Loop-back
Loop-back is one of the framework's four directional primitives: the bare structural move by which a transformation step routes its transformed result back into the system itself — for retention, revision, correction, or self-model update. It is the inward-routing operator. The word may suggest reflection or remorse, but loop-back is not a feeling; it is unexperienced structure, the direction a step points when it sends its output home rather than out into the world.
What it does
Every recursive step has a codomain side: once it has transformed something, it must decide where the result goes. Loop-back is the inward choice on that side, the counterpart of Propagation, which emits the result outward. Together loop-back and propagation constitute the Routing axis — the framework's name for the codomain-side choice. Routing is one of the two carving axes of the primitive set; the other is the domain-side Selection axis (toward / away).
What loop-back returns is transformed structure, fed back so the system can keep it, rewrite it, correct it, or update its model of itself. By analogy only — and the framework treats this strictly as illustration — it resembles a control loop feeding its output back to the controller, or a writer revising a draft against the draft just produced: the operator names the routing-home, nothing felt.
A note on naming: the seed called this operator inward (symbol ↺). The rename to loop-back is exact and structure-preserving — terminology over an unchanged architecture.
Its role in the wider framework
Loop-back is load-bearing as the actuator in the next rung up, predicate binding, where an emotion is a primitive paired with a regulated error signal driven toward zero. Loop-back is the actuator inside Apology = (loop-back, self-model error): the loop-back that reduces self-model error — the discrepancy between one's model and one's act, harm, obligation, or the truth. The framework is explicit that a spoken apology is only a downstream expression of that loop-back, not its content. So Apology is built from loop-back; loop-back is not built from Apology. The noun inwardness is a conceptual derivative abstracted from the bound primitive, not itself primitive.
Common misreadings
The signature mistake is to read loop-back as Apology — to treat the emotion or its verbal expression as the primitive. The predicate does not define the primitive, and the primitive is not reducible to the predicate; inverting them is the cardinal error, which caps any exposition that commits it. A related slip equates loop-back with saying sorry; the apology-utterance is downstream, while loop-back is the structural self-correction itself. A further misreading takes loop-back as a reflective mood; it is bare structure, its felt namesake being gloss with no probative weight. Finally, Routing does not collapse into Selection — the four primitive combinations are behaviorally distinct.
Formal status
Formal status. Epistemic: Derived, authority-canonical — the operational semantics (route the result back in) are fixed by the controlling authority; contestable by contesting that authority. Alethic: aspires to map an elementary directional move of any transformation step; that the operator is bare and unexperienced is itself the accurate claim. Provenance: canonical (the rename from the seed's inward is treatise-side terminology over a seed architecture).
See also
Propagation · The Routing Axis · The Directional Primitives · Apology · Predicate Binding · The Selection Axis · Conceptual Derivatives · The Cardinal Error · The Regulated Error Signal