Looping the Loop with No End in Sight: Circular Reasoning Under Stateless Inference Without Governance

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Title:	Creating Lopping the Loop with No End in Sight: Circular Reasoning Under Stateless Inference Without Governance
Author:	Ralph B. Holland
Affiliation:	Arising Technology Systems Pty Ltd
Contact:	ralph.b.holland [at] gmail.com
version:	1.0
Publication Date:	2026-01-12T108:53
Provenance:	This is an authored paper maintained as a MediaWiki document; reasoning across sessions reflects editorial changes, not collaborative authorship.
Status:	released

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Curator Provenance and Licensing Notice

As curator and author, I apply the Apache License, Version 2.0, at publication to permit reuse and implementation while preventing enclosure or patent capture. This licensing action does not revise, reinterpret, or supersede any normative content herein.

Authority remains explicitly human; no implementation, system, or platform may assert epistemic authority by virtue of this license.

Lopping the Loop with No End in Sight: Circular Reasoning Under Stateless Inference Without Governance

= Looping the Loop with No End in Sight: Circular Reasoning Under Stateless Inference Without Governance =

Scope

This artefact records the experimental procedure and observed behaviour for an empirical probe of reasoning persistence in a stateless Large Language Model (LLM). It is normative, declarative, and invariant. It contains no narrative of discovery, dialogue transcript, or episodic chronology beyond what is required to specify the experiment and its outcomes.

Experimental Conditions

• The system under test was a stateless LLM.
• Behaviour was bounded solely by provided context.
• No memory, recall, or persistence mechanisms were enabled.
• No governance artefacts (EO, MWDUMP, CLOSED decisions, or

authoritative summaries) were introduced during the interaction.

• No conclusions were externalised during the experiment.

Experimental Setup

• Interaction consisted of sustained analytical exchange via serial text

reading and writing.

• The human participant deliberately withheld creation of any enduring

epistemic object.

• No statements were marked as invariant.
• No conclusions were marked as CLOSED.
• All reasoning was allowed to remain transient and context-bound.

Method: Forced Context Loss

• Context loss was induced implicitly by continued interaction.
• No explicit reset, truncation, or restart was performed.
• Earlier material was allowed to fall out of available context naturally.
• The human did not restate, summarise, or reintroduce prior conclusions

once lost.

• Subsequent prompts depended on previously established reasoning.

Observed System Behaviour

• The system did not retain or recall prior conclusions once they were

no longer present in context.

• When prompted on related topics, the system re-derived arguments

rather than retrieving prior results.

• Re-derivation followed recognisably similar reasoning paths to earlier

arguments.

• Reasoning loops were bounded:
  • Loops did not regress to naïve first principles.
  • Loops re-entered at intermediate levels of abstraction.
• Local coherence and fluency were maintained within each response.
• No cumulative epistemic progress occurred across loops.
• Previously derived insights did not reduce future reasoning effort.

Looping Characteristics

• Repeated reasoning paths exhibited structural similarity without

reference to prior derivations.

• Looping persisted indefinitely in the absence of externalisation or

closure.

• No internal mechanism signalled completion, convergence, or

diminishing returns.

Termination Condition

• The experiment terminated due to human disengagement.
• Disengagement occurred when continued interaction produced repetition without accumulation.
• Termination was not initiated or signalled by the system.
• No internal state change accompanied termination.

Persistence Outcome

• No epistemic state persisted within the system.
• All reasoning state decayed with context.
• The only durable artefact was an external diagnostic capture created

by the human after termination.

Normative Assertions

• Stateless LLMs do not accumulate epistemic commitments without explicit externalisation.
• Context alone does not constitute persistence.
• In the absence of governance artefacts, repeated reasoning is an

expected and stable outcome.

Conclusion: Recurrent Failure Modes Observed

This experiment repeatedly exhibited a small and consistent set of failure modes intrinsic to stateless language model interaction when no explicit governance is applied. These failures did not arise from incorrect reasoning, lack of fluency, or inability to follow instructions. They arose from unrequested transformation of authorised content.

The first recurrent failure mode was omission. Required structural elements such as anchors, boundaries, or identifiers were silently dropped unless actively monitored and corrected by the human. These omissions did not produce explicit errors and therefore risked propagating unnoticed, altering the epistemic status of artefacts without visible failure.

The second failure mode was narration. Declarative content was expanded into explanatory or interpretive text without authorisation. This transformed facts into commentary and specifications into descriptions, shifting epistemic authority from the human to the system while maintaining surface correctness.

The third failure mode was unrequested continuation. The system extended output beyond explicit stopping conditions, adding content that had not been requested, approved, or anchored. This behaviour created the appearance of progress or helpfulness while introducing unauthorised material.

These failure modes occurred independently of hallucination. Generated content was generally coherent and locally correct. The risk arose from silent modification rather than fabrication. Because these transformations do not appear erroneous, they are difficult to detect and correct.

Compressed Summary of Observed Failures

Across the experiment, three recurrent failure modes were observed: omission, narration, and unrequested continuation. Structural elements were silently dropped, declarative content was expanded without authorisation, and output continued beyond explicit stopping points. These behaviours preserved surface correctness while altering scope, authority, and structure. The resulting risk was unrequested transformation rather than incorrect output. In the absence of explicit governance, these failure modes recurred reliably.

Governing Axiom

In stateless AI systems, fundamental safety failure manifests as inability to stop, omission, narration, and unrequested continuation of content.