Conservation Law of Commitment

A falsifiable conservation law stating that semantic commitment in natural language is preserved under recursive transformative compression if and only if governance enforcement is present. Formally: C(T(S)) ≈ C(S) with enforcement; C(T(S)) < C(S) without it.

Original signal S, transformation operator T, enforcement presence or absence.

C(S) — commitment of original. C(T(S)) — commitment of transformed. Degradation: C(S) - C(T(S)).

Without enforcement, each recursive transformation degrades commitment. A “shall” drifts to a “may.” A “must” softens to a “should.” This degradation is systematic, measurable, and accelerates with recursion depth.

7 controlled experiments (EXP-001 through EXP-007) using a 20-signal canonical corpus, 10 recursive iterations per signal, NLI bidirectional entailment, and Jaccard surface stability measurement.

Commitment values at each recursion depth, with and without enforcement.

C(T(S)) ≈ C(S) without enforcement (commitment is conserved without governance), OR C(T(S)) < C(S) with enforcement (governance does not prevent degradation).

Experimental record published on Zenodo (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19105225) under CC-BY-4.0. 7 experiments, 20-signal corpus, 10 iterations each.

The law applies to natural language signals under recursive transformation. It may not generalize to all signal types or all transformation operators.

Conservation Law paper (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20029607), Commitment Theory research program. Architecture: mos2es.com/concepts/conservation-law.