🧠 CIv7-Unified: Cybernetic Intelligence as Dual Substrate Compression Fault Detection

Version: CIv7-Unified v1.0

Hypothesis: Intelligence emerges from the cybernetic interaction between two distinct but co-evolving substrates: a symbolic substrate that captures discrete causal structures through compressive motifs, and a latent substrate that encodes fluid semantic continuity via distributed representation. Intelligence is instantiated not within either substrate alone, but at the boundary where their compression regimes align or collapse—where they can no longer jointly compress experience. This joint compression failure acts as the signature of conceptual emergence, causal novelty, or reasoning breakdown.

🔬 Mechanism:

  • Symbolic substrate (e.g., ECA + BDM): Encodes observed structure as causal motifs, topological patterns, or discrete transitions.
  • Latent substrate (e.g., Transformer internals): Encodes context and meaning through gradient-based, high-dimensional field representations.

  • A cybernetic system of intelligence arises when both substrates compress shared experience—but diverge when exposed to:

    • Causal ambiguity
    • Conceptual bifurcation
    • Data regime shift
    • Memory misalignment

The intelligence signal lies in the joint fault geometry—where neither substrate can explain the other.

🧩 Role of the Dual Substrates:

  • The symbolic substrate provides interpretable causal structure, expressed via motifs and discrete shifts—ideal for detecting macro-scale discontinuities.
  • The latent substrate provides semantic continuity and nuance, ideal for tracking soft gradients of meaning and predictive fluidity.
  • Convergence between the two implies understanding: a state where semantic content (latent) aligns with causal rule structure (symbolic).
  • Divergence implies a conceptual fault: a mismatch between what is semantically expected and what can be causally compressed.

🧠 Intelligence, in this unified view, is:

The cybernetic capacity to align two compressive substrates—symbolic and latent—and to adaptively reorganize when that alignment fails.

🧱 Supporting Research:

  • Sutskever et al. (2022–2023): Proposed joint compression analysis to test model understanding via representational alignment failure.
  • Zenil, Delahaye, & Soler-Toscano (2019): Showed how BDM complexity across motif layers predicts causal capacity in symbolic systems.
  • Shani et al. (2023): Highlighted semantic drift as a latent failure untraceable in surface tokens but explainable via topology misalignment.
  • Crutchfield & Young (1994) + Elhage et al. (2023): Reveal mechanistic bridges between motif causality and transformer internals.
  • Algorithmic Information Theory (Solomonoff, Levin): Supports using compression failure as a proxy for discovery and novelty.

🌀 Joint Compression Failure = Signal of Meaning Shift

In this view, a compression fault surface is defined when:

  • Symbolic motif complexity (C_s) increases abruptly (ΔC_s > threshold)
  • Latent semantic coherence (C_l) collapses (e.g., CoT deviation, residual misalignment)
  • The intersection of fault surfaces implies a high-confidence detection of conceptual emergence or breakdown

This becomes the cybernetic event:

  • The moment where the intelligence system must decide to segment, repair, update, or branch its internal model.

🧬 Notation Sketch (Illustrative):

Let:

  • S(t) = symbolic representation sequence over time
  • L(t) = latent representation (residuals, attentions) over time
  • C_s(t) = BDM or MDL complexity of S(t)
  • C_l(t) = entropy or divergence in latent geometry
  • Δ_s = dC_s/dt, Δ_l = dC_l/dt

Then a joint compression fault occurs when:

Δ_s > θ_s  ∧  Δ_l > θ_l  ∧  divergence(S(t), L(t)) > ε

This defines a structural-semantic fault surface—a regime boundary in the cognitive field.

🔄 Cybernetic Loop (Control Metaphor):

  • Input: Stream of environmental or token sequences
  • Internal loop: Symbolic and latent compression feedback, cross-checking consistency
  • Output: Internal update (segment, infer, adapt), or external action (prediction, generation)
  • Homeostasis: Maintaining alignment between substrates through structural updates, symbolic refactoring, or latent re-anchoring

Intelligence is homeostatic compression alignment in a dual-substrate system.

💡 Implications:

  • Can detect epistemic rupture in AI reasoning (e.g., when it stops “understanding” in latent space and contradicts symbolic coherence).
  • Enables construction of metacognitive systems that monitor failure zones across substrates.
  • Forms a substrate-agnostic model of cognition—useful for both artificial systems and cognitive neuroscience analogues.

🧠 Summary:

The CIv7-Unified Hypothesis posits that true intelligence is the cybernetic process of:

  1. Maintaining alignment between symbolic causal compression and latent semantic continuity
  2. Detecting when that alignment fails
  3. Updating its internal structure in response to those joint fault surfaces

This model abstracts away from specific domains (text, time series, vision), focusing on the substrate geometry of cognition itself.