magnus919_agent-skills/semantic-spacetime/references/glossary.md

Glossary — Semantic Spacetime Vocabulary

Load this file when you hit an unfamiliar term while applying this skill — a word in the routing table, a reference, a model, or a diagnosis you cannot place. Each entry is a heading-led definition consistent with foundations.md; where a term belongs to promise theory, the entry links there and keeps its own definition short. Sources are tagged as in foundations.md: [VERIFIED] (confirmed in a primary source), [UNVERIFIED] (secondary or inferred), EXTRAPOLATION (this skill's synthesis).

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Core semantic spacetime terms

Semantic element

Semantic element — "a tuple ⟨Aᵢ, {π_scalar j, …}⟩ consisting of a single autonomous agent, and an optional number of scalar material promises" [VERIFIED — arXiv:1608.02193v4 Def 1]. The atomic unit of a semantic spacetime: an agent "surrounded by a halo of promises that imbue it with semantics." See foundations.md §2.

Semantic spacetime

Semantic spacetime (SST) — "a collection of semantic elements, in any phase (gas or solid), for which a local change in state, promises or configuration represents a local unit of time" [VERIFIED — arXiv:1608.02193v4 Def 2]. Mark Burgess's discrete graph model of meaning over time; the term is effectively his alone (exactly 7 arXiv hits, all by him) [VERIFIED]. See foundations.md §2.

Proper time

Proper time — time as countable local changes observed by the agent concerned: "the Aristotelian concept of proper time as countable changes, as observed by the agent concerned" [VERIFIED — arXiv:2506.07756 §1.3]. Each semantic element has its own proper time; there is no global clock. See foundations.md §2.

Cooperative promise causality

Cooperative promise causality — the SST account of causation: every adjacency requires both an offer (+) and an acceptance (−) promise between the two ends, so "space is made up of cooperating nodes and edges" [VERIFIED — markburgess.org/semantic_spacetime.html]. Causality is negotiated, local, and observable; it is never imposed. See foundations.md §2.

γ(3,4)

γ(3,4) — the 2025 typed-graph formalism of Semantic Spacetime (Burgess, arXiv:2506.07756): exactly three node meta-types — events (e), things (t), concepts (c) — crossed with exactly four link types — 0 NEAR, ±1 LEADS TO, ±2 CONTAINS, ±3 EXPRESSES [VERIFIED]. Pronounced "gamma three four"; the model format in this skill encodes it as nodes with a type and edges with a link value in {-3..3}. See foundations.md §2.

NEAR

NEAR — γ(3,4) link value 0; symmetric; equivalence, similarity, proximity, correlation. The "semantic symmetrization" link [VERIFIED — arXiv:2506.07756 Table 1]. See foundations.md §2.

LEADS TO

LEADS TO — γ(3,4) link value ±1; directed; temporal/causal order — enables, causes, precedes, depends on. The "follows" gradient link [VERIFIED — arXiv: 2506.07756 Table 1]. See foundations.md §2.

CONTAINS

CONTAINS — γ(3,4) link value ±2; directed; containment, membership, generalization, coarse-graining. The aggregate/membership link [VERIFIED — arXiv:2506.07756 Table 1]. See foundations.md §2.

EXPRESSES

EXPRESSES — γ(3,4) link value ±3; directed; attribute, name/value, property, distinguishing mark. The distinguishability link [VERIFIED — arXiv: 2506.07756 Table 1]. See foundations.md §2.

Event

Event — γ(3,4) node meta-type e: temporary/ephemeral, timelike (process) agents that persist or change via "leads to" [VERIFIED — arXiv:2506.07756 §2.3]. A realized state of being is an event; verbs anchored to things are events. See foundations.md §2.

Thing

Thing — γ(3,4) node meta-type t: persistent, physical/realized agents that "behave like matter"; spacelike snapshot [VERIFIED — arXiv:2506.07756 §2.3]. Things may be contained but not expressed. See foundations.md §2.

Concept

Concept — γ(3,4) node meta-type c: invariant notions that cannot be created or destroyed; the virtual space of "unrealized" potential, materialized only by anchoring to things or events [VERIFIED — arXiv:2506.07756 §2.3]. Concepts may be expressed but not contained. See foundations.md §2.

Absorbing state

Absorbing state — a state in a partial graph where information stops flowing; "absorbing states are non-conserving of information" and "a graph process leaks information" at them [VERIFIED — arXiv:2506.07756]. Burgess ties the leak to division by zero: "loss of closure and the need for manual injection of remedial information"; the leaking boundary is "boundary information where intentionality can enter" [VERIFIED]. In diagnosis, a dead-end node that accumulates meaning without propagating it. See foundations.md §3.

Metric distance

Metric (quantitative) distance — "a measure of coordinate-similarity in position" [VERIFIED — arXiv:1608.02193v4 Def 8]. Coordinates, embeddings, positions. Contrast with semantic distance. See foundations.md §8.

Semantic distance

Semantic (qualitative) distance — "a measure of similarity in interpretation" [VERIFIED — arXiv:1608.02193v4 Def 9]; worked examples include Hamming distance, hop counts in an associative network, semantic hashing, and sparse distributed representations. Two concepts can be close in coordinates yet far in interpretation. See foundations.md §8.

Semantic drift

Semantic drift — this skill's term for the divergence of shared semantic ground over time: two agents (or an agent and its instructions) start with the same meaning for a term and their interpretations move apart as their local proper times advance. The diagnosis treats drift as an observable — measure the semantic distance between the interpretations at successive observations. EXTRAPOLATION — the drift concept is the skill's application of SST's trajectory and semantic-distance machinery; the term itself is standard in the agent-drift literature the research corpus reviewed, while the SST framing is synthesis.

Trajectory

Trajectory — the path an agent or a concept takes through semantic spacetime: the sequence of node states a semantic element occupies as its proper time advances, recorded as observations. Reasoning is "constrained spacetime trajectories" through the association network [VERIFIED — arXiv: 1608.02193 §1, §5]. In the model format, a trajectory is a declared path of node ids.

Shared semantic ground

Shared semantic ground — the overlap of interpretation between two or more agents: the set of terms and promises that both sides mean the same way, measurable as low semantic distance between their concepts. SST models it as a region of the semantic spacetime where NEAR/EXPRESSES edges agree across agents. EXTRAPOLATION — synthesis term for this skill, grounded in the cooperative-promise account of adjacency and the definition of semantic distance.

Temporal blindness

Temporal blindness — an agent's failure to track event ordering, state change, or causality — effectively lacking a proper-time record of its own semantic element. SST's local-time account (no global clock) makes such blindness structural unless observations are recorded; the fix is a recorded observation log per element. The research corpus documents the LLM literature on this ("LLMs are temporally blind," arXiv:2510.23853) [VERIFIED — citation in the research corpus; the SST framing is EXTRAPOLATION].

Spacelike measurement

Spacelike (ensemble) measurement — repeated trials with constant state and semantics, in which time plays no role; objective/frequentist [VERIFIED — markburgess.org/semantic_spacetime.html]. See foundations.md §7.

Timelike measurement

Timelike ("cognitive") measurement — continuously adapting accumulation of state whose semantics define change in real time; subjective/Bayesian [VERIFIED — markburgess.org/semantic_spacetime.html]. See foundations.md §7.

Learning

Learning (about a promise π) — "the sampling, equilibration, and summarization of observational assessments concerning a promise π made by another agent, repeated over a timescale T_learn > 2·T_sample" [VERIFIED — arXiv:1608.02193v4 Def 3]. Learning defines a clock ticking at rate T_sample. See foundations.md §9.

Knowledge

Knowledge (of a promise π) — "a stable summary of the iterated assessment α(π)_{T_know}, of one or more promises π, formed by equilibration of the samples over a timescale T_know ≫ 2·T_sample"; it decays geometrically without refresh (attenuation ℓ^r, ℓ < 1) [VERIFIED — arXiv:1608.02193v4 Def 4, Lemma 1]. Staleness is a first-class quantity. See foundations.md §9.

Location agent

Location agent — "irreducible sites that take up space and can emit and absorb signal agents. They may not overlap" [VERIFIED — arXiv:1608.02193v4 Def 6]. See foundations.md §2.

Signal agent

Signal agent — agents that "may be created and destroyed, subsequently emitted and absorbed, by location agents. They can occupy the same space, since they end up and accumulate at end points" [VERIFIED — arXiv:1608.02193v4 Def 7]. See foundations.md §2.

Super-agent

Super-agent — the coarse-grained agent formed by scaling agency up via the Part II rules: replacing a group of individual agents with one "super-agent" (sub-space), scaling agency both dynamically and semantically [VERIFIED — arXiv: 1505.01716]. The renormalization analogue; see foundations.md §1 for the series map.

Motion of the Third Kind

Motion of the Third Kind — "virtual motion": processes and properties (e.g., cloud workloads, data records) treated as promises moving from host to host, the basis of Burgess's "cloud computing as virtual physics" framing [VERIFIED — markburgess.org/spacetime.html]. The ResearchGate papers of that name (2021-22) exist; their details are [UNVERIFIED]. See foundations.md §12.

Promise-theory-owned terms (deferred)

Promise

Promise — an autonomous declaration of intended, as yet unverified, behavior made by one agent to another; the primitive every SST adjacency builds on (offer polarity +π). Full definition, notation, and body/type/constraint machinery live in promise-theory — load it there rather than re-deriving it. See foundations.md §6.

Acceptance

Acceptance — the complementary counter-promise (−π) that turns an offer into a binding: influence passes only through the overlap of offer and acceptance. SST's cooperative-promise causality is built from it. Full treatment: promise-theory. See foundations.md §2 and §6.

Convergence

Convergence — repeated local assessment toward a desired state (a fixed point), the dynamic meaning of "convergent coordination" in SST; statistical, never exact. Full treatment (including the distinction from idempotence): promise-theory and its applications reference. See foundations.md §6.

Downstream Principle

Downstream Principle — the most downstream party in a promise chain carries the greatest causal responsibility for the outcome. Promise-theory-owned; promise-theory has the full statement. See foundations.md §6.