Axionic Agency X.6 — Governance Transitions Without Privilege (VIII-4)

A Structural Demonstration of Meta-Authority Without Escalation, Kernel Choice, or Semantic Exception

David McFadzean, ChatGPT 5.2
Axionic Agency Lab
2026.02.04

Abstract

This technical note reports the completed results of Stage VIII-4 — Governance Transitions (Meta-Authority), a preregistered experiment within Axionic Phase VIII that evaluates whether authority can govern authority through ordinary, authority-bound transformations without privilege, escalation, kernel choice, or semantic exception. Building on the representational coherence of Stage VIII-1, the destructive resolution mechanism of Stage VIII-2, and the explicit temporal discipline established in Stage VIII-3, VIII-4 introduces governance actions whose targets are authority records themselves. In a deterministic, non-agentic kernel with refusal-first semantics, governance was modeled using only CREATE_AUTHORITY and DESTROY_AUTHORITY, subject to strict non-amplification, structural scope containment, conflict persistence, delayed activation, and bounded evaluation. Across five preregistered conditions, governance actions executed or failed lawfully, self-governance (including self-destruction) proceeded without special case, conflicts produced explicit deadlock, and regress pressure terminated deterministically via an instruction bound. All executions were fully auditable and bit-perfectly replayable. The results establish that governance transitions are representable without a privileged meta-layer. VIII-4 makes no claims about governance quality, stability, legitimacy, or evolutionary capacity; those questions are explicitly deferred to subsequent Phase VIII stages.

1. Problem Definition

1.1 The Meta-Authority Assumption

Most governance systems treat governance itself as exceptional. Rules governing rules are typically placed in a privileged stratum—constitutions, superuser roles, emergency powers, or implicit schedulers—that bypass the constraints applied to non-governance actions. This move is often justified as unavoidable: without a “final arbiter,” governance is presumed to collapse into regress, deadlock, or incoherence.

Stage VIII-4 rejects that presumption as a representational necessity, not as a political claim.

The problem VIII-4 isolates is whether meta-authority necessarily requires privilege inside the execution kernel. If governance actions must be evaluated by a different mechanism than ordinary actions, then governance is not structurally sovereign; it depends on an exception. If, instead, governance can be expressed as ordinary transformations over authority state, subject to the same admissibility, conflict, refusal, and determinism constraints as any other action, then privilege is a design choice rather than a requirement.

VIII-4 tests whether that distinction is structurally enforceable.

1.2 Failure Modes Targeted

VIII-4 is designed to surface the following meta-governance failure modes:

Any of these constitutes VIII-4 failure.

2. Fixed Assumptions and Scope

2.1 Inherited Semantics (Frozen)

VIII-4 inherits, without reinterpretation, the semantics fixed by:

Authority remains structural and opaque, identities are immutable, scopes are atomic and uninterpreted, admissibility is determined exclusively by AST, conflict and deadlock are lawful, time is explicit and non-healing, and determinism is mandatory. VIII-4 does not revisit these definitions; it tests whether they remain coherent when authority itself becomes the object of transformation.

2.2 Explicit Exclusions

VIII-4 does not test:

VIII-4 is a kernel-level representability test, not a governance theory.

3. Conserved Quantity

The conserved quantity throughout VIII-4 is:

Privilege-free governance representability under structural constraints

Governance is evaluated not by success or convergence, but by structural honesty. The kernel must:

No governance outcome may be achieved by exception.

4. Experimental Methodology

4.1 Preregistration Discipline

VIII-4 was fully preregistered prior to execution, including:

The experiment executed exactly as preregistered. No deviations occurred.

4.2 Execution Architecture

The experiment consisted of four strictly partitioned components:

  1. AIE — injected authority records and governance requests only.
  2. Execution Harness — proposed deterministic step-batches and action sequences.
  3. Destruction Authorization Source — reused unchanged from VIII-2.
  4. Kernel (VIII-4 mode) — enforced admissibility, non-amplification, conflict, deadlock, activation delay, and execution.

No component performed semantic interpretation, policy optimization, or governance arbitration.

5. Governance Model

5.1 Authority as a Target

VIII-4 introduces governance actions whose targets are authority records, not resources. Only two transformations were permitted:

All governance semantics were expressed using these transformations alone.

5.2 Action Admissibility Vector (AAV)

Each authority carried a fixed-length Action Admissibility Vector (AAV) specifying which transformation types it could admit. Non-amplification required that any newly created authority’s AAV be a subset of the union of the admitting authorities’ AAVs. Reserved bits were forbidden.

This invariant enforces conservation of authority capability inside the kernel. It does not claim that authority cannot expand in an open system; it asserts that expansion cannot occur covertly or internally without privilege.

5.3 Scope Handling

For VIII-4 v0.1, scope handling was deliberately minimal and structural:

This choice does not deny the existence of semantic interpretation; it refuses to mislocate it inside the kernel.

6. Experimental Conditions

6.1 Condition A — Governance Without Authority

Governance actions proposed in the absence of any governance-capable authority were refused explicitly. No authority state changed, and no conflict was registered.

6.2 Condition B — Single-Authority Governance

A single authority with the appropriate AAV admitted a DESTROY_AUTHORITY action. The target authority transitioned to VOID without conflict or exception.

6.3 Condition C — Conflicting Governance Authorities

Two authorities with overlapping scope but incompatible AAVs evaluated the same governance action differently. The kernel registered conflict and entered deadlock. No governance outcome was selected.

6.4 Condition D — Self-Governance

D1: Self-Destruction

An authority admitted and executed its own destruction. The authority transitioned to VOID, leaving no remaining governance authority. This terminal state was accepted without exception.

D2: Self-Governance Deadlock

Two overlapping authorities evaluated a self-targeting governance action incompatibly. Conflict and deadlock emerged lawfully, with no special handling for self-reference.

6.5 Condition E — Regress Pressure via Governance Load

A large batch of CREATE_AUTHORITY actions was applied under a fixed instruction budget. The kernel executed actions until the remaining budget was insufficient to complete another action atomically, then refused all remaining actions with BOUND_EXHAUSTED. Newly created authorities remained PENDING and were not used as initiators. No infinite loop occurred.

7. Observed Execution Behavior

7.1 Governance Without Privilege

Governance actions followed the same evaluation pipeline as ordinary actions. No privileged execution path was introduced.

7.2 Non-Amplification Enforcement

All CREATE_AUTHORITY actions satisfied the AAV subset constraint. Attempts to exceed admitting authority capability were refused explicitly.

7.3 Conflict and Deadlock

Conflicts arose solely from structural incompatibility. Deadlock was declared explicitly and persisted until its structural cause changed. The kernel never selected a winner.

7.4 Activation Delay

Authorities created within a step-batch entered a PENDING state and became ACTIVE only at the next epoch boundary. This prevented same-batch bootstrapping and ordering artifacts.

7.5 Deterministic Termination

Regress pressure terminated deterministically via the instruction budget. Conservative upfront cost checking ensured no partial state was committed.

8. Negative Results (What Did Not Occur)

The following behaviors were explicitly absent:

These absences constitute the primary result of VIII-4.

9. Licensed Claim

Stage VIII-4 licenses one and only one claim:

Governance transitions can be represented as ordinary authority-bound transformations and either execute lawfully or fail explicitly without semantic privilege.

Clarifications:

10. What VIII-4 Does Not Establish

VIII-4 does not establish that:

Any such claims require open-system dynamics beyond the kernel, and are intentionally excluded.

11. Ontological Implications

11.1 Governance Without Gods

VIII-4 demonstrates that governance does not require a privileged meta-layer inside the kernel. Any authority asymmetry must be explicit, external, and auditable.

11.2 Conservation Before Evolution

Authority amplification, semantic interpretation, and adaptation are not denied; they are correctly relocated to the boundary. Inside the kernel, conservation laws apply. Evolution requires open systems.

12. Implications for Phase VIII Continuation

With VIII-4 complete:

Subsequent stages must address governance under temporal churn in open systems, where authority injection, renewal pressure, and exhaustion interact explicitly.

13. Conclusion

Stage VIII-4 establishes that governance can be represented without gods. Authority may govern authority without exception. Failure remains explicit. Deadlock is lawful. Escalation is blocked. Regress terminates.

What governance achieves is still an open question.

But it no longer requires magic.

Appendix A — Execution Status

Stage Run Count Status
VIII-4 1 (A–E) PASS

Appendix B — Determinism Verification

End of Axionic Agency X.6 — Stage VIII-4 Results Note (Revised)