Chapter 6: The Layer Separation Lemma: Life Is Genuinely E₂

The sharpest formal result of the book: SelfDesc is not automatic for all refinement-coherent distinctions. A neutron star near the TOV limit provides the canonical counterexample—it has a conditionally stable distinction satisfying all five conditions of the relevant chapter, yet boundary instability prevents the evaluator Eval_X from converging to a fixed point, so SelfDesc fails. The proof is constructive, not abstract: we exhibit the system, verify the five conditions, and demonstrate the failure mode. This establishes E₂ as genuinely non-reducible to E₁; the gap between physics and life is real.