The Principle of Irreducible External Correction: Corrective Stability in Finite Adaptive Systems

This paper derives a higher-order constraint principle for corrective stability in finite adaptive systems. Building on the feasibility law, it argues that stable correction requires an external corrective channel the system does not own, and decomposes corrective authority into four necessary branches: feasibility, channel irreducibility, sustained exogenous access, and corrective authenticity. The paper frames these results as a physics-level constraint on correction, with alignment treated as one important application rather than the only domain.