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

The same bounded-commit dynamics recur, unnamed, across quantum decoherence and einselection, classical Onsager–Machlup path integrals with Kramers escape, race-model accumulators in decision neuroscience, and autoregressive language models — literatures whose citation patterns leave the shared structure invisible. This paper proposes race-architecture as the vocabulary and empirical anchor that makes that common structure explicit. It is a synthesis, not new physics. 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). 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. 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). v4.3 changelog (July 2026): a prior-art and positioning revision; no result is altered and no new empirical claim is made. (1) Section 8.1 previously surveyed adjacent unification programmes while omitting the two most prominent contemporary cross-substrate ones. Constructor theory (Deutsch 2013; Deutsch & Marletto 2015) and assembly theory (Sharma et al. 2023, Nature) are now cited and differentiated, and Wolpert (2019) is credited for the stochastic-thermodynamics bridge to computation. Because both added programmes are themselves cross-substrate, the section's closing differentiator is rewritten: cross-substrate scope alone no longer distinguishes this proposal, and the distinction is relocated to the organising primitive (modal / historical / dynamical) together with the consequences that follow from it. (2) Section 2.2 now states explicitly that a commit-event is, mathematically, a first-passage event, credits first-passage theory as already a substrate-agnostic cross-domain unification, and concedes that no new results in that formalism are claimed. The kernel-conditional non-monotone rate-shape is explicitly withdrawn from the paper's residual claims, since it has close antecedents in resonant activation, optimal stochastic resetting and hazard-shape effects; it is presented as a substrate-crossing synthesis only. (3) Section 4.3 anchors the computational substrate in the statistical-mechanics-of-learning literature (Gardner 1988; Engel & Van den Broeck 2001), with Shan, Li & Sompolinsky (PNAS 2025) cited as independent warrant rather than as a finding of this paper. (4) Abstract and scope statements tightened, and strawman disclaimers removed (the paper no longer disavows claims a reader would not attribute to a vocabulary proposal). Nine references added, all verified. Revisions made after external review.