---
identifier: "urn:ivankotov:publication:boundaries-machine-interpretation:v0.2"
doi: "10.5281/zenodo.21841445"
title: "Boundaries of Machine Interpretation"
author: "Ivan Kotov"
author_orcid: "https://orcid.org/0009-0009-6002-9845"
version: "0.2"
publication_date: "2026-08-07"
primary_presentation_language: "en"
languages: ["en", "ru"]
status: "authorial philosophical-architectural publication"
---

# Boundaries of Machine Interpretation

**Ivan Kotov**  
Version 0.2 | 7 August 2026 | Brussels, Belgium  
DOI: <https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21841445>

> The future is not an event. It is a process.

This publication defines a discipline for machine interpretation. A measurable
signal, stored record, optimized outcome, or generated self-description must
not be silently promoted into a stronger epistemic, relational, normative, or
phenomenal status. Such a transition requires separate grounds, an explicit
rule, and a provenance record.

The work has three deliberately different layers:

1. **Four operational interpretation boundaries** state what does not follow
   from a technical proxy.
2. **One reflexive authorial definition** addresses the freedom of a being to
   keep its understanding of itself open to revision and responsibility.
3. **One temporal process premise** places persistence, correction, and
   becoming in time.

The definition and the premise are not additional operational boundaries. The
unit count is six; the boundary count remains four.

## Reader map

| Layer | Count | Function |
|---|---:|---|
| Operational interpretation boundaries | 4 | Prevent proxy-to-status collapse |
| Reflexive authorial definition | 1 | Keep self-interpretation open and accountable |
| Temporal process premise | 1 | Prevent becoming from being reduced to an event |

## Common interpretive rule

> 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. It does not prohibit inference. It requires the
inferential step, its authority, and its limits to remain visible.

## I. Four operational interpretation boundaries

### 1. 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.

Identifier:
`urn:ivankotov:statement:doubt-numerical-uncertainty-boundary:v0.1`

Operational reading: a score may trigger a `HOLD` rule, but the score is not
itself doubt. The held judgment, its review conditions, and the authority to
exit the hold are separate records.

### 2. Forgetting 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.

Identifier:
`urn:ivankotov:statement:forgetting-data-loss-boundary:v0.1`

Operational reading: preservation, retrievability, significance, and present
authority are distinct. A hash-valid archive may remain historically intact
while no longer being authorized to govern current action.

### 3. Empathy 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.

Identifier:
`urn:ivankotov:statement:empathy-optimization-boundary:v0.1`

Operational reading: distress detection is evidence for consideration, not
consent and not automatic authority to act. The intervention basis is a
separate, inspectable decision input.

### 4. Subjective 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.

Identifier:
`urn:ivankotov:statement:subjective-experience-telemetry-boundary:v0.1`

Operational reading: a valid checksum establishes something about data
integrity. It does not establish whether anything experienced the represented
colour, sound, pain, or event.

## Machine-readable non-entailments

```text
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_absent
```

These are directed non-entailment constraints. They are not declarations that
the right-hand states are impossible, unknowable, or non-computational.

## II. 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.

Identifier:
`urn:ivankotov:statement:soul-open-ended-self-reflection:v0.2`

Status: `authorial-philosophical-definition`

The definition does not equate a soul with a self-model, a stored biography, a
first-person sentence, or recursive computation. Its centre is freedom: the
capacity of a being not merely to describe itself, but to keep that description
unfinished, revise its self-understanding, and answer for the direction of its
continued becoming.

The definition supersedes the shorter provisional statement recorded as
`urn:ivankotov:statement:soul-freedom-self-reflection:v0.1`. The earlier wording
is preserved in `provenance/`; it is not a second, equally current definition.

This statement is not a diagnostic test and does not attribute or deny a soul
to any present human, animal, machine, model, or digital entity.

## III. The future as process

The opening sentence is a temporal premise for the whole publication. 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 prediction that a particular future will occur. It is a claim about how
futures are made and sustained.

Identifier:
`urn:ivankotov:statement:future-not-event-process:v1.0`

Status: `canonical-authorial-process-premise`

## How the three layers connect

The four boundaries block premature proxy-to-status promotion. The soul
definition locates its centre in a being's freedom to keep its
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. The phrase “what it continues to become” connects
self-interpretation to memory, consequence, and responsibility across time
rather than to a single snapshot.

## 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

This publication:

- is an authorial philosophical-architectural statement set, not an empirical
  scientific paper;
- does not provide a consciousness test, a soul test, or a personhood test;
- does not attribute or deny doubt, forgetting, empathy, subjective experience,
  consciousness, personhood, or soul to any particular system;
- does not claim that all digital or biological beings have the same internal
  organization;
- does not infer internal freedom from fluent self-description;
- does not infer subjective experience from telemetry, nor its absence from a
  failure to observe telemetry;
- does not turn detected distress into automatic intervention authority;
- does not use forgetting to authorize destruction of provenance, required
  records, or protected evidence;
- does not present the process premise as a forecast, theorem, or guarantee;
- does not claim historical uniqueness, empirical validation, certification,
  legal authority, or deployment authorization.

## Language, authority, and precedence

English is the primary presentation language of this publication. Russian
authorial texts are visually secondary but remain intact, independently
hash-bound, and fully available to human and machine readers.

Source-language authority is assigned per statement:

- the four operational boundaries: the corresponding Russian
  `CANONICAL_*.txt` files control;
- the soul definition: the Russian `AUTHORIAL_05_*.txt` file controls;
- the future/process premise: the English `AUTHORIAL_00_*.txt` file controls;
  the Russian text is an approved publication rendering.

The English boundary texts and soul definition are authorized primary-reader
renderings. They do not silently override their Russian authorial sources. If
a material conflict is detected, interpretation of that unit must fail closed
and return to the controlling source file. Metadata, PDF layout, examples, and
explanatory prose cannot alter a controlling statement.

## Provenance and version history

Version 0.2 forms a unified publication from material previously recorded in
two v0.1 source packages and the author's process premise. It preserves the
four v0.1 Russian boundary statements byte for byte and retains their original
statement identifiers. It does not overwrite either predecessor package.

The expanded soul definition is a substantive revision and therefore has a new
identifier and version. The previous canonical and verbatim forms are retained
under `provenance/`, together with the independently verified SHA-256 of the
original v0.1 archive.

Any change to a controlling statement byte creates a new statement version.
Any change to set membership, order, authority, or precedence creates a new
publication version. Older versions remain addressable and are never silently
rewritten.

## Citation

Kotov, Ivan. (2026). *Boundaries of Machine Interpretation* (Version 0.2).
Zenodo. <https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21841445>

Machine-readable relations, statement texts, authority rules, hashes, and
package inventory are provided in `machine/`, `MANIFEST.json`, and
`SHA256SUMS`.

## Appendix A: Authorial Russian texts

### A.0. Future as process — approved Russian rendering

> Будущее — это не событие. Это процесс.

The English sentence at the beginning of this publication is the controlling
authorial source for this unit.

### A.1. Сомнение и численная неопределённость

> 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.

### A.2. Забывание и потеря данных

> 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.

### A.3. Эмпатия и оптимизация

> 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.

### A.4. Субъективное переживание и телеметрия

> 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.

### A.5. Душа как свобода незавершённого самоосмысления

> Душа — это свобода существа делать самого себя предметом незавершённого размышления, пересматривать понимание себя и отвечать за то, кем оно продолжает становиться.

The Russian paragraph is the controlling authorial source for this unit.