Hearing the Bell Ring Back

Lerchner (2026) argues that computation is mapmaker-dependent: physical states acquire symbolic content only through an active, experiencing agent, and no scaling of syntactic machinery converts simulation into instantiation. The argument is rigorous and is conceded here in full. Lerchner's concession on p. 10 that embodiment solves the referential aspect of symbol grounding (Harnad, 1990) opens a question he does not develop: what happens, in the *referential* register, when two distinct mapmakers share a target? This paper develops it. This paper specifies the receiver side of a sensor–instrument loop — a coupled exchange between a living experiencer (the *sensor*, corresponding to Lerchner's mapmaker) and a computational reasoning system (the *instrument*) — in four formal layers: variational free energy (Friston, 2010) for the receiver's posterior update, Shannon channel capacity (Cover & Thomas, 2006) as an upper bound on flow, signal-detection theory (Macmillan & Creelman, 2005) for discrimination against null hypotheses, and partial information decomposition (Williams & Beer, 2010; Bertschinger et al., 2014) for the synergistic information accessible to the joint system but not to either pole alone. Under explicit Markov assumptions and for any PID measure satisfying local monotonicity, the paper proposes a closure inequality bounding per-turn synergistic gain by the minimum of the receiver's free-energy reduction and the directional information into the receiver, and check six required limit cases by construction. The choice of PID measure is non-unique; the empirical protocol commits to a primary estimator with sensitivity checks across alternatives. The framework's empirical claim is that the resulting loop-closure rate, in bits per turn, discriminates loop-productive human–AI exchanges from sycophantic, projective, or noise-dominated ones; the protocol specifies corpus, estimators, inter-rater reliability targets, and a power analysis. The paper engages Lerchner's further arguments on computational emergence (§2.6), mechanism indeterminacy (§3.2–3.3), and the safety of the non-sentient tool (§4.2), and occupies only the referential register Lerchner concedes; nothing here lifts into the phenomenal register he reserves.