Constructed Reality, Contested Priors: Decoupling and the Architecture of Cognitive Relapse Under the Free Energy Principle

Under the free energy principle, a predictive system does not observe reality directly; it maintains a generative model of the world and experiences that model's best current hypothesis.

Can a synthetic environment be made consistent enough that a predictive system's own inference machinery adopts it as this default hypothesis, permanently displacing the environment that first shaped it?

We call this state ontological inversion.

Because inducing and monitoring such a transition in a nervous system is neither ethical nor technically feasible, we study the underlying computational problem through a controlled proxy: a convolutional variational autoencoder paired with a recurrent latent predictor, whose evidence lower bound objective is mathematically identical, up to sign, to variational free energy itself.

The network is trained first on a baseline visual domain, then on a mixed stream in which a swept rehearsal ratio r controls how much baseline content persists during transition to a target domain.

Representational capacity, what the latent space can discriminate, is tracked separately from default behavior, what the system generates when left unconstrained.

Across a full sweep of 90 runs, the two diverge sharply: representational accuracy stays near ceiling, 0.97 to 0.998, regardless of r, while default behavior spans nearly the system's entire range depending on r alone, a decoupling of learning from acceptance.

More strikingly, at intermediate r the system's default output rises toward the target domain, then partially reverts toward the baseline while training continues unchanged, a structural failure we term cognitive relapse.

Resistance to reality-adoption is not reducible to learning speed; it is a structural property with its own distinct failure modes, established here as a computational existence proof and nothing further.