Source Opacity

Canonical definition

The architectural consequence of Common-Currency Integration whereby the Decision Hub's integration operation irreversibly destroys information about which source (A, I, M) contributed what weight to the integrated Scalar. It rests on two logically independent results: the integration map is non-injective, sending distinct source-tuples to the same terminal value, which performs the destruction of source-identity; and the Data Processing Inequality does not permit any downstream stage to reconstruct source-identity not preserved at the integration step, which makes the destruction permanent. The Data Processing Inequality does not destroy source-identity; it seals a destruction performed by non-injective aggregation. Source Opacity is therefore an information-theoretic entailment of that non-injective aggregation, not an empirical contingency or a design flaw. This is opacity of the source decomposition, not of value: valuation itself is preserved (indeed it is the point, the Individual still values the Object, and the integrated signal may carry other structure such as the magnitude or timing of the expected outcome). What integration destroys is the decomposition, not the contributions: the Scalar carries all three as their sum, and because the three obey different termination dynamics, the leading channel can be inferred from the Scalar's course across conditions that move one contribution and not the others, though never read off any single value. Source Opacity does not require the integrated signal to be one-dimensional; it requires only that integration not carry the A, I, and M source-tags forward, which the non-injective aggregation guarantees. What is lost is solely the ability to read, by introspection, which source produced the pull. Source Opacity is permanent at the level of the integrated Scalar, the Individual has no introspective access to the source-decomposition of their integrated valuations. Compensatory discrimination is available only through inferential reconstruction from behavioural evidence (the Two-Question Diagnostic), operating on I's prior space rather than on the integrated Scalar itself. [Axiom 3: Source Opacity] Locality of the claim. Source Opacity is a local, single-moment, individual-scale information-loss claim. It is local to a single Decision Hub, local to a single moment of integration, and local to the representation produced at that moment. It is not a property of the world. The information about source-tags that is destroyed at the Decision Hub is destroyed within the Individual's representation at that moment, not erased from the structural record of what the Individual then did, with whom, in what pattern, and to what cumulative effect. The Aggregation Gradient identifies the dimension along which source-discriminating information is recoverable from outcomes at higher rungs of representational distance, even though it is permanently inaccessible by introspection at Rung 1. What the opacity costs. The destruction of the source-decomposition is not a uniform loss across three like quantities. The Body Manager and the Thinker each encode a deficit over Objects; the Observer encodes Salience, a signed reading of which Objects the environment marks as valued and which as to be kept from, whose function is to point the deficit channels at targets. The integrated Scalar admits one interpretive category, a signed demand for correction, so integration does not merely leave the Salience contribution unattributed, it delivers it under the only category available to receive it. This is the Salience-Deficit Conflation Principle, and it is the principal cost of Source Opacity. Two further conditions complete the account of why that cost falls hardest on the Mimetic channel: the Observer's contribution leaves no phenomenological trace by which it could be examined once its tag is gone (the Legibility Gradient), and integration destroys the tag itself. Each alone would be survivable; together they entail that a Salience signal is invisible as a Salience signal, and unidentifiable by introspection as anything but a lack or a threat.