The Source and the Record

Argues that a single inversion runs under every science of living agents: the field crowns a downstream "record" — the price, the gene, the model, the equilibrium — as protagonist, and demotes the living agent, the "source" that produces what the record cannot yet hold, to a vehicle or to noise. Traces the same move in economics (Grossman–Stiglitz), evolutionary biology (the selfish gene), neuroscience (the free-energy principle), the thermodynamics of life, finance, and AI, and argues that each field's own famous anomaly is evidence of the missed source. Proposes that a living thing is the source of the unabsorbed remainder, and sets out how to test the frame in a field outside AI. Companion to "The Un-Skippable" and "The Conserved Quantity."