On Self-Manifestation · Form Chapter 7 v1.0: Mis-Externalization — A Structural Account of Why Internal Representations Are Taken as External

Why do internally generated structures appear to come from the outside? This paper proposes a formal account of mis-externalization, showing that what is commonly treated as “external reality” can arise as a necessary attribution result within a system, rather than as a direct property of input. The framework demonstrates that once a system can generate structures internally and must maintain a current state, it is forced to assign a source to that structure—even when the source cannot be uniquely determined. Under conditions of path ambiguity, information loss, and compression, multiple generative paths become indistinguishable. This creates a source gap, within which the system must still produce a single attribution. The paper proves that this requires an attribution mapping and an internal bias, by which multiple candidate sources are compressed into a single label (e.g., “external” vs. “internal”), and stabilized through a convergence mechanism. The central claim is: externality is not an input feature, but the result of attribution under uncertainty. Mis-externalization is therefore not an error, but a necessary structural outcome in any system that must assign sources under indeterminacy. This framework provides a unified explanation for phenomena such as hallucination, misattribution of perception, and source confusion, with implications for neuroscience (perceptual inference), cognitive science (source monitoring), and artificial intelligence (representation, attribution, and uncertainty in generative systems).