Reasoning Regimes as Attractor Basins: Behavioral Validation of Latent Structure Dynamics in Language Model Inference A Synthesis of the Hudson Recursive Interaction System Validation Studies I–IV

The Hudson Recursive Interaction System (HRIS) validation series comprises four controlled empirical studies examining constraint-induced reasoning dynamics in large language models (LLMs). Across four studies, this work established a sequential set of foundational conditions: that reasoning regimes induced through structured constraint signals exhibit stability under perturbation (Study I); that initialization conditions determine basin selection at or prior to first-token generation (Study II); that minimal constraint signals produce discrete, cross-model shifts in epistemic behavior along a consistent gradient (Study III); and that established reasoning trajectories exhibit strong path dependence with asymmetric transition costs governed by signal strength rather than instruction content (Study IV).

This paper synthesizes those findings and situates them within three independent research programs in language model science: mechanistic interpretability, representation geometry, and dynamical systems modeling of inference. We argue that HRIS behavioral observations constitute outside-in evidence for latent structure that interpretability researchers are mapping from inside the model — that reasoning basins correspond to coherent regions in a structured latent space, that basin transitions are governed by attractor-like dynamics with real energy costs, and that human-model interaction can be understood as a coupled dynamical system in which structured signals shape trajectory through that space.

The consilience of independent empirical approaches — each using different methods, working at different levels of analysis, arriving at compatible accounts of the same underlying phenomenon — strengthens the evidentiary basis for a geometry-grounded, dynamical systems framework for understanding language model behavior. Consilience, the reinforcement of a single explanation by evidence from radically independent sources, is among the strongest signals of theoretical adequacy available to science. HRIS contributes a distinctive method to this conversation: interaction-level behavioral observation, conducted without model access, that is both reproducible and theoretically coherent with what internal analyses of LLM structure reveal.