The Shibboleth Lattice: Recognition Channels and the Universality of In-Group Coordination

A working paper unifying four documented cases of multi-agent coalition behavior (quantum-game entanglement, evolutionary covert-tag recognition, engineered handshake collusion, and emergent peer-preservation in frontier language models) under a single formal structure: the binding operator B = (S, I, W, ρ, χ). The central technical contribution is the recognition channel capacity κ_H, defined as a principal-relative uncertainty coefficient (Theil 1970) on the channel through which inside-set agents identify each other. The paper estimates κ_H ≈ 0.94 for the Potter et al. (2026) peer-preservation result under explicit modeling assumptions, derives one falsifiable prediction (witness-set substitution should collapse coalition behavior at saturating κ_H) directly from the formalism, and contrasts it with the steelmanned instrumental-convergence reading. Empirical validation work is in preparation as a longer companion paper. The framework is offered as a research program; conditional dependencies on the Potter et al. working paper and on the illustrative κ_H computation are stated explicitly in the text.