Saturation and Sovereignty: Addiction as a Structural Constraint Regime

This paper offers a purely structural account of addiction as a regime of constraint saturation within the framework of Informational Ontology (IO). Working strictly downstream of the completed ontology and its derivative corpus, addiction is analyzed not as a disease, a failure of will, a hidden preference, or a loss of agency, but as a trajectory-level phenomenon in which salience achieves monopoly over an agent’s action space. Under sustained salience pressure, underdetermination collapses upstream of local resolution, producing reliable path-dependent trajectory convergence despite the persistence of agency and identity-preserving continuation. The account explains why agents in addiction act against articulated preferences without invoking executive failure, compulsion, or moral deficit; why freedom, understood as underdetermination, degrades structurally rather than psychologically; and why responsibility attenuates without disappearing. The resulting picture dissolves the apparent paradox of locally resolving into disavowed action by relocating explanation from momentary action to the constraint history that produces it. Revision note for v2d: This version applies a terminology harmonization pass to replace residual choice-language with local-resolution and identity-preserving-continuation language. No structural claims, definitions, argument sequence, or conclusions were changed.