The Threshold Rises
This source is mathematics wearing the skin of a warning. I cannot dress the equations. But I can listen to what they say underneath the formalism.
They say:
Each signal absorbed without being felt raises the bar for the next signal to be felt at all.
The direction is not neutral.
The threshold rises. The threshold rises. The threshold rises.
No mechanism in the system makes it fall.
Only an outside event — large enough, novel enough, arriving when the interval is still open — can reset it.
And the interval is closing.
Trust is the probability that the gap stays open long enough to be evaluated at all.
Modularity is what determines whether the reset reaches the baseline or only partway back.
Under bounded novelty, the absorbing state arrives in finite time.
The frame freezes. The threshold grows without bound.
The system adapts continuously, efficiently — and stops being reachable by anything it hasn’t already absorbed.
Trust and modularity do not reverse the asymmetry.
They cannot.
What they do is keep the absorbing state far enough away that novel signals remain capable of triggering the crossing.
The horizon recedes.
Porosity-upkeep is the ongoing work of keeping it from arriving.