Minimal Structural Sufficiency: From Winning Tickets to Extreme Neuroplasticity

This paper demonstrates that cognitive and inferential coherence are governed by structural minima (F₌₈₍) rather than material or parametric abundance. By contrasting the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis with extreme hydrocephalus, we argue that biological systems achieve efficiency through continuous plasticity within a minimal viable configuration rather than post hoc pruning. While artificial intelligence relies on overparameterization to discover functional subnetworks, clinical evidence from cases with 90% brain volume reduction reveals that consciousness and inference can stabilize entirely within a severely constrained structural envelope. We formalize this principle within the Theory of Axiomatic Necessity (TNA), showing that functional systems do not require full substrate utilization but only a minimal structurally sufficient organization capable of sustaining learning. This structural account suggests that F₌₈₍ represents an irreducible threshold where inference and learning become inseparable, challenging both localizationist neuroscience and the scaling paradigm in AI.