The Degeneracy of the Centre Comonad Model and the Precomposition Obstruction for Quantum Modalities on Presheaf Topoi

Abstract

The centre comonad model provided the first concrete cohesive linear $\infty$-topos, settling an open problem of Schreiber. However, the model is degenerate: the quantum modality annihilates all non-commutative algebras, and the associated linear logic collapses to classical cartesian logic. In this paper we give a complete mathematical diagnosis of this degeneracy. We prove that the centre comonad sends the representable sheaf of a simple non-commutative algebra to the empty presheaf, and that the state space of any such algebra is empty. We then prove that the Day convolution on the classical core is cartesian, forcing the Seely isomorphism to hold trivially and collapsing the linear logic. We isolate the structural reason behind this collapse: whenever the opposite of the classical core is monoidally equivalent to a cartesian monoidal category, any coreflective precomposition comonad will exhibit the same degeneracy. We conclude that a non-degenerate quantum modality must be constructed without precomposition, and we briefly discuss possible directions.