Observation, Model, Control: Information Limits of Representation and the Reflexive Agent

This work formalises why no representation can be at once faithful to reality, comprehensible, and able to confer control. From a single axiom, every observation is a finite-capacity channel, follows a hard ceiling: no model knows more about reality than its sensor let through. Below that ceiling, for complex systems, precision, comprehensibility and controllability lie on a Pareto frontier and cannot be jointly maximised. The original contribution is the reflexive layer: a built controller acts inside the system it regulates, so its own complexity becomes variety that oversight must absorb. It is stated as three falsifiable hypotheses, with an experimental programme and a meter in bits, injected variety, control gap, reflexive opacity, to measure them.