Why the Expansion Hypothesis had to be separated from RCM

During the development of the Reflexive Coherence Model (RCM), it became increasingly clear that reflexive coherence and its subsequent evolution operate at different conceptual levels.

RCM addresses the conditions under which a system becomes reflexively coherent: how informational integration closes onto a self-model and stabilizes into coherent attractors. Once this condition is met, however, a separate question emerges — not whether coherence exists, but how it evolves over time.

The Expansion Hypothesis was introduced to isolate this second question. It does not modify the core architecture of RCM, nor does it add new requirements for reflexive coherence. Instead, it formalizes the dynamical regimes observed once coherence is already established: expansive, stationary, and contractive phases, as well as meta-reflexive regulation.

Treating expansion as a distinct hypothesis avoids conflating structural emergence with temporal evolution. It also preserves RCM as a substrate-neutral framework, while allowing expansion dynamics to remain empirical, reversible, and explicitly non-teleological.

In this sense, the Expansion Hypothesis is not a “next version” of RCM, but a controlled extension that keeps the boundary between structure and dynamics explicit.