Order Is Not Control: Driven-Dissipative Response Laws Across Artificial and Biological Systems

Aligned language models gate behaviors such as refusal and language routing through sparse feed forward neurons, yet no theory predicts when a single neuron intervention controls a behavior coherently rather than collapsing the output. We develop a budget normalized control window framework for single neuron steering. A dose along one write direction reduces to one control coordinate: the alignment between the residual stream and the write, driven along a universal saturation curve in units of a coherence budget set by the residual norm divided by the write norm. Coherent control exists when a behavior trigger lies below the collapse ceiling. The same coordinate governs benign mode switches and refusal; the ceiling follows from weights and one generic forward pass, while triggers are measured at rollout. On fifteen held out neurons, the predicted ceiling has mean absolute error 0.14, about 0.07 in bulk layers, and the committed open or closed verdict holds on eleven against a ten of fifteen majority baseline. Closed cases expose three failure modes rather than violations: collapse before trigger, too little depth to propagate, or a normalization that caps how far one neuron can push. The law explains why local gradient attribution anti predicts control: true controllers write off the readout axis and carry a near zero first order gradient. A forward only contrastive screen made precise by the window recovers controllers that attribution misses. On refusal, the hardest case, intervention success is typed, not scalar: coherent bypass and strict actionable reach separate, so a neuron can flip refusal in fluent, on task text with no actionable content, and genuine actionable reach appears only for three of six audited Llama pivots and only at later rollout horizons. Single neuron steering is therefore a budgeted, typed audit of controllability rather than a fixed dose anecdote.

Large language model (LLM) agents inherit reactive failure modes: escalation under provocation, sycophantic drift under flattery, perseveration when stuck. These are failures of propensity, not capability; they concern what a model does under sustained pressure, which training-time alignment reduces but does not eliminate at runtime. This research led to the Gubernaut Cognitive Controller (GCC), a model-agnostic runtime control layer in a Nelson--Narens monitoring--control loop: an object level reads and writes text, while a deterministic meta level reads only the numeric telemetry {intensity, valence, repetition} and returns a regulating posture. Because the meta level ingests zero tokens, no injection channel to the controller exists by construction (an architectural property, not yet adversarially tested); the text-exposed arbiter's compliance is measured, not assumed. We evaluate the GCC with a pre-registered, generate-once/judge-many protocol across a 4x4 matrix of four frontier models (GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, Gemini 3.5 Flash, Grok 4.3), each serving as both a generator and a judge. The regulated arm is calmer in 13 of 16 cells at p<.05 and 15 of 16 by sign; the three sub-threshold cells, including a -0.04 null, all fall on the single near-saturated host. The effect survives a lineage-independent fourth judge family (xAI), strong evidence that it is no artifact of shared judge style. The clearest mechanism is the recovery signature: arousal that integrates under attack and then decays, valence-gated, on de-escalation, replicating across all four families. Transcripts and panels ship with SHA-256 provenance and are re-judgeable; five failure modes are pre-registered. No consciousness claims are made.

Large language models are increasingly used as behavioral simulators, but it remains unclear when their outputs reflect human-like cognitive mechanisms rather than prompt-sensitive surface patterns. We study this question through the realization effect, a well-characterized finding in behavioral economics in which risk-taking differs systematically after paper versus realized gains and losses. We evaluate LLM behavior at three levels: prompt-only behavioral sensitivity, linear readout of internal representations, and causal control via activation steering. Prompt-only results show systematic condition sensitivity, but the directional pattern does not reproduce human realization-effect predictions. Gemma's residual stream contains a linearly decodable realization-status signal at layer 18 that generalizes to held-out prompts. Steering along this direction does not, however, reliably shift downstream risk choices, a null result that holds across positive scales and in a negative sign-symmetry run. Behavioral sensitivity, latent readout, and causal control are three distinct properties that do not automatically co-occur, and successful latent readout is insufficient evidence that a model behaviorally relies on a representation during downstream decision-making.