Assessment

No single measurement captures agency. A four-layer stack (physiological proxies, capacity probes, evaluative access self-report, action coherence) is required, each layer with known limitations. Together they triangulate.

Time-to-regulation is both the proximal measurement candidate for the objective function and a research question. It is not a single number -- multiple systems recover on different timescales, and identifying the rate-limiting factor for a given person at a given time is an open problem.