Navigation Without Narration: Constraint, Legibility, and the Limits of Execution Architectures

Two representational architectures encoding the same constraint can exhibit a systematic directional asymmetry in legibility. Translation from a compact, description optimised architecture into an expanded, execution optimised architecture is mechanically tractable. The reverse---recovering a surveyable, epistemically usable description from the execution architecture---is structurally unavailable when two conditions jointly obtain: many-to-many encoding, and semantic structure realised as distributed causal process rather than explicit representation. The unavailability is not primarily a matter of computational difficulty. It arises either because information required for canonical recovery is lost at encoding, or because no privileged description was ever encoded in the execution architecture in the first place, together with the absence of a self-narrating interpretive key in the execution architecture itself. The argument is grounded in the causal container framework, which identifies circumscription as the condition for epistemic access. Execution architectures preserve the causal pathway while destroying the circumscribability that makes it legible. This asymmetry has been identified in the relationship between symbolic proof and tensor geometry in large-scale neural networks. The present paper argues that the same structural conditions arise independently in the relationship between Turing machine encodings and Conway’s Game of Life. The two cases support a general result: where the two conditions jointly obtain, the encoding from description optimised to execution optimised architecture functions as a one-way epistemic gate. Two further features---dimensional expansion and loss of privileged description level---typically accompany execution architectures but are not necessary for the asymmetry. The paper defends a philosophical thesis about representational opacity, not a formal result. Its force is explanatory and conceptual.