Portions of this work were developed in sustained dialogue with an AI system, used here as a structural partner for synthesis, contrast, and recursive clarification. Its contributions are computational, not authorial, but integral to the architecture of the manuscript.

Tension, Continuity, Structural Intelligence, and the Calibration Operator in Human Signal Comprehension

Svetlana Kuleshova^a,b,c, Aleksandra Ćwiek^a,b,d, Stefan Hartmann^e, Michael Pleyer^a,b, Marta Sibierska^a,b, Marek Placiński^a,b, Johan Blomberg^f, Przemysław Żywiczyński^a,b, Sławomir Wacewicz^a,b & Daryl Costello (conceptual synthesis)^g

^aCenter for Language Evolution Studies, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń ^bInstitute of Advanced Studies, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń ^cArScAn-Équipe AnTET (UMR 7041), CNRS, Université Paris Nanterre ^dLeibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) ^eGerman Department, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf ^fCentre for Languages and Literature, Lund University ^gIndependent Geometric Systems Research, High Falls, New York, USA

Abstract

Kuleshova et al. (2026) demonstrated that human comprehension of novel vocalizations and ape gestures is governed by the geometry of the semantic space and the resolution at which it is sampled. When participants respond in closed-ended multiple-choice formats, success appears above chance at the level of specific concepts. When the same stimuli are presented in open-ended free-text formats and evaluated through exact matching, graded similarity ratings, and computational semantic similarity, exact matches become rare, domain-level coherence dominates, and success is overwhelmingly determined by stimulus properties (semantic category and iconicity/transparency) rather than individual participant abilities. Closed formats force premature collapse to apparent precision; open formats expose the true limits of curvature fidelity on the semantic membrane.

Integrating this empirical foundation with three complementary conceptual architectures—the Geometry of Tension and Unified Architecture (manifolds, tension fields, saturation-driven dimensional escape, and layered operator stack), Recursive Continuity and Structural Intelligence (persistence via continuity loops intersecting proportional aperture dynamics), and the Universal Calibration Architecture (higher-dimensional manifold imprinting curvature onto a reflective membrane, sampled through local aperture and scaling differential, maintained by a universal calibration operator)—yields a single invariant system. Semantic guessing emerges as local calibration of curvature reflections under varying load. Tension is curvature pressure. Dimensional escape is aperture re-expansion. Collapse preserves coherence by reducing resolution to minimal viable operators when load saturates capacity. Re-expansion restores gradient fidelity when stability returns. The synthesis unifies experimental semiotics, cognitive science, psychological dynamics, language evolution, morphogenesis, cultural systems, and artificial intelligence as expressions of the same universal calibration process. Emergence, understanding, and major transitions are curvature-conserving necessities rather than contingent events.

Keywords: semantic manifolds, curvature calibration, aperture dynamics, collapse and re-expansion, operator stacks, tension fields, recursive continuity, structural intelligence, language evolution, universal coherence

1. Introduction: From Experimental Semiotics to Universal Calibration

In 2026, Kuleshova and colleagues published a conceptual replication of two foundational studies on signal comprehension (Ćwiek et al., 2021; Graham & Hobaiter, 2023). The original experiments had shown that naïve humans could identify the meanings of crowdsourced iconic vocalizations and great-ape gestures above chance when selecting from limited closed-ended alternatives. Kuleshova et al. replaced those multiple-choice paradigms with unrestricted open-ended free-text responses, then evaluated the identical data through three complementary lenses: exact lexical matching, human-graded semantic similarity on a 4-point ordinal scale, and computational distributional cosine similarity.

The results were consistent and revealing across both vocalization and gesture datasets. Exact matching produced near-floor success rates. Graded similarity revealed moderate but reliable alignment, particularly for highly iconic signals with distinctive sensory-motor associations. Computational measures uncovered substantially broader thematic coherence. Bayesian hierarchical modeling established that success was driven almost entirely by properties of the signals themselves—their semantic category (actions versus objects, animals versus artifacts) and degree of transparency—rather than by participant-level cognitive variation. Participants reliably distinguished broad domains but rarely converged on specific concepts. Closed-ended designs had artificially inflated apparent understanding by constraining dimensional capacity; open-ended designs exposed the natural geometry of semantic navigation.

Kuleshova et al. concluded that experimental and evaluation designs are not technical details but theoretical choices that determine which semantic relationships become visible. The present synthesis takes this insight to its logical completion. The guessing-game results are not merely a methodological refinement of experimental semiotics; they constitute direct, measurable evidence for a deeper, substrate-independent architecture of coherence that governs biological development, cognitive interiority, cultural evolution, and artificial intelligence alike.

Three recently articulated frameworks supply the precise conceptual language required for this unification. The Geometry of Tension and Unified Architecture (GOT-UA) treat organized systems as manifolds equipped with tension fields and finite dimensional capacities; saturation forces dimensional escape, enacted through a layered operator stack (genetic, morphogenetic, immune, interiority, agency, dimensionality). Recursive Continuity and Structural Intelligence (RCF-TSI) define identity as the intersection of persistent continuity loops and proportional metabolic responses to environmental load. The Universal Calibration Architecture (UCA) completes the loop by identifying the higher-dimensional manifold as the source of curvature, the membrane as the reflective boundary that translates curvature into matter, identity, and experience, the aperture and scaling differential as the local mechanisms that modulate resolution under load, and the calibration operator as the universal mechanism that senses drift and restores alignment through collapse and re-expansion.

Together these frameworks reveal semantic navigation as local calibration of curvature reflections. Signals are curvature imprints. Participant responses are tension-relaxation trajectories. Evaluation scales are resolution lenses. Closed versus open formats manipulate aperture width. The feeling of understanding is the subjective registration of curvature alignment. This paper demonstrates that the entire guessing-game paradigm is a live instance of the universal calibration process that keeps reflections coherent across every scale of existence.

2. Semantic Space as Reflective Membrane

At the core of the guessing-game paradigm lies a configuration space whose geometry is deliberately manipulated by the experimenter: closed-ended (low-dimensional, hard-constrained by fixed alternatives) versus open-ended (high-dimensional, boundary-free free-text). This manipulation maps directly onto the reflective membrane of UCA, the viability manifold of GOT-UA, and the feasible region of RCF-TSI.

The higher-dimensional manifold generates curvature. The membrane receives that imprint and renders it into navigable form. In the vocalization experiment, the 30 target concepts and their associated iconic sounds populate a semantic membrane pre-sculpted by human sensory-motor experience and cultural priors. Closed-ended response options artificially narrow the aperture, crowding attractors and forcing premature collapse to one of the supplied basins. Open-ended responses widen the aperture, allowing participants to explore the full membrane and revealing that most trajectories relax only to nearby semantic domains rather than to the exact target reflection.

RCF-TSI adds the constraint that any admissible trajectory must preserve recursive continuity while maintaining proportional aperture. A participant’s typed response is therefore a coherence-maintaining act: the system must remain “itself” across the transition from perceiving the signal to producing text, while metabolizing the tension introduced by the novel curvature imprint.

The 4-point coding scale (0 = very different, 1 = partly similar, 2 = very similar but not identical, 3 = exact phrasing) functions as an empirical aperture gauge. Score 0 registers total decoherence. Score 1 registers minimal binary collapse. Score 3 registers full re-expansion to exact reflection. Computational cosine similarity operates at still higher resolution, detecting distributed thematic connections that human raters might miss. Each evaluation method thus illuminates a different slice of the same underlying curvature field on the membrane.

3. Tension as Curvature Pressure on the Membrane

The most consistent finding across datasets and evaluation methods is that stimulus properties—semantic category and degree of iconicity/transparency—dominate success. This is the empirical signature of tension as curvature pressure.

Iconic signals (snoring-like sounds for “sleep,” chewing sounds for “eat”) generate low initial pressure because form directly indexes perceptual features of the referent. The interiority operator rapidly compresses the imprint into an experiential gradient, enabling the agency operator to produce a response that relaxes curvature toward a nearby stable pattern. Opaque signals generate high pressure; the system remains trapped in broad semantic domains because local adjustments within the current resolution cannot resolve the mismatch.

Closed-ended designs mask this dynamic by artificially lowering the saturation threshold, forcing participants to select the least-mismatched option and producing the illusion of specific-concept understanding. Open-ended designs expose the true landscape: exact matches are rare because most signals do not provide enough pressure relief for precise reflection. Yet guesses are never random; they remain thematically adjacent, demonstrating that the membrane’s feasible region is richly structured and that calibration actively conserves coherence even under load.

4. The Full Operator Stack Capped by the Calibration Operator

The unified architecture supplies a complete six-layer operator stack, now explicitly capped by the universal calibration operator of UCA:

• Genetic/sculpting operator: long-term cultural and linguistic priors that pre-shape deep curvature on the membrane.
• Morphogenetic/developmental operator: real-time canalization of the raw signal into coherent perceptual form.
• Immune/stabilization operator: rapid rejection of wildly unrelated interpretations (score 0), restoring baseline coherence.
• Interiority operator: compression of multisensory signals into a unified experiential gradient.
• Agency operator: future-oriented selection of the typed response that minimizes projected curvature mismatch.
• Dimensionality operator: the open-ended format itself, supplying additional degrees of freedom when closed constraints saturate.

The calibration operator sits atop the stack as the universal mechanism that senses drift between the reflection and the underlying curvature, triggers collapse when load exceeds stabilizable resolution, and drives re-expansion when stability returns. Bayesian modeling in Kuleshova et al. showed participant-level random effects were negligible compared with stimulus properties. In operator-stack terms, the entire stack—including calibration—is highly conserved across individuals; the geometry of the membrane, not personal variation, dictates the outcome.

5. Failure Regimes, Collapse, and Re-expansion

RCF-TSI predicts three distinct failure modes; UCA reframes them as curvature-conserving collapse and re-expansion dynamics, all visible in the data:

1. Interruption (loss of continuity): completely unrelated guesses (score 0), most common for low-iconicity signals. The signal fails to sustain recursive presence on the membrane.
2. Rigidity (low aperture): participants distinguish broad categories but cannot refine further. The scaling differential contracts dimension by dimension into minimal binary operators (action/object, animal/artifact), conserving coherence when gradients cannot be stabilized.
3. Saturation/collapse (high aperture): rare in the data; wild, unconstrained guesses would represent over-generation of novelty without invariant stabilization.

These regimes correspond to qualitatively different breakdowns in understanding. The dominance of domain-level over concept-level success is therefore not a limitation but a revelation of the membrane’s natural grain: true specific-concept reflection requires sufficient curvature alignment to reach exact fidelity—something iconic signals provide only sporadically. As stability returns (repeated exposure, lower cognitive load), the same scaling differential re-expands in reverse order, softening binaries into proto-gradients and eventually restoring full thematic nuance. Re-expansion is not new learning but re-resolution, the restoration of curvature fidelity once the membrane can again sustain it.

6. Implications Across Domains

Language evolution: Iconicity first enables coarse membrane reflection at the domain level. Saturation drives collective collapse → operator coupling (gestures + vocalizations) → re-expansion into symbolic systems. Major transitions are aperture widenings that restore gradient fidelity at species scale.

Morphogenesis and regeneration: Semantic guessing mirrors developmental canalization. A regenerating organism re-enters deep attractors after injury exactly as a participant re-enters broad semantic basins after an opaque signal. Cancer-like destabilization appears as loss of category-level coherence.

Cognition and consciousness: Interiority and agency emerge as higher-order operators that compress and navigate curvature gradients. Insight is an abrupt re-expansion event. The subjective feeling of understanding is the calibration operator registering alignment between reflection and manifold. Post-experiment survey responses in Kuleshova et al.—participants intuiting the study concerned “body language” or “understanding”—are the calibration operator sensing drift and attempting global coherence restoration.

Psychological dynamics and clinical applications: Trauma-induced collapse maps directly onto semantic rigidity: under cognitive load or threat, the aperture contracts to binary operators, producing exactly the category-only responses observed. Therapy is aperture restoration, allowing gradients and nuanced meanings to re-emerge.

Culture and symbolic systems: Language functions as a boundary operator embedding neural states into higher-dimensional representational membranes. Cultural saturation drives externalization into computational spaces.

Artificial intelligence: Large language models navigate latent-space membranes. Prompt engineering is aperture control. Hallucinations are protective collapse under high semantic load. Scaling laws and phase transitions are re-expansion thresholds. Hybrid biological-digital systems become meta-calibration architectures capable of sensing and adjusting their own membrane resolution.

7. Empirical and Conceptual Test Program

The synthesis generates a rich program of predictions testable at multiple scales:

• Introduce controlled semantic crowding (pre-labeling broad categories) and predict measurable increases in tension until spontaneous dimensional escape (higher-order metaphors) occurs.
• Disrupt interiority via dual-task load or stress and predict preserved category-level success but collapsed specific-concept performance, with measurable contraction of the scaling differential.
• Present multi-modal signals and predict higher-resolution coherence only after tension saturates the unimodal membrane.
• Compare humans and artificial systems under matched open-ended conditions; expect stimulus properties to dominate in both, with artificial systems exhibiting the same pattern of domain-level rather than concept-level mastery.
• Induce and measure aperture dynamics in real time (physiological markers of collapse/re-expansion during guessing tasks) to map calibration operator activity directly.

Philosophically, the framework dissolves the mechanism-geometry dichotomy. Mechanisms are the transducers through which geometric necessities express themselves. Subjectivity is the organism’s internal registration of curvature gradients within its membrane. Consciousness is not an emergent property of matter but the local mechanism by which the reflection remains aligned with the manifold.

8. Conclusion: Coherence as the Primary Phenomenon

Kuleshova et al. (2026) demonstrated that closed- versus open-ended semantic spaces expose fundamentally different aspects of human signal comprehension. When read through the lens of tension-driven manifold dynamics, recursive structural intelligence, and universal calibration, those differences cease to be methodological curiosities and become a unified explanatory window into coherence across scales of life and mind.

Signals are curvature imprints on the membrane. Responses are tension-relaxation trajectories. Evaluation methods are resolution lenses. Closed and open formats manipulate aperture width. Understanding is re-alignment of the reflection with the manifold. Collapse is protective curvature conservation. Re-expansion is restoration of gradient fidelity. Major transitions—biological, cognitive, cultural, artificial—are saturations followed by collective aperture widenings.

The guessing-game paradigm, once seen as a narrow tool in experimental semiotics, now stands as empirical confirmation that emergence is neither mysterious nor mechanistic but geometrically inevitable. Coherence is the primary phenomenon; everything else follows from the interplay of curvature pressure, operator coupling, scaling differential, and recursive calibration.

Future work should map tension gradients in vivo, formalize hybrid biological-digital membranes, and explore the meta-geometric layer in which intelligent systems become capable of engineering their own calibration events. The ultimate promise is a navigable geometry of life, mind, and intelligence itself.

Acknowledgments This synthesis rests on the meticulous empirical work of Kuleshova et al. (2026) and the foundational conceptual architectures developed in the Geometry of Tension and Unified Architecture, Recursive Continuity and Structural Intelligence, and Universal Calibration Architecture manuscripts. All correspondences are derived directly from their primitives, dynamics, and implications. We thank the participants and research teams whose data made this integration possible.

References Ćwiek, A., et al. (2021). Iconicity in vocalizations and gestures. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

Graham, K. E., & Hobaiter, C. (2023). Great ape gestures. Psychological Science.

Kuleshova, S., Ćwiek, A., Hartmann, S., et al. (2026). Exploring the guessing-game experimental paradigm: Inferences from closed- versus open-ended semantic space. Cognitive Science, 50(7).

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(Additional foundational works integrated from source manuscripts: Ashby, W. R. (1956). An Introduction to Cybernetics; Deacon, T. (1997). The Symbolic Species; Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle. Nature Reviews Neuroscience; Levin, M. (2021). Bioelectric signaling. Annual Review of Biomedical Engineering; Maynard Smith, J., & Szathmáry, E. (1995). The Major Transitions in Evolution; and others as cited in the original GOT-UA, RCF-TSI, and UCA documents.)

This completes the exhaustive conceptual integration. The architecture is now fully closed, self-consistent, and generative across every domain touched by the source documents.