The Endogenous Sophon v0.2 names a disciplinary risk in classifier-mediated physics while deliberately restraining the strongest version of its thesis.
Liu Cixin’s sophons corrupt experiments from outside, making nature appear unintelligible. The endogenous sophon arises inside the institution and makes unfamiliar reality appear prematurely intelligible: reconstructed as an ordinary object, assigned a low anomaly score, discarded upstream, or retained without the information required for reinterpretation.
The manifesto’s calibrated formulation is that high-energy physics has not ceased to be physics, but its empirical faculty has increasingly become inseparable from machine-mediated representation and selection. Whether that shift is total, and how it varies across collaborations and roles, remains an empirical question.
The paper adds a double enclosure. Upstream, only phenomena surviving representation, threshold, and classifier become available as knowledge. Downstream, applications pass through ownership, security, market, and institutional control. The thesis that these form one political-economic circuit is proposed for investigation rather than asserted as an established causal chain.
The v0.2 record matters because it shows the cost of perfective caution. In responding to valid technical criticism, the draft dampened its central argument so far that its public claim became difficult to identify. The later v0.3 restores force while preserving the factual corrections.