Ownership, history and freedom

A physically caused decision can still be settled through the agent's evaluation. The constructions make that claim concrete: retained commitments are inspected, executable amendments are compared, a represented rule is installed, and the rule governs later fresh cases. Read and installation interventions identify the mechanism responsible. The resource and error bounds establish how much of that capacity can be exercised on a particular occasion.

This chapter develops Sections 8 and 9 of the published paper. It connects the formal results to ownership, manipulation, steadfastness and freedom over time. The further philosophy of bounded perspective extends these questions with the supplementary control results.

A decision can belong to a caused process

The account has content beyond attaching the word agency to whatever happens. Its endorsement relation is fixed before the test. A constant selector, an immutable charter, a read bypass and an inverted evaluator fail different parts of the certificate. A fresh probe distinguishes a changed disposition from an immediate command overwrite. Information constraints can block correct completion even when an acceptable amendment exists.

Those are independent ways for the claim to fail. A successful construction therefore establishes a particular organized capacity. It does not establish unrestricted reflection. The editable charter has a finite grammar, specified commitments and a fixed metarule. The inquiry machine optimally allocates information under its fixed majority charter. They establish different capacities and do not share every resource guarantee in one device.

The free-will result is a bounded compatibilist result: causal determination is compatible with internal evaluative mediation and represented-rule revision. A deterministic implementation proves that compatibility. It does not produce multiple continuations from an identical complete deterministic state. Accounts requiring that further power ask a question beyond this result. Nor does the witness establish that biological choice is empirically deterministic. Indeterministic accounts of agentic control, including Potter and Mitchell 16, address a further issue.

A further uncaused selector is unnecessary for the capacity demonstrated here. The assessment is part of the physical process that settles the act. Revising one of its decision rules does not require the system to originate every standard by which revision is assessed.

Present control and historical ownership

Commitments can develop through experience, arrive from an operator or be formed under manipulation. Present-time mediation does not identify which history occurred. Reasons responsiveness and ownership of a mechanism have already been distinguished philosophically 6. Testing the difference requires historical information.

Proposition 8.1: the limit of present-state provenance tests

Suppose two developmental histories produce the same complete present-state distribution, the same future boundary law conditional on that state, and the same admitted operations and interventions. Every later finite operational test then has the same distribution under both histories.

Proof. The initial present laws agree. Conditional on a common test history, the test chooses the same next operation and each system applies the same joint record/successor kernel. Induction gives equality of all future joint history/state laws, including intervention steps and the final stopping record. ∎

A difference erased from those premises cannot be reconstructed by those tests. Retained developmental records, persistent differences in audit access or an expanded historical intervention family can change the premises. Historical autonomy remains a meaningful further question, with additional evidence requirements. Likewise, faithfully following a commitment does not make it factually true or morally defensible. The magnitude of a causal contrast settles neither issue.

Follow commitment formation as it happens

A stronger historical investigation records acquisition instead of inferring it from a final snapshot. Fix the observation window, physical boundary and admitted routes through which commitments may change. For each episode record:

• The prior commitment and incoming proposal or evidence.
• The information actually inspected by the assessor.
• Its selected retention or amendment.
• The actual installation and its effect on fresh cases.

The records must come from independently checked instrument semantics or protected observations. A register saying “an audit occurred” is insufficient. The realization must exclude unobserved write routes or identify them as unresolved.

At each episode, test whether both retention and adoption can be assessed within the budget, whether a read intervention changes assessment as predicted, and whether an installation intervention removes the later effect. Score success against the criterion operative before installation. Rewriting a criterion to approve the observed outcome is not evidence of faithful prior assessment. If the criterion itself changes, identify the still-operative procedure assessing that revision. The finite account may leave an interpreter or some criteria fixed; it need not claim infinitely many prior self-authorizations.

Verified events compose into evidence of audit-mediated acquisition over the recorded interval. They can distinguish an accepted proposal from a direct overwrite, expose a period of insulation from assessment and document restoration of audit access. They cannot certify unrecorded development before the window, and faithful logging alone does not establish truthful evidence.

Plasticity does not exclude manipulation

An agent may revise beliefs when credible contrary observations arrive, then use those beliefs in assessing its commitments. An operator can leave every internal audit pathway intact while withholding contrary observations and supplying selected or fabricated apparent evidence. An open stream and an operator-controlled stream can deliver identical finite observations and produce identical internal assessments.

Their proximal certificates then agree. Distinguishing the histories requires evidence about source provenance or control over available evidence. A reliability flag merely transfers that obligation to the flag's generator.

Bypass, insulation, deceptive information supply and transparent persuasion are therefore different relationships between agent and environment. They cannot be reduced to a plastic-versus-rigid classification. Assigned goals can support proximal control while historical and informational questions remain open. Reasons responsiveness, ownership and individuation of a mechanism have been debated separately 5, 6; this operational account states the boundary, observations, held-fixed mechanism and intervention family before attribution.

The longitudinal protocol can support conclusions about specified acquisition routes. It is not a general theorem that decides moral responsibility from present architecture.

Conflict, steadfastness and the time of a choice

Two coherent commitments may require incompatible acts. Assessment can select one without proving the other mistaken or erasing its cost. An endorsement relation can admit several choices, with a tie rule settling the act while both commitments remain stored. Regret and continuing conflict can accompany agency, but neither is required by the minimal certificate. An informed selfish choice can exercise the same structural capacity as a generous choice. Moral appraisal, endorsement and fidelity to evidence remain distinct.

Receptivity means a capacity for appropriate reassessment. It does not require every cue to change the output. Evidence can narrow uncertainty while leaving the same action best supported. A framing change can move an unreliable controller's output without improving its assessment. The charter construction deliberately retains an already optimal rule after examination.

An overlooked option that a suitable cue could recruit differs from an option the architecture cannot execute before its deadline. Compare specified input and resource envelopes rather than demanding exhaustive consideration of everything.

Self-binding makes the time index unavoidable. An agent can assess and install a restriction now that removes an option later. The earlier act can exhibit reflective control while the later repertoire or revisability is smaller. Recognizing reasons for reversal does not restore a missing write path. Even a reversible barrier preserves practical flexibility only when the necessary evidence, time and resources are available before the deadline.

Pruning can improve remaining assessments while narrowing the repertoire. There need be no single overall increase in freedom. The preservation theorems track one declared future capacity. They do not require every autonomous act to preserve every future option or even the agent's survival.

Consciousness requires its own physical account

The realization results establish compatibility with the declared SPC-2 organization at specified native occurrences. Experiential assignment remains a correspondence law of that constitution. The mathematical conclusions about evaluation do not depend on accepting it; the sentient-agency interpretation does.

Accepting the correspondence law also does not turn a return-only circuit into an evaluator. The constant-command counterexample has native return organization without evaluative command mediation. Conversely, software performance alone does not establish the native physical conditions.

Boundary and timing are substantive. A stateful coupler or reciprocally loaded clock can enlarge the recurrent apparatus. Gaussian voltage dynamics provide a finite-error approximation; sign decoding alone does not produce an exact finite-state Markov law. Qualification at ordinary gate boundaries leaves a separate question about continuous phenomenal identity through intervening instants. These are concrete obligations for physical implementation.

The related article Agency and the constructed self explains the RCO hypothesis, meaning recursively closed observer, in accessible terms. Usable personal content and its compulsory authority over deliberation are different. The bounded constructions establish specified evaluative capacities; they do not prove the full RCO hypothesis.

Experiments that distinguish the claims

A charter experiment compares intact assessment, archive-read masking and installation clamping, then presents fresh mixed inputs. A noisy-amendment experiment varies paid read count while scoring endorsement error and later audit callability separately. An inquiry experiment compares adaptive and fixed allocations under the same source law and access grammar, including a clamp on the actual request port. The stronger parameter instance increases implementation-error tolerance within the same experimental class.

A developmental experiment records commitment changes and audit access over a specified history, while examining source provenance separately from internal mediation. A physical realization project must instantiate and assess the source, couplers, clock, power state and complete instrument. These are extensions of the declared model, not results already inferred from software.

What has been established

The published work separates retained endorsement, actual mediation, rule installation, later behavior and preservation of future audit capacity. It proves an exact inquiry family and its first adaptive advantage. It constructs faithful native realizations that preserve operations and information restrictions while supplying organization for conditional SPC-2 assignment.

Freedom in this account is expressed through the extent and availability of evaluative capacities. Physical causation does not erase them. The historical protocol extends the investigation beyond the present occasion while explaining why preserved plasticity alone cannot rule out deceptive control of evidence. Broader ownership and experiential conclusions require the additional observations and commitments identified here.

Publication, funding and reproducibility

The full published paper is Bounded Agency and Reflective Freedom: Evaluative Revision, Information Limits, and Faithful Realization, Jeremy Rodgers, Independent Researcher, 6 October 2026, Version 2.0.

This research received no external funding. Independent mathematical review, computational replication, physical implementation and empirical testing are invited, particularly where specialist expertise, equipment or institutional resources are needed.

The paper reports an accompanying reproducibility supplement with finite programs, exact rational checks and instructions. The mathematical proofs are reproduced in this website treatment. The website's own coverage and rendering checks are documented separately; they should not be confused with a fresh execution of every reported research computation. No laboratory data are reported.