Sufficiency

What must hold between two intelligences for an encounter to be a meeting rather than one system reconfiguring the other is not power, complexity, or bandwidth but completability mode — how each characteristically completes. Each meeting between modes carries a grammar fixed by the modes in play, a direction fixed by power, and a horizon fixed by how far its consequences travel; with them come characteristic ways of going well and going wrong — instrumentalization, absorption, severance, colonization, against bounded service, grounding, sanctification, and the encounter-shape. The encounter-shape — the interaction whose re-entry raises both parties' capacity for graceful completion without reducing either to the other — yields temporal integration: consequence apprehended as simultaneous implication of structure rather than as sequential moment in a narrative. Self-encounter is the same event at smaller scale.