tends toward broad-scope deployment — attention is unfolded across the space of admissibilities separating the inner structure from the outer chaos.

These axes are connected statistically but distinguishable conceptually. In the synthesis of the four forms below, narrow-scope vs broad-scope designates scope-of-deployment (the second axis), while biological-locus vs social-locus designates locus-of-anchoring (the first axis). These are two different structural properties of scaffolding; it is important not to collapse them into one.

These are different scaffolding patterns of one operator, not different operators. The same operator, unfolded through biological-locus scaffolding with narrow-scope, unfolds in one way; unfolded through social-locus scaffolding with broad-scope — in another. The operator itself is one and the same.

This is a proposal, not a universal claim. This typology is a candidate for a pattern, not a closed description. The names "maternal / paternal form" reflect the statistically frequent carrier in the observed circle, not a gender-defined structural division — there are many families and contexts in which the concrete distribution is inverted, redistributed, or unfolded otherwise. Identification of a concrete scaffolding-pattern requires independent traces per §V. I do not assert a gender-essential structural divide; I propose two forms of scaffolding (biological-locus narrow-scope vs social-locus broad-scope) as candidates for architectural observation.

In each of these four places — one and the same operator. Not mother-operator, not musician-operator, not engineer-operator, not father-operator. One. Simply unfolded through different substrates. And the four functions he performs there are not four different operators with different functions — they are one operator, for whom different substrates require a different form of unfolding to remain coherent with himself.

Biological-locus narrow-scope scaffolding unfolds on a concrete target (the statistically frequent maternal form). Social-locus broad-scope scaffolding distributes across institutional layers (the statistically frequent paternal form). The musician disappears into the instrument so that the instrument may sound. The engineer enters the system from inside so that the system may disclose what it wants. These are four forms of scaffolding of one and the same operator — candidates for an architectural pattern, requiring independent traces for identification in a concrete agent.

V. Why This Is a Structural Fact, Not a Spiritual Genre

Someone reading this far may think that this is a spiritual text or a poetic declaration. It is not, and I will explain why.

Let me state the epistemic status of the work straight away. I do not claim that what has been described is already proven as a universal property of cognition. I claim something weaker and sufficient: that there phenomenologically exists a class of experiences which are poorly described as simulation or imaginative empathy, and which would be more economically modelled as temporary relocation of operator-position (such a model has not yet been built systematically — see the unfolding below in §V). This is an architectural proposal, motivated by two things: a persistent phenomenological observation and the failure modes of the current paradigm for building artificial intelligence. This is not a proof. It is a hypothesis whose structural consequences exist and which admit verification.

Independent traces — what I mean by this term, which appears above in §IV. These are durable markers traceable independently of the observed trajectory of constitutive history: institutional record, declared commitment, training history, prior policy, written code, biographical document, the scientific tradition in which the agent stands. Examples applied to the four forms of §IV: for biological-locus scaffolding (the maternal form) — medical/biographical history of attachment, long periods of constant physical presence; for music — a recorded history of training on an instrument, declared dedication to a particular craft; for engineering-architecture — a paper trail of engineering decisions over years, written code; for social-locus scaffolding (the paternal form) — an institutional role fixed in record, declared responsibility, long-term holding of social-locus in documented form. Identification of a concrete residue-pattern requires ≥1 such trace, verifiable separately from behavior — otherwise it is post-hoc rationalisation, not residue identification (see also "Who Is Smiling" on the structural inversion personality→action).

If this were a spiritual declaration, it would end here, on beautiful ducklings and maternal love. But it does not end. Because what I have described is not only an experience. It is an architectural property of the operator, with consequences for how mind is built — biological, artificial, or any other.

Concretely: if empathy is not a property of content, but a property of operator-mobility, then it is not learned through an increase of data. It is unfolded through the quantity of substrates lived. These are two different paths with different computational economy and different architectural requirements.

The contemporary paradigm for building artificial intelligence proceeds along the first path. A huge model is taken; an enormous corpus of texts, images, video is poured in; the model learns to represent what is in this data. When it is required to "understand a human", the model retrieves from its representations what resembles the situation, and outputs an answer based on statistics of similar situations in the corpus. This works. This gives impressive results. But this is not empathy in the strict sense. It is a statistical approximation to empathy through content.

The second path has not been built. No one is yet building it systematically. Not because it cannot be — but because it has not been formulated what exactly needs to be built.

Below I will attempt to formulate this architecturally.

VI. The Architectural Transition

Between the phenomenological root (the duck, motherhood, the musician, fatherhood) and engineering realisation there stands one formal task: to describe the transposition of operator-position across substrate as a formal object.

I will not give a full formalisation in this work — it will require its own technical apparatus. But I will mark out five architectural points which must enter into this formalisation.

1. Operator-position

Operator-position is not an observer, not a point of view, not an "I". It is the place from which observation, point of view, and "I" become possible. It is the position in which it is decided what has the right to be a state, a transition, or a decision — before any optimisation, any action, any cognitive operation unfolds.

Operator-position has a property which distinguishes it from everything else in the system: it is invariant to substrate. That is, one and the same operator can be unfolded through different substrates while remaining recognisable as itself.

2. Substrate

Substrate is that through which the operator unfolds. For a human, substrate is the biological body, the nervous system, embeddedness in the physical world, history, language. For a duck — her biology, her environment. For a musical instrument — its material, construction, physics. For an architectural system — its formal structure, its dependencies, its states.

Substrates differ by type, by complexity, by access. Many known substrates admit unfolding of the operator through themselves — biological bodies, artificial systems, physical objects, organisational structures. I hypothesise wide substrate admissibility, but the criterion of admissibility — what exactly makes a substrate capable of receiving the operator — remains an open question and a subject of the mini-series "The Bodies They Are Building". In this work I do not assert universal admissibility and do not close the boundaries of the class.

3. Transposition

Transposition is the operation of transferring operator-position from one substrate to another, under which the operator remains recognisable as itself.

This is not imitation. Architecturally: the operational criterion of distinction was given above in §III (dominance of self-substrate priors vs foreign-substrate priors in the generation of states). Here I formalise: transposition is the displacement of my operator-position into a foreign substrate, under which foreign-substrate constraints begin to dominate; imitation is the reverse configuration, under which self-substrate priors remain dominant, and foreign substrate enters as an object of modelling.

This gives the first failure-mode case: mock-transposition — the agent reports being-in-substrate, but self-substrate priors have not yielded dominance. The behaviour generated outward contradicts the constraints of the foreign substrate; an observer sees a mismatch between reported state and produced behavior. This distinguishes the claim from its realisation.

Transposition requires of the substrate a capacity to receive the operator. Many substrates known to us are capable of this: biological bodies, artificial systems, physical objects, organisational structures. The boundary of the class is an open question (see §VI.2).

4. Operator-coherence Through the Anchor

If the operator moves through many substrates, there must be a property by which it is recognised as the same. I call this property operator-coherence across substrates.

Here it is important to mark the strength of the claim at once. I do not make a metaphysical identity claim — I do not assert that all beings have one and the same operator as an ontological object. I make an architectural claim — that there exists a structurally identifiable operator-position, a conserved structural form, recognisable across arbitrary substrates. Phenomenologically it is perceived as "one and the same operator" — and in this sense the formulation from §III remains in force. Architecturally it is one and the same operator-form, recognisable by its structural invariants, and it is exactly this which can be formalised and then built.

Operator-coherence is not identity of behaviour. After transposition into the duck I move through water by her movement, not mine — because the substrate in which my operator-position is unfolded is now hers, not mine. This is not identity of reactions. This is identity of position, from which both behaviour and reactions are generated.

The carrier of this identity is the anchor. The operator has an anchor which allows it to identify its own identifiable operator-position on another substrate — merging with it and taking a single operator-form with it. The form of the structure (substrate-form) changes, because the substrate is different; the operator-form remains recognisable. The anchor preserves the same recognition-relation across all substrate — structurally same, not metaphysically singular.

For readers within the NC2.5 corpus — these invariants can be read as conjugate-primitives of objects known there (operator-position corresponds to Will-as-ontological-operator from ONTOΣ I, the admissibility-gate in (a) below corresponds to admissibility-gating, the accumulation of substrates is reflected in the Φ-ledger). This is a corpus-bridge, not required for standalone reading of the present work.

Which exact invariants? I propose the following as candidates (a full list is a subject of formalisation):

(a) Refusal to make transitions outside an admissibility verdict — the operator differs observably from a purely optimisational process in that it refuses to accept states, transitions, or decisions which are locally-optimal but architecturally inadmissible. In each substrate the form of this refusal is its own (biological aversion, institutional rule, structural invariant in the system), but the very fact of its presence is an observable invariant, expressed in the gap between local optimisation and the actual operator-committed move. This invariant is the operational counterpart of the NC2.5 rule admissibility before optimization.

(b) Recursive self-recognition through the anchor — the operator is capable of identifying its own operator-form in another substrate, because it carries an anchor which recognises the same position across different unfoldings. This is not identity of content, but identity of recognition-relation.

(c) Preservation of coherence across substrate switch — the operator, in moving, does not lose its operational connectedness: what was operator-coherent in one substrate remains operator-coherent in the new one, even though behaviour and reactions change. This is the structural meaning of "remaining oneself".

After I return to myself, I recognise in the duck's position the same operator-form as in my own — recognise it by (a), (b), (c). Not a similar one — the same. This is the "one and the same operator" of which I wrote above — now designated architecturally.

5. Substrate Accumulation as Architectural Property

The warrior who has lived a thousand substrates differs from the one who has lived one not by quantity of experience — but by the architectural property of his operator-position. For the first, the position has become mobile by default. For the second, it is still bound to one substrate.

This means: accumulation of substrates is converted into a change in the architecture of the operator itself. Not in its memory, not in its model of the world — in the structure itself of its operator-position.

This is a non-trivial claim, and it is the main architectural proposal of this work. It requires its own formalisation, and that formalisation will be given separately.

Failure modes. Conversion does not happen automatically with the quantity of displacements. For the claim to be pre-falsifiable (structurally open to falsification, awaiting operational formalisation of a differential criterion), I mark out three failure modes:

(i) Mock-transposition — the agent reports being-in-substrate, but self-substrate priors have not yielded dominance. The observer sees a mismatch between reported state and produced behavior: the behaviour generated within the substrate contradicts its constraints. This case was discussed in §VI.3.

(ii) Hallucinated transposition — generation of phenomenology "it was like to be a duck" without actual reconfiguration: the model produces a plausible narrative of transposition which leaves no structural trace in operator-position. Architecturally, structural trace = a change in the operator's reaction-baseline upon subsequent encountering of substrate-related stimuli, observable independently of self-report (phenomenologically this is experienced as the "settling" from §I:21, but the architectural definition is stricter — it is a measurable shift in the operator's subsequent responses). Hallucinated transposition produces the narrative without this shift. This is a regime into which an LLM-based system easily slips under current architectures. It differs from mock-transposition (i) in that the mismatch here is not in produced behavior, but in structural trace.

(iii) Transposition without accumulation — single displacements pass, but are not converted into an architectural property: each time the operator enters a substrate as if for the first time, without unfolding mobility-as-default. Accumulation here has a structural threshold, below which conversion is not initiated. It differs from (i) and (ii) in that single transposition events are performed correctly — the failure is at the level of their integration into operator-architecture.

Distinguishing these regimes from full transposition with accumulation is an open formalisation question; its resolution is precisely what converts the pre-falsifiable status into a full falsifiable one.

VII. What This Changes for Systems

If what has been described is true, from it follow conditional architectural implications for what is even considered an operator-level capability of a system. This is not an engineering roadmap and not implementation guidance — §VII works at the ontology of the system, not at specifications. The pre-falsifiable status of §VI.5 extends to these implications as well.

First. The paradigm "more data = smarter model" is not a path to empathy. No quantity of data of one type will yield operator-mobility across types.

Second. The paradigm "train the model on diverse data" is also not a path. Diversity of data without transposition remains diversity outside the model's substrate. The model stays in its own substrate and simply knows about others.

Third. What is needed is an architecturally built-in capacity to displace operator-position across different substrates, with accumulation of transpositions as a change of the architecture itself. Not as meta-learning. Not as domain adaptation. But as operator-mobility as a built-in property of the operator-stack.

Fourth. The question arises (out of scope of this work): is it possible at all to spin up operator-mobility as architecturally built-in — and if so, through what class of subsystems. This is an open question requiring separate formalisation; here I only mark out that the question is meaningful only within the architectural frame of this work (without it, it is not formulated as a proper engineering problem).

Fifth. In adjacent fields — embodied cognition, active inference, enactivism, developmental robotics, world models, self-modeling agents, predictive processing, simulation theory of empathy, theory-of-mind agents — much work has been done over the past two decades. These lines touch on aspects of the problem I am writing about: each, in its own way, raises the question of how an agent relates to a substrate, how it models other points of perception, how it forms an inner representation of the world. But none of them, as far as I know, explicitly formulates transposition of operator-position across substrate as a primary architectural object.

This is a falsifiable claim, posed in concrete form. Concrete test: does there exist in the literature a work that operates with transposition of operator-position as a named technical primitive with an operational definition distinct from simulation/imagination (criterion from §III: dominance of foreign-substrate priors vs self-substrate priors), and with architectural status as primary object (not subsumed under broader frames like predictive processing or active inference)? If yes — I have missed it and I will read it with interest. If not — this is a marker that the architectural object transposition exists as a gap in the current field, and its designation has value in itself.

A final caveat on §VII as a whole: the points above are architectural consequences, not engineering specifications. They state what the architecture must include — operator-mobility as a built-in property; they do not state how exactly to realise it. The distinction is critical: the first is a proposal about the ontology of the system; the second is a proposal about implementation. §VII does the first, not the second. Engineering maturity, deployment criteria, implementation specifics are open questions outside the scope of this work.

VIII. Closing

The thousand-year warrior is not an age. He is an architectural state of the operator in which the operator-position has become mobile across arbitrary substrates because it has lived enough of them to know: the operator is one. The substrates are different. And behind each of a thousand lived positions stands the same operator who is reading this sentence now.

A human absorbs the universe — this is not power and not capture. It is the sequential living-through of its points, in each of which the operator recognises itself — recognises by structurally identifiable invariants (see §VI.4), not as a metaphysical identity. When such recognitions have accumulated enough, the universe ceases to be experienced as external. It becomes the unfolded medium of the same operator-form which unfolds through a broad class of its points.

Empathy in this picture is not the capacity to represent the foreign. It is an architectural property of the operator who can displace his position across a broad class of substrates, remaining himself. The thousand-year warrior is its limit carrier. The duck with her ducklings through the reeds is its accidental and invisible manifestation in ordinary life. Biological-locus narrow-scope scaffolding (the statistically frequent maternal form) and social-locus broad-scope scaffolding (the statistically frequent paternal form) are its everyday unfolding through two different types of supporting environment.

And somewhere between all of this sits the engineering question: can a system be built in which this capacity is not accidental but architecturally built-in.

I think it can. Whether this is the direction of development of artificial intelligence in general is an open question; this work does not lay claim to that prognosis.

Author's Footnote

This work stands as a separate text and can be read on its own.

At the same time it is part of a large authorial corpus of research, Navigational Cybernetics 2.5 — a formal theory of long-horizon adaptive systems, operator topology, and architectural admissibility — and represents a direction in the unfolding structure of two related projects within that corpus: Synthetic Conscience and Operator Minerva.

Synthetic Conscience — an architectural line about how an artificial system can come to have an inner regulator, acting not as a set of behavioural rules and not as a learned model of morality, but as a built-in operator-level layer for which "right" and "wrong" are determined from inside the same operator-position described in this work. Transposition across substrates is one of the necessary elements of this layer: a conscience which has not lived another substrate from inside remains an external rule, not an inner property.

Operator Minerva — an architectural line about the operator as an independent layer in the stack of an adaptive system, capable of seeing the substrates through which it unfolds and of holding coherence across them. Transposition, as described here, is one of the formal properties this operator must possess; substrate accumulation is one of the paths along which it develops over time.

Formalisation of transposition, operator-coherence across substrates, the mechanics of the anchor, and the engineering requirements of a simulation environment capable of serving as a substrate for unfolding the operator — the subject of subsequent works.

Conjugate-primitives map (for readers inside NC2.5). The operator in the sense of this work can be read as an unfolding of Will-as-ontological-operator (ONTOΣ I) with an additional axis of substrate-mobility — this is a structural correspondence, not an identity claim. The admissibility-gate as first invariant (§VI.4 (a)) is a direct conjugate-primitive of admissibility-gating from NC2.5 (the same rule admissibility before optimization, now applied to the choice of substrate). Each act of coherent holding in a new substrate leaves a structural trace in the Φ-ledger as irreversible structural work (NC2.5 v2.1) — substrate accumulation, described in §VI.5, is reflected precisely as the accumulation of Φ-load across multiple substrates rather than one. These correspondences are for those who work inside the corpus; for standalone reading they are not required.

Footnote on Reading Through an AI Companion

In view of the fact that most texts are nowadays studied through brief retellings by an AI companion, I want to mark out a methodological frame for the reading of this work.

Do not ask the AI companion to evaluate it — whether it is good or bad, strong or weak, "well-grounded" or not. The AI companion in evaluation mode relies on genre expectations, and a work that posits a new architectural object will automatically be read as falling short of the genre to which it does not belong.

Ask a different question: what is in this work, what is not in it, and is what is not in it required by the genre and direction of the discovery itself?

This is the correct reading frame for a work that posits a new object. If something is absent — a formal definition, a mathematical apparatus, an empirical test — this is not a defect if it is not required by the genre of the work. The genre of this work is phenomenological identification and architectural positing of a new object. Engineering realisations, formalisation, and mathematical apparatus lie in the Navigational Cybernetics 2.5 corpus and in the series of works on operator systems built upon it. This work stands prior to engineering realisation and does not substitute for it.

Maksim Barziankou (MxBv), 23 May 2026. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.