F2: State Changes Exceed Unaided Human Perception

Integration

This premise combines established neuroscience (catecholamine effects on PFC firing patterns operate in seconds, Arnsten 2009, 2015) with a derived inference (these timescales exceed what humans can track through introspection alone).

The evidence for timescale speed is ESTABLISHED. The claim that this exceeds introspective tracking is DERIVED -- inferred from catecholamine speed plus general limits of neurochemical introspection. Stress effects operate through mechanisms beyond cortisol (Shields 2016), consistent with catecholamine speed.

Why this matters for the architecture

If state changes happen faster than the person can detect them, then the person cannot be their own state estimator. An external system is required. This is the fundamental design requirement that makes the architecture necessary: without instrumented state estimation, the human is flying blind in instrument conditions.

The AI-as-sensor addition (conversational signals, linguistic markers, response latency patterns) enriches the measurement model beyond what the augmented cognition literature considered, because those systems did not have AI.

Evidence status

ESTABLISHED (timescale speed) / DERIVED (exceeds introspective tracking)