Four Boundaries of Machine Interpretation: Canonical Authorial Statement Set

Ivan Kotov

Common frame

What the set separates

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.

Layer	Technical fact	Conclusion not established by that fact alone
Epistemic	Probability or confidence value	Doubt
Temporal / memory	Deletion, corruption, or retained bytes	Forgetting or operative memory authority
Relational / normative	Detected adverse state or improved metric	Empathy or authority to intervene
Phenomenal	Captured and parsed telemetry	Presence or absence of subjective experience

Canonical Russian wording

Four canonical units

01 / epistemic boundary

Doubt and Numerical Uncertainty

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.

Non-canonical discovery translation: 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.

02 / temporal-memory boundary

Forgetting and Data Loss

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.

Non-canonical discovery translation: 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.

03 / relational-normative boundary

Empathy and Optimization

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.

Non-canonical discovery translation: 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.

04 / phenomenal boundary

Subjective Experience and Telemetry

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.

Non-canonical discovery translation: 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.

Machine reading

Prohibited automatic inferences

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

DOES_NOT_ENTAIL is deliberate. The set does not say that the terms can never interact; it says that the technical fact is insufficient by itself to establish the stronger conclusion.

Interpretive framework — not canonical wording

Bridges to the existing corpus

The doubt boundary connects to c[q]: controlled non-collapse under uncertainty requires a held state, review, and exit conditions, not merely a probability value.

The forgetting boundary connects to AMDR/PAMDC: preserved bytes, historical truth, retrieval availability, and current memory authority must remain distinct. An archive may survive after losing permission to govern the present.

The empathy boundary connects to arbitration, role consent, and soft-safety: a recognized state may justify attention, but does not automatically authorize action on another's behalf.

The subjective-experience boundary connects to raw-locality and experience-refinery profiles: signal capture, parsing, and an operational Experience Artifact must remain distinguishable from a claim about subjective experience. A provenance witness is not thereby a phenomenal inner witness.

Across all four boundaries, data, semantic status, and authority remain separate. The shared discipline is restraint against premature collapse into judgment, deletion, intervention, or ontological attribution.

Engineering ground

What the distinction changes in practice

On an electrical panel, a 0.51 / 0.49 reading may trigger HOLD because a procedure requires review; the number itself is not doubt. A hashed log may remain in an archive after its entries lose operative authority. A distress = 0.72 assessment and a pulse of 110 are signals, not a person's consent to intervention. A video checksum proves that the pixels arrived intact, not that red was experienced. These cases need separate records for assessment, held status, memory policy, action authority, and the epistemic status of any experience claim.

Record and provenance

Publication record

Author: Ivan Kotov.

ORCID: 0009-0009-6002-9845.

Place and date recorded and approved: Brussels, Belgium — 2026-08-07.

Version: 0.1.

Status: provisional-authorial-boundary-set.

Set identifier: urn:ivankotov:statement-set:four-boundaries-machine-interpretation:v0.1.

Canonical language: Russian.

License: not assigned by the package.

The preserved source note is a normalized transcription of the author's initial philosophical sketch. Copy/paste zero-width characters were removed, but the source wording was not promoted into the canon. The four corrected Russian boundaries were separately approved for fixation.

Canonical GitHub package Publication commit Human-readable record Machine-readable JSON-LD Normalized source note

Precedence and scope

What this record fixes — and what it does not claim

Each Russian CANONICAL_*.txt file controls only its corresponding boundary. MANIFEST.json controls set membership, order, identifiers, and version. The machine graph, explanatory record, source note, and English translations cannot override those files. A conflict must fail closed.

This set is not a neuroscientific, psychological, or metaphysical proof; not a theory or diagnostic test of consciousness; not a claim that every machine has one architecture; and not an attribution or denial of doubt, forgetting, empathy, consciousness, or subjective experience in any particular system.

It does not authorize endless inaction under the name of doubt, destruction of evidence under the name of forgetting, or abandonment under the name of empathy. Separately grounded protective action remains possible where a request, consent, established duty, or immediate-harm prevention mode applies.

Site mirror

Files for people and machines

The files below are byte-for-byte mirrors of the verified canonical GitHub package.

Canonical RU 01 — Doubt Canonical RU 02 — Forgetting Canonical RU 03 — Empathy Canonical RU 04 — Subjective experience STATEMENT_SET.md statement-set.jsonld SOURCE_NOTE_RU.txt README.md MANIFEST.json CITATION.cff SHA256SUMS Complete deterministic ZIP ZIP SHA-256 sidecar

Integrity

Separately verifiable SHA-256 values

Boundary 01 — Doubt: 81beacfba0257e33aea6a74e71de392459d1e2e57a67d4a8665f233c3a74bf9c.

Boundary 02 — Forgetting: 0eaf76e52f9e962d6635c896078c93d32526e4442e87121ccb7620ba59fbf1dc.

Boundary 03 — Empathy: 4f9accac33823beb9c2f63adbd3821f48c49fbc791e2d2ce318c87648a694b24.

Boundary 04 — Subjective experience: 06d3c524cc128fd25299dca1bb216bc9271bf9757481462d7d51d4caa6f11aca.

Machine-readable statement set: f235b1bd980a7a8285323af7bee7d80ee0b6d6cce321a7765515c2c107fb4515.

Complete ZIP: 6f443de9149b983476db542ed8230b33c8c9a134596a6f5aa86e5ebd8352892f.

Two independent deterministic ZIP builds produced the same SHA-256. Internal checksums, ZIP CRC, member order, safe paths, duplicate absence, UTF-8/NFC encoding, and exact canonical-text mirrors were verified before publication.

Citation

Recommended citation

Kotov, Ivan. (2026). Four Boundaries of Machine Interpretation: Canonical Authorial Statement Set (Version 0.1) [Authorial boundary set]. https://ivankotov.eu/publications/four-boundaries-of-machine-interpretation-v0-1/

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