Race all the way down, race all the way up: A unifying vocabulary for bounded-commit dynamics across quantum, classical, biological, and computational substrates

What this paper is: a vocabulary-and-empirical-anchor paper that proposes "race-architecture" as a unifying lens organising existing bounded-commit-dynamics literature across substrates whose current citation patterns leave the shared structure invisible. What it is not: a new-physics paper. The connected literatures include: quantum decoherence and einselection (Zurek 1981+); Onsager-Machlup classical path integrals + Kramers escape; race-model accumulators in cognitive psychology and decision-neuroscience (Vickers; Ratcliff; Usher-McClelland; Cisek-Kalaska); Wallace's biocognition rate-distortion / Yerkes-Dodson programme; 1/f noise across condensed matter, neural avalanches, and financial markets; large-language-model CR-signal dynamics (Pødenphant Lund 2026d). These literatures share an underlying structure — competing processes resolving under a finite-time budget — but use mutually incompatible vocabulary. Race-architecture is captured by R1+R2+R3 (parallel candidates with non-trivial competitive interference + bounded resources + irreversible commit), refined to five axioms A1-A5 for compatibility with Schwinger-Keldysh formalism. The §1.5 structural prediction is kernel-conditional (Wallace counterexample: monotone-survival kernels yield single-peaked inverted-U; non-monotone kernels yield bimodal or U-shape via Lambert-W branch geometry). The Schwinger-Keldysh formalism admits a race-axiomatisation under three assumptions; Feynman path integral and Onsager-Machlup are exhibited as parameter-regimes. The LLM CR-signal is a substrate-mapping providing empirical access. Two worked synthesis-examples: §4.4 develops cross-substrate path-coherent memory (Berry phase / Hannay angles / perceptual hysteresis / drift-diffusion / LLM attention-trajectory memory as A2-instantiations, stratified by analogy-strength). §5 develops commit-as-time-unit as substrate-operational synthesis (Rovelli thermal time + Page-Wootters clock-entanglement + phenomenology + Margolus-Levitin ceiling). §9.3 treats commit-events as a cross-substrate normalization unit and develops three transferable research hypotheses: path-dependent mode-selection in non-monotone race-substrates; observable correlation functions may collapse better in commit-count than coordinate-time when commit-rate varies; geometric-phase accumulation under bounded control is constrained by quantum speed limits and adiabatic/control-error tradeoffs. v3.7 changelog (May 2026): substantial reframe from v1's new-physics positioning to synthesis-vocabulary scope. v3.0 dropped foundational-physics overclaims (time-emerges, FEP-as-corollary, Born-rule-derivation, substrate-universality-strong, pathology-mappings, cosmology speculation). v3.1 added the §4.4 + §5 worked synthesis-examples. v3.2 added §9.3 commit-events-as-normalization-unit with three productive-yield hypotheses. v3.3-3.5 implemented post-hostile-review claim-hygiene passes. v3.6 rebuilt the bibliography (38 missing references added). v3.7 Crossref DOI verification for newly-added entries + critical Tarraga→Di Gioia author correction. Venue moved from Foundations of Physics to Synthese (primary), European Journal for Philosophy of Science (secondary), Philosophy of Science (alternate), Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (tertiary). Companion papers in the friction-theory series: Paper 0 — Behavioural Friction Theory (concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19462499); Paper 1 — Friction as the cost of probabilistic computation (10.5281/zenodo.20012654); Paper 3 — Friction-guided inference (10.5281/zenodo.20014121); Paper 13 — Operational Friction Theory (10.5281/zenodo.20059876).