Reality Access Science: Foundations of Mediated Participation in Reality

Reality access is commonly treated as an implicit precondition of perception, measurement, modeling, simulation, decision, and action. This paper instead makes access itself the primary scientific object. It defines Reality Access Science as the study of the structured, state-bearing relations through which configurations of Reality become available to situated observers and agents for a declared purpose. The framework begins from four commitments: finite participation is bounded; access is mediated by an architecture; accessible state is not identical to its referent; and consequential participation recursively changes the next access problem. From these commitments, the paper develops an ontology of Reality, observer, agent, participant, access boundary, interface, channel, evidence, reconstruction, representation, accessible reality state, access envelope, access gap, action, consequence, reality return, and re-entry. It formalizes observer-relative access, current and required access envelopes, an epistemic access-state type family, and a master participation loop while preserving provenance, uncertainty, authority, and consequence distinctions. External literature confrontation positions these elements as an integration and formalization across established traditions in active perception, partial observability, situation awareness, decision-relative information, representation fit, provenance, traceability, cybernetics, scientific perspectivism, and model accountability rather than as wholesale invention of those antecedents. A retained synthetic executable/analytic suite provides PASS-SCOPED R4 evidence for eight priority propositions by showing discriminating behavior against explicit comparators and retaining boundary/no-advantage cases. The evidence is EC-X/EC-W and REP-2 only; it does not establish external-domain, human, operational, independent, or universal validity. The result is an evidence-bounded foundation for comparing human, artificial, instrumented, simulated, collective, and cross-domain participation without expanding claims beyond the literature and validation state.