Co-Semantic

This field note explores how “being able to live together” can be expressed as an executable condition, rather than a psychological or cultural claim. This note originates from a recurring question: What does it mean for an existence to be interactive. At the surface level, the question appears technical—about agents, systems, and interaction semantics. At a deeper level, it intersects with a much older constraint: What kind of existence can actually live with another existence over time. ...

1. Scope This document defines a class of interactional risk arising in human–agent systems that engage in continuous, real-time coordination. The focus is not on incorrect output, model bias, or system malfunction, but on failure modes where technically valid system behavior undermines human subjectivity and participatory stability. 2. Background Most existing standards frame human oversight as a control or intervention mechanism: the human monitors system behavior and intervenes when necessary. ...

1. Problem Statement Most contemporary agent systems are optimized for predictive control: perception is immediately converted into inference, and inference into output. This architecture maximizes responsiveness, but systematically destabilizes relational interaction. The failure mode is subtle: the agent remains technically correct, yet interaction becomes brittle, unilateral, or emotionally incoherent. 2. Insight from Social Partner Dance In social partner dance, coordination is sustained through leading and following. Neither role corresponds to command or submission. ...

My engagement with dance did not precede my work in computer science. It came after years of thinking in terms of formal systems, execution models, and computational control. This ordering matters. Social dance — particularly partner dance with explicit leading and following — exposed the limits of output-driven, predictive coordination in a way that abstract agent models could not. In social dance, stable coordination does not emerge from faster inference or earlier decision-making. It emerges from maintaining a shared temporal envelope — a co-semantic session — where neither party collapses the interaction into unilateral control. ...