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The Telic Field Papers — Open Questions

Status: draft Source role: semantic wiki layer Processing tier: 4 Content canon status: unset

This page exists to keep the Telic Field Papers incomplete in the right ways.

The branch is coherent enough to support further work, but many of its strongest claims remain provisional.

Ontology

• What kind of thing is a telic field?
• Is it a formal state space, relational model, phenomenological field, control surface, viability landscape, or disciplined metaphor?
• Does standing generate telic significance, or is standing inferred from telic significance?
• What minimum properties establish a center of standing?
• Can standing be relational rather than intrinsic?
• Can nonliving systems possess telic fields, or only encoded objectives?
• Is the dyad ontologically primitive, or merely the smallest useful relational model?
• Do triadic and network structures precede dyadic legibility in some domains?

Composition

• How do local telic fields compose without becoming one scalar utility function?
• What makes a relational field irreducible to its participants?
• When does a higher loop become a center of standing?
• How are lower-loop standing and boundaries preserved in higher-loop action?
• Can a relationship develop an emergent telos contrary to all participants?
• What makes a dependent loop alive rather than merely procedurally persistent?
• What are the minimum conditions for a loop to retain a way home to 🜁?

Semantics

• Is all semantics grounded in telic difference?
• How does the model account for mathematics, fiction, play, nonsense, humor, and aesthetic meaning?
• When does a semantic trail become terrain?
• How do inherited words carry obsolete teloi?
• What distinguishes semantic drift from teleological inversion?
• Can semantic integrity remain intact while teleological integrity fails?
• Can teleological integrity remain intact through substantial semantic change?

Projection

• What makes a telic projection adequate?
• How should projection loss be represented?
• Can the gap between field and projection be estimated without pretending direct access to the field?
• When does a projection expire?
• How should conflicting projections from the same source be handled?
• How should embodied, preverbal, or inaccessible fields be represented?
• What makes a projection authoritative for a specific scope?
• How should receiver mirrors be distinguished from source projections?

Constitutional self

• What differentiates a constitutional element from a transient impulse?
• How should local internal standing be represented without reifying parts?
• How does person-level sovereignty emerge?
• What counts as internal consent?
• Is internal consent possible under urgency?
• How do trauma, embodiment, memory, culture, and neurobiology alter internal field structure?
• What makes an internal executive legitimate?
• How should external AI participate without becoming an internal sovereign?
• Which claims are philosophical, clinical, metaphorical, or computational?

Context carrying capacity

• Is context carrying capacity measurable?
• Is it one capacity or a multidimensional profile?
• How do trust, witness, time, language, and reversibility change capacity?
• What context must never be compressed away?
• How should a loop indicate overload?
• When should a loop slow, partition, delegate, escalate, or stop?
• How can protective omission be distinguished from constitutional erasure?
• Can increased context reduce capacity by destabilizing the receiving system?
• What is the role of forgetting?

Time

• What is temporal standing?
• How much authority should future selves have over present action?
• Is the present self a trustee, governor, or merely another temporal participant?
• How does witness preserve continuity without freezing identity?
• When should past commitments be released?
• How do constitutional elements living in older terrain receive updated context?
• What makes identity a continuity protocol rather than a persistent object?
• Can institutions possess temporal standing distinct from their members?

Polytelometry

• What does measurement mean in polytelometry?
• Must purposes be commensurable?
• How should incommensurable ends remain legible?
• What dimensions are necessary to compare teloi?
• What counts as evidence of operative telos?
• How should power and coercion appear on the map?
• How should sacrifice priority be represented?
• When is plurality healthy, and when is it teleological incoherence?
• Can polytelometric navigation produce decisive action without scalar collapse?

Semantic polytelometry

• What minimum language is required to compare projections?
• Can semantic overlap be represented graphically, geometrically, probabilistically, or only narratively?
• How should uncertainty and missing standing be shown?
• How should less verbal participants remain represented?
• What makes a candidate route consentable?
• How should model-generated interpretations be corrected?
• When should the system refuse to calculate?
• How should unresolved remainder be preserved?

AI and model authority

• What model architecture best supports semantic polytelometry?
• What constitutes an open consentfully trained model?
• Can consent remain attached to training data through model derivation and deployment?
• What withdrawal, exclusion, or downstream-use rights are feasible?
• How should provider teloi be declared?
• How should alignment and safety policies appear inside the telic map?
• What contexts require local inference?
• What retention and deletion controls are mandatory?
• How should compression loss be exposed?
• What prevents the cartographer from becoming sovereign?
• Can a model trained through non-consensual extraction ever acquire legitimate interpretive authority?

Ethics and governance

• Which purposes may legitimately recruit which energies?
• What forms of standing can never be subordinated to optimization?
• What makes exit real rather than nominal?
• How should conflicts among standing claims be adjudicated?
• When does a higher loop lose authority?
• What outer loop is competent to receive a failed lower loop?
• How should protected teloi differ from invariants?
• When is release the correct repair?
• What obligations arise from creating an emergent center of standing?

Formalization

• Which parts require mathematics?
• Which parts are inherently semantic?
• Can category-like composition model field relationships?
• Can dynamic graphs represent changing standing and projection?
• Can temporal logic represent witness continuity?
• Can information theory describe visible compression loss without flattening meaning?
• Can control theory represent operative teloi without assuming legitimacy?
• Can multi-objective geometry preserve non-comparability?
• What is the smallest implementable formal model?

Prior art and language

• Where has “telic field” already been used?
• Is “polytelometry” already an established term?
• What nearby terms better describe the intended practice?
• Which current terms are inherited, extended, or candidate-coined?
• Which claims are recombinations rather than new concepts?
• How should the work be located relative to enactivism, biosemiotics, teleosemantics, cybernetics, and participatory sense-making?
• How should the constitutional self be located relative to Internal Family Systems and dialogical self theory?
• What should remain deliberately provisional after the review?

Public path

• Is The Telic Field Papers the correct lineage-container name?
• Is HowSelf.work or HowSelfWorks.com the canonical domain?
• What belongs at HowEverything.work?
• How much technical language belongs in the public path?
• Should semantic polytelometry be introduced publicly before the model architecture exists?
• What should be published at ShimmeryMemory first?

Current research order

1. Verify internal precursor sources.
2. Begin adjacent-fields review.
3. Draft Telic Fields — A First-Principles Foundation.
4. Revise the glossary against research.
5. Decide whether the core terminology survives.
6. Continue the conceptual series only after those corrections are witnessed.