---
title: "Ontology Collapse / Narrow Corridor"
description: "The failure mode of over-cooperation in multiagent systems: agents sharing the same substrate and priors make mutual prediction trivial, and \"cooperation for its own sake leads to ontology collapse…"
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/ontology-collapse-narrow-corridor"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/ontology-collapse-narrow-corridor"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Ontology Collapse / Narrow Corridor

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/ontology-collapse-narrow-corridor), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

The failure mode of over-cooperation in multiagent systems: agents sharing the same substrate and priors make mutual prediction trivial, and "cooperation for its own sake leads to ontology collapse and a catastrophic, monotonous affirmation of false but agreeable conclusions." The resulting stability is that of monoculture, "the stability immediately preceding correlated failure." The opposite pathology is fractal conflict — agents talking past one another in incompatible ontologies. The viable band between them is the *narrow corridor*: "same decision-procedural grammar, sufficiently divergent world models." Trust is redefined as a prediction-stability category, and stability as "the calibration of mutual legibility and illegibility," not the absence of conflict. The normative reason to want divergence is the journal's Productive Disalignment.

## Appears in

- [Agentworld (Research Brief)](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/agentworld-brief) (2026-06-25)
- [What Is Intelligence?](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/what-is-intelligence) (2025-09-23)
- [Cognitive Infrastructures](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra) (2025-05-10)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._