Planck thought “science advances one funeral at a time” was a law of intellectual life. TEI reads it as a diagnostic — the measured latency of a captured cycle, and now a design problem.
Four forces hijack the SPCA cycle by capturing a mind already formed. A fifth — ungoverned AI, reaching children whose cycles are still under construction — can keep a mind from fully forming at all.
The First Law of TEI holds that intelligence wants to know itself through an infinite continuum of phenomena. Belief, addiction, money, and power are the forces that close it into a loop.
