The Bootstrapping-Interval Metrics
The quantities that exist only while the loop is running
The modes describe what a structure can build. These metrics describe what a structure is doing while it holds itself together. They are the framework's own instruments, and they share one strange and load-bearing property: they exist only across the bootstrapping interval, born at ignition and gone at loss. Reaching for them keeps you inside the recursive frame, because outside the living recursion there is nothing for them to measure.
A note on the name
The kernel's formal name for this layer is Tier-3 persistence descriptors. Bootstrapping-interval metrics is the friendlier handle used here, and it names the property that matters most: each of these quantities is defined only during the bootstrapping interval, written IB, the span of a sovereign attractor's active life. Before ignition they are undefined. After loss they are undefined. To assert one outside that interval is not a poor measurement; it is a category error.
The metrics
Seven descriptors characterize the activity of a sovereign attractor. Each has a formal name and a formula-form symbol; both name the same construct. All are descriptive, never causal, and none is a force, an energy, or an entropy.
The stored recursive compression a structure carries. A scalar magnitude with a spatial gradient, capturing active recursion happening now. Its sub-components are Recurcline Pressure and the Recursive Pressure Vector (RPV), the directional bias of that stored compression.
Defined only across IB
The accumulated record of what has survived recursive selection. A structured object, not a scalar; the durable history the recursion leaves behind. Live α-trace filters what comes next; passive α-trace is inert residue.
Defined ignition to loss; empty at ignition
Logic Mass
A structure's resistance to admissible reconfiguration. High logic mass means change is expensive; low means change is cheap. Rises with recursive depth, feedback interlock, and accumulated history. Not physical mass.
Defined only across IB
Stability Margin
The distance between the current state and the nearest admissibility boundary: how much perturbation the structure can absorb before it loses a sovereignty condition. Measured in transaction-cost space. Not thermodynamic entropy.
Defined only across IB
Continuation Cost
The transaction burden required to stay sovereign, per unit of continuation. A structure persists only while this cost stays within the resources it can pay from itself, with no external subsidy.
Defined only across IB
Admissibility Threshold
The minimum condition for a specific recursive behavior to remain admissible. Crossing a threshold is not catastrophe; it is loss of admissibility for one behavior. Variants gate maintenance, reconfiguration, and rupture.
Behavior-gating, sovereign scope
How densely history is encoded within the α-trace: how packed and interlocked the record is, not how large the substrate that carries it. Rises with repeated successful selection, and correlates strongly with logic mass.
Defined within the live α-trace across IB
Why they hold you in the frame
A metric that sits on a fixed external ruler lets you stand outside the system and read it off. None of these do. Because each is defined only while the recursion is live, you cannot reach for one without placing yourself inside the loop it measures. That is the cognitive use of the set: recursion is hard to think in, and the mind keeps sliding back into a straight line of cause and effect. These metrics resist that slide. They will not answer a linear question, because a linear question asks for a value where no loop is running, and there the metric does not exist. The modes tell you what is being built; the metrics keep you standing in the right place to see it.
These descriptors are Tier-3 in the kernel, strictly downstream of the primitives, the admissibility theorems, and the sovereignty conditions. They are generated by recursion; they do not generate it. Metrics estimate these quantities; no metric defines them. The collective handle bootstrapping-interval metrics is descriptive; the kernel's formal name for the layer is Tier-3 persistence descriptors.
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