Causal–Constitutive Interlock: A Rule–Entity Architecture for Physical Shaping and Realization

This paper develops Causal–Constitutive Interlock (CCI) as a rule–entity architecture for distinguishing two different relations that can hold together. The first is Shape: a rule or real dynamical structure causally or dynamically shapes a physical entity or event. The second is Bear: that same physical entity bears, instantiates, realizes, or provides a concrete physical locus for the same rule. A local CCI obtains when both relations hold for the same rule–entity pair: the same rule Shapes the entity or event, and that same entity Bears the same rule. The architecture further requires typed rule and physical endpoints, preservation of same-rule and same-endpoint identity, compatibility with many-to-many relations, separation of ontic relations from the evidence that supports them, and a domain-indexed Direct/Mediated refinement of Shape through First Physical Landing (FPL). The paper distinguishes the different evidential burdens associated with local CCI witnesses, the actual-world universal CCI claim, and the highest-modal CCI claim. It then examines concrete physical instantiations across quantum chromodynamics (QCD), atomic hydrogen, weak-field gravity, neutron beta decay, and effective Fermi–Hubbard dynamics. Only after the CCI architecture, its evidential conditions, and its physical witnesses have been established does the paper introduce the Domain-Indexed Compression Audit (DICA) as a comparative tool for testing how much of the CCI structure existing theories can reconstruct while preserving the relevant endpoints, relations, domains, evidence, and bridge provenance. DICA therefore functions here as a method of theoretical comparison rather than as the source of the CCI definition or as a substitute for physical verification.