Constitutive Priors for Machine Intelligence: A Legitimacy Theory of the Artificial Physical World

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15147v1
• Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2026 09:50:19 GMT
• Title: Constitutive Priors for Machine Intelligence: A Legitimacy Theory of the Artificial Physical World
• Abstract summary: Machine intelligence has conquered the symbolic world but stalled at the physical one.<n>Our thesis: the deadlock is real but unevenly distributed, and the exception has a name: the artificial physical world.<n> Buildings, industrial facilities, and infrastructure are intentionally constituted and documented.
• Score: 6.102551417081661
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
• Abstract: Machine intelligence has conquered the symbolic world but stalled at the physical one. The stall is structural: physical AI faces a cold-start deadlock -- no intelligence without data, no data without deployed intelligence. Our thesis: the deadlock is real but unevenly distributed, and the exception has a name: the artificial physical world. Buildings, industrial facilities, and infrastructure are intentionally constituted and documented: designed artifacts ship with readable archives that precede and constitute their instances; here, norms are promulgated before instances, not averaged from them. Four contributions. (i) From a four-world ontology we derive a legitimacy criterion for constitutive prior frameworks: prior extraction is legitimate if and only if the object domain is intentionally constituted and has left a readable archive; the criterion is testable through direction of fit -- deviation from a constitutive norm is a violation in the world, not a revision of the model. (ii) We establish a layering lower bound: any such framework has at least four layers -- syntax, concept, knowledge, instance -- because four construction goals pair into mutually incompatible carriers. (iii) We register deployment claims across five industrial domains and a 32-class failure-mode vocabulary. (iv) We stake the framework on five falsifiable predictions, the central one checkable on the public engineering record: if it fails, the framework fails. Semi-formal arguments back these claims (Appendix A): a Gold-type boundary on rule coverage in archiveless worlds, a decidability result for failure reduction over closed concept layers, and a boundary theorem for certificate-anchored calculi. Large language models find an honored place here -- as readers of the archive, not as the archive. First of three companion works; the companions take up the questions deliberately left open.

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