Picture two people glancing at a bowl of fruit. Both say "that is an apple," and both are correct. The first saw it plainly, in good light, from a foot away. The second caught a half glimpse in shadow and filled in the rest from memory and habit. Their reports are identical. Their confidence may even feel identical. But if you pressed them, or changed the lighting, or told them the bowl sometimes holds wax fruit, the two would behave very differently. The difference is not in

Active Inference tells us that biological systems minimize surprise, but what happens when minimizing surprise isn't enough? When the stakes of getting it wrong actually matter? In this video, we introduce support sufficiency: a theoretical framework for how cognitive systems calibrate the depth of their uncertainty processing based on the consequences of their decisions. Not all beliefs need the same level of scrutiny. A system that treats every inference the same, whether i

The next paper in the support-sufficiency program is now available on arXiv: Support Sufficiency as Consequence-Sensitive Compression in Belief Arbitration. This post summarizes what the paper argues, what the simulation shows, and where the program goes from here. The Problem When a cognitive system commits to a belief, it compresses away most of the evidential structure that led to that commitment. Standard accounts assume that the survivors, a selected hypothesis and some

This paper is available on arXiv: Audited Calibration Under Regime Shift as a Computational Test of Support-Structured Broadcast. This was the first simulation paper in what has since become the support-sufficiency program. It was written as a companion to an earlier theoretical manuscript and predates the Constraint Geometry framework that now anchors the broader project. Even so, the core result holds up well and does real work in setting up what came after. This post descr