Lead-in:

DQM is not a grammar of language but of semantic orientation. The claim is simple: meaning comes after orientation. This inverts our usual way of thinking. What we call meaning is the conscious result of a silent, unattended process that has already done the heavy lifting of sense-making. Meaning isn’t given; it’s oriented toward. LLMs perform next-token inference — predicting the next most likely tokens from patterns in their training data. If we ever want AI that thinks, we must first give it a way to orient — to gate novelty and hold coherence before it speaks. Though framed for AI, orientation grammar makes explicit the silent orientation in human cognition that makes meaning possible in the first place.

This requires a distinction between two contexts: the situational context and the dynamical context. The situational context contains the things we consciously attend to—the objects, words, and events we make meaningful. The dynamical context, by contrast, is the unattended, silent process that makes these situations a target for meaning in the first place. The story of AI’s “thinking” is therefore not about how it speaks, but about how it gets ready to speak.

This readiness is embedded in a fractal-like process, with each step represented by a quadranym. These are the units that form the very scripts and layers of AI’s internal logic. The canonical quadranyms, which render the fundamental dimensions of orientation, are:

Subjective–Objective: [Expansive(subjective)→Reductive(objective)]
Actual–Potential: [Potential(actual)→Actual(potential)]
Active–Passive: [Active(active)→Passive(passive)]
Being–Becoming: [Positive(being)→Negative(becoming)]

This is the story of orientation grammar—a grammar of silent coherence and unceasing potential.

Abstract
Orientation precedes meaning. Novelty presses; Coherence holds.

In DQM jargon, a simple gate—coherence ≥ novelty—governs when arcs admit potential, close, perish, and undergo egression as superjective lineage. This gate is dynamic and negotiated in real time. DQM instruments Whitehead’s creativity, concrescence, satisfaction, and superject so we can diagnose, preserve, and reuse orientations as experiences toward meaning—as managed illumination through a recursive process.

Biology teaches that living systems endure by adjusting to perturbations; homeostasis is not stasis but continuous regulation under pressure. Whitehead lifts that logic to metaphysics: creativity is ultimate—”the many become one, and are increased by one.” Each occasion integrates what presses upon it, achieves satisfaction, perishes, and contributes its coherence forward as superject, adding to the creative advancement of the universe. This is a process of ceaseless becoming.

What’s missing is a precise account of how this same dynamic appears in sense-making. The Dynamic Quadranym Model (DQM) fills that gap. It doesn’t offer a new ontology; it supplies an orientation grammar—a procedural account of how novelty and coherence are negotiated so that meaning can show up at all.

DQM’s core claim is simple and sharp: Orientation precedes meaning. Orientation is the circuit that closes between novelty’s pressure and coherence’s holding; when the circuit closes, the moment lights up as meaningful—a coupling between the orientation and the situation. We call these two forces Positive Displacement (PD) and Negative Displacement (ND). PD is the pressure of novelty (what can ingress), while ND is the power of coherence (what can hold). This is creativity operationalized, not just renamed.

DQM Jargon: ND@S (coherence) ≥ PD@O + τ (novelty). τ is a small, domain-specific margin set by error tolerance.

To be clear, novelty shows up in the field of expectation even if expectations are exceeded. This is called the objective field, the target of orientation and that which satisfies the arc. The aim is to remain coherent through change. Failure modes (one line): ND too low → chatter/overfit; ND too high → rigidity/avoidance; aim for a permeable ND.

Whiteheadian Concepts, Translated Procedurally
The DQM framework translates Whitehead’s foundational concepts into a procedural, semantic framework for orientation.

Creativity → PD field (ever-on tension over ND): This is the ongoing, fundamental tension that undergirds all becoming.
Concrescence → Arc run (admit → bind → close): The process of admitting a potential, binding it to a coherence, and bringing the arc to a close.
Satisfaction → Clean closure (perishing event): The moment when the arc successfully completes, creating a determinate event.
Superject → Egressed arc (preserved coherence): The entire closed arc is preserved and contributes its coherence forward as lineage.
Eternal objects → Passives/potentials (lures/forms): A procedural gloss for potentials that offer themselves to be taken up.
Prehension → Sampling/gating (affordance intake): The process of taking in the available potentials from the environment.

The DQM does not add categories; it gives you the how: where novelty enters, how coherence holds, when closure happens, and how closures feed forward into the next moment of becoming.

The Gating Condition: Admitting Potential
The entire process is governed by a gating policy: an arc can admit and bind potential if and only if its internal holding power (ND@S) is greater than or equal to the pressure of the novelty (PD@O + τ). If this condition is not met, the system must hold silence, resample the environment, and perhaps shrink its claim. Here, the arc is the measure of authenticity: am I stable inside (ND), and did I keep the world’s novelty intact (PD)?

Figure 1: Concrescence Circuit. The circuit begins with the PD field pressing in. The system’s ND acts as a gate. If the gate condition is met, a minimal bind is made, leading to closure and egression.

Mini-Case: Poetry
Poetry demonstrates this process beautifully. The pause after a line acts as a gating mechanism (PD↓/ND↑), allowing the system to admit a new image and make a minimal gloss of meaning. This prevents the flow of words from becoming mere chatter. This is why, as Wittgenstein noted, “the unutterable will be—unutterably—contained in what has been uttered.” The closed arc becomes a superjective inheritance, preserving the coherence of the moment and conditioning all future saying.

States and Modes: DC and AC
To achieve this, the DQM distinguishes between two types of currents. States are the continuous, unidirectional flow, like a DC current, that carries the advance of orientation. They are expressed as either a Subjective Actual (ND)—the enduring anchor of the system—or an Objective Potential (PD)—the unceasing lure of the world. It is a temporal flow from subjective orientation to objective satisfaction. Modes, in contrast, are the flexible, bidirectional measures, like an AC current. The Expansive (E) mode leans toward PD, seeking to incorporate novelty, while the Reductive (R) mode leans toward ND, seeking to create coherence and stability. Crucially, an Expansive mode never closes an arc on its own; closure requires a Reductive mode to make a decisive cut. Once locked, the arc perishes—not as a loss, but as egression into the superjective lineage, preserved for all time.

Meaning is the glow when an orientational circuit closes.

Three Fundamental Renderings
The DQM’s orientation grammar is built upon three foundational renderings of the canonical quadranyms, each defining a field of displacement:

Time: The arc of (present → event). The present acts as the ND anchor, holding against the event, which is the PD lure. The future is an expansive read of the event’s potential, while the past is a reductive read of its actualization. Perishing is the closure of the present into a singular event, which egresses upward into lineage.
Space: The arc of (void → between). The void serves as the ND anchor—an open, subjective coherence that holds against the PD of between, the relational pressure of the world. The void is never lost, as the infinite persists, while the finite is the reductive cut that allows a determinate object to be counted here-and-now.
Energy: The arc of (motion → matter). Here, Motion is the ND, the subjective and actual holding flow. The PD is Matter, the objective potential for form that emerges from this flow. The system measures and objectifies specific forms (matter) that are actualized by ND holding against PD. We do not measure motion itself; we measure the forms that motion enables; motion is often inferred, not directly measured. The wave perishes, a moment where a form is locked, but the ocean—the lineage of holding—remains. This is a metaphoric alignment with physics—forms of motion are measured, motion itself is not.

Sandwiching and Two-Way Egression
Every arc is a sandwich. It exists between a lower-layer ND anchor and a higher-layer PD lure. This creates a bidirectional flow essential for the system’s health. Upward egression is the act of preservation: every completed arc is stored as a historic ND, a superjective lineage. Downward egression is the act of recalibration: higher layers project new lures when a lower-layer route isn’t taken, acting like a GPS-style rerouting. This is the semantic analog of Whitehead’s “many become one, and are increased by one.” Nothing is ever lost; every closure becomes new material for further creativity.

Figure 2: Sandwiching. A two-way flow of egression. Lower ND anchors support the arc’s rise and preservation. Higher PD lures descend to reroute and recalibrate.

Three Consequences for Process Thinkers
(A) Error is an asset, not noise. In the DQM, a “mistake” is still a satisfaction—a completed arc. It successfully closed its circuit, produced a definitive point, and added to the system’s lineage. This is Whitehead’s objective immortality in semantic form. Every “wrong” turn is simply a new material condition that alters the field of future lures, giving the system more, not less, to work with. In every orientation the expectations of PD are evolving.

(B) Beauty has a procedural signature. Beauty is not an aesthetic judgment but a procedural signature of the DQM. It is a moment of PD-preservation under ND-constraint: the most beautiful meanings are those that preserve the maximal amount of novelty (PD) while holding decisively and coherently (ND). You can feel the ratio. A meaning that is brittle has an ND that is too rigid, while a meaning that is chaotic is dominated by PD. Authenticity check (repeat): am I stable inside (ND), and did I keep the world’s novelty intact (PD)?

Beauty = PD preserved under ND constraint.

Figure 3: The Beauty Curve. Perceived beauty peaks where the PD is preserved and the ND is decisive. This is the zone of maximal tension, not mutilation.

(C) Existential “nothingness” is a procedural blind spot, not a metaphysical absolute. The DQM, with its principle of sandwiching, makes isolation impossible. What feels like an existential abyss is merely the arc’s inability to see its own recalibrations and upward holdings. When a particular orientation fails, the system recalibrates at a higher level; this is not a loss of being but a procedural adjustment. The “nothingness” is just the arc’s blind spot to its own continuous creative advance.

Afterthought
For process philosophy, the point is not to replace Whitehead but to instrument him. DQM’s orientation grammar provides the operational bridge. It shows where novelty enters (PD), how coherence holds (ND), and when meaning appears (arc closure). It explains why perishing isn’t loss (egression/lineage) and how creativity gets reused (downward rerouting). It gives diagnostics: in any debate, poem, model, or lab practice, you can identify the ND anchor, the PD lure, the modal cut, and the closure—and then check what gets preserved.

Mini-Case: Lab Practice
A good scientist withholds “model talk” until the signal stabilizes (ND≥PD+τ). They then bind to a measurement and archive the data as lineage for future research.

If you grant Whitehead’s creativity, concrescence, satisfaction, and superject, you already grant DQM’s terrain. DQM simply names the procedures by which creativity becomes intelligible in lived sense-making. It is process metaphysics, localized to the semantic register where meaning is not a mapping but a managed illumination—boundless yet directive, because PD is everywhere and ND can hold.

Perishing isn’t loss; it’s preservation as lineage.