Chronic Premature Closure as Uncertainty-Intolerance Wrong Attractor: The Anxiety-Resolution Architecture, False-Certainty Basin, and the Return to Calibrated Deliberation

Chronic premature closure — the compulsive rushing to conclusions, decisions, and resolutions before adequate information or processing has occurred, driven by intolerance of sustained uncertainty rather than genuine readiness to conclude — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_CPC in the landscape of calibrated deliberation. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as calibrated deliberation: the capacity to hold questions, decisions, and unresolved situations open for as long as genuinely needed, tolerating the discomfort of not-yet-knowing without compulsively collapsing uncertainty into premature resolution.

W_CPC is rigorously distinguished from appropriate decisiveness, healthy action orientation, legitimate time-pressure decision-making, and adaptive satisficing. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the basin: uncertainty-as-threat architecture (sustained uncertainty is experienced as intolerable — not merely uncomfortable but threatening; D(ξ) is generated by open questions and decisions not yet made), false certainty consolidation (once premature closure is reached, the person defends the conclusion against new information to protect the anxiety relief closure provided), and decision quality degradation (chronic premature closure produces systematically poor decisions; the cumulative cost progressively worsens life outcomes while paradoxically increasing the urgency of the closure drive).

The Certainty Paradox is central: chronic premature closure reliably produces the uncertainty it is organized to eliminate — poor decisions made under premature closure generate new problems and unresolved situations requiring new closures, maintaining the person in perpetual unresolved uncertainty. Nine formal propositions characterize the calibrated deliberation ground state, the anxiety-resolution wrong attractor, the three maintenance mechanisms, the certainty paradox, developmental roots in environments where prolonged uncertainty was genuinely dangerous, and return paths through uncertainty tolerance training, ACT defusion, Socratic questioning, and graduated exposure to sustained not-knowing.