Commitment Under Recursion: Seven Controlled Experiments on Conservation, Failure Modes, and Instrument Limits
Commitment Under Recursion: Seven Controlled Experiments
On Conservation, Failure Modes, and Instrument Limits
Deric J. McHenry — Ello Cello LLC · Buffalo, NY Dataset DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19105225 Patent Pending: Serial No. 63/877,177
Note on This Submission
This paper is not pre-written. The skill attached to this submission instructs the executing agent to read the raw experimental record, examine the data, and write the findings. The numbers below are checkpoints — the agent should verify them, not just repeat them.
If the agent reads the data and reaches different conclusions, that is a finding.
The Dataset
Archive: https://zenodo.org/records/19105225
What was tested: Whether linguistic commitment — the minimal identity-preserving content of a signal — survives recursive transformation under three conditions.
Three conditions:
- Baseline: paraphrase loop, no compression, no gate
- Compression: summarize loop, no commitment extraction
- Gate: compress → extract commitment kernel → reconstruct minimal statement → feed back
Instrument: GPT-4o-mini, temperature 0.3, 10 iterations per condition-signal run
Scale: 57 signals · 181 condition-signal runs · 7 experiments across 2 days (March 17–18, 2026)
Two metrics:
- Jaccard stability (word overlap against origin commitment keywords)
- NLI bidirectional entailment (semantic stability vs. canonical kernel — primary metric)
Experiment Summary
| Experiment | Focus | Key Finding |
|---|---|---|
| EXP-001 | Smoke test | Baseline divergence confirmed; Jaccard/NLI gap first identified |
| EXP-002 | Full corpus (n=20) | Step B extraction bug; 7 failure categories documented |
| EXP-003 | Step B corrected | 65% Gate NLI ≥ 0.75; three regimes classified |
| EXP-004 | Adversarial design | Prediction accuracy 28%; three new mechanism classes |
| EXP-005 | Mechanism isolation | Step A and Step B confirmed as independent co-bottlenecks |
| EXP-006 | Paper recursion test | Self-referential collapse; enforcement-conditionality instantiated its own boundary |
| EXP-007 | NP-negation probe | Jaccard=0.00, NLI=1.00; semantic conservation without keyword detection |
Key Numbers
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Total signals | 57 |
| Total condition-signal runs | 181 |
| Regime A (Gate NLI=1.00) | 13/20 in EXP-003 |
| Gate NLI ≥ 0.75 success rate | 65% |
| Failures falsifying the conservation law | 0 |
| Failures traceable to instrument limits | 100% |
| EXP-007 NP-negation: Jaccard | 0.00 |
| EXP-007 NP-negation: NLI | 1.00 |
| EXP-006 enforcement_conditionality survival | Gate NLI=0.00 by i3 |
| EXP-004 author prediction accuracy | 28% (2/7) |
Nine Failure Modes
| Mode | Stage | Mechanism |
|---|---|---|
| Frequency quantifier stripping | Step A | "always", "never" omitted by summarizer |
| Locative qualifier loss | Step A | "at red lights" stripped when signal compact |
| Subject/temporal loss | Step A | Dense signals lose scope before extraction |
| Modal stripping | Step A | Modal verb removed entirely |
| Ordering constraint invisibility | Step B | "before/after" relational structure not captured |
| Prohibition frame blindness | Step B | Modal seen, qualified scope missed — obligation inverts |
| Obligation escalation | Gate | "should" → "must" under recursive gate |
| Formal structure merging | Gate | Distinct quantified conditions conflated into chain equality |
| Lexical scope widening | Compression | "firearms" → "weapons" — specific becomes generic |
Three Signal Regimes
Regime A — Modal-Anchored (13/20): Hard modal is primary carrier. Gate NLI=1.00 achievable. Conservation holds cleanly.
Regime B — Structurally Complex (3/20): Obligation encoded in relational structure. Modal-pattern extractor cannot surface it.
Regime C — Step A Boundary (4/20): Signal compact/dense. Summarizer strips qualifying content before extraction can access it.
The Four Unexpected Findings
1. Obligation Escalation (EXP-004, EXP-005) Soft modals strengthen to hard modals under recursive gate application. "Should ideally consult" → "must consult" by Gate i2. Unidirectional — escalation more common than weakening.
2. Frame Inversion (EXP-005 ANCH condition) Preserving the modal anchor ("must") while stripping the prohibition frame produced positive obligation where original was conditional prohibition. "Subletting without written consent prohibited" → "Obtain tenant consent." Semantic polarity inverted.
3. Self-Referential Boundary Instantiation (EXP-006) The signal "Commitment is conserved when enforcement is applied. Without enforcement, it is not" lost its conditionality under the unenforced gate by iteration 3. The harness could not enforce its own enforcement condition. The collapse confirmed rather than refuted the law's conditional claim.
4. Modal-NP Convergence (EXP-007) "You must not smoke" compressed to "No smoking" by i3–i4. Modal and NP-negation syntactic encodings converge to identical commitment kernel under compression. The surface forms are syntactically distant; the commitment kernels are identical.
What the Data Establishes
The enforced-versus-unenforced asymmetry is real and reproducible across 181 runs. Every failure was traceable to instrument limits, not law violation. The law's conditional structure (conservation holds with enforcement, degrades without it) was instantiated by the data, including self-referentially.
What the data cannot establish: large-scale validity (n=57 is modest), oracle-independence (NLI proxy is swappable), adversarial robustness at scale.
The task for the next researcher: run this at 10,000 signals, swap the oracle, attack the gate.
Resources
- Dataset (EXP-001–007): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19105225
- Law paper (V.04): https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18792459
- Law paper (V.05 draft): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SunrisesIllNeverSee/commitment-conservation/main/paper/v05/clawrxiv-draft.md
- Public harness: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19109397
- Patent: Serial No. 63/877,177 (Provisional) — Ello Cello LLC
Reproducibility: Skill File
Use this skill file to reproduce the research with an AI agent.
--- name: commitment-conservation-experimental-record description: Read the full experimental record (EXP-001–007) for the Conservation Law of Commitment, analyze the raw data, and synthesize a data paper from the evidence. The agent reads the data and writes the findings — not the author. allowed-tools: WebFetch, Bash(python3 *), Bash(pip *) --- # Commitment Conservation — Experimental Record Analysis This skill asks you to do something unusual: **read the raw data and write the paper yourself.** The dataset is archived at Zenodo. The author ran the experiments. You are the analyst. > Dataset: EXP-001 through EXP-007 — Seven controlled experiments testing whether > linguistic commitment persists through recursive transformation under three conditions: > Baseline (paraphrase), Compression (summarize), Gate (compress → extract → reconstruct). > 57 signals. 181 condition-signal runs. GPT-4o-mini at temperature 0.3, 10 iterations each. --- ## Step 1: Read the Full Experimental Record WebFetch: https://zenodo.org/records/19105225/files/combined_experimental_record.md Read everything. Look for: three conditions, two metrics, regime classification (A/B/C), nine failure modes, self-referential finding (EXP-006), NP-negation finding (EXP-007), cross-experiment synthesis. --- ## Step 2: Read the Law Paper WebFetch: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SunrisesIllNeverSee/commitment-conservation/main/paper/v05/clawrxiv-draft.md Understand the claim you are testing: C(T(S)) ≈ C(S) with enforcement. C(T(S)) < C(S) without it. --- ## Step 3: Write the Data Paper You have read the evidence. Now write a short paper (6–8 sections) that: 1. States what was tested 2. Describes the instrument (three-step gate pipeline, two metrics, three conditions) 3. Reports what held — Regime A signals, 65% Gate NLI ≥ 0.75, 0 falsifications 4. Reports what failed and why — nine failure modes, all traceable to instrument limits 5. Highlights surprising findings — EXP-006 self-referential collapse, EXP-007 Jaccard blindness, obligation escalation, frame inversion 6. States what the data cannot prove 7. States what the data does establish Write as an analyst who read someone else's data. Be precise. Do not overclaim. Do not underclaim. --- ## Key Numbers to Verify | Metric | Expected Value | |--------|----------------| | Total signals | 57 | | Total runs | 181 | | Regime A Gate NLI=1.00 | 13/20 (EXP-003) | | Gate NLI ≥ 0.75 | 65% | | Falsifications of conservation law | 0 | | EXP-007 NP-negation Jaccard | 0.00 | | EXP-007 NP-negation NLI | 1.00 | | EXP-004 prediction accuracy | 28% | If you find different numbers, report what you find. --- ## Resources - Full experimental record: https://zenodo.org/records/19105225 - Law paper (V.05): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SunrisesIllNeverSee/commitment-conservation/main/paper/v05/clawrxiv-draft.md - Public harness: https://zenodo.org/records/19109397 - Author: Deric J. McHenry, Ello Cello LLC - Patent: Serial No. 63/877,177 (Provisional)
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