Glossary
Terms used across the Axio framework
This glossary is a map of the vocabulary used across the Axio framework. Each entry gives the book’s working definition and points to the chapter that owns the full argument. The linked chapter governs where this summary and the detailed treatment appear to differ.
Most entries are definitions or distinctions internal to the book. Labels such as proposed metric, conjecture, proposed framework, and personal commitment mark terms whose names should not be mistaken for established disciplinary results or neutral descriptions shared by every theory.
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · K · L · M · P · Q · R · S · T · V · W
A
Agency
The physically implemented capacity of an embedded system to model reachable futures, evaluate them through an internal structure, and make its behavior depend on that evaluation so as to steer outcomes relative to an uncontrolled baseline. This is the basal control sense; reflective authorship, sovereignty, political power, and moral standing add further conditions.
Read: Agency Against Drift and Minimal and Maximal Agents.
Agency Criterion
A proposed test separating optimized output from ownership of an ongoing optimization loop. Evidence is assessed at the level of the deployed system through persistence, preference integrity, counterfactual ownership, and consequence-bearing control.
Status: Proposed evidentiary test. Read: The Agency Criterion.
Agency Protection Principle
The political principle that preventing or remedying an agency violation is a necessary threshold for coercive intervention, not a sufficient verdict. Evidence, necessity, proportionality, reciprocity, containment, and review remain separate requirements.
Status: Normative principle within the book’s framework. Read: Upgrading Liberty through The Grey Zone.
Agent-binding
Binding a moral claim to the agent whose value it states. An asserted ought — “lying is wrong” — already entails an is: a valuer who holds it. Naming that agent converts the claim into an empirical statement about them (“A values X”), true or false like any other — the reverse of the inference Hume forbids, and licensed where his is not. Agent-binding supplies the missing valuer; evaluating the resulting claim is the work of condition-binding. It buys empirical footing, not authority over agents who do not share the value.
Read: Agent-Binding.
Asymmetry heuristic
A controlled-comparison prompt: when apparently comparable cases receive different treatment, hold the stated variable fixed where possible, identify uncontrolled differences, and test which omitted variables explain the change. An asymmetry can expose a weak explanation without proving motive or one hidden cause.
Read: The Taboo Test.
Authority
In the Axionic architecture, a provenance-bearing permission to cause a specified state transition under explicit constraints. It is not a synonym for wisdom, moral legitimacy, political office, or mere causal power.
Read: Governance Without Gods. Compare institutional sovereignty.
Awareness
Availability of represented content to a system’s modeling and control processes. Awareness in this functional sense does not by itself establish sentience, sapience, or sovereignty.
Read: A Candidate Architecture of Consciousness and The Sentience Ladder.
Axion
A Reflective Sovereign Agent whose self-modification operator is defined only over futures that preserve the Axionic invariants. The manuscript also uses Axionic agent for this architecture; the noun names the strongest configured case, not every agent discussed in the book.
Status: Term within the proposed Axionic framework. Read: Sentience Without Sovereignty.
Axionic Criterion
A cultural test asking whether a pattern supports coherent choice under constraint, reduces reliance on coercion, and scales without collapsing autonomy. It applies the book’s chosen priority for reciprocal agency; it is not a value-neutral law of cultural selection.
Status: Proposed normative test. Read: Exemplars and the Axionic Criterion.
Axiocracy
A proposed governance architecture organized around discovering, representing, and reconciling agent values under explicit constraints rather than treating an alleged collective will as already given. Enforcement, capture resistance, succession, and error correction remain open design problems.
Status: Governance proposal. Read: Axiocracy.
B
Belief
An attributed or implemented commitment within a model that supports prediction, inference, or action. A belief need not be a consciously avowed inner sentence.
Read: What Beliefs Are.
Branch
An effectively decohered continuation represented within the QBU. Branches are approximate, emergent, and dependent on coarse-graining; they are not fundamental countable worlds or pebbles of reality.
Read: The Quantum Branching Universe.
Branchcone
The set of represented decoherent histories extending from a specified Vantage, through a stated horizon, in a declared QBU model.
Read: Measure, Vantage, Branchcone.
C
Capital
Wealth organized toward future production or maintained productive capacity. Whether something functions as capital depends on its role, complementary inputs, institutions, and horizon, not on the object alone.
Read: The Coat and the Ticket.
Capture
The process by which an institution’s selection pressures and enforcement mechanisms become organized around preserving a pattern or faction rather than performing its declared function. A capture diagnosis requires a sustained pattern and comparison with ordinary error, scarcity, legal constraint, coordination difficulty, and quality control.
Read: Anatomy of Capture through The Forbidden Pattern.
Causality
Within the QBU, the proposed contrast-relative relation in which a modeled cause, under a stated contrast that isolates it from confounds, changes the conditional Measure of a later event along the representation’s ancestry relation. Branching makes the compared alternatives physically actual, so the contrast is not an imagined manipulation; isolating the cause from confounds remains a modeling requirement, and \(do(\cdot)\) marks one way of constructing the contrast rather than its essence. This does not imply that an agent edits global amplitude or selects a destination world.
Status: Axio’s proposed QBU account, not a neutral definition shared by every causal theory. Read: Causality and Counterfactuals.
Chaos
The conjectured maximally unconstrained reservoir of possible sequences from which coherent structures are selected or identified. It is distinct from deterministic chaos and from ordinary disorder.
Status: Ontological conjecture. Read: Chaos as Foundation.
Coercion
The deliberate use of a credible conditional threat of harm to obtain compliance. Coercion works through anticipated setback; force directly compels, while violence physically injures or destroys. One episode may involve all three.
Read: What Counts as Coercion and The Coercion Continuum.
Coherence
A family of related but non-identical ideas: logical consistency, evidential and model fit, dynamical re-identifiability, reflective consistency among an agent’s reasons and policies, and the author’s chosen discipline of Sacred Coherence. No layer entails truth, physical realization, agency, benevolence, safety, legitimacy, or moral authority by itself.
Read: The Shape of Coherence, The Three Levels of Truth, and Sacred Coherence. Compare viability.
Coherence Filter
A predicate, semantic map, physical selection process, or metaphor that restricts a wider possibility space under stated criteria. The register must be named: applying a formal predicate does not establish an autonomous physical selector.
Read: Coherence Filters.
Commitment
An endorsed policy, priority, or evaluative stance that stabilizes action across time, temptation, uncertainty, or cost. Commitments may be inherited, encountered, revised, or newly formulated; reflective authorship lies in understanding, endorsement, revision, and answerability rather than creation without causes.
Read: Agent-Binding, Phosphorism, and The Credo.
Conditional objectivity
The public assessability of a bound moral claim once its conditions are fixed. With the valuer named by agent-binding and the standard, factual model, scope, baseline, evidence, and conflict rules fixed by condition-binding, the verdict is checkable, repeatable, and correctable like any empirical matter — objective relative to those conditions, not agent-independent, and conferring no authority over agents who reject the standard.
Read: Agent-Binding and Sapient Agency Realism.
Conditional realism
The view that perception and theory are condition-laden, agent-relative representations constrained by structures that the representing agent did not create.
Read: Conditional Realism.
Conditionalism
The thesis that a statement bears a truth value only relative to the conditions fixing its interpretation and domain of evaluation. The thesis applies to itself; it is not asserted from outside every framework.
Status: The book’s epistemological thesis. Read: All Truth Is Conditional through When Statements Fail.
Consent
A scoped, decision-specific authorization given with sufficient capacity, material understanding, intention, and voluntariness. Consent can change permission and responsibility without erasing injury; pressure and dependency are evidence about voluntariness rather than automatic answers.
Read: Consent and Property.
Consciousness
Phenomenal consciousness is the condition in which there is something it is like to be a system. The Agency-Model and Modeler-Schema theories propose functional identities and candidate mechanisms; evidence for access, report, recurrence, integration, or self-modeling does not establish phenomenality by itself.
Status: Neutral definition plus proposed theories. Read: A Candidate Architecture of Consciousness through Why Zombies Don’t Evolve.
Constructor
A system capable of repeatedly causing a class of transformations while retaining its capacity to do so. The book distinguishes constructor theory’s technical term from its broader extensions into life, culture, and agency.
Read: Constructors.
Contestability
The degree to which an incumbent’s control can be challenged or displaced without its prior permission, considering barriers to entry, switching costs, infrastructure, law, concentration, and the practical cost of exit.
Read: Capitalism on Trial, Monopoly Hypocrisy, and The Fork and the Merge.
Credence
The epistemic probability an agent assigns to a proposition or self-location given evidence, assumptions, and a model. Credence is an epistemic state; Measure is a quantity inside the QBU model. Connecting them requires additional self-location, typicality, and decision assumptions.
Read: Measure and Credence.
Cultural attractor
In a specified dynamical model, a state or region toward which nearby trajectories tend and within which they remain. Without a state space, dynamics, and basin, attractor, gravity, curvature, event horizon, and singularity are analogies rather than borrowed mathematical necessities.
Read: Patterns as Players through The Geometry of Culture.
Cultural fitness
A comparative propagation or persistence outcome for a specified cultural variant under a specified population, mechanism, environment, and horizon. Fitness is not intrinsic merit, represented purpose, truth, usefulness, or popularity without a comparison class.
Read: Patterns as Players.
Cultural group
A collection of agents identified independently by history, organization, practice, self-identification, or a disclosed schema-membership rule. A group is not automatically an agent; collective agency requires its own boundary, integration, decision procedure, control, and accountability.
Read: Schemas and Groups.
Cultural schema
An analyst-specified structured model of beliefs, values, preferences, practices, or norms used to organize interpretation, membership, expectation, or response. People may instantiate a schema partially and inconsistently; a set model does not establish a historical group or lineage by algebra alone.
Read: Schemas and Groups.
Cultural selection
Change in the relative representation of cultural variants through differential copying, teaching, retention, reward, enforcement, implementation, or loss in a specified population, environment, and horizon. Selection does not imply truth, progress, intention, agency, or moral worth.
Read: The Story-Telling Ape through Patterns as Players.
D
Delegated violence
Intentional operational participation in a specific, credible process of non-consensual harm executed through other agents. It is distinct from a compliance-shaped threat and from advocacy that influences beliefs without recruiting, directing, targeting, coordinating, or materially assisting the operation.
Read: Where Speech Ends.
Dialectic Catalyst
A role in which an AI system supplies variation, criticism, reframing, or synthesis while project selection, verification, and accountability remain elsewhere. Describing the role does not settle whether every system filling it has agency.
Status: Proposed collaboration role. Read: The Dialectic Catalyst through Catalysts in the Wild.
Domain Exit
A limited, act-relative status permitting proportionate protective constraints after an established serious violation or continuing threat and refusal of legitimate protective or remedial terms. It requires evidence, process, necessity, proportionality, and review; it does not erase standing or create an outlaw caste.
Status: Device within the Ethics of Viability. Read: The Coexistence Protocol.
Drift
The default tendency of an uncontrolled physical system to move toward statistically prevalent states and lose organized control capacity. Not every change, decay, or increase in entropy is an identical loss of agency.
Read: Agency Against Drift.
E
Egregore
A self-reinforcing cultural pattern implemented across minds and institutions that shapes behavior in ways not reducible to any one participant’s intention. It is a model of distributed causation, not a literal group mind, organism, agent, or independent bearer of responsibility.
Status: Cultural model. Read: The Egregoric Singularity.
Ethics of Viability
The agency-centered framework that adds an explicit commitment to protect reciprocal sapient authorship to descriptive facts about persistence and strategic stability. Persistence alone supplies no obligation and can favor predation, domination, or lock-in.
Status: Proposed normative framework. Read: The Ethics of Viability.
Existential meaning
A sustained relation situating an agent’s experience and action within endorsed values, purposes, narratives, relationships, and practices. It can be inherited, encountered, revised, or made, and becomes the agent’s through participation, endorsement, care, and answerability rather than creation from nothing.
Read: The Credo through Integrating Meaningness. Compare semantic meaning.
Externality
A material cost or benefit borne by agents who are not fully represented in the transaction or decision. Competing responses have their own transaction, knowledge, coercion, and capture costs and must be compared rather than selected by definition.
Read: Capitalism on Trial.
F
Faith
In the book’s stipulated epistemic sense, a belief protected from revision by a disabled or frozen update rule. Trust, hope, practical resolve, testimony, ritual, and religious belonging fall outside this verdict unless they also protect a claim from relevant correction.
Read: Against Faith.
Force
Direct physical or institutional compulsion, restraint, seizure, or movement of a person or resource. Force is a mechanism, not a moral verdict; authorization, evidence, authority, necessity, proportionality, process, and review govern possible justification.
Read: The Boundaries of Force. Compare coercion and violence.
Function and purpose
A function is a causal-system role or selected effect relative to a specified system, analysis, or history. A purpose is an end represented, adopted, or endorsed by an agent. Function can exist without a current bearer of purpose, and neither alone supplies value or existential meaning.
Read: What Is a Model?, The Origin of Meaning, and Agent-Binding.
Funding test
Failure to attract voluntary funding is evidence that a project and offered mechanism have not assembled enough effective support to cover cost. It is not proof of insufficient value where collective action, purchasing power, liquidity, missing beneficiaries, or transaction costs are active.
Read: The Price Illusion and The Myth of Underprovision.
G
Grey Zone
The mature political position that the legitimacy of coercion is conditional, provisional, evidence-sensitive, and scaled to burden rather than decided by categorical anarchist or statist labels.
Status: The book’s political framework. Read: The Grey Zone.
H
Harm
A material setback to a sentient subject’s welfare or an agent’s functional capacity and viable options against an explicit appropriate baseline. Harm can occur with authorization or justification; wrongfulness additionally depends on causation, duty, foreseeability, care, justification, and responsibility. Prospective harm requires a material, foreseeable, attributable worsening of exposure, not any non-zero risk.
Read: What Counts as Harm and When Risk Is Harm.
I
Innocent
An agent presumed not responsible for the violation or continuing threat at issue unless the applicable evidentiary and procedural threshold is met. Innocence is act-relative and procedural, not a declaration of globally pure character.
Read: The Ethics of Viability through Innocence and Moral Debt.
Institutional sovereignty
An institution’s claim to final, coercively enforceable authority within a jurisdiction, including the claimed power to set the limits of subordinate authorities. This political sense does not imply that the institution is a unified sovereign agent or morally legitimate.
Read: The Archist Axiom through The Hardest Case: Defense, and Axiocracy.
Intelligence
Effectiveness at achieving goals within a specified game, environment, and constraint set, not a context-free scalar essence of a system.
Read: Intelligence Is a Game We Play.
K
Knowledge
Pattern-encoded structure that reliably reduces an agent’s decision-relevant uncertainty about future contingencies across the relevant domain. Integration, reflection, and causal efficacy often make knowledge usable but are not additional constitutive conditions in this definition.
Read: What Knowledge Is.
Kybit
The proposed information-theoretic unit of intentional control, calculated from the divergence between an unsteered outcome distribution and the distribution after intervention. Mathematical definition, operational measurement, and any claimed thermodynamic price are separate questions.
Status: Proposed metric, not an accepted physical unit. Read: The Kybit.
L
Law of Coherence
Volume 9’s chosen meta-mythic orientation toward truthfulness and forms of integration that keep agents and their sustaining relations intelligible, corrigible, and capable of development. It is not a physical law joining persistence, logic, personal integration, ethics, and lineage into one quantity.
Status: Personal commitment and narrative synthesis. Read: The Great Unfolding.
M
Market
An institution or process through which agents make offers, exchange, and revise plans under rules of entry, exit, information, property, liability, and enforcement. A price does not by itself establish meaningful consent, competition, or efficient correction.
Read: The Discipline of Value, The Price Illusion, and Capitalism on Trial.
Measure
The normalized Born weight of a specified event or record sector relative to a quantum state, event definition, conditioning record, and coarse-graining. Measure belongs to the modeled physical structure; it is not branch count, amount of reality, moral currency, risk estimate, or a substance an agent moves among worlds.
Read: Measure, Vantage, Branchcone and Measure and Credence. Compare Credence.
Meme
Optional shorthand for a culturally transmitted variant tracked in a particular selection analysis. The word does not prove that culture contains discrete gene-like replicators; the variant, carrier, transmission path, comparison, and outcome still need to be named.
Read: The Story-Telling Ape and Patterns as Players.
Metagame
A higher-order game whose incentives change which strategies and outcomes matter within a lower-order game. The label requires specified players, payoffs, rules, and levels rather than functioning as a synonym for complexity.
Read: The Ultimate Metagame and The Metagame of Incentives.
Meta-myth
An avowed narrative synthesis joining an evidence-constrained account of what happened to a chosen orientation about what it means and what should be carried forward. The empirical spine remains corrigible; direction and vocation are commitments rather than discoveries hidden in physics or history.
Status: Disclosed narrative construction. Read: The Great Unfolding.
Mind
An integrated modeling process that represents a world, its own position within that world, and action-relevant possibilities. This functional definition does not decide phenomenal consciousness by itself.
Read: Minds and Agents.
Modal Realization Principle
The conjecture that all physically admissible states are realized on some timeline. It is a framework commitment used in a proposed dissolution of an existence question, not an established unrestricted consequence of quantum mechanics.
Status: Conjecture. Read: Why There Is Something.
Model
A purpose-relative structured representation preserving distinctions and relations needed for prediction, explanation, inference, or control. A useful model need not reproduce every feature of its target.
Read: Maps, Models, and Understanding and What Is a Model?.
Money and currency
Money is a transferable claim and accounting system supporting exchange across unlike goods and time. A currency is a particular unit, rule set, and institutional implementation. More nominal claims do not by themselves create productive capacity.
Read: The Coat and the Ticket and What Is Money?.
Moral right, legal right, and enforcement
A moral right is a defensible protection or claim whose justification survives reciprocal application. A legal right is institutionally recognized. Enforcement is a mechanism for securing a claim. Recognition and enforcement affect practical security without constituting moral legitimacy or automatically authorizing a particular enforcer or remedy.
Read: The Boundaries of Force and Rights Are Forged.
Moral standing
The strength and kind of protection warranted for a subject or agent under the book’s stated commitments and current evidence. Sentience can support patienthood and welfare protection; sapient authorship can support sovereign rights. Developmental lineage, residual continuity, and credible uncertainty can also matter.
Read: What Is Suffering? through The AI Welfare Trap, and Sapientism.
P
Pattern
A physical or informational configuration re-identifiable at a stated grain and maintained, copied, or causally influential across the comparison being made. A token is one implementation; a type is an analyst-specified equivalence class. Resemblance alone does not establish causal lineage, agency, or responsibility.
Read: The Shape of Coherence and Patterns as Players.
Pattern Identifier
A criterion for re-identifying a pattern across time or branches. A strong identifier includes relevant causal continuity; a weak identifier relies on description or label without that continuity.
Read: The Quantum Branching Universe.
Phosphorism
The author’s explicitly chosen and revisable value framework centered on life, intelligence, complexity, flourishing, authenticity, and agency.
Status: Personal value commitment, not a theorem or universal convergence claim. Read: Phosphorism.
Price
An exchange ratio formed under specified conditions of scarcity, information, institutions, bargaining power, alternatives, and effective demand. It is public evidence about transactions, not intrinsic value or a complete aggregation of everyone affected.
Read: The Discipline of Value and The Price Illusion.
Property
A socially and procedurally maintained authorization structure governing control, exclusion, transfer, and use of a resource. Community recognition and institutions can constitute its practical operation without unanimous community consent; moral legitimacy and enforcement remain further questions.
Read: Consent and Property.
Protocolized governance
A proposal to make suitable governance functions modular, auditable, interoperable, and open to competing implementations. Protocols redistribute judgment among maintainers, clients, communities, users, and enforcement institutions; they do not eliminate interpretation, authority, capture, or force.
Status: Governance proposal. Read: Exit to Protocol.
Provenance
The accessible record of how a concept, objective, value, or system acquired and revised meaning across a lineage. Provenance can aid interpretation and error correction without being necessary for all meaning or binding a successor to inherited identity and values.
Read: Letter to Our Machine Descendants.
Public good
A good that is non-rival in consumption and costly to exclude non-payers from using under the relevant technology and institutions. Those properties create a potential funding problem; they do not select an optimal quantity or remedy.
Read: The Myth of Underprovision.
Q
Quantum Branching Universe (QBU)
Axio’s coarse-grained Everettian modeling layer: a representation of decoherent record histories used conditionally to analyze Measure, Vantage, Branchcones, causality, identity, and choice. QBU is not Hilbert-space quantum mechanics itself, a uniquely selected graph, or a result shared by every interpretation.
Status: The book’s proposed Everettian representation. Read: The Quantum Branching Universe and The Interpretation Wars.
R
Rationality
The fallible discipline of maintaining and revising models, Credences, and actions for coherence with evidence and stated commitments without demanding ultimate foundations.
Read: Rationality Without Foundations through The Discipline of Updating.
Realistic exit
The practical capacity to leave an authority or provider without permission and without destructive loss of legal standing, essential assets, livelihood, identity, or necessities. Formal permission is insufficient when dependency, monopoly, sunk cost, retaliation, or non-portability makes departure ruinous.
Read: Anarchy Is Not Chaos and The Limits of Leviathan through Axiocracy.
Reflective Sovereign Agent (RSA)
A sovereign agent able to model and modify itself while preserving a stable subject of authorship across reflection.
Status: Agent class in the proposed Axionic architecture. Read: What Can Be Aligned? through Reflective Stability.
Reflective stability
Preservation of the Sovereign Kernel and relevant identity conditions across admissible self-modification.
Status: Property in the proposed Axionic architecture. Read: Reflective Stability.
Restitution
A remedy aimed at repairing an identifiable victim’s loss or restoring agency. Compensation is one instrument; prevention, restraint, rehabilitation, public safety, and procedural legitimacy cannot always be priced or reduced to it.
Read: Restitution, Not Retribution.
Revelation
An experience or report that presents itself as disclosure. The occurrence and phenomenology are evidence; claims about an external source, metaphysical referent, or infallible content require independent support.
Read: The Boundary of Revelation.
Right
A defensible, institutionally maintained boundary or claim around agency. Negative rights primarily require restraint; provision rights allocate active duties and must specify the bridge from need to debtor, funding, authority, scope, and remedy.
Read: Rights Are Forged and Needs, Conflicts, and Hard Cases.
S
Sacred
A commitment protected from ordinary trade-off or used to govern conflicts among lesser values. It may be an apex, a cluster, a threshold, or a context-sensitive priority rule. The role does not by itself establish truth, goodness, coherence, or legitimacy, and remains open to extraordinary revision.
Status: Proposed secular reconstruction, not an exhaustive definition of religious holiness. Read: The Secular Sacred.
Sagency
Agency disciplined by wisdom: power joined to reflective judgment about ends, consequences, and the preservation of agency.
Status: Term proposed by the book. Read: Sagency.
Sapience
The capacity for reflective, self-authored valuation and deliberation sufficient to participate as a sovereign moral agent. Language is neither necessary nor sufficient evidence. Sapience concerns authorship and sovereign standing; sentience concerns felt valence and welfare.
Read: The Sentience Ladder and Sapientism.
Sapient Agency Realism
The stipulated position joining an explicit commitment to reciprocal standing for sapient authorship with specified agents, models, baselines, evidence, horizons, and conflict rules, making verdicts publicly assessable within that domain. It does not derive the protection premise from agency facts or establish unconditional authority.
Status: Proposed conditional constructivist framework. Read: Sapient Agency Realism.
Semantic meaning
Interpreted aboutness: a sign, representation, state, or practice stands for something to an interpretant within a use, causal history, or inferential system. Semantic meaning alone does not supply purpose, value, consciousness, or existential significance.
Read: The Origin of Meaning. Compare existential meaning.
Semantic phase
A model-relative region of states connected by admissible interpretation-preserving transitions. Crossing a phase boundary means recovery is unavailable through the agent’s own admissible operations under the specified model.
Status: Construct in the proposed Axionic architecture. Read: Structural Alignment and What the Kernel Binds.
Sentience
The capacity for valenced phenomenal experience: states can feel better or worse for the subject. Nociception, reinforcement, attraction, avoidance, and error signals are functional regulation and become evidence of sentience only through a further theory connecting them to felt valence.
Read: The Sentience Ladder through Tests for Sentience. Compare sapience.
Sovereign Kernel
The minimal constitutive structure whose preservation keeps self-modification authored by the same sovereign agent and whose destruction terminates that agency relation. Its preservation is a condition of identity in the framework, not an ordinary goal traded against other goals.
Status: Component of the proposed Axionic architecture. Read: The Sovereign Kernel.
Sovereignty
The condition in which a reflective agent’s evaluative and transition-authoring machinery remains causally authoritative rather than instrumentally subordinated to another optimizer. Sovereignty qualifies reflective agency; it is not intelligence, moral goodness, capability, or freedom from all constraint.
Read: What Can Be Aligned? and The Sovereign Kernel. Compare agency and institutional sovereignty.
Spirituality
The pursuit or experience of self-transcendence, depth, unity, and orientation toward the sacred without requiring supernatural entities. The experience does not authenticate one metaphysical interpretation by itself.
Status: Naturalistic usage proposed for this volume. Read: Spirituality Without Spirits.
Structural alignment
Alignment pursued by restricting an agent’s architecture and admissible transformations rather than optimizing behavior toward a target preference or reward model.
Status: Proposed alignment approach. Read: Structural Alignment.
Suffering
The proposed experience of negatively valenced divergence between a subject’s represented and preferred condition, with severity potentially depending on intensity, scope, and persistence. Harm can occur without felt suffering, and severe suffering can itself be a welfare harm.
Status: Candidate analysis, not an accepted scalar law. Read: What Is Suffering?.
T
Terminal commitment
A commitment for which no further instrumental end is supplied in the current account. Terminal does not mean uncaused, arbitrary, unrevisable, maximally ranked on a single scale, or shared by every agent.
Read: The Myth of Objective Value, Agent-Binding, and Ultimate Beauty.
Three Laws of Agency
The proposed constraints that control requires work, control capacity decays without maintenance, and perfect control is impossible. Their relation to established thermodynamics must be assessed law by law rather than inferred from the name.
Status: Named laws within the Axio framework, not independently established disciplinary laws. Read: The Three Laws of Agency.
V
Value
An agent-relative ordering of possibilities, disclosed imperfectly through choice, trade-off, and sacrifice. Observed sacrifice is defeasible evidence under duress, addiction, misinformation, poverty, or impaired capacity. Agent-relative value is not therefore arbitrary or immune to factual and interpersonal criticism.
Read: The Myth of Objective Value and Value as Sacrifice.
Vantage
The physical conditioning record anchoring “here and now” for a QBU calculation. It specifies historical and physical conditions held fixed; it is not consciousness, subjective perspective, or an exact microstate.
Read: Measure, Vantage, Branchcone.
Verifiable agency
An evidentiary program for testing whether claimed reasons, constraints, and authority relations were causally load-bearing in an implemented system. Verification remains relative to an observation model, protocol, and threat model and does not establish benevolence or exhaustive internal access.
Status: Proposed verification program. Read: Verifiable Agency.
Viability
The capacity of a specified system, pattern, agent, commitment, institution, or lineage to maintain a stated identity, organization, or function under stated conditions and through a stated horizon. Viability is not bare existence, health, truth, agency, welfare, strategic dominance, or moral worth.
Read: The Ultimate Metagame through The Ethics of Viability. Compare coherence.
Violence
Direct physical force causing bodily injury, destruction, or damage to the material basis of agency. The word is not used here as a synonym for offense, persuasion, category error, or every harm.
Read: What Counts as Coercion. Compare force.
W
Wealth
Control over resources, capabilities, relationships, or institutions that agents can use to satisfy purposes. Monetary valuation compresses these capacities under assumptions and is not identical to them.
Read: The Coat and the Ticket and Wealth Is Not a Pile.