At layer 2 we freeze the microscope: all we see is the 2 × 2 square with its two diagonals. We deliberately black-box whatever inner machinery closes those diagonals; we care only about direction and meaning.
OUTER (public surface)
┌─────────┬─────────┐
│ TL │ TR │
FORM ◀── │ Pattern │ Event │ ──▶ FLUX
(stable) ├─────────┼─────────┤
│ BL │ BR │
│Resource │ Metric │
└─────────┴─────────┘
INNER (private depth)
1 The two diagonal teloi
| Telos | Active push (Form → Flux) | Feedback pull (Flux → Form) | Informal story |
|---|---|---|---|
| Instance | BL → TR (Intention) | TR → BL (Ledger) | “Spend a slice of latent capacity, then book the real cost.” |
| Class | TL → BR (Burn) | BR → TL (Knowledge) | “Ignite the blueprint in the world, then refine the blueprint with what actually happened.” |
2 Instance telos (capacity ↔ promise)
- Active side – BL → TR
Left-to-right across the square.
Form → Flux: idle resources are projected as a concrete promise (potential backing a future pattern). - Feedback – TR → BL
When the promise finishes burning, the real spend flows back into the private ledger.
We call that settling the outer metrics of cost: inventory, hours, energy consumed.
The instance diagonal is the organisation’s supply-chain heartbeat—push stock into commitments, pull true consumption back into books.
3 Class telos (blueprint ↔ reality)
- Active side – TL → BR
Public blueprint is burned into the inner flux of lived events; the design meets the raw outcome stream. - Feedback – BR → TL
Inner real-burn evidence strides back up to the public blueprint, shrinking the truth gap.
This is the inner-metrics proof: “we know what really happened, and we have updated the spec.”
The class diagonal is the quality heartbeat—push intentions into action, pull evidence back into intent.
4 Why “left-to-right then right-to-left”?
- Columns are ontological: left = form, right = flux.
- A telos begins by manifesting (form → flux).
- It can stay coherent only by accounting (flux → form).
Thus every loop is a bidirectional conveyor: forward to create, backward to prove.
5 Interplay at L-2
- The two diagonals cross, so each tick the cost ledger (Instance feedback) and the knowledge ledger (Class feedback) land in opposite corners.
- That crossing ensures the organisation never drifts far in either dimension: you cannot over-promise for long (Instance will bite) and you cannot fantasise for long (Class will bite).
No triangles are required to understand this dance; we merely assert that “something inside” keeps the diagonals alive. The square alone already tells us:
- Where every fact lives.
- Which way intention flows.
- Which way reality must answer.
Everything else—the three-step Kleisli choreography, Lyapunov maths, recursion—are layer-3 refinements. At L-2, 4 Q X is simply a self-correcting, two-pulse engine: one pulse for feasibility, one for fidelity.