# Agency as a physical capacity

**A decision can be physically caused and still be governed by the agent's own evaluation.** The useful question is what the system actually does: which commitments it can inspect, which alternatives it can assess, which rule it can install, and how that rule governs the next decision.

Bounded Agency and Reflective Freedom turns that question into a set of finite constructions and exact tests. A controller reads retained commitments, assesses a represented decision rule, installs its assessment, and applies the rule to fresh inputs. Separate tests establish that its assessment agrees with its declared commitments and that the result actually travels through the claimed read and installation pathways. Information and resource bounds then determine how much of this capacity the controller can exercise.

This is the complete website treatment of Jeremy Rodgers's published paper, [Bounded Agency and Reflective Freedom: Evaluative Revision, Information Limits, and Faithful Realization](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23202999). The scientific account establishes **proximal evaluative self-governance**: present, locally implemented capacities for assessment and rule revision. Further pages develop the philosophical and technical implications without changing those results' assumptions.

## What an internal decision must demonstrate

An externally supplied answer, a stored command and an internal assessment can produce the same output. To distinguish them, we need more than a successful answer. We need an operating contract and tests of the mechanism.

The contract specifies information, time, executable operations and available resources. An alteration that an experimenter can physically impose is not automatically an option that the installed controller can execute. A controller might contain a dormant procedure yet have no way to call it before its deadline. It might represent an option that its hardware cannot carry out. The account measures what the actual architecture can recruit and do under the stated conditions.

Three obligations organize the work:

1. **Endorsement:** the assessment agrees with a relation specified in advance between retained commitments and acceptable amendments.
2. **Mediation:** actual internal reads and installation operations cause the tested result through the identified routes.
3. **Continuing disposition:** the installed rule governs later fresh cases, beyond the register value produced during revision itself.

These obligations are independent. A selector can be strongly sensitive to a retained bit and systematically choose the amendment that bit rejects. A controller can install an acceptable rule by accident while bypassing the retained commitment entirely. A one-time command overwrite can succeed without creating a new conditional disposition. Each fails a different part of the test.

## Three contributions, three distinct constructions

The first construction is an **editable charter**. Its finite grammar contains four conditional rules and two possible read orders. The controller assesses these charters against retained commitments, retains an already optimal rule, changes an inferior one, and uses the installed charter on a fresh case. A sharp information, mediation and endorsement inequality bounds what its inquiry transcript can support. A deliberately inverted selector shows why causal contrast alone cannot establish faithful evaluation.

The second contribution concerns **bounded inquiry**. Preservation criteria determine when the controller can continue making endorsed amendments while retaining its future audit capacity. Noisy-read bounds give exact limits on warranted revision. A separate parameterized sensor experiment solves the competition between inspecting three retained endorsements and calibrating an unknown reliability regime. Its theorem establishes the exact optimal adaptive performance and the first shared budget at which it exceeds every fixed-count allocation. The proof covers every admitted query interleaving, stopping rule and choice of unread endorsement index.

The third contribution is **faithful native realization**. A compiler preserves ordinary computations and their diagnostic interventions while adding protected-source returns at stated gate boundaries. Resource counts include the return schedule. A successor-revealing continuation establishes the required joint predictive congruence for the specified finite stochastic instruments. An access lemma ensures that native records do not give the executive an uncharged information channel. The same return construction also works for a constant-output controller, demonstrating that recurrence alone cannot supply evaluative competence.

These are related constructions with different guarantees. The compact charter evaluator revises a represented rule. The optimal inquiry machine allocates queries under a fixed majority charter. The noisy-amendment witness establishes a separate error frontier. Their contracts support comparison, but no single device is claimed to attain every bound simultaneously.

## Physical causation and reflective freedom

The philosophical position is compatibilist. A complete deterministic state can fix its actual continuation while the resulting mechanism still responds to relevant variations, assesses commitments and changes an operative rule. Reasons-responsiveness accounts already distinguish a mechanism's capacities from the history through which an agent comes to own that mechanism [6](/consciousness/agency/references#ref-6). The mathematical target here is the present organization, with bounded operations and an explicit retained-commitment relation.

The account allows model-free selection in a restricted domain. It also allows fixed metarules. A system can assess and change a represented rule without choosing the physical laws or every standard by which the assessment proceeds. Requiring prior self-authorization of every evaluative standard would add ultimate self-creation to the question. The demonstrated capacity is more precise: the present mechanism can inspect, retain and revise particular rules that govern later decisions.

Historical independence of values remains a further property. Neither internal location nor current responsiveness determines how a commitment was acquired. A successful assessment can still rely on false evidence or morally objectionable commitments. The tests distinguish fidelity to a declared evaluative relation from the truth of incoming evidence and the moral standing of the relation itself.

## How consciousness enters

In Shadow Theory, source and readout are operational aspects of a physical description. An aperture exposes only part of the source structure. This motivates precise accounting of available information, but incomplete access by itself establishes neither evaluation nor agency.

The SPC-2 consciousness constitution assigns experience to qualifying native recurrent organization under declared correspondence laws [19](/consciousness/agency/references#ref-19). Its treatments of boundaries, effective interfaces and interventional realization distinguish physical qualification from software behavior [18](/consciousness/agency/references#ref-18), [20](/consciousness/agency/references#ref-20), [21](/consciousness/agency/references#ref-21). This work asks whether an independently verified evaluator can exist in a common realization satisfying those native conditions. A decision score is never used as evidence sufficient for experience.

The resulting coexistence claim is conditional on the declared SPC-2 bridge laws. The evaluative mathematics can be assessed independently of those laws. Accepting the laws also does not make every recurrent controller evaluative: the constant-output counterexample preserves the distinction.

## Where the contribution sits

The paper makes its contribution through explicit constructions, sharp bounds and compatible realizations. It builds on established methods rather than treating each mathematical tool as a new principle.

| Earlier work | What it contributes | The specific task here |
| --- | --- | --- |
| List's analysis of AI free will [14](/consciousness/agency/references#ref-14) and Kenton and colleagues' causal identification of agents [13](/consciousness/agency/references#ref-13) | Intentional agency, alternative possibilities, causal control and adaptation under mechanism interventions | Verify that a declared bounded evaluator reads retained commitments, installs an assessed rule and uses it on fresh cases |
| Imperfect-information games [3](/consciousness/agency/references#ref-3) and certified self-modifying code [2](/consciousness/agency/references#ref-2) | Knowledge-set methods, preservation kernels and mutable instructions subject to invariants | Specify a relational evaluative property, actual amendment mechanism and information obligations needed to preserve it |
| Gödel machines and utility-sensitive self-modification [4](/consciousness/agency/references#ref-4), [24](/consciousness/agency/references#ref-24) | Assessment of modifications through retained standards | Test the actual bounded assessment and installation routes without requiring revision of every metarule |
| Metalevel decision processes [11](/consciousness/agency/references#ref-11) and restricted single-coin reliability models [15](/consciousness/agency/references#ref-15) | Selection of computations and the sensor law | Prove an exact calibration threshold and a shared-budget optimum with a paid-port implementation |
| Deadline-sensitive sequential testing [7](/consciousness/agency/references#ref-7) | Likelihood-ratio reasoning for fallible inquiry | Derive the exact finite endorsement-error frontier under the specified read law |
| Causal abstraction [1](/consciousness/agency/references#ref-1), [22](/consciousness/agency/references#ref-22) | Preservation of intervention laws under representation maps | Construct native schedules, records, physical refinements and access restrictions that meet the compatibility requirements |

A comparison class needs equal care. Fixed-order Boolean evaluation can stop when it finds a certificate even within a class called nonadaptive [12](/consciousness/agency/references#ref-12). The inquiry separation here concerns **fixed counts allocated across two tasks**. Its improvement comes from reallocating effort saved on one task to the other. That is the precise restriction the theorem removes.

This treatment begins with the operating contract, constructs rule revision, establishes its information and preservation limits, then develops the exact inquiry separation and its native realization. The philosophical conclusion follows the same route: freedom is expressed through available evaluative capacities and their limits in an embodied system.