From Joint State-Transition Prediction to Language: A Minimal Predictive Hypothesis of Intelligence

Abstract This paper proposes a minimal hypothesis connecting physical structure, biological intelligence, language, and artificial intelligence. The central claim is that intelligence may not require causality, logic, symbolic reasoning, planning, or explicit object relations as primitive cognitive mechanisms. At its lowest level, intelligence may consist only of predicting transitions between high-dimensional joint states. Reality is minimally assumed to admit local states that can participate in larger joint states and undergo state transitions. A nervous system, itself composed of many simultaneously active units, naturally supports distributed high-dimensional states and can learn to predict how such states change. Language is proposed to emerge from this predictive process rather than from a predesigned symbolic system. During practical interaction with the world, sounds, gestures, perceptions, actions, and bodily states occur together. When sounds become reliably predictive of other states, they acquire symbolic function. Once symbols begin predicting other symbols, prediction can operate in a compressed, recursively composable symbolic state space. On this view, explicit causality, logic, mathematics, planning, and science emerge from increasingly complex language-state prediction rather than from separate underlying cognitive mechanisms. This hypothesis suggests a corresponding direction for artificial intelligence: a unified multimodal latent state space in which perception, language, memory, action, and world dynamics are learned through state-transition prediction. 1. Minimal Reality: Local and Joint States We begin with a deliberately weak assumption about reality. Reality can be represented, for an observer, as states that change. States can also contain distinguishable local structure and participate in larger joint states. Let X_t denote the state accessible to an intelligent system at time t . A state transition can be written simply as: X_t → X_(t+1