Layer-0 primitives (P1–P10)
Start here to ground anything. Most failures are missing boundaries, missing authorization, hidden comparators, or broken feedback.
P1 — Boundary and Interface boundary 🝚
Direct
Systems are separated by boundaries; interaction occurs only through interfaces with conditions.
Mirror
What you fail to model as a boundary becomes an invisible coupling.
Shadow
Ambiguous boundaries produce leakage, misattribution, and unintended propagation.
Diagnostics
What is inside vs outside? What conditions govern crossing?
P2 — Agency and Capacity witness 🜹
Direct
Claims about choice, responsibility, or consent presuppose an agent with sufficient capacity to understand and act.
Mirror
When capacity is absent, responsibility shifts to guardianship or protocol.
Shadow
Treating low-capacity agents as fully capable produces coercion and false accountability.
Diagnostics
Does the agent understand consequences? Can they meaningfully choose?
P3 — Authorization and Consent Gate consent 🝁
Direct
Cross-boundary intervention requires authorization (consent, mandate, or delegated authority).
Mirror
Absent explicit authorization, systems default to force, drift, or accidental violation.
Shadow
Unconsented intervention produces breach and systemic instability.
Diagnostics
Who authorized this? What scope and duration?
P4 — Legibility and Interpretability mirror 🝮
Direct
Authorization and governance require legibility of relevant consequences to affected agents.
Mirror
If a decision cannot be explained in the receiver’s frame, it is not truly shared.
Shadow
Opaque systems manufacture agreement without understanding.
Diagnostics
Can the affected party restate the implications? Is the reasoning traceable?
P5 — Conservation and Accounting ledger ⚖️
Direct
Flows (time, money, risk, information, responsibility) must be conserved or accounted for across boundaries.
Mirror
Unaccounted flows reappear as hidden debt.
Shadow
Hidden debt accumulates until forced reconciliation or collapse.
Diagnostics
What ledger exists? Where is “missing mass”?
P6 — Feedback and Recursion loop 🝳
Direct
Actions propagate through feedback loops; systems stabilize, learn, or destabilize through recursion.
Mirror
If you do not observe feedback, it will govern you invisibly.
Shadow
Unchecked positive feedback amplifies error; delayed feedback causes oscillation.
Diagnostics
What are reinforcing vs balancing loops? What are delays and gains?
P7 — Incentive Drift and Attractors vortex 🌀
Direct
Systems drift toward locally rewarded equilibria unless constrained.
Mirror
What is rewarded—explicitly or implicitly—becomes dominant behavior.
Shadow
Optimization toward proxies detaches behavior from intended purpose.
Diagnostics
What behaviors are rewarded? What becomes easier over time?
P8 — Reversibility and Exit undo ↩️
Direct
High-impact actions require reversibility paths proportional to potential harm.
Mirror
If reversal is impossible, governance must scale accordingly.
Shadow
Irreversible commitments create hostage dynamics and brittle lock-in.
Diagnostics
What is the rollback? What is the appeal path?
P9 — Power-Proportionate Governance matrix 🝖
Direct
Controls and governance must scale with system impact (power, reach, irreversibility, externalities).
Mirror
Large blast radius demands formal constraint.
Shadow
Under-governed power produces abuse and catastrophic risk.
Diagnostics
What is the impact radius? Who bears downside?
P10 — Distinction and Comparator reflect 🪞
Direct
Meaning, evaluation, and optimization require distinction; distinction requires a comparator.
Mirror
If comparators are not chosen explicitly, they are chosen implicitly by incentives, defaults, or power.
Shadow
Hidden or frozen comparators create invisible value systems; optimization then produces “success” that may be reality-misaligned.
Notes
Operational comparators must be revisable under feedback (
P6). Constitutional comparators are revisable only via governance legitimacy (P9).Download the canonical machine-readable spine from /downloads/.