Addressed Admissible Futures: Future-Sufficient State, Load-Bearing Relations, and Restorative Reachability
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Many dynamical systems are described by their present state, yet the variables required to predict lawful continuation may include momentum, phase, retained history, boundary conditions, relational context, or other coordinates not visible in an instantaneous snapshot. This paper formalises that distinction by introducing the Addressed Admissible Future (AAF): the future-equivalence object generated by a state description that is sufficient for a declared target, horizon, intervention class and tolerance. The central move is operational. An Address is not defined as a list of preferred variables. It is defined by predictive closure: two histories share an effective Address only when they induce the same admissible future law, exactly or within a declared tolerance. This immediately yields a minimum-sufficient address frontier, an upward-closed family of sufficient descriptions whose minimal elements need not lie on one scale.The second move concerns recovery. Present viability and future recoverability are treated as distinct dynamical objects. Within the admissible future, the restorative subset contains trajectories that preserve load-bearing viability constraints and reach a declared restored target without unnecessary irreversible deformation. A restorative-future reserve measures how much relation structure must be removed or deformed before every sufficient restorative continuation is lost. This turns “load-bearing relation” into a counterfactual definition: a relation is load-bearing relative to a declared functional future when removing it materially deforms that future, even if the relation carries little or no present flow.Three formal consequences follow. First, a currently viable system may already have a fragile or empty restorative future. Second, variables such as velocity, phase or hysteresis enter Address only when omitting them splits the future. Third, traversal is recursively readdressing: a realised transition changes the history and therefore may change the future-equivalence class governing the next transition.The framework is anchored to established mathematics in predictive state representations, computational mechanics, viability theory, control-barrier methods, graph cuts and, where recurrent flow itself is empirically load-bearing, Hodge decomposition. A bounded braking example shows the separation between present position and future-sufficient state. Biological calibration is supplied by single-cell work showing that p21/Cdk2 position plus velocity predicts fate better than position alone, and that p53 phase resetting changes downstream p21 dynamics and cell-cycle arrest robustness. The paper ends with a preregistered test using public p53/p21 single-cell data. No empirical result is claimed here. The contribution is a falsifiable formal object and a fixed route for testing whether future structure carries predictive information beyond conventional present-state summaries.
Author: McLaughlin, Mark Charles
Language: English
Topic: Complex Systems and Dynamics
Subfield: Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7203869951