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 proposed as a missing formal category in information theory, sitting underneath content, structure, and pragmatics. Beginning from the phenomenology of neural seizure and its outward propagation through social systems, the paper identifies a substrate-independent morphism: the same dynamics that overwhelm a nervous system operate in institutional capture, platform virality, charismatic authority, and AI alignment failure. Four variables define the topology (variety differential, threshold proximity, perceivability horizon, container topology), yielding three invariants: seized-system invisibility, maximal sovereignty from maximal collapse, and perceivability-horizon rotation. A hierarchy of control extending Ashby's cybernetics from first-order regulation through second-order map-topology manipulation to third-order deliberate contained inversion provides the vertical structure. Plato's Symposium is recovered as the first complete staging of excitability topology, with Socrates operating as a third-level control system and the ∂E/∂S gradient formalizing the attractive force that unifies charisma, beauty, virality, and sexiness under a single information-theoretic quantity. Container topology — the conditions under which threshold-crossing produces reorganization rather than capture — is formalized through four features (regulatory margin, selective permeability, temporal adequacy, domain specificity). Sub-threshold grammatical capture is identified as the dual-use application: influence operating below the target's parse-resolution. An echo protocol is operationalized for neural, institutional, and computational substrates, shifting diagnostic frameworks from categorical to topological.