Semantic Physics: The Inward Turn, Competing Ontologies, and the Convergence Horizon I. The Layer You Didn't Know Was Writable

Semantic Physics: The Inward Turn, Competing Ontologies, and the Convergence Horizon is a theoretical paper by Lee Sharks on the writable summarizer layer. It argues that search summaries, AI-mediated synthesis, and other presentation systems increasingly stand between readers and primary information, and that coherent, cross-referenced, durably deposited bodies of work can alter what those systems report as knowledge.

The paper shifts the problem from publication alone to ontology competition. It proposes measurements for cross-interpreter stability, compression survival, predictive gain, adversarial robustness, and cost-to-maintain ratio. A system is stronger when independent interpreters recover similar invariants, when its architecture survives summarization, when additional depth improves prediction or coordination, and when its coherence does not require unsustainable labor or compute.

Two limits are distinguished. Semantic saturation occurs when further distinctions no longer improve prediction, reconstruction, or coordination. Informatic saturation is the physical ceiling imposed by storage, compute, energy, bandwidth, and attention. The convergence horizon concerns what happens when many internally coherent systems compete within those limits.

The work explicitly separates observed conditions, bridge arguments, model propositions, and lower-confidence projections. Its projected phases—interference, opacity, and forced convergence—are hypotheses with stated time horizons rather than retrospective facts. The paper is a theoretical foundation for later records on retrieval-layer attribution, share links, semantic installation, and the financial effects of presentation-layer narratives.