Mind Science

The Maintenance Constraint: How Resource Boundaries Shape Cognitive Availability

Authors: Lluis Eriksson
Comments: 12 Pages.

Cognitive systems are resource-limited, but "resource limitation" is often invoked without distinguishing one-shot costs (forming a representation) from sustained costs (keeping it usable under noise). We argue that availability of internal state features for control, integration, and report is constrained by their maintainability under finite budgets. As a technical anchor, we cite a companion technical preprint deriving an operational inequality in explicit thermodynamic control models, showing that incremental maintenance power can have a non-arbitrary lower bound tied to dynamical fragility. This motivates an operational cut: a feasibility boundary separating maintainable from unmaintainable state features. We develop an auditable bridge argument (maintainability → stability → availability), propose a neutrality-friendly principle of maintenance-feasibility bias, and show how it can be incorporated into active inference (Free-Energy Principle) as a maintenance penalty or constraint, while aligning secondarily with Global Workspace accounts of access stability. We address common objections and offer falsifiable predictions for synthetic agents and neuromorphic systems, plus an explicitly exploratory psychophysics subsection framed in terms of reportability and stability rather than phenomenology. We do not propose collapse mechanisms, do not derive the Born rule, and make no claims about phenomenological consciousness.
Category: Mind Science