Meaning Dissolution: The Progressive Degradation of Structural Coupling as the Temporal Precursor to Meaning Collapse

This paper derives meaning dissolution — the progressive degradation of the structural coupling between identity and its formations — as a formally distinct condition from meaning collapse, the threshold event at which the coupling fails. The derivation proceeds from the Law of Identity (Gaconnet, 2026; DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19316564), specifically Axiom 2 (Coupling) and Axiom 3 (Closure), which together establish that the coupling is an identity with structural properties that admit of degree. Where meaning collapse identifies the structural failure (what fails and why), meaning dissolution identifies the temporal structure of the failure (the rate at which the coupling degrades, the mechanism that accelerates the rate, and the threshold at which degradation becomes failure).

The paper specifies four structural contributions: (1) the derivation of meaning dissolution as the time-domain expression of the coupling condition; (2) the acceleration mechanism through the masking equation, demonstrating that the dissolution rate is non-linear and self-reinforcing; (3) the mapping of meaning dissolution onto Phases 1–3 of the invariant six-phase identity collapse sequence, with meaning collapse corresponding to Phase 4; and (4) the iatrogenic mechanism by which interventions designed for a functional meaning-production system accelerate the dissolution rate when applied to a degrading one, derived from the Law of Recursion (Gaconnet, 2026a; DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/MVYZT).

The paper further establishes that self-report cannot measure meaning dissolution, deriving the measurement constraint from the Recursive Reliability Effect (Gaconnet, 2026c; DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/MVYZT), and specifies six falsification criteria under which the derivation's claims would be disproven.