This page provides a research-level elaboration of Semantic ISA as defined at the position level. It examines its structural implications and candidate primitives within executable semantic order, without redefining its role or scope.

Semantic Instruction Architecture (Semantic ISA) is examined as an intermediate semantic execution layer that mediates between expressed semantic intent and concrete computational behavior.

Within the research, Semantic ISA is not treated as a hardware instruction set or a finalized execution standard. It functions as a structural abstraction for exploring how semantic commitments may be rendered executable, inspectable, and composable across heterogeneous systems.

Structural Analogy

The term instruction architecture is used by analogy.

In conventional computing systems, instruction set architectures define the minimal operational vocabulary through which computation is carried out, independently of specific implementations.

Semantic ISA adopts a similar structural role, but at the level of meaning rather than machine operations:

  • not to prescribe how systems must be built,
  • but to identify which semantic primitives must be expressible for execution to be possible.

This analogy is conceptual rather than literal.

Role within Executable Semantic Order

Executable semantic order presupposes an intermediate layer in which semantic intent is:

  • decoupled from surface language,
  • rendered into discrete, well-typed units,
  • and constrained such that execution effects become inspectable and verifiable.

Semantic ISA is examined as a candidate layer for this role.

It is not bound to a specific programming language, runtime environment, or model architecture.

Semantic Primitives

At the structural level, Semantic ISA concerns itself with identifying a minimal set of semantic instruction primitives, such as:

  • commitment declaration and scope,
  • authorization and delegation boundaries,
  • obligation fulfillment and violation,
  • conditional entailment and constraint propagation,
  • and event attribution across agents.

The emphasis is on what kinds of semantic operations must be representable, rather than how they are encoded or executed.

Determinism and Traceability

For semantic intent to be operationally meaningful, execution effects must remain traceable.

Semantic ISA is therefore examined in relation to:

  • deterministic mapping between declared semantic intent and admissible operational effects,
  • constraints that limit nondeterministic interpretation at execution time,
  • and structures that permit replay and audit independent of model internals.

These considerations are treated as structural requirements, not implementation guarantees.

Scope Boundary

Semantic ISA is not proposed as:

  • a processor-level ISA,
  • a universal semantic language,
  • or a finalized interoperability standard.

It is used as a conceptual execution abstraction within the research to reason about how semantics may participate in computation under verifiable constraints.

Relation to Other Structures

Semantic ISA serves as a structural lens for examining how meaning may enter execution without collapsing into opaque behavior.