Coherence is now cheap: institutions, platforms, and generative AI can produce smooth explanation and emotional alignment at scale. Yet contact—truth coupled to constraint through cost, revision, binding, witness/trace, and repair—has become rare. This paper introduces Structural Intelligence (SI) as both a philosophical model of intelligibility under load and a practical audit instrument for distinguishing contact from coherence-theater across persons, institutions, and AI systems. SI defines intelligence as the organization of form under pressure: the ability to remain coherent and corrigible—able to revise, repair, and re-bind under constraint without collapse or performative compliance. A five-pillar tensegrity model (Answerability, Action, Resilience, Connection, Self-Awareness) and three feedback loops explain stability under pressure as an emergent resultant. Two mechanisms—maintenance inflation and the invariance constraint—make drift predictive and protect agency from programmability. The paper closes with a minimal presence-check and containment gate to prevent truth from becoming destabilization.
Vladisav Jovanovic (Sat,) studied this question.