Purpose Under Constraint: Maintenance, Organization, and Alignment Over Time

Persistent systems exhibit a familiar pattern: declared purposes erode, ends are replaced by proxies, and action becomes increasingly governed by short-horizon viability dynamics. Prior work models this erosion as a consequence of lossy mediation: ends must be carried by representations, representations are repeatedly summarized and converted into legible artifacts, and ground-relevant distinctions attenuate by default under transmission and pressure [2, 6]. A dual constraint follows. Alignment over time is achievable only through continuous maintenance: recoupling processes that inject nonredundant information about the relevant ground state into the representational pipeline at interfaces where loss matters. Because maintenance is a control act, not a declaration, it presupposes organization; because organization is imposed and shaped by viability, stable global ends are downstream of survival.