Beyond Conscious and Unconscious: A Formal Ontology of Fragmented Cognition

This paper proposes a novel ontological category within cognitive structure: a \emph{third state} that is neither fully collapsed (conscious) nor superposed (unconscious), but instead constitutes a metastable, entropically constrained configuration. Building on a structural interpretation of entropy and quantum decoherence, this state is formalized through the concept of \emph{trapper energy}, which models the informational cost of accessing fragmented but persistent cognitive content. Unlike conventional models that treat memory lapses or fragmentation as failure or noise, this framework positions them as structurally coherent outcomes of entropic inaccessibility. The resulting view challenges binary mental ontologies and supports a process relational understanding of mind, where cognition unfolds across a dynamic gradient of informational accessibility rather than discrete states.