Cognition: Capacity-Limited Engagement with Relational Substrate

This paper argues that cognition is unified without homuncular primitives. Features often treated as independently foundational—bounded simultaneous engagement, temporally ordered progression, structural modification through repeated engagement, stabilization, and cognition that continues beyond immediate task demands—are not separate starting points. They are consequences of the same structural relation: cognition as capacity-limited engagement with a differentiated relational substrate. The account begins from two minimal constraints: a differentiated relational substrate and finite engagement relative to its extent. From these conditions, a persistent asymmetry follows between available structure and concurrent engagement. Because cognition cannot be globally coextensive with the full field available to it, engagement is necessarily partial, and cognition proceeds through traversal of that field. Repeated traversal differentially modifies the substrate, producing relative stabilization through accumulated history. When external task guidance is reduced without restoration of global closure, traversal continues under reconfigured constraint, giving rise to spontaneous cognition within the same architecture rather than through a separate foundational system. The paper’s central claim is that several constructs often treated as explanatory primitives in cognitive theory are better understood as downstream consequences of this dependency structure. The result is a unifying structural account of cognition that reduces explanatory primitives rather than multiplying them.