Architecture of Self-Regulating Cognitive Systems: Structural Organization, Historical Formation, Processing-and-Control Availability, and Episode-Level Regulatory Routing

This paper introduces a substrate-independent architectural hypothesis for sufficiently complex self-regulating cognitive systems. The architecture is organized through four complementary projections: Structural Organization, Historical Formation, Processing-and-Control Availability, and Episode-Level Regulatory Routing. Structural Organization distinguishes current Processing Organization from Structural-Update Governance. Historical Formation concerns the formation histories of Processing Organization, recursive re-entry, Structural-Update Governance, and relatively persistent structural constraints. Processing-and-Control Availability distinguishes structurally supported processing/control possibilities from those currently available. Episode-Level Regulatory Routing concerns which available regulatory route is instantiated in a current episode without treating routing as a complete algorithm of cognition. The four projections are integrated without being collapsed into modules, developmental stages, or a mandatory processing sequence. The architecture is constrained by the General Theory of Cognitive Structuring (GTCS) where their claims overlap, but it is not part of the universal GTCS Core. Human Psychic Processing / Psychological Architecture supplies human-specific constructions that can be compared with selected architecture roles; stronger realization claims require separate bridges. The paper fixes the scope, vocabulary, and principal non-equivalences of the architecture. It does not claim empirical validation, neural implementation, completeness, or a general theory of cognitive lineages.