The Structure Beneath Simulation: Phase-Gated Intelligence, Sign-Regime Drift, and the Governance of Persistence

Abstract This orientation and bridge paper develops a structural account of why bounded observers and bounded societies rely on signs, games, metrics, beliefs, records, and regimes. It does not prove a new theorem or claim ontological finality. Its central claim is that bounded systems cannot act from total reality, so they compress recurrence into mediated structures that make action and coordination possible. These structures are not fake merely because they are mediated. They become operative when they constrain behavior, preserve recurrence, survive admissible redescription, and produce consequences inside a regime. The characteristic failure mode is sign-regime drift: the sign keeps firing after the governing recurrence it once tracked has changed. A label may remain stable while the identity-bearing unit drifts; a metric may improve while the counted object changes; an institution may continue speaking while the regime that once gave its signs force has moved. What appears as clarity can become precision over drift. The paper develops this from observer neutrality and phase-gated access through the order of reason: identity, invariant, observable, probability. It then applies the structure to human bounded cognition, belief as thresholded structure, social games, proxy substitution, level mismatch, forcing-function diagnostics, and AI decision governance. The proposed repair is regime discipline: declare the level, regime, invariant, observable, drift bound, cost ledger, and correction path. The conclusion is that simulation is not the enemy. Untracked persistence is.