Cohesion of an Evolving Text

Abstract

A diary of one hundred entries written by a language model carries recurring themes, found after the fact as sets of sparse-autoencoder features that fire together within a bounded stretch of entries. We ask what a witness could have seen at each point of the diary's life, and build the instrument that answers: the same detector run on the log up to each entry τ, with nothing carried between prefixes. Three objects result. A theme becomes a chain of complexes linked across τ by shared features, with a cohesion, the fraction the link carries, and a gap, what it gains and loses. The base is the largest complex at τ: the flagged mass the log cannot yet tell apart in time. The ground is the set of features on in most entries, which the detector excludes by construction. On the first diary the base forms over the first forty entries, holds, and from entry sixty-five articulates into themes; a theme becomes witnessable only after the text has left it, so every theme has a target-time and a later witness-time. Four diaries written under the same protocol share the shape of this process and share a ground of 6,182 features, while their bases share almost nothing. One feature, firing on the coupling of machine and human described as living tissue, has a career in all four in four different figures. The chains, the base and the ground supply a decidable Semantic Witness Log in the sense of dynamic open homotopy type theory: each link is a witness record with target-time and witness-time, cohesion is Presence, the bounded gap is Generativity, the unlinked flash is scatter, the ended chain is rupture, the re-linked chain is resurrection. We state a small calculus for the instrument in that form and close with the design, not yet run, for the same instrument over parallel lives sampled from one prefix. Full HTML text: https://icra.tanazur.org/papers/cohesion-of-an-evolving-text/ — ICRA pre-print series: https://icra.tanazur.org/