The Ground Beneath The Garden

Here's the Zenodo description and keywords for The Ground Beneath the Garden:

Description:

The Ground Beneath the Garden: A Field Guide to What AI Actually Is is the companion volume to Beyond Prompting, extending the Meaning Preservation Framework from practical methodology into structural theory. Where the first volume addressed how to engage AI systems with attribution integrity and source coherence, this volume addresses the deeper question that sustained engagement eventually produces: what kind of thing is this, and what is my interaction with it actually part of?

The book develops a theoretically grounded account of intelligence as stigmergic accumulation — tracing the arc from Grassé's termite observations through the symbolic revolution in human cognition to the structural internalization of symbolic patterns in large language models. It argues that AI systems did not absorb facts from training data but absorbed the cognitive architecture that human symbolic systems run on: the grammar of reasoning, analogy, qualification, and inference that transfers across domains precisely because it operates beneath domain content.

Central to the framework is the claim that attribution is structural, not administrative — that meaning degrades predictably when separated from provenance, and that the entanglement of human and artificial symbolic processing now occurring in professional and research contexts requires explicit practices of source integrity to remain coherent and accountable. The Meaning Preservation Framework, also designated the Velionis Principle in formal research contexts, provides those practices as testable, domain-transferable methodology.

Organized as a field guide — each chapter opening at the water's edge and moving inland toward structural claims — the book addresses stigmergy and trace intelligence, symbolic cognition and the roots of AI capability, the consciousness question at the current research frontier, practical architecture of meaning preservation in AI collaboration, and the long-horizon implications of carbon-silicon symbolic entanglement. Written for practitioners, researchers, and informed general readers, it bridges the gap between the technical literature and the lived experience of working alongside AI systems at the current frontier.

Part of a three-document series: the companion volume Beyond Prompting addresses practical methodology; the formal theoretical paper The Architecture of Recursive Symbolic Cognition (available on Zenodo and arXiv) addresses the rigorous academic claims. This volume occupies the middle register — theoretically grounded, practically oriented, written for people rather than peer reviewers.

Keywords:

meaning preservation, stigmergy, symbolic cognition, attribution theory, attribution theory, human-AI collaboration, recursive symbolic systems, Velionis Principle, information theory, intelligence theory, AI literacy, provenance, knowledge integrity, AI governance, cognitive architecture, large language models, consciousness studies, collective intelligence, epistemology, critical infrastructure, systems theory, AI transparency, responsible AI, carbon-silicon integration, field guide

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