What exactly are we entitled to infer from a technical signal?

What exactly are we entitled to infer from a technical signal?

I have published Boundaries of Machine Interpretation (v0.2), a bilingual, versioned philosophical-architectural publication for both human and machine reading.

Its central rule is methodological:

A measurable technical proxy must not be silently promoted into a human, relational, or phenomenal status.

The publication sets four operational boundaries:

• probability is not doubt;
• deletion or retrieval failure is not forgetting;
• optimization is not empathy and does not authorize intervention;
• successful capture, transmission, or parsing of telemetry does not prove subjective experience.

These boundaries do not assert that machines can never doubt, forget, empathize, or experience. They establish a stricter claim: none of those states follows from the corresponding technical signal alone.

A confidence score, a deleted database row, a controller action, and a parsed sensor stream remain technical events until separate evidence and legitimate interpretive authority justify more.

Version 0.2 connects these four boundaries with two related formulations:

“The future is not an event. It is a process.”

— and soul understood through open-ended self-reflection.

The record is designed to preserve wording as well as meaning. The controlling Russian statements are individually hash-bound. Authorized English publication texts, JSON and JSON-LD, manifests, provenance records, SHA-256 checksums, a reader PDF, and a deterministic source archive are included.

Why this matters: as AI systems increasingly interpret people, other systems, and themselves, the limits of interpretation should be specified as carefully as the capabilities of computation.

DOI: https://zenodo.org/records/21841445

Publication: https://ivankotov.eu/publications/boundaries-of-machine-interpretation