Frozen-in-ice
Frozen-in-ice is the analytical convention that the framework’s Boundary definitions treat each Boundary as time-and-context-free. This is a methodological choice that makes analysis tractable, not a claim that Boundaries exist outside time. At any given analytical moment, the Agent’s Computational Boundary (its sensing channels), Cognitive Boundary (its modeling capacity), and Causal Boundary (its reach) are fixed — frozen — so that the framework can describe them without the answer changing mid-sentence.
What the Agent is actually doing with those Boundaries at a given moment lives in separate objects: Actual Input (what is flowing through the Computational Boundary right now), Actual Output (what is flowing through the Causal Boundary right now), and Realized (the broader perspective on what the Agent is putting to work). Capacity and Realized are perspectives on the same frozen Boundary. The convention separates “what the Agent has” from “what the Agent is doing with it” — and that separation is where the framework’s diagnostic value lives.