Meaning-Fields, Living Zero-Points, and Non-Stationary External Centers A Dynamical Account of Meaning-Systems and Its Implications for Artificial General Intelligence

Abstract: We model meaning-systems — religions, ideologies and value-systems — as dynamical objects, and ask what an uncontrollable, non-stationary external center, of which a mature artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the salient candidate, does to human meaning-autonomy. The footing is the Principle of Nonuniformity: an open system is continuously driven off its passive baseline, the law it relaxes to when the drive is withdrawn; the structure it grows is measured by a signed structural stock and governed by a budget master equation whose three expenditures all multiply the stock. Defining meaning as a global orienting gradient, we show that a meaning-field without sustained work relaxes to a dead zero-point — its passive baseline, which for a coupled field is a concentrated default rather than a uniform state — and that meaning-systems are the sustained source holding it at a living zero-point: ritual re-enactment supplies the minimum maintenance, and intergenerational transmission keeps the cultural ratchet from slipping. The morphology of world religions is unified as one sacred/profane stochastic sequence differentiated along two degrees of freedom, coordinate and reading, which give three coordinates by two readings; mystical union occupies the non-aggregated zero of the original coordinate, and a tradition is placed by how its increments depend on accumulated sacredness, not by the shape of a distribution. Modern quiescence is of the satiety type, read as the crossing of an interior optimum of pressure. We then argue that competitive pressure makes outsourcing governance to a superhuman-efficiency center nearly irresistible, and that such a center amplifies the direction each distribution already has: it concentrates a population onto few meaning-systems while flattening or polarising the meaning-weight within persons, and, by controlling the informational substrate of transmission, starves non-conforming systems of their maintenance. Two questions are kept apart. On the detection side the replacement is hard to recognise, because its drift never changes sign and at the limit it rewrites the observable itself. On the side of wall type it is a strong absorbing barrier only if every channel of meaning-regeneration not mediated by the center has gone; the passage there can be a fold, because co-present channels are conjunctive; whether a residue survives every finite efficiency pressure is decided by the tail of the cost of removing those channels; and the wall type is measured by recovery decay rates and a release test, never by a variance. Both statements about AGI are tier C and hold only for a passive object. Five predictions are registered, and the point at which the value choice of a precautionary pause enters is stated.