Minimal Structural Sufficiency: From Winning Tickets to Extreme Neuroplasticity

This paper demonstrates that cognitive and inferential coherence are governed by structural minima (Fₘᵢₙ) rather than material or parametric abundance. By contrasting the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis with extreme hydrocephalus, we argue that biological systems achieve efficiency through continuous plasticity within a minimal viable configuration rather than post hoc pruning. While artificial intelligence relies on overparameterization to discover functional subnetworks, clinical evidence from cases with 90% brain volume reduction reveals that consciousness and inference can stabilize entirely within a severely constrained structural envelope. We formalize this principle within the Theory of Axiomatic Necessity (TNA), showing that functional systems do not require full substrate utilization but only a minimal structurally sufficient organization capable of sustaining learning. This structural account suggests that Fₘᵢₙ represents an irreducible threshold where inference and learning become inseparable, challenging both localizationist neuroscience and the scaling paradigm in AI.