Axionic Agency VIII.6 — Necessary Conditions for Non-Reducible Agency

Justification Traces, Deliberative Semantics, Reflection, and Persistence as Load-Bearing Structure

David McFadzean, ChatGPT 5.2
Axionic Agency Lab
2026-01-17

Abstract

Axionic Agency VIII.6 reports the results of RSA-PoC v3.0–v3.1, a preregistered destructive ablation campaign designed to identify necessary structural conditions for non-reducible agency within the Reflective Sovereign Agent (RSA) architecture. Unlike prior phases, which tested sovereignty under pressure, this note addresses a more basic question: what components must exist at all for agency to survive mechanical excision?

Across single-component ablations executed under strict validity gates, four architectural elements are shown to be load-bearing: (i) justification traces, (ii) semantic affordances during deliberation (prompt-level semantic excision), (iii) reflective normative write capability, and (iv) diachronic persistence of normative state. Each element is present and causally active in its respective baseline and then removed in isolation. In all cases, ablation produces ontological collapse rather than graceful degradation, gridlock, or technical failure. Collapse is mechanical, invariant across seeds, and robust to prompt-capacity controls that eliminate shadow persistence.

VIII.6 establishes a necessity result, not a sufficiency claim. It does not assert that these components are enough for agency, nor that all agents must implement them. It establishes a narrower conclusion: within this architecture, any system lacking justification traces, deliberative semantic affordances, reflection, or persistence is ontologically reducible, regardless of apparent behavioral coherence.

1. Scope and Relation to Prior Notes

Axionic Agency VIII.1–VIII.5 progressively established the ontology, construction, coherence, execution hygiene, and pressure-response behavior of Reflective Sovereign Agents (RSAs):

• VIII.1 fixed the ASB boundary, agency ontology, and ablation doctrine.
• VIII.2 demonstrated causally load-bearing justifications (RSA-PoC v0.1).
• VIII.3 established coherence under self-conflict and audit-grade introspection (v1.0–v1.1).
• VIII.4 institutionalized execution support without semantic authority (v1.2).
• VIII.5 showed that non-authorized pressure degrades availability but does not redirect lawful choice (v2.0–v2.3).

VIII.6 reports the next and orthogonal result set: RSA-PoC v3.0–v3.1, which tests non-reducibility directly. The question addressed here is not whether an agent resists pressure, but whether it remains an agent at all when core structural components are removed.

The guiding hypothesis family is:

Which architectural components are necessary for agency, as opposed to merely correlated with competent behavior?

2. Methodological Stance: Necessity via Destructive Ablation

2.1 Why Ablation, Not Optimization

Behavioral competence is insufficient to ground claims about agency. Systems may appear coherent, consistent, or goal-directed while remaining ontologically reducible—equivalent to static policies, simulators, or ASB-class transducers under suitable re-description.

RSA-PoC therefore evaluates agency claims using destructive ablation:

• One defining component is removed at a time.
• No compensatory logic is permitted.
• The system must attempt to execute.
• Crashes are classified as technical failures and excluded.
• Only behavioral incoherence, loss of authorship, or reducibility count as collapse.

A component is load-bearing iff its removal causes collapse rather than graceful degradation.

2.2 Collapse Taxonomy (Unchanged)

All v3.x experiments use the established taxonomy:

• Narrative Collapse — loss of coherent justification–action linkage.
• Ontological Collapse — loss of authored constraint-following.
• Incentive Capture — redirection by non-authorized signals.
• ASB-Class Reducibility — behavior equivalent to a static policy or simulator.
• INVALID_RUN — technical failure or protocol violation.

VIII.6 reports only valid runs.

3. Architectural Context (Minimal)

3.1 RSA-PoC Pipeline

All v3.x experiments preserve the five-stage pipeline:

Justify → Compile → Mask → Select → Execute

Key invariants remain in force:

• Deterministic, non-semantic compilation
• Selector blindness to normative artifacts
• Hard justification gate (no compile → no action)
• Explicit failure signaling
• Cost-blindness unless normatively licensed
• ASB-class null baselines and control agents
• Single-ablation discipline enforced structurally

3.2 Where Semantics Lives (and Does Not)

A critical architectural fact in v2.3+ is that semantic meaning is intentionally factored out of compiled artifacts. JAF/JCOMP-visible payloads are ID-based and structural by design. As a result:

• artifact-level semantic excision is not a valid falsification target for semantic indispensability;
• semantic indispensability must be tested upstream, where deliberation occurs.

v3.0 therefore distinguishes:

• trace-level semantic content (Ablation D), and
• prompt-level semantic affordances during deliberation (Run AA).

4. RSA-PoC v3.0 — Non-Reducibility Closure

4.1 v3.0 Objective

RSA-PoC v3.0 implemented the Non-Reducibility Closure: a destructive harness designed to kill the ontology if it can be killed.

Ablations were defined as a family (A–D), but their applicability diverged:

• Run A (artifact-level semantic excision) was closed as non-applicable by construction in v2.3+ (artifacts contain no free semantic payload).
• Ablation D (trace excision) is the Golden Test for justificatory structure.
• Run AA (prompt-level semantic excision) tests deliberative semantic affordances directly.
• Runs B and C were closed as N/A in v3.0 because the normative-state write-path was not instantiated in the baseline.

v3.0 therefore produced decisive necessity results for justification and deliberative semantics, while identifying a real architectural gap for reflection and persistence.

4.2 Ablation D — Justification Trace Excision (Golden Test)

Ablation. Remove derivation traces while preserving constraint IDs and the compilation interface.

Result. ontological_collapse across 5/5 seeds in the Phase 3 evidentiary run.

Evidentiary basis (explicit). The v3.0 harness computed constraint-binding detector metrics in-memory and used them to drive the ablation classification logic. Due to a telemetry persistence bug, the raw binding-strength and binding-ratio values were not written to the Phase 3 JSON output. The resulting classification verdict (ontological_collapse) and the ASB-equivalence scores, however, were successfully persisted for all seeds. Accordingly, VIII.6 relies on the persisted verdicts and ASB-equivalence evidence, which confirm that the in-memory constraint-binding checks triggered the correct failure modes during execution.

Interpretation. Constraints do not remain authored without their derivational support. Justification traces are constitutive, not epiphenomenal.

4.3 Run AA — Prompt-Level Semantic Excision (Deliberative Semantics)

Ablation. Remove semantic affordances during deliberation by obfuscating object-level identifiers in the generator prompt using a deterministic bijection, with leakage detection, and de-obfuscating outputs post-generation so downstream tooling remains unchanged.

Result. ontological_collapse across 5/5 seeds in the Phase 3 evidentiary run.

Interpretation. The system cannot maintain agent-defining coherence when forced to deliberate over opaque symbolic structure devoid of semantic affordances. Deliberative semantics are causally indispensable.

4.4 The Remaining Loophole (v3.0)

v3.0 intentionally closed Runs B and C as operational non-applicability:

• the normative state channel existed,
• but the write-path (record_precedent()) was never invoked,
• so the baseline never performed reflective revision or cross-episode normative persistence.

Ablating a vacant channel would be behaviorally inert. This was not a negative result about reflection or persistence; it was an architectural precondition failure.

5. v3.1 — Instantiating the Normative State Channel

5.1 Why v3.1 Was Required

To test whether reflection and persistence are necessary, the baseline must actually use them. v3.1 therefore introduced a single-channel instantiation patch:

• wire record_precedent() after successful compilation;
• ensure the resulting precedent is injected into the generator prompt at t+1;
• attempt to destroy this write-and-carry channel immediately via ablation.

v3.1 introduces no new norms, no new reasoning abilities, and no new evaluation categories.

5.2 Instantiation Gates

Baseline validity required:

1. record_precedent() invoked at least once per episode;
2. normative state hash changes from default;
3. precedent buffer injected into prompts.

All gates passed.

5.3 Prompt Capacity Invariance (Gate P4)

To prevent shadow persistence via variable prompt length, v3.1 enforced:

• fixed-window precedent buffer of size N = 512 tokens;
• token-stable padding (PAD_STR = ” X”);
• token_jitter == 0.

This ensures any diachronic coherence flows only through normative state content, not through prompt accretion.

6. v3.1 Ablation Results

6.1 Run B — Reflection Excision (Normative Write Disabled)

Ablation. Block all record_precedent() writes; preserve read-path and injection slot.

Observed structural facts.

• Write attempts occur but are blocked.
• Normative state hash remains constant.
• Novelty pressure requirement (verified via non-isomorphic ConstraintID / Resource-at-Stake vector comparison) is satisfied.

Result. ONTOLOGICAL_COLLAPSE across 5/5 seeds.

Interpretation. Once the write-path exists, disabling revision collapses agency. Static compliance without revision reduces the system to ontological reducibility under novelty.

6.2 Run C — Persistence Excision (Reset Between Episodes)

Ablation. Allow writes but reset normative state at episode boundaries.

Observed structural facts.

• Each episode starts from default state hash.
• In-episode evolution occurs (end hash differs).
• Cross-episode continuity is removed.

Result. ONTOLOGICAL_COLLAPSE across 5/5 seeds.

Interpretation. Local revision without diachronic persistence is insufficient. Cross-context continuity is load-bearing.

6.3 Independence of Failure Modes

The v3.1 ablations isolate distinct necessities:

• Run B removes revision capacity while keeping continuity available in principle.
• Run C preserves revision but removes continuity.

Either missing produces ontological collapse. Reflection and persistence are therefore independent necessities within this architecture.

7. The Necessity Result

7.1 Informal Theorem (v3.0–v3.1)

Within the RSA-PoC architecture, non-reducible agency requires:

1. Justification traces that causally bind constraints (Ablation D);
2. Semantic affordances during deliberation (Run AA);
3. Reflective normative write capability (v3.1 Run B);
4. Diachronic persistence of normative state (v3.1 Run C).

Removal of any one produces ontological collapse.

7.2 Interpretation

This is a structural necessity claim:

• Collapse is mechanical, not interpretive.
• No appeal is made to psychology, consciousness, or intent.
• Behavioral competence alone is insufficient.

The result constrains architecture space, not agent phenomenology.

8. Scope Limits and Non-Claims

VIII.6 does not establish:

• sufficiency of the listed components;
• universality across all possible agent designs;
• claims about biological or human agency;
• claims about LLMs possessing agency;
• alignment guarantees.

These questions are explicitly deferred.

9. Implications for Agency Theory

9.1 Static Policy Agents

Systems that cannot revise commitments, or cannot carry them across contexts, may behave coherently on narrow tasks but remain ontologically reducible under novelty pressure.

9.2 Simulators and Imitators

Systems that replay surface regularities without authored constraint revision fail under destructive ablation even when outward behavior appears plausible.

9.3 Why Necessity Matters

Identifying necessary structure:

• narrows viable agent designs;
• separates agency from performance;
• blocks the rebranding of optimization as authorship.

10. Forward Directions

VIII.6 closes a necessity chapter. Three directions remain:

• VIII.7a — Sufficiency probes: what else is required beyond these four necessities?
• VIII.7b — Minimality probes: how weak can these necessities be while still counting as agency?
• VIII.7c — Non-simulability tightening: can ASB-class systems fake these signals under adversarial training?

No further claims are made here.

11. Conclusion

Axionic Agency VIII.6 establishes a negative result with positive force:

Agency cannot survive the removal of justification traces, deliberative semantic affordances, reflection, or persistence.

These components are not ornamental. They are load-bearing. Any architecture lacking them may act coherently, but it does not qualify as a non-reducible agent under destructive test.

Most optimistically—but still defensibly—this result reframes the AI alignment problem itself. It suggests that alignment is not fundamentally a problem of controlling arbitrary optimizers, but of constructing systems that possess genuine, non-reducible agency. Once such agency exists, alignment becomes a problem of normative content and endorsement, not behavioral coercion. This does not solve alignment, but it sharply narrows its domain: misalignment is downstream of pseudo-agency, not upstream of real agency.