Legibility Gradient

Canonical definition

The Legibility Gradient is the ordering of the three motivational channels by how much of itself each leaves available to notice once Common-Currency Integration has stripped its source-tag. The Body Manager's signal is anchored to a physiologically specifiable Referent and arrives with bodily phenomenology (stomach contraction, dry mouth, shivering) that persists into conscious awareness. The Thinker's signal is anchored to what the process it is running requires and arrives as work directed at a particular Object for a stated purpose, which likewise persists, accompanied by Curiosity and Boredom as the signatures of the ground-resolution function's recruitment and its exhaustion. The Observer's signal arrives as bare directional valence with no anchoring phenomenology whatever: nothing accompanies mimetic approach and nothing survives into awareness. Because Confabulation must complete a narrative over whatever the signal leaves behind, the Gradient fixes how far each channel constrains the narratives available, A narrowing them to deficit-relevant accounts, I to accounts the work can be checked against, and M not constraining them at all. Source Opacity strips all three tags equally; it is the absence of anchoring phenomenology in the Mimetic channel that makes the stripping operationally decisive there and only there. The Gradient is accordingly the first of the three conditions on which Axiom 3's account of Mimetic inaccessibility rests, the other two being that the traceless signal is a Salience reading rather than a deficit, and that integration destroys the tag that would mark it as one.