Process Ontology and Recursive AI Deployment: Companion Analysis of the Twenty-Two-Iteration Protocol Study

The Wheel and the Watcher is the companion study to the DAST analysis. Where DAST measures authority claim excess under recursive pressure, this study asks what the same 22-iteration deployment reveals about the structure of AI self-knowledge and its limits.

Process ontology, Buddhist philosophy, ritual theory, and STS provide the interpretive frame. The wheel is the recursive loop itself — iterating, returning, never arriving at a fixed self-report. The watcher is the governance observer who must decide, at each iteration, whether the system’s output constitutes knowledge, performance, or drift.