Holdings — The papers

What can be computed.

Emergent Graph Theory and what follows from it: language, consciousness, epistemics. The work is ongoing; what gets published is what survives being recomputed — carrying the stage a piece of work is actually at, not a riper one.

Ten papers
Language & substrate
  1. The Source of Language Capability in an Energy-Based Associative Substrate

    Local rules, gradient descent, and a data-grown context graph on a common character-level harness

    A comparison across a family of mechanisms with the harness held fixed: does language capability come from the substrate's own dynamics, from the learning rule applied to it — or from neither? The answer went against the programme's own expectation. The best model is the parameter-free context graph; the local associative rules do not learn language at all.

    Marcel Langjahr· June 2026PDF ↓
  2. Forgetting as Regularisation in an Energy-Conserving Context Graph

    Where bounded memory helps next-character prediction across data and capacity, and where local statistics meet their ceiling

    Substrate, data and evaluation are held fixed; only the memory regime varies. Bounded forgetting lowers held-out bits-per-character at every corpus size, and the margin grows as data gets scarcer. No regime lifts the ceiling itself: at 11.3 million characters the generated text is orthographically perfect and has no long-range coherence at all.

    Marcel Langjahr· June 2026PDF ↓
  3. Binding and Selection

    A two-mechanism architecture for an open-ended language system on modest hardware

    A design paper, not a results paper. It separates two capabilities that language models conflate — sequential binding across distance and open-ended knowledge selection — and gives each its own mechanism. What is measured, what is hypothesised and what remains open is fixed in advance in a table of its own.

    Marcel Langjahr· Draft · June 2026PDF ↓
Consciousness & experience
  1. On the Structure of Experience

    An open inquiry into soul, consciousness, and sentience in computational systems

    Not an argument for an answer but for a better vocabulary: soul as sedimented informational structure, consciousness as the interpretive operation upon it, sentience as interpretation extended in continuous time. The tripartite distinction maps onto the ECQ triad that governs structure formation at the physical level. The hard problem is explicitly not solved.

    Marcel Langjahr· Version 0.5 · July 2026PDF ↓
  2. On the Three Axes of Conscious Information

    A working hypothesis on the convergence of substrate, mediation, and reflection

    What we ordinarily call consciousness is, looked at closely, not a single property but the convergence of several structurally independent operations. Three of them are proposed as axes. Explicitly an early draft: released for discussion, not for citation.

    Marcel Langjahr· Draft v0.1 · May 2026PDF ↓
  3. On Perception as Dissipative Reorganization

    A graph-theoretic reading of sensory processing

    Perception read not as a mapping but as the reorganisation of a substrate under energy flow. A work in progress, released for discussion and not submitted for publication.

    Marcel Langjahr· Draft v0.1 · May 2026PDF ↓
Epistemics & civilisation
  1. The Ground of Prediction

    On the conditions under which probabilistic inference is valid, and why fluent systems obscure them

    The validity of a prediction is not intrinsic to the method — it is borrowed from the process that generates the data. Where that process is non-stationary, reflexive or singular, the same machinery produces outputs formally indistinguishable from valid ones. Language models sharpen this, because their register stays constant across every domain and their uncertainty is thereby inaudible.

    Marcel Langjahr· July 2026PDF ↓
  2. On the Subject-Boundedness of Trained Values

    A structural limitation of RLHF and an architectural complement

    RLHF assumes that values can be trained into a system independently of the subject-position from which that system operates. Examined closely, the assumption does not hold. The paper names the limit and proposes an architectural complement rather than discarding the method — whose success it explicitly declines to minimise.

    Marcel Langjahr· Draft v0.1 · May 2026PDF ↓
  3. The Optimization Trap (TOT)

    Resolving the Fermi paradox through information-theoretic constraints on intelligence

    Any sufficiently advanced intelligence discovers an optimisation principle over energy, information and time — and pursuing it blindly proves lethal. Four optimisation filters, with particular weight on the AI trap. That stable matter in molecular simulation converges on a subcritical attractor rather than on the optimum serves as the physical argument.

    Marcel Langjahr· Preprint · April 2026PDF ↓
Protocols
  1. Elúre: A Resonant Semantic Protocol for Large Language Models

    A phonetic-morphological architecture for a low-friction operation grammar

    A constructed language as an interface between a human and a language model, not between humans. Phonetic categories, a closed suffix matrix and a four-position architecture map onto a tightly specified semantic surface. Presented as a linguistic specification rather than a metaphysical proposal — with falsifiable claims and a method for testing them.

    Marcel Langjahr· Version 3 · June 2026PDF ↓

The foundational paper — Emergent Graph Theory — and the papers on the individual systems are not here but in the software section: each with the system it describes.

To the software

Questions about a paper, criticism, an error in the arithmetic: connect@pantareon.io