Can a Dynamic Internal Field Govern a Transformer's Cognition? Certifiability, not Superiority, in Homeostatic Compute Control

Title:Can a Dynamic Internal Field Govern a Transformer's Cognition? Certifiability, not Superiority, in Homeostatic Compute Control

Abstract:An intelligent system does not merely reason: it governs its own reasoning - how much to compute, when to stop, which module to activate. Can that role be played by a dynamic internal field - a low-dimensional homeostatic state with explicit physics and certified stability - that modulates cognition without performing it? Ours is a field on the module graph governed by a family of PDEs on the graph Laplacian, advancing with an adaptive-depth reasoner. We certify the stability of the integrator of the whole family - an integrator certificate, not a closed-loop one. New, and proved here: a discrete Schur-Cohn criterion for Verlet with velocity coupling, necessary and sufficient per latent root, with no commutation hypothesis. The answer is threefold: substance no, structure only in part, certifiability yes. The type of the field's physics is irrelevant for accuracy: wave, diffusion, gated mixtures and a 2D Navier-Stokes substrate tie. A twenty-seed preregistered deconfounding campaign bounds the structural claim: at equalized caps the second-order effect is strong in one family (+0.087 [+0.042, +0.132], t=4.0) but is not detected in the other (+0.014 [-0.013, +0.040], n.s.), so part of the original contrast was capacity, not order; and a matched-interface GRU is indistinguishable in the first and nominally exceeds the field in the second (-0.035 [-0.067, -0.002]). What distinguishes the field is not capability but that its one-step operator admits an exact runtime stability check - a difference of kind, not of existence: learned recurrences carry certificates too, sufficient and conservative ones. A kill-gate with a positive control finds no evidence for the field as evidence accumulator (Delta AUC +0.0007 [-0.0065, +0.0079] vs a 0.03 threshold). A dynamic internal field is a viable, certifiable compute governor, but not an enhancer of cognition: it modulates, it does not think.

22 pages, 4 figures. Companion paper: "Where Cognition Lives" (arXiv:2608.22347). Code, preregistrations and results: this https URL

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Systems and Control (eess.SY)

arXiv:2608.24319 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2608.24319v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.24319 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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