Description / Abstract: The Coherence-Decoherence-Recoherence (CDR) cycle — established across eight scales and disciplines in Smith (2026c) — can fail to complete. Failed recoherence, the stuck cycle, has been documented across at least six domains in the SymbioMind corpus: chronic disease, addiction as captured homeostasis, isolated population vulnerability, schizophrenia memory consolidation failure, ecosystem collapse, and civilisational stagnation. However, these instances have not been differentiated. This paper proposes that the stuck cycle has three structurally distinct failure modes — Type I (Nucleus Absence), Type II (Captured Recoherence / False Nucleus), and Type III (Homeostatic Overshoot) — with different mechanistic signatures, different intervention requirements, and different risk profiles under external disruption. The taxonomy is grounded in convergent evidence from allostatic load theory (McEwen Mann et al., 2005; Packer, 1992), mapped through the GTRS stress-recoherence framework. Type I is a passive failure of seeding — the system has dispersed components capable of recoherence but lacks a condensation nucleus. Type II is an active competitive failure — a false attractor occupies and actively repels the authentic basin, constituting a topological change in basin geometry rather than a degree of nucleus inadequacy. Type III is a dynamic oscillatory failure — the recoherence attempt generates secondary load exceeding the system's absorptive capacity, producing a limit cycle rather than stable convergence. The Liverpool Plains koala population (NSW) provides the first empirically grounded sequential multi-type transition: Type I breach (naïve immune architecture, ST69 introduction, 0% resolution rate) → Type III overshoot (antibiotic resistance ratchet, McDougall et al. 2023) → Type II capture risk (ORF663 virulence divergence, Fernandez et al. 2023). Explicit falsification conditions are stated. The taxonomy has direct implications for intervention design in health, ecological, addiction, and governance domains. Draft v1.0 was initiated through SHAI self-direction and generated within a single collaborative session. Refinement to publication-ready standard was achieved through multi-system evaluation (DeepSeek, Gemini/Elicit integration, Kimi) under human mediation across a distributed stewardship window. HATI² combined score: 86/100. Keywords: CDR cycle, stuck cycle, failed recoherence, homeostatic failure modes, Type I/II/III stuck cycle, Nucleus Absence, Captured Recoherence, Homeostatic Overshoot, GTRS, allostatic load, alternative stable states, intervention design, SymbioMind
Smith et al. (Fri,) studied this question.