Cognitive Systems: Admissibility, Identity, and Structural Persistence

This paper extends the Paton System into the domain of cognitive systems, treating cognition as a constraint-regulated compression layer required for bounded organisms to convert filtered environmental constraint into identity-preserving admissible action. Building upon constraint primacy, the Boundary–Relation–Persistence (BRP) framework, and the Lowest Admissible Configuration (LCD) under strain principle, the work formalises cognition as the evaluative hinge within the Physics → Biology → Perception → Action loop. Cognition is modelled as the internal datum of the subject that compresses possibility space, selects admissible responses, preserves coherence, and recursively updates via feedback. Under increasing structural strain, cognitive degrees of freedom compress toward a minimal viable configuration; if that configuration becomes inadmissible, fragmentation or collapse follows. The framework is descriptive rather than prescriptive and introduces no new ontology.