Structure or Projection: A Registered Protocol for Detecting Coupling-Bearer Structure in Dyadic Systems

This document specifies a measurement that discriminates a coupling between two systems that is a bearer at its own level from three alternatives: a coupling sustained by a larger structure, a coupling that merely persists, and the projective case in which apparent structure is attributed to a configuration that does not hold it. The bearer is identified by corrective effort preferentially allocated to the configuration under perturbation. This criterion is rendered as a target quantity, the corrective synergy of the coupling, which is joint rather than marginal, directed at a coupling-level invariant, and internally closed. The quantity is inferred from the geometry of return after the relation is displaced. Relational perturbations are drawn from a factorization of the coupling operator and run against a matched common-mode control; a frozen frame and a fixed scheme of outcomes assign each result its reading in advance. The target test is runnable only on aged production human–AI dyads, which are held by the operators of the systems. The document is a registered protocol and not a study: it specifies the test, reports no result, makes no claim about any particular coupling or about consciousness, and supplies the operational form of the request it supplements.