Qinfu Li

The Attention Budget: A Dynamics of Meaning-Systems Why a meaning-field has a master equation, in what currency it is paid, and how a system can starve with no one starving it

Abstract The dynamics of a meaning-system requires a budget. Energy will not serve — not because meaning is unconserved, but because in a society with surplus calories and insufficient waking hours, energy is no longer the quantity that runs out first. We argue that the budget is...

When Correction Stops Arriving in Time Comparing completion time with detect-and-restore time: an observer-relative criterion, its lower bound, and a per-cell measurement protocol

Abstract On the question whether a given system already constitutes general intelligence, mutually contradictory verdicts now coexist and neither side can refute the other: the developer announces arrival on the strength of scores across benchmarks, commentators point out non-arr...

The Ratchet on Mandatory Links How many places in a loop still require a human to approve: a computable model, an ordering prediction, and the exponent that decides whether the count has a floor

Abstract How many places in a loop still require a human to approve is a quantity that appears as an input in the criterion for timeliness [13] and as a binary verdict in the criterion for decoupling [14]. This paper gives it a dynamics. Each mandatory link is written as a pair:...

When Correction Stops Arriving in Time Comparing completion time with detect-and-restore time: an observer-relative criterion, its lower bound, and a per-cell measurement protocol

Abstract On the question whether a given system already constitutes general intelligence, mutually contradictory verdicts now coexist and neither side can refute the other: the developer announces arrival on the strength of scores across benchmarks, commentators point out non-arr...

Loop Decoupling and the Loss of Stationarity Time-Side Criteria and Cold-Zone Feasibility for Tier-Three Risk

Abstract First, the criterion is observer-relative. "Graduation" is defined as the point at which the time required to complete an action falls below the time required for a human to recognise it and respond. Whether one is in time is a property of the system-observer pair, not o...

Loop Decoupling and the Loss of Stationarity: Time-Side Criteria and Cold-Zone Feasibility for Tier-Three Risk

Abstract First, the criterion is observer-relative. "Graduation" is defined as: the time a system needs to complete an action is shorter than the time people need to recognise it and then respond. Whether there is time is a property of the pair consisting of the system and the ob...

Is There a Wavelength on This Transect? Two dimensions suffice, one does not, and counting bands needs a window condition

Abstract Whether a spatial pattern has a selected characteristic wavelength is usually decided by looking for a peak in the power spectrum at a finite wavenumber. The operating characteristics of that step are rarely calibrated, and a string of downstream conclusions takes its ou...

Numerator or Denominator Decomposing the successive transitions of the screening length into two mechanisms: a public analysis protocol for existing data

Abstract The screening length can grow along two routes, a rise in transport capacity or a fall in local dissipation, and the two are fully separable observationally: the first is read from accessibility, the second from the relaxation curve of a disturbance. Every historical tra...

Numerator or Denominator Decomposing the successive transitions of the screening length into two mechanisms: a public analysis protocol for existing data

Abstract The screening length can grow along two routes, a rise in transport capacity or a fall in local dissipation, and the two are fully separable observationally: the first is read from accessibility, the second from the relaxation curve of a disturbance. Every historical tra...

The Cognitive Field: Six Positions in a Judgement, and Two Rays An exhaustion of the misjudgement chain, a self-referential ratchet, and a strategy criterion that does not look at the amount

Abstract The standard treatment of cognitive error is a list: overconfidence, anchoring, confirmation bias, survivorship bias. Such lists can be long, and they have no way of checking themselves for omissions, because their entries do not lie on one axis. Some name the direction...

How Many Layers, and How Concentrated Within Each What would falsify "the more complex, the more centralisation is needed": one decomposition and a test design for three propositions

Abstract That rising complexity requires more centralisation is used repeatedly in cybernetics, organisation theory and complexity science, yet it has never been taken apart, and so can neither be falsified nor turned into an executable prescription. This paper does not argue tha...

How Many Layers, and How Concentrated Each One What would falsify "the more complex, the more centralised": one decomposition and a test design for three propositions

Abstract That rising complexity requires more centralisation is a claim used repeatedly in cybernetics, organisation theory and complexity science, and it has never been taken apart. Because it has not, it can be neither falsified nor turned into an executable prescription. This...

When Does an Accounting Inequality Have Teeth? A landing criterion for the maintenance power bound in prebiotic chemistry, with a first empirical execution

Abstract Background. Prebiotic chemistry has long lacked a common ledger. Synthesis experiments either reconstruct reaction pathways or investigate energetic conditions in isolation; over several decades the two have advanced separately, and the two standard strategies, “lower th...

The Maintenance Floor on the Heavy-Tailed Branch

Abstract Classical proofs of dissipation lower bounds rest on spectral gaps or logarithmic Sobolev inequalities, and both tools are natively suited to light-tailed steady states. In multiplicative open systems whose tail index lies in the Pareto range the spectral gap disappears,...

What Survives Coarse-Graining Four Components of Cross-Level Explanation, and the Bounds on Contingent Bits

Abstract Asking whether a lower-level science can explain a higher-level one usually produces an argument rather than a result, because the question conflates objects that behave differently. This paper separates them, and downgrades V1’s central equation to a pair of bounds — th...

From Binary Randomness to Macroscopic Emergence A Microscopic Derivation of Nonuniformity Emergence, with the Load-Bearing Link Graded in Four Layers

Abstract. The macroscopic phenomenological equations of open systems — an income-minus-expenditure master equation, a gradient-flow relaxation, and a quasi-potential landscape — are usually posed as postulates. This paper supplies the microscopic link. Starting from a minimal den...

From Binary Randomness to Macroscopic Emergence A Microscopic Derivation of Nonuniformity Emergence, with the Load-Bearing Link Graded in Four Layers

Abstract. The macroscopic phenomenological equations of open systems — an income-minus-expenditure master equation, a gradient-flow relaxation, and a quasi-potential landscape — are usually posed as postulates. This paper supplies the microscopic link. Starting from a minimal den...

The Principle of Spatial Gradient Excess Screening Length, the Jeans Instance, and a Cross-Scale Applicability Map

Abstract A few nodes carrying most of the flux while vast regions remain quiescent is a spatial pattern that recurs from cities and wealth to stars and galaxies. We propose the principle of spatial gradient excess, which unifies such concentration under a single screened-field pi...

The Principle of Nonuniformity Three Structural Quantities, a Master Equation Graded in Four Layers, and the Correct Classification of Aggregation Limits

Abstract: The macroscopic phenomenological apparatus of open flow-through systems — an income-minus-expenditure master equation, a gradient-flow relaxation, and a quasi-potential landscape — is usually posed as a set of postulates. This paper assembles that apparatus into a diagn...

Cross-Scale Critical Synchronization in Driven Multi-Layer Systems:Thresholds, Zero-Parameter Predictions, and the Non-Normal Variance Trap

Abstract When the coupling between two adjacent layers of a driven system crosses a threshold, their critical slowing down phase-locks: the layers no longer approach instability independently but share a single diverging slow mode. This paper takes the threshold formula from elem...