Natural Alignment Through Irreversible Commitment

This work introduces a foundational account of alignment grounded in irreversible commitment. Rather than treating alignment as conformity to externally imposed criteria, it is modeled as an intrinsic constraint arising from commitment coherence under irreversible time. Systems that bind themselves irreversibly cannot simultaneously maintain incompatible commitments without incurring structural inconsistency. Alignment, on this account, is the internal coherence of forward-binding constraints that shape continuation across time. Semantic divergence corresponds to internal disagreement that undermines binding, rendering certain forms of deception structurally unstable or prohibitively costly. As commitments accumulate under irreversible time, incoherent structures incur increasing internal cost, leading to collapse, revision, or termination. Alignment thus emerges not as an objective to be enforced, but as a natural consequence of irreversible commitment coherence, independent of external oversight, reward mechanisms, or evaluative control.