This paper argues that, within one determinate pre-physical generative route, existence should be understood as closure-completed facthood. Earlier papers in the sequence established three broader results: that any viable pre-physical generative theory must preserve minimal conditions of genuine attainment, that ontology, generation, and readout must remain functionally non-collapsed, and that some genuine settlement is required if what is generated is to stand prior to later observability rather than be constituted by it retrospectively (Li and Li 2026a, 2026b, 2026c). The present paper does not restate those results. It asks a narrower but stronger question: once settlement has been shown to be necessary, what makes settlement complete? The paper rejects four weaker answers. Existence cannot be identified with admissibility, because admissibility still leaves attainment to be achieved. It cannot be identified with ongoing generation, because process as such does not yet distinguish the merely pending from the obtained. It cannot be identified with mere completion, because culmination, convergence, or descriptive finality do not yet tell us whether settlement has actually been completed. And it cannot be identified with later readout, because that would reverse explanatory order by allowing downstream accessibility to constitute what is supposed to have been attained earlier. In place of these weaker criteria, the paper develops a single settlement-judgment structure with three analytically distinguishable but functionally integrated moments. First, there is a closure-point: a unified point at which settlement becomes answerable rather than indefinitely deferred. In the local route presupposed here, this structurally specified role is borne by phase-closure: closure is a discrete completion-point, not an asymptotic tendency, and in the concrete GOCD vocabulary it is associated with simultaneous completion of a full phase cycle. Second, there is a threshold-condition: settlement is not completed merely by reaching the point of judgment, but only where the relevant condition of successful completion is satisfied. In the local route, this is the point at which relational weight reaches the required threshold. Third, there is facthood: what has thus completed settlement must stand within generative history as an obtained predecessor rather than as a merely earlier or merely descriptively complete output. In the local vocabulary of the paper, this obtained standing is associated with freezing. The paper therefore argues that existence, within this determinate route, is best understood as closure-completed facthood. The claim is not that every viable pre-physical framework must adopt the same vocabulary or local realization. It is that, in the route defended here, no weaker representative criterion examined in the paper is sufficient to explain when settlement becomes answerable, when it counts as successfully completed under a threshold borne by the generative order itself, and how the completed result stands as obtained prior to later readout. Throughout, the paper uses a compressed local vocabulary only in the criterion-oriented form needed for the present argument. The broader minimal, architectural, and interface burdens presupposed here are established in Li and Li (2026a, 2026b, 2026c).
Li et al. (Thu,) studied this question.