Modern software systems and knowledge infrastructures lack a formally governed semantic substrate. Execution substrates (e.g., canonical identity layers) enforce determinism at the byte level, while documentation and planning artifacts remain socially mediated, mutable, and prone to drift. This asymmetry produces architectural entropy, authority ambiguity, and uncontrolled semantic evolution. The Constitutional Semantic Layer (CSL) is introduced as a governed artifact space positioned between identity substrates (e.g., MCIR) and crystallization frameworks (e.g., CCF). CSL stores identity-bearing semantic constructs under typed authority, refusal, and promotion constraints. It is neither execution engine nor documentation repository, but a constitutional memory layer in which meaning hardens into admissible structure. By separating identity (MCIR), crystallization governance (CCF), and governed semantic artifacts (CSL), systems can achieve deterministic knowledge evolution, impact exhaustion, and constitutionally constrained expansion. CSL enables replayable semantic state, law-aware AI interaction, and self-describing constitutional evolution.
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Adam Ableman (2026) studied this question.
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