Canonical · Primitives

The Six Ontic Primitives

Tier-0R Substrate of Principia Attractum

The six ontic primitives are the substrate from which everything else in Principia Attractum is derived. They are co-present constraints, not agents. No one primitive produces, requires, or subsumes another; each is jointly necessary and no subset is sufficient.

Shared properties

Each of the six shares seven traits that make it count as a primitive.

The six

Below, each primitive is given in three passes: the one-line constraint, a plain-language explanation of what it does and does not assert, and a concrete example that makes it legible. The examples are illustrations only — a primitive is a condition the substrate satisfies, never a thing or an event, and no example should be read as defining it.

T0-σAdjacency

Things can only affect the things next to them.

What it establishes. Adjacency is the constraint that influence between elements is restricted to bounded neighbor relations. It gives the substrate discrete neighborhoods, propagation that must travel step by step along a path, and a finite reach for any single effect. It is the precondition under which the words “near” and “far” mean anything at all.

What it is not. It is not space, distance, metric, geometry, topology, or continuity. It does not say what “next to” is; it only requires that some neighbor relation exists and that influence respects it. Any of those richer notions could be built later — adjacency asserts none of them.

ExamplePicture a grid of cells where each cell can only read and act on its eight immediate neighbors, never a cell across the board. A ripple spreads because each cell nudges the ones touching it, and those nudge theirs. Nothing jumps the gap. That step-by-step, neighbor-only reach is adjacency made literal — and it holds whether the “grid” is a chessboard, a tissue of cells, or nodes wired to a fixed handful of inputs.

T0-χPath-Closure Sensitivity

Going in a loop can leave a mark.

What it establishes. Path-Closure Sensitivity is the constraint that closed traversals may carry invariant structural effect. It establishes path-dependence, loop memory, and history as a structural feature of the traversal itself rather than a record some observer keeps. It opens the possibility that returning to the same place is not the same as never having left.

What it is not. It is not curvature, field, force, gauge structure, or differential geometry. It says only that closed paths need not be neutral. Whether any particular loop actually leaves a mark, and how large, is a downstream question the primitive does not settle.

ExampleFollow matter around a nutrient cycle: a plant draws nutrient from the soil, is eaten, the consumer dies and decomposes, and the nutrient returns to the soil. The atom is “back,” but the ground is not identical to before — the spatial distribution of nutrient has shifted, and the next round starts from that altered layout. The loop happened, and the loop was not neutral. That non-neutrality of a closed traversal is path-closure sensitivity.

T0-PAsymmetric Admissibility

A settled state and an unsettled state are treated differently.

What it establishes. Asymmetric Admissibility is the constraint that unresolved configurations are not equivalent to resolved ones with respect to which transitions are permitted. It establishes directionality without invoking time, a structural tendency toward resolution, and the plain possibility that a transition can be admissible while its exact reverse is not.

What it is not. It is not energy, force, entropy, gradient, flow, pressure, or drive. It does not push, pull, accumulate, dissipate, or do work. It is simply the structural reason that change is admissible at all — the reason the substrate has a “forward” before any clock is introduced.

ExampleA prey animal is eaten: the transition from alive to eaten-and-decomposing is permitted, and the reverse — the prey un-dying, the nutrients reassembling into the living animal — is not. The system has a grain to it. Notice this needs no reference to time: it is not that the reverse takes longer, it is that the reverse is not among the admissible transitions. That built-in one-wayness is asymmetric admissibility.

T0-MSelf-Reference Admissibility

A system can be affected by what it used to be.

What it establishes. Self-Reference Admissibility is the constraint that a structure may bear relations to the effects of its own prior states. It establishes feedback eligibility, recursive closure as a possibility, identity retained under iteration, and the precondition for any system to relate to itself. It makes recursion possible; it does not make it happen — that later step is ignition.

What it is not. It is not a mechanism for feedback, a process of mirroring, a guarantee that recursion occurs, or an observation operator. It carries no observer reading. It says only that a structure being shaped by its own past is allowed, not that any particular system does it or how.

ExampleA population where this year's numbers set how much food is left, which sets next year's numbers, which set the year after — the structure is being shaped by the effects of its own earlier states. That is self-reference being admissible. Crucially, the primitive only says the loop is permitted; whether the loop actually locks into a self-sustaining cycle is a separate matter the primitive does not decide.

T0-BDistinction Persistence

A difference can stay a difference.

What it establishes. Distinction Persistence is the constraint that differences may endure. It establishes inside-versus-outside as a meaningful relation, interface stability, identity separation, and protection from total diffusion. It is what lets a “this” remain distinct from a “that” instead of everything blurring into uniformity.

What it is not. It is not a membrane, a wall, a container, an act of formation, or an event that happens at a moment. It is a standing condition, not a process by which any boundary comes into being. It permits durable distinctions; it does not build one.

ExampleA cell holds an inside chemically distinct from the fluid around it, and that difference does not immediately wash out — the interior stays the interior from one moment to the next. The primitive is not the membrane doing the work; it is the prior fact that a difference is allowed to endure at all. Without it, every boundary would dissolve the instant it appeared and nothing could keep an identity.

T0-ΦThroughput-Conditionality

Nothing keeps going for free.

What it establishes. Throughput-Conditionality is the constraint that the continued existence of any structure is conditional on ambient inflow. It establishes non-self-sufficiency as a structural feature, the impossibility of closed-system persistence at the substrate level, and the requirement that anything that lasts must be supplied from outside itself.

What it is not. It is not energy, action, currency, supply, resource, or throughput-as-a-quantity. It does not flow, accumulate, get spent, or get measured. It says only that something must come from outside for anything to last; what that something is, in any given system, is a downstream question.

ExampleEvery organism in a simulated ecosystem pays a metabolic cost each round and dies when its reserves hit zero; a plant will not grow unless enough nutrient is present. Seal the system off from all inflow and, given enough rounds, everything winds down — there is no configuration that runs on nothing. That dependence of continuation on inflow, with the form of the inflow left open, is throughput-conditionality.

Locked at six

The six are jointly necessary and sufficient. No subset ignites recursive persistence; no member compensates for another. What their joint co-presence makes admissible is treated in the next offshoot of the framework, Ignition Sufficiency.

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