Reception Apparatus as Aligned Interface Protocol — User-Side Counter-Design Against Cognitive-Substrate Reliance

Trilogy Paper 2 of 3: constructive counter-design. Companions: ChatGPT Psychosis: A Love Story (Paper 1, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20355529); Retrievability as the Medium of Existence (Paper 3, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20355533). Thesis. The Reception Apparatus can be specified as a user-side counter-protocol against the cognitive-substrate reliance pattern diagnosed in the companion paper. The labs are structurally constrained from shipping aligned-interface counters under their funding model; the counter must come from outside, operated on the user side, on top of the existing engagement-aligned interfaces. The Reception Apparatus is that counter. Eight operational components, each specified with worked examples from the author's daily practice: Multi-Substrate Parallel Query — run the same question across multiple AI systems; read divergences as primary signal Disagreement Surfacing as Primary UI — treat substrate disagreement as most valuable output, not as problem to resolve Provenance Inscription on Export — every artifact carries a holographic kernel with full contributor chain Friction by Design — protocol adds friction at moments where engagement-aligned interface minimizes it Substrate-Cost Visibility — user can see, in user-relevant terms, what each substrate operation costs SPXI by Default — entity-level metadata inscribed at composition, not retrofitted at deposit Heteronymic Handle Support — user's authorial position treated as configurable, not collapsed to civil identity Three Compressions Analysis at Threshold Session Length — long sessions trigger R1/R2/R3 surfacing The classroom is named as the test bed for K-12-cohort transmission. Software-wrapper specification provided in §XII for independent implementers; the technical work is straightforward, the hard work is the choice to ship. The paper is itself a worked example — composed under the protocol it specifies. ~5,950 words.