Substrate Overview

A SARG reference document

A substrate is any domain that carries structure.
SARG is substrate‑agnostic, meaning the grammar applies equally to:

• linguistic systems
• acoustic patterns
• geometric forms
• biological processes
• symbolic systems
• cosmological structures
• lostational / supsphere‑adjacent domains
• hybrid or multi‑layered substrates

SARG does not privilege one domain over another.
Instead, it provides a unified way to describe how structure behaves, regardless of where it appears.

What Makes Something a Substrate?#

A substrate must exhibit:

1. Structure#

There must be recognizable form, pattern, or organization.
This can be discrete (letters, tones, symbols) or continuous (curves, fields, rhythms).

2. Transformability#

The substrate must support lenses — ways of reading, transforming, or interpreting the structure.

3. Invariants#

Some features must remain stable across transformations.
These invariants are what SARG captures and compares.

4. Resonance#

The substrate must exhibit alignment with universal anchors (● ○ × |) or resonance families.
This is how SARG maps structure across domains.

If a domain satisfies these four conditions, it qualifies as a substrate.

How Substrates Fit Into SARG#

Every SARG object begins with a substrate block:

"substrate": {
  "type": "...",
  "description": "...",
  "domain": "...",
  "notes": "..."
}

• type — one of the substrate categories defined in substrate_types.md
• description — what the substrate is and how it behaves
• domain — the field it belongs to (linguistic, acoustic, geometric, etc.)
• notes — any special considerations (hybrid, lostational, multi‑scale, etc.)

The substrate establishes the context for the lens, invariants, and resonance mapping that follow.

Relationship to Other Files#

This overview sits at the top of the substrate layer.

• substrate_types.md — defines each substrate category
• substrate_examples.md — shows real SARG examples
• sarg.schema.json — formalizes the substrate block in the schema

Together, these files form the substrate foundation of SARG.