16 Persistent Structure Across a Lifetime

Transport across environments and the growth of reusable compositional knowledge

A sequence of environments tests whether an admitted geometry, comparator sketch, repair type, or decision quotient reduces the structural work required later without forcing one optimizer everywhere. Let \(\mathcal E\) be a category of environments and let \(\mathsf K:\mathcal E\to \mathcal S\) assign to each environment its learned semantic object. A transport arrow should preserve declared universal structure up to the chosen notion of equivalence, while recording any defect in observations, actions, consistency maps, or observers.

Parameter reuse is the weakest case. Policy transport additionally preserves a decision readout. Structural transport preserves a construction together with its universal comparison maps. Persistent universal knowledge requires that the transported construction continue to solve new extension or consistency problems without being identified with the representation in which it was first learned.