Bounded Reality and Admissibility: A Structural Alignment

This paper establishes a structural alignment between bounded system architectures and the Paton System. While bounded architectures define how intelligent systems operate within explicitly constrained environments, the Paton System identifies the prior condition under which any system may exist and continue: admissibility. The relationship is clarified as hierarchical rather than competitive. Bounded operation is shown to be an implementation-level expression of admissibility constraints. This alignment demonstrates cross-framework structural compatibility without modification to either system. The paper positions admissibility as the pre-theoretical condition for system existence, while bounded architectures operate as domain-level implementations within admissible space. The result is a unified structural interpretation of system behaviour across domains without altering existing frameworks.