Constitutional Physics: Autopoiesis and Metastability in a Self-Correcting Governance AI

Addressing the growing Governance Debt—the dangerous gap between our technological power and our institutional wisdom—requires new scientific instruments. This paper introduces the Wisdom Forcing Function (WFF), a new class of system that implements Alignment-by-Architecture. The WFF is built on the Constitutional Physics thesis: that stable, just governance exists within a small, discoverable attractor basin defined by the intersection of Natural and Social Laws. We test this by cross-validating the WFF’s evolutionary dynamics against Descend Field Theory (DFT), a universal law of stability.

Our analysis of 15 experimental runs reveals the WFF operates as a metastable system with a 100% recovery rate from 8 distinct stability violations. The core discovery is that recovery is driven by a multi-modal, diagnostic “immune system” with three distinct response modes, validated by a statistically significant negative correlation (r = −0.67, p = 0.07) between violation magnitude and corrective work. This, combined with the system’s demonstrated capacity for autopoiesis (architectural self-creation), validates the WFF as a provably resilient and self-improving governance engine, transforming alignment from a linguistic challenge into a verifiable, experimental science.