[Submitted on 14 Oct 2026]
Title:When Reality Outpaces Cognition: A New Scaling Principle for Reliable Intelligence
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Abstract:This paper challenges the understanding capabilities of existing AI paradigms and emerging world models by asking a fundamental question: How quickly can reality change before an intelligent system can no longer reliably perceive, reason, and act? We formulate this as a theory- and model-agnostic challenge in which systems must infer reliable actions for increasingly distant future states across a growing observation--reality gap. We operationalize this challenge through the effective Speed of Coherent Cognition (\(S_C^{\mathrm{eff}}\)), defined as the highest tested Speed of Reality (\(S_R\)) through which a system continuously satisfies a predefined behavioural reliability criterion from baseline. As a proof of concept, reinforcement-learning agents are trained at the baseline \(S_R\) and evaluated, without retraining, as \(S_R\) is increased by up to \(50\times\) while computational resources remain fixed. We compare Transformer and gated-MLP baselines with \(Co^4\), an architecture inspired by cellular mechanisms implicated in conscious processing and awake thought. Across the tested scenarios, \(Co^4\) achieves substantially higher \(S_C^{\mathrm{eff}}\) than the baselines, motivating \(S_C^{\mathrm{eff}}\) as a new benchmark and the scaling of coherent cognition as a principle for reliable AI.
Subjects:
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2610.20764 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2610.20764v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.20764
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Ahsan Adeel [view email] [v1] Wed, 14 Oct 2026 18:13:18 UTC (12,070 KB)
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