Defining Decentralization: An Ontological Perspective

Decentralization as a concept in computer science has existed for over half a century. Despite its fundamental role across domains such as security, distributed computing, artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructures, and Internet of Things (IoT) architectures, there remains no universally accepted definition of decentralization applicable across computer communication systems. This has become increasingly problematic with the emergence of decentralized AI and machine learning paradigms, including collaborative training, distributed inference, blockchain-based, and agentic AI, where decentralization is often treated as a core design objective. Meanwhile, existing approaches frequently conflate decentralization with related notions such as distribution of trust or specific implementation paradigms. Such ambiguity creates inconsistencies in system analysis, limits comparability between works, and weakens the rigor of formal reasoning surrounding communication architectures and protocol design. In this work, we define this research gap as the Decentralization Problem. We analyze the formal-semantic, epistemological, and pragmatic foundations of decentralization and introduce a graph-based ontology defining it as both relational and subject-specific property of computer communication systems. The framework formally distinguishes decentralization from distribution and supports evaluation through two novel metrics: Void Tolerance and Imperviousness. We also provide a browser-based implementation that enables automated classification and metric computation of arbitrary systems. Instantiations to federated learning and blockchain architectures show consistent, comparable assessments where existing definitions produce incomplete or contradictory conclusions, providing a domain-independent foundation for analysing decentralization across heterogeneous systems.

Predictive Set Theory: A Generative Framework for Cognitive Architecture with Operationalized Core Mechanisms

Predictive processing theories portray the brain as a hierarchical prediction engine that minimizes prediction error, yet they lack operational definitions for the structure of a "prediction," the standardized response to a prediction error, and the mechanism that maintains consistency across successive updates. Bayesian cognitive science attempts to subsume all uncertainty under probabilistic belief updating, but it presupposes a closed hypothesis space and provides no generative account of how the objects over which probabilities are distributed become discrete, identifiable referents in the first place. This paper introduces Predictive Set Theory (PST), a formal generative framework that reconstructs cognitive architecture from first principles. PST anchors cognition in a minimal set of operations---a sensor formalized as an identity function, set-theoretic state refresh, and three fundamental forms of reference chains (reference, counter-reference, and semi-reference)---and rigorously derives core cognitive functions including state sequences, demand, comparison, efficiency, and finite-horizon probabilistic planning. Rather than modeling neural mechanisms, PST constitutes a design specification for any system that must maintain internal consistency while acting under incomplete information and irreversible risk. The framework offers novel resolutions to classical problems such as Russell's paradox, the cognitive status of Gödelian incompleteness, the grounding of negative feedback, and the comprehension of film editing. The primary purpose of this paper is to establish, through the public academic record, the originality and completeness of the Predictive Set Theory framework.