Object-Precedence Principle

Canonical definition

Every Object over which the Observer can emit signed Salience must already exist, and must already be present in the Thinker-parsed Object field as a possible target of action, prior to the Observer cycle that charges it. The Observer is therefore strictly posterior to its Object. Creation of Objects is a Thinker function, and for deficit-correcting Objects follows from Body Manager states the Thinker has parsed. It is never an Observer function. Creation is the first-encounter event and not a per-cycle requirement. Once the Thinker has parsed a deficit-correcting Object into the field, that Object is thereafter identified rather than created, and the identifying is the Observer's continuous work: sensory detection runs through the Observer, which reads the Object from the field on every cycle and supplies the Decision Hub with the target the Body Manager's deficit signal is acted on. Action-selection then proceeds at habit timescales on the cached-value store. What is intermittent is the Thinker's involvement, not the Observer's. The Thinker is returned to the Object only by the conditions that recruit it in the first place, novelty and prediction-mismatch (Chapter 4, Section 4.4.3): a correction that does not close the deficit, a location not met before, a context the stored posterior did not predict. A first itch parses the Object. Every itch after it is located by the Observer and scratched from the store. The Observer cannot precede the existence of its Object, because its only output (action-bearing signed Salience to the Decision Hub) presupposes the Object's existence.