Author: Vladisav Jovanović
Status: Preprint
Version: Latest archived (Mar 2026)
In an era in which coherence can be produced cheaply by institutions, platforms, branding systems, and artificial intelligence, the old temptation returns in a new form: the wish to find a single number, pattern, or elegant law that would mark what is real. This paper begins with that temptation but argues that contact is not itself a number. Contact is relational: it names the tether between a form and what can push back on it. For that reason, Structural Intelligence does not culminate in a sacred constant, but in a diagnostic ratio. The paper proposes the Drift Ratio as a formal instrument for tracking when representation outruns answerability. In its compressed form, the model can be expressed as the ratio of representation to answerability. In its operational form, it compares performance, actor inflation, and delay to contact with constraint, revision capacity, load survival, and consequence internalization. The aim is not to produce a final law of reality, but to create a disciplined way of distinguishing grounded form from cheap coherence. The result is not a mathematical proof, but a structured conceptual instrument: SI does not discover the number of reality; it identifies the ratio by which representation can outrun answerability.
structural intelligence; drift ratio; coherence; contact; answerability; representation; epistemic integrity; formal epistemology; social epistemology; philosophy of artificial intelligence; organizational failure