Schizophrenia as Precision Collapse and Delusional Crystallization

High-Level Prior Failure, Aberrant Salience, and the Two-Phase Dynamics of Psychosis within Informational Nosology. Schizophrenia is conventionally described through positive symptoms, negative symptoms, and cognitive impairment, with enduring debates over dopaminergic dysregulation, NMDA hypofunction, and neurodevelopmental vulnerability. These accounts catalogue important mechanisms, yet they often leave unresolved how an initially unstable inferential regime becomes a rigid, self-protecting delusional structure. This monograph formalizes schizophrenia within Informational Nosology as a two-phase regime of precision collapse followed by pathological stabilization. In the first phase, high-level contextual priors lose precision under converging loads: interneuron redox stress, developmental synaptic over-pruning, and conduction dispersion in long-range tracts. The result is an explosion of uncertainty and aberrant salience. In the second phase, the system reduces that uncertainty by adopting an overly rigid explanatory hypothesis — delusional crystallization — that restores local coherence at the price of global inflexibility. Hallucinations and fixed beliefs are therefore not treated as mere noise, but as secondary stabilizations of a system that can no longer maintain graded, revisable constraint. The account is explicitly non-substitutive. It does not displace dopaminergic pharmacology, glutamatergic evidence, or clinical staging. It relocates them within one dynamical language already used across the Nosology corpus: precision, threshold stability, noise, energetic headroom, and the status of operational presence. Schizophrenia is demarcated from autism as developmental constraint reconfiguration, from bipolar disorder as a different mood-energy regime, and from the gradual neurodegenerative portals by tempo, reversibility profile, and the distinctive two-phase trajectory from uncertainty explosion to rigid closure. Empirical signatures and falsification criteria are stated in advance. Highlights Schizophrenia is formalized as a two-phase regime: precision collapse at high-level priors, followed by delusional crystallization. Core mechanism: loss of contextual constraint generates uncertainty and aberrant salience; rigid hypothesis formation then restores local coherence at the cost of revisability. Symptoms reinterpreted: hallucinations and delusions are secondary stabilizations, not primary random noise. Clear demarcation from autism, bipolar disorder, PTSD-related lock-in, and the gradual neurodegenerative portals. Non-displacement stance: dopaminergic, glutamatergic, and neurodevelopmental evidence remain intact; the contribution is a unifying systems architecture. Keywords: schizophrenia; precision collapse; aberrant salience; delusional crystallization; predictive processing; NMDA; dopamine; informational nosology; psychosis; systems neuroscience.