[verhash]

That’s a fair critique, but it slightly misidentifies what’s being claimed. The system does not assume embeddings encode truth, nor does it attempt to extract truth from latent space. It measures proximity to a substrate that has already been declared authoritative. In that sense it’s a conditional gate, not a semantic oracle. If the substrate is wrong, incomplete, or absurd, the mechanism will enforce that wrongness consistently. That is not a failure mode; it is the boundary of responsibility. The engine is not discovering truth, it is enforcing consistency relative to an explicit reference set.

On salami-slicing toward a contradiction: that concern applies to memoryless, single-pass filters. This mechanism is explicitly stateful. Deviations accumulate stress over time and do not reset, so a sequence of “almost acceptable” steps still fractures under sustained pressure. You cannot asymptotically walk toward a contradiction unless the configuration allows it, in which case that permissiveness is deliberate and inspectable. The trade being made here is not correctness for convenience, but opacity for causality. Instead of stochastic acceptance that can’t be replayed or audited, you get a deterministic enforcement layer whose failure modes live upstream in substrate and configuration choices, where they can be examined rather than guessed at.