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 Section 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: Section 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). Section 5 develops commit-as-time-unit as substrate-operational synthesis (Rovelli thermal time + Page-Wootters clock-entanglement + phenomenology + Margolus-Levitin ceiling). Section 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. v4.1 changelog (May 2026): substantial expansion of Section 8.1 Haken Synergetics engagement, with formal mapping between race-axioms R1+R2+R3 and synergetics' modes / timescale-separation / phase-transition structure, plus two worked examples where synergetics' standard apparatus does not natively apply (discrete-time autoregressive substrates such as LLM token generation; substrate-uniform time-unit identification under Section 5). The new Section 8.1 includes an explicit honest summary acknowledging that synergetics is more rigorous than race-vocabulary within its scope, and that race-vocabulary is offered as a complementary level of abstraction rather than as a competing dynamical theory. The standard one-paragraph Acknowledgements (uniform across the Friction Theory series) is adopted, aligned with the public-facing disclosure policy at frictiontheory.org. Other Adjacent-Programmes paragraphs in Section 8.1 (decoherent histories; stochastic thermodynamics; biased-competition) remain as in v3.8. 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).