# Locked-In Inversion **Entity class:** Analytic and phenomenological frame **Domain:** Perception / Brain-Computer Interfaces / Cognitive Rights **Doc Type:** Canonical Concept Node **Maturity:** Developed authorial framework **Primary source:** [[articles/The Closed-Loop Gaussian Sensorium Engine|The Closed-Loop Gaussian Sensorium Engine]] **Collection:** [[collections/Neurotech|Neurotech]] --- ## Definition The **Locked-In Inversion** turns the simulation question from a claim about an externally fabricated universe into a question about the interface through which one subject experiences a world. Its clinical anchor is [[wiki/Locked-In Syndrome|Locked-In Syndrome]]: a person can remain cognitively present while ordinary motor routes no longer make that presence externally legible. The inversion asks the reader to consider the sensorium itself as an interface assembled from sparse and uncertain signals. In the source article, this frame joins predictive completion, derealization, dreams, simulation intuitions, assistive communication, and neural write-paths without settling the metaphysical question of what exists outside any one subject's reconstruction. ## Interpretive boundary The frame treats felt distinctions between perceptual completion and exterior agency as phenomenological data about a subject's experience. It does not establish that another person lacks interiority, that an apparent agent is unreal, or that solipsism is true. The article preserves those possibilities as questions about access and inference rather than settled claims about other minds. ## Operational significance When a bidirectional interface participates in constructing the subject's experienced world, the inversion becomes a deployment test: can the subject know what is being generated, refuse or terminate the intervention, inspect its provenance, and recover an unmediated baseline? Those questions route directly to [[wiki/Perceptual Sovereignty|Perceptual Sovereignty]]. ## Relationships - **Clinical anchor:** [[wiki/Locked-In Syndrome|Locked-In Syndrome]]. - **Architecture:** [[wiki/Closed-Loop Gaussian Sensorium Engine|Closed-Loop Gaussian Sensorium Engine]]. - **Perceptual model:** [[wiki/Predictive Processing|Predictive Processing]] and [[wiki/Gaussian Perceptual Field|Gaussian Perceptual Field]]. - **Rights consequence:** [[wiki/Perceptual Sovereignty|Perceptual Sovereignty]], [[wiki/Cognitive Liberty|Cognitive Liberty]], and [[wiki/Neurorights|Neurorights]]. - **Biographical route:** [[wiki/Stephen Hawking|Stephen Hawking]] and [[wiki/Assistive Technology|Assistive Technology]]. ## Sources and provenance - [[articles/The Closed-Loop Gaussian Sensorium Engine|The Closed-Loop Gaussian Sensorium Engine]] — origin and full statement of the inversion. - [Chaudhary et al., intracortical communication in a participant classified as completely locked-in (Nature Communications, 2022)](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28859-8) — clinical case used by the article as its concrete anchor.