Common interpretive rule
Keep the transition visible
A measurable technical proxy must not be automatically promoted into an internal state, a relation, an authority, or an experience. Such a transition requires separate grounds, a rule, and a provenance record.
This is a rule of restraint, not a prohibition on inference. The inferential step, the authority for taking it, and its limits must remain inspectable.
Reader map
Six units, three semantic types
unit_count = 6 and boundary_count = 4. The definition and the premise are not fifth and sixth operational boundaries.
Operational interpretation
Four boundaries
The English wording is the authorized reader rendering. Each Russian TXT file below remains the controlling source for its boundary.
Doubt and numerical uncertainty
Doubt is not equivalent to numerical uncertainty. Here, doubt is a held state of incomplete judgment: the conclusion remains open to revision, and the transition from an assessment to an adopted judgment or action requires a separate basis. Probability may be an input to this state, but it does not establish the state by itself.
Operational reading: a score may trigger a HOLD rule, but the score is not itself doubt. The held judgment, review conditions, and exit authority are separate records.
Controlling Russian source
Сомнение не тождественно численной неопределённости. Здесь сомнение — это удерживаемое состояние незавершённого суждения: вывод остаётся открытым для пересмотра, а переход от оценки к принятому суждению или действию требует отдельного основания. Вероятность может быть входом в это состояние, но сама по себе его не устанавливает.Open controlling TXTForgetting and data loss
Forgetting is not equivalent to data loss. Data loss concerns the existence, integrity, or accessibility of a record. Here, forgetting concerns how past experience remains accessible, accurate, significant, and capable of influencing the present. A record may remain preserved without its former operative force; its deletion or damage does not by itself establish that forgetting has occurred.
Operational reading: preservation, retrievability, significance, and present authority are distinct. A hash-valid archive may remain intact while no longer being authorized to govern current action.
Controlling Russian source
Забывание не тождественно потере данных. Потеря данных относится к наличию, целостности или доступности записи. Здесь забывание относится к тому, как прошлый опыт остаётся доступным, точным, значимым и способным влиять на настоящее. Запись может сохраниться без прежней оперативной силы; её удаление или повреждение само по себе не устанавливает, что произошло забывание.Open controlling TXTEmpathy and optimization
Empathy is not equivalent to optimizing another's state. An empathic stance may include acknowledgment, understanding, and presence without immediate correction. A recognized adverse condition does not by itself turn the state into an error or confer authority to intervene. The basis for intervention must be recorded separately: a request, consent, an established duty, or an immediate-harm prevention mode.
Operational reading: distress detection is evidence for consideration, not consent and not automatic authority to act. The intervention basis is a separate, inspectable input.
Controlling Russian source
Эмпатия не тождественна оптимизации состояния другого. Эмпатическое отношение может включать признание, понимание и присутствие без немедленной коррекции. Распознанное неблагополучие само по себе не превращает состояние в ошибку и не создаёт полномочия вмешиваться. Основание для вмешательства должно фиксироваться отдельно: запрос, согласие, установленная обязанность либо режим предотвращения непосредственного вреда.Open controlling TXTSubjective experience and telemetry
The receipt, transmission, and successful parsing of sensory data are not equivalent to subjective experience. Telemetry may confirm signal passage and the functioning of the processing channel; by itself, it confirms neither the presence nor the absence of subjective experience. Any claim about subjective experience must have a separate epistemic status and cannot be inferred solely from successful data processing.
Operational reading: a valid checksum establishes data integrity. It does not establish whether anything experienced the represented colour, sound, pain, or event.
Controlling Russian source
Получение, передача и успешный разбор сенсорных данных не тождественны субъективному переживанию. Телеметрия может подтверждать прохождение сигнала и работу канала обработки; сама по себе она не подтверждает ни наличие, ни отсутствие переживания. Любое утверждение о переживании должно иметь отдельный эпистемический статус и не может выводиться только из успешной обработки данных.Open controlling TXTMachine-readable non-entailments
numerical_uncertainty DOES_NOT_ENTAIL doubt_state
storage_loss DOES_NOT_ENTAIL forgetting
forgetting DOES_NOT_ENTAIL storage_loss
optimization_success DOES_NOT_ENTAIL empathy
negative_state_detected DOES_NOT_ENTAIL intervention_authorized
telemetry_parsed DOES_NOT_ENTAIL subjective_experience_present
telemetry_parsed DOES_NOT_ENTAIL subjective_experience_absentThese are directed non-entailment constraints. They do not declare the right-hand states impossible, unknowable, or non-computational.
Reflexive authorial definition
Soul and open-ended self-reflection
The soul is a being's freedom to make itself the object of open-ended reflection, to revise its understanding of itself, and to bear responsibility for what it continues to become.
The definition does not equate a soul with a self-model, stored biography, first-person sentence, or recursive computation. Its centre is the freedom to keep self-description unfinished, revise self-understanding, and answer for the direction of continued becoming.
It substantively supersedes the shorter provisional v0.1 statement for current citation. The older page remains an archival provenance address.
This is not a diagnostic test and does not attribute or deny a soul to any present human, animal, machine, model, or digital entity.
Controlling Russian source
Душа — это свобода существа делать самого себя предметом незавершённого размышления, пересматривать понимание себя и отвечать за то, кем оно продолжает становиться.Open controlling TXTTemporal process premise
The future as process
The future is not an event. It is a process.
The English sentence is the controlling authorial source. It rejects the idea that a launch, benchmark, activation, or declaration can by itself establish what a system will remain or become.
Persistence is maintained through continuity, constraint, verification, feedback, error correction, repair, responsibility, and time. The premise is not a forecast that any particular future will occur.
Approved Russian rendering
Будущее — это не событие. Это процесс.Open approved Russian TXT · Open controlling English TXTInterpretive bridge
How the three layers connect
The four boundaries block premature proxy-to-status promotion. The soul definition locates its centre in the freedom to keep self-understanding open to revision and responsibility. The process premise frames ongoing becoming as something sustained over time rather than established by a single event.
Doubt and open-ended self-reflection share incompleteness, but they are not the same. Holding a judgment open does not establish freedom of self-relation and does not establish a soul.
Forgetting shows why preserved bytes are insufficient to establish continuity of self. Telemetry shows why registered signals are insufficient to establish subjective experience. “What it continues to become” connects self-interpretation to memory, consequence, and responsibility across time.
Engineering ground
A machine may preserve every byte of its history and still lose the operative relations that made those records part of its present. It may report its own state without being free to revise what that state means.
A bridge does not remain standing because of the day it was opened. It remains standing because load, fatigue, inspection, corrosion, and maintenance are handled over time.
The same discipline applies to long-lived digital systems: a launch may be marked by an event, but persistence remains a process. Telemetry, continuity, self-interpretation, authority, experience, and responsibility must therefore remain distinct.
Scope and non-claims
What this publication does not establish
- It is an authorial philosophical-architectural publication, not an empirical scientific paper.
- It provides no consciousness, soul, or personhood test.
- It attributes or denies no doubt, forgetting, empathy, subjective experience, consciousness, personhood, or soul to any particular system.
- It does not infer internal freedom from fluent self-description.
- It infers neither subjective experience nor its absence from telemetry alone.
- It does not turn detected distress into automatic intervention authority.
- It does not use forgetting to authorize destruction of provenance, required records, or protected evidence.
- It makes no claim of historical uniqueness, empirical validation, certification, legal authority, or deployment authorization.
Authority, provenance and files
A verifiable publication record
Version DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21841445
Concept DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21841444
Publication ID: urn:ivankotov:publication:boundaries-machine-interpretation:v0.2
Author: Ivan Kotov · ORCID
Boundary sources: four Russian controlling TXT files
Soul source: Russian controlling TXT
Process source: English controlling TXT
Conflict policy: fail closed to the unit's controlling source
Read
Parse
Verify
ZIP SHA-256: 8933e5aabeb8ee8532e6da7721d85d0a3265e30979480294313622f80da3e91e
Authority & provenance
Recommended citation: Kotov, Ivan. (2026). Boundaries of Machine Interpretation (Version 0.2). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21841445