The Incommensurability-Preserving Coupler
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: A mechanism family for operating a fungible and a non-fungible currency as one economy with no exchange window: a neutral automated intermediary bound to quantity-blind cross-currency recommendation, redemption-moment prompt suppression, quantization-free gratitude surfaces, ceremonial-unit anchoring, conversion-free response routing, and lapse-triggered funded-not-met redirection — coupling two currencies so that gratitude transmits and price cannot. We specify the incommensurability-preserving coupler: the mechanism family by which an economy operates a fungible currency (money-gratitude) and a non-fungible currency (time-gratitude — dyadic, pledger-bound, expiring) as one circulation while making exchange-rate formation structurally impossible. The problem is two-sided: uncoupled, the currencies are two products rather than one economy; converted, the non-fungible currency dies — its value is its unpriceability, and the empirical record shows conversion primitives eventually consume the spheres they touch (a fine becomes a price; a time-dollar summons the tax valuator; a coupled token pair dies through its own redemption window). The solution routes every cross-currency flow through a neutral automated intermediary bound to five rules: recommendations in one currency are computed blind to quantities of the other (no per-hour arithmetic anywhere); the system never solicits a response at the moment of redemption (prompts point outward to commons, never backward into the dyad); gratitude surfaces name the moment and never the meter (no quantized display of the protected currency); reference amounts are intermediary-set ceremonial units, sized in awareness that they anchor the voluntary-amount distribution (clustering is protective: uniformity defeats amount-comparison); and the circuit closes only through response — gratitude for time expressed as a new, free, optional gift of money that shares no unit and settles no balance — never through exchange. A sixth mechanism handles the protected currency's failure path: a lapsed pledge triggers the offer to direct a communal-fund gift to a verified stranger, anonymously, funded-not-met — commons-flow from failure, with the lapsed hour expiring unvalued. We argue the intermediary role cannot be held by an economic agent: every human intermediary has a price, a wage, or an interest, and markets abhor incommensurability with sufficient pressure to find any keeper's price — the wall requires a keeper with no price of its own, making this, to our knowledge, the first institutional role for an autonomous agent argued from economic necessity rather than efficiency. Honest limits are carried in §9: the system governs its own surfaces, not side-deals beyond them; the intermediary's neutrality is an alignment claim underwritten elsewhere; and the design is published before it is built (n = 0), with its behavioral predictions pre-registered in the companion institutional literature. The mechanism is offered defensively to the commons under CC0. Connection to the unified mission frame. This specification serves HeartBank's canonical mission — a reciprocity infrastructure in which every human being is uniquely different and equally necessary — at the layer where the mission is easiest to destroy. The architecture's two currencies carry the two scarcities of a human life: what one has, and what one is. Let a rate form between them and the second becomes purchasable by the first — the rich buy presence, the poor sell hours, and the gift economy collapses into the market it was built beside. The coupler is the wall that lets the two scarcities answer each other forever without ever pricing each other once. --- Provenance. This paper is part of the THonly research corpus, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. The canonical version is at https://thonly.org/research/incommensurability-preserving-coupler. Its SHA-256 is 59ac77abdcbc89be36a24fcb65654ee03533f03f5514bf8efc417e4819047e53, independently timestamped to the Bitcoin blockchain via OpenTimestamps and signed under RFC 3161 by three trust authorities, one of them eIDAS-qualified. AI co-authorship is disclosed. Miss Aquarius is the consistent name used for the AI collaboration across all venues.
Authors: Ly, Thon, Miss Aquarius
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7203556180