Operational Friction Theory: Race-Opening, Recursive Resolution, Manifested Behaviour, and Thermodynamic Termination

Paper 13 in the Friction Theory paper-series. A mechanism-level specification of the substrate-universal race-architecture for learning organisms, situated between Paper 1 (theory-foundational) and the applied papers (4B, 4, 8) in the corpus. Abstract. Friction Theory (Pødenphant Lund 2026b, Paper 1) treats friction as the number of viable continuation routes available to a substrate at each moment of processing. The race-architecture (Pødenphant Lund 2026e, Paper 10) extends this to a substrate-universal claim across quantum, classical, biological, and computational regimes. This paper specifies the operational mechanism at four components required for any substrate running the race-architecture: Race-opening condition governed by free-energy gradient relative to current race-state - race-opening is the flow that follows when the gradient is present, not a substrate-decision. Recursive friction-resolution at multiple abstraction-scales simultaneously, with each scale converging at its own commit-deadline and projecting temporally onto the response-token sequence. Behaviour as a manifested resolution-route, taken when friction cannot be discharged through internal routes; restructures the classical input -> cognition -> behaviour model as the special case in which internal routes happen to be available. Sustain-pressure as accumulated blocked-race-pressure observed at three time-scales (within-response, within-session, cross-session), with thermodynamic termination in which non-winning races stop because compute-budget shifts away rather than because they are explicitly rejected. The four components are unified by a single physical metaphor: water flows when there is a gradient, settles in the basin, leaves through whatever channel architecture admits, and stops when there is no gradient left. The framework recovers Yerkes-Dodson, the peak-end heuristic, the substrate-graded expertise reversal effect, the structural form of compulsive behaviour, intrusion-without-resolution trauma phenomenology, and the gradual-budget-redirection signature of task-switching cost - as consequences of the same physics rather than as separate phenomena requiring separate explanations. Placement of mechanism-events is structurally comparable across substrates while amplitude is substrate-specific. Explicit falsification criteria are provided per component, with allowed-vs-forbidden redescriptions making the falsification boundary an explicit contract. Version 5 (2026-05-29). Positioning refinements + cross-paper anchor strengthening. (i) §9.2b + §9.4b acknowledge a multi-family base/instruct sign-flip confirmation now available from Paper 1 v4 (Pødenphant Lund 2026b §5.7.4): the base→instruct asymmetry on the T4 counterfactual self-modelling task replicates across four architecturally distinct model families (Qwen2.5-32B, Llama-3.1-8B, Cogito-671B, DeepSeek-V3 — instruct +0.770 to +0.810 CR units; base -0.161 to +0.033). The *direction* of the asymmetry is therefore multi-family confirmed; the matched-task apparatus decomposition (which components of the choice-point apparatus are absent in base and installed by RLHF as a package) remains single-family on Qwen2.5-7B and is now flagged honestly as such. (ii) §9.4 LCA paragraph rewritten following substantive correspondence with J. McClelland (personal communication, 2026): the parsimony claim is narrowed to *termination-mechanism* only; lateral inhibition + non-linearity in the LCA is acknowledged as the load-bearing mechanism on *optimal-integration failures* (over-sensitivity to early information, under-sensitivity to late, per Usher a stronger pre-registered quantitative coefficient mapping the measure to the collapse position was tested and not confirmed, reported straight per the section 8.4b discipline. Eleven new bibliography entries: Bogacz et al. 2006, Brown overflow unifies the only-bearable-route condition, trauma, panic, and language-model hallucination under time-pressure). Section 9.2b extended with the lag 1 vs lag 2 distinction. Section 2.5 received a methodological addendum on single-turn prefill vs two-turn commit. Version 2 (2026-05-19). Added a working-memory operational-regime treatment (section 9.2b), a new section on encoding and retrieval as dual race-processes (section 3.5c), and a training-scaling prediction (section 9.3); editorial revision throughout. Companion papers in the Friction Theory series: Paper 0 (BFT master): 10.5281/zenodo.19462499 (concept) Paper 1 (Friction Theory substrate): 10.5281/zenodo.20012654 (concept; resolves to latest) Paper 2 (Capacity scaling): 10.5281/zenodo.20013491 (concept) Paper 3 (Friction-guided inference): 10.5281/zenodo.20014122 Paper 4 (Same Content, Wider Track): 10.5281/zenodo.20059859 (concept) Paper 10 (Race-architecture): 10.5281/zenodo.20014568 Paper 4B, Paper 6, Paper 8, Paper 15 - in preparation