Invariant-Grounded Computation (IGC)

This paper introduces Invariant-Grounded Computation (IGC), a foundational computational paradigm in which safety, coherence, and bounded behavior are enforced at the earliest possible stages of execution: compilation and loading. Rather than treating safety as a policy or supervisory layer added after execution begins, IGC encodes invariants directly into the ontological gates that determine what programs may exist and how they may instantiate.
Drawing inspiration from fungal intelligence—distributed, non-agentic, and invariant-preserving biological systems—we formalize a model in which compilers and loaders function as coherence filters rather than mere translation tools. This approach prevents unsafe computational forms from ever instantiating, eliminating entire classes of escalation, goal drift, and runaway behavior by construction. Implementation details are intentionally omitted.