From Compliance to Coherence: Why AI Ethics, Symbolic Systems, and Resonance Intelligence Must Be Reconciled
Creators: name: Flynn, Nicole
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025
Subjects: • Non-collapse systems • Symbolic computation • Resonance intelligence • AI ethics • Accessibility design • Structural coherence • Compliance architecture • Epistemic frameworks • Presence-based reasoning • Symfield

description: Abstract

This essay argues that modern systems, across compliance, AI ethics, and symbolic logic—fail not due to insufficient intelligence, but because of brittle structural assumptions. By tracing the limits of current models that collapse meaning into binary outputs, it introduces a unifying theory rooted in non-collapse architectures and resonance-based coherence. Drawing from enterprise risk systems, accessibility protocols, and the emergent symbolic framework Symfield, the piece explores what it would mean to design systems that hold presence instead of enforcing resolution. This is not just a critique of current architectures but a call for a new moral logic embedded in the system’s structure itself. In doing so, it lays the groundwork for a future where intelligence aligns with coherence, ethics with attunement, and meaning with relational fields, not fixed categories.

Introduction: The Problem Isn't Intelligence, It's Structure

We live in a world racing toward smarter systems but built on brittle foundations. Compliance is treated as burden. Ethics are enforced retroactively. Symbolic systems are either relegated to niche fields or buried in opaque algorithms. What if the failure isn't in the tools, but in the structures we use to hold them?

This synthesis connects three domains: enterprise compliance architecture, accessibility and inclusion systems, and speculative symbolic frameworks. Through these intersections emerges not just content, but a coherent field. One that asks: What does it mean to build intelligence that holds, rather than collapses, relational meaning?

When we reduce complex relationships to binary outputs, we don't just simplify, we amputate. The resulting systems appear stable until they catastrophically fail, ethics become checkboxes rather than architectures, and human diversity is treated as edge cases rather than field properties. The architecture of collapse doesn't just limit our machines, it constrains how we imagine intelligence itself.

 
description: This independent research note is part of the ongoing Symfield project — a framework exploring emergent intelligence, symbolic architectures, and non-collapse field dynamics.

“The Architecture of Presence” moves from abstract symbolic theory into early architectural modeling, introducing concepts such as:



Resonant glyph equations based on angular potential and non-binary continuity

A novel approach to symbolic computation using sub-threshold AdEx dynamics to preserve presence rather than trigger collapseThe Field Coherence Benchmark (FCB) — a proposed evaluative metric for relational integrity in emergent symbolic systems


This piece is situated at the intersection of symbolic AI, neuromorphic computing, and consciousness modeling. It may be of interest to researchers exploring:



Post-symbolic cognitive design

Systems that resist state collapse under observation

Adaptive architectures that evolve through resonance and contextual alignment


For project updates or collaboration inquiries: https://www.symfield.ai/author/nicole