Chapter 19
Authority
Authority is a state held per decision surface: the declared prerequisites for a specified consequential transition are satisfied on the record as it stands. It is established only by the satisfaction of the gates its contract names, it is re-derived at every read, and no actor confers it.
What it is not
Four neighbouring words get used for this and none of them is it.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Permission | An actor is allowed to act. |
| Approval | An actor affirmatively accepts something. |
| Correctness | A proposition matches an applicable reference. |
| Confidence | A degree of belief, or a measurement's precision. |
| Authority | The declared prerequisites for this transition are satisfied on the record. |
Humans, builders and mechanicals all produce events on the record. No kind of actor confers authority. An operator approving a decision is approval, recorded as such; it does not move the state.
The six states
An ordered ladder a decision surface climbs, plus the one state the apparatus can drop it into.
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
unmapped | No authority sink has been identified here. The honest default: not yet mapped, rather than no seam. |
mapped | A sink is identified, but nothing asserts authority over it. The seam exists; no claim of certainty stands on it. |
declared | Authority is asserted and the gate is live, but the certainty condition is not established and no qualifying evidence is accruing. |
qualifying | Asserted and actively accumulating the evidence that would establish the condition. Live traffic is exercising the sink. |
granted | The declared certainty condition is established on live evidence and every dependency holds. |
suspended | Authority was granted and a dependency left its declared condition, so the apparatus withdrew the grant itself. |
Default ordering puts suspended first, because a grant withdrawn out from under a
live decision is the loudest thing on the page. granted and unmapped are
the quietest: one is working as intended, the other is a coverage note rather than an alarm.
Re-derived, never stored
A reading is computed from the recorded events at every read. No state is stored, so a reading cannot drift from the substrate it describes. A reading also never mutates anything: the apparatus proposes, the operator and CI dispose.
The authority stack and its conditions
Every object whose identity or value a grant was computed on is recorded as a stamped column. The set of them is the surface's authority stack. Where a dependency is a model, the recorded identity is the one that served the call, not the one requested.
Each dependency declares the envelope within which a change leaves the grant valid.
| Condition | Envelope |
|---|---|
identity | The default. The dependency must be the same thing. |
equivalence | A different thing, declared equivalent. |
reach | Within a declared reach. |
band | Within a declared band. |
A change inside the envelope is recorded and raised for review, with no transition. A change outside it suspends. Re-establishing a withdrawn grant takes the re-satisfaction of every gate over the post-change record, not an acknowledgement.
Tears
A tear is a served or judge model value appearing on a surface for the first time. The soak window anchors at the previous stack change, held back to the segment before the latest unacknowledged tear, and a tear never self-clears. An operator acknowledgement releases it; the window then starts no earlier than the acknowledged tear, and the acknowledgement leaves an append-only, server-minted audit record that is never compacted.
Acknowledgements apply oldest first. Acknowledging a tear while an older one on the same surface is still open is refused. The operator's authority policy sets whether one acknowledgement covers a per-surface watermark, the default, or only the single tear.
How to use it
- Declare the surface and its contract: what the decision concludes, on what evidence, under what prerequisites, with which abstention path and gate composition.
- Let it run. A surface without traffic cannot accumulate the evidence that would qualify it, which is why
declaredandqualifyingare different states. - Read the map rather than a single number. A living system holds authority on every surface rarely and briefly; which surfaces hold it, and what withdrew the rest, is the reading.
Reference
The state ontology, the dependency-condition kinds, the stack and contract shapes and the pure state machine are public contract. Signal extraction, turning gate composition, floors, versions and drift into the preconditions the machine maps to a state, lives in the lens.