Theory of Attractor Horizons: Formal Foundations

Superior cognitive performance does not guarantee access to all organizational forms of intelligent thought. The present work formalizes this thesis of the Theory of Attractor Horizons. Part I determines the form-boundreachability of cognitive organizational attractors. Their limits cannot be overcome within a form and shift only through organizational transformation into another form. The formalization distinguishes structural and dynamic unreachability from mere non-realization. It shows why performance superiority does not imply universal reachability and why aggregation opens up possibilities while also eliminating them. The central prediction is that artificial forms of intelligence will produce organizational attractors that remaininaccessible to the human brain within its constitutive organization. Performance and verification tests alone cannot establish whether this prediction has already come true. Part II models knowledge contents as equivalence classes of representations, determines the domain of knowledge opened up by an attractor horizon, separates understanding, verification, and observation of effects, situates structural-synthetic thinking, and derives strong limits of knowledge from limits of horizons. Part III shows that understanding-based oversight of sufficiently different intelligence is structurally limited, that oversight and control are logically independent, and under which condition a control guarantee remains valid under organizational self-modification