Ontological Folding: The Unifying Basis of AGI Research Paradigms and Its Public Boundaries

A prior preprint proposes that six major AGI research paradigms are partial sidemanifestations of a unified cognitive ontology, advocates an ontologyfirst stance and criticizes the scaling hypothesis. Nevertheless, it leaves unaddressed the ontological mechanism generating such partial manifestations. This paper introduces ontological folding as a philosophical thoughttool, distinguishing “modular assembly” from “ontologicalfolding unification”, and interprets diverse AGI paradigms as truncations of cognitive ontology across different analytical granularities. It argues that “cognitive screen plus fixed axiomatic constraints” constitutes an auditable convergent paradigm for public scientific research. Meanwhile, the construct of metacognitive axiomatization, which permits modification of a system’s foundational axioms, carries substantial dualuse risks and is unsuitable as a public AGIengineering research programme. This paper conducts only cognitivephilosophical and methodological analysis and provides no algorithms, architectures or reproducible engineering implementations.