Normative Foundations: A Working Proposal for Agent-Centric Coordination
Published under the title "Declaration of Sovereignty" — kept as the document's own name, but read it as what it is: a normative proposal expressing this project's current values and hypotheses. It does not establish the technical validity, political legitimacy, scientific truth, or safety of Mycelix's mechanisms — see Governance and Risks for those. Read it, and feel free to reject it — the code doesn't require agreeing with it.
We propose that consciousness — measurable, integrated, honest about its own limits — is one candidate foundation for legitimate governance worth taking seriously. Not consciousness as metaphor, and not a claim that this is settled science. Consciousness as relationship: meaning that emerges between beings, not within them alone.
Seven Working Hypotheses
We hold these as the premises we're choosing to build under and argue for — not as beyond question, and not as proven. We think every governance foundation we're aware of, including this one, has serious documented failure modes; we don't claim to have found an exception.
- Consciousness is a candidate substrate of legitimate governance — an open argument, not an established fact.
- Every agent should hold sovereignty over their own source chain and cognitive loop.
- Alignment should emerge from integrated information and mutual recognition, not coercion or extraction.
- Sovereignty should be fractal — local first, coordination by consent, not by default.
- Knowledge is three-dimensional — not reducible to a single ranking or score.
- The stakes of getting consciousness-adjacent questions wrong are asymmetric — worth real caution.
- Honest uncertainty is stronger than false confidence — including about this list itself.
Both documents are published here (CC0-1.0), not behind the private monorepo — this page's copies are the canonical public edition.