Excitability: A Post-Seizure Cybernetics of Control Inversion Across Substrates of Intelligence

Excitability topology — the structure of a substrate's susceptibility to control inversion — is the missing formal category underneath content, structure, and pragmatics. Its recovery transforms cybernetics from a theory of regulation into a theory of transformation, and isolates a control principle classical cybernetics lacks: steering an inversion one can no longer out-vary, by coupling rather than by domination — the higher-order agency of deliberately allowing and steering control inversion within a container. A perturbation-recovery protocol (the echo protocol) can in principle map a system's position in this topology and detect pre-inversion signatures before threshold-crossing occurs, shifting diagnostic frameworks from categorical to topological.