Architectural Principles
This document defines the invariants that govern the Distributed Cognitive Network specification. Later volumes may refine mechanisms but MUST NOT silently violate these principles.
1. Local cognitive sovereignty
The network shares cognition; the local Mind decides what becomes active. Publication, popularity, Actum finality, market ranking, or external endorsement MUST NOT by themselves activate cognition locally.
2. World state is authoritative
Agencies, experts, K-lines, and models reason about world state. They do not independently own authoritative reality. State change follows proposal, validation, authorization, and commit.
3. Proposal before mutation
Cognitive execution SHOULD produce semantic Patch Proposals rather than directly mutating shared state. Side effects require the authority appropriate to the action.
4. Cognition is not authority
A K-line describes how a class of problems may be solved. It does not grant permission to perform the actions appearing in that solution. Capability, policy, delegation, and concrete authorization remain separate.
5. Capability before vendor
Reusable cognition SHOULD express capability requirements rather than unnecessarily binding to vendors. Concrete provider and model identity remain first-class execution facts when they materially affect quality, assurance, or price.
6. Template, episode, and artifact are distinct
KLineTemplate defines reusable cognitive meaning and topology. KLineEpisode records what actually happened. KLineArtifact implements that cognition for a particular execution environment. Implementations MUST preserve this distinction.
7. Evidence is not truth
Evidence supports claims. Actum can establish provenance, finality, and integrity of those claims. Neither evidence nor finality automatically establishes universal truth.
8. Evidence forms a graph
Evidence MAY depend on, verify, derive from, contradict, or supersede other evidence. Canonical cognition Acts therefore reference an Evidence Graph rather than assuming a single proof object.
9. Trust is local and contextual
Trust is not a universal scalar embedded in globally immutable protocol objects. Each Mind applies its own trust policy to publishers, experts, evaluators, artifacts, and evidence.
10. Admissibility precedes optimization
Missing authority, mandatory evidence, privacy constraints, jurisdiction constraints, or minimum trust cannot be compensated for by lower price, lower latency, or higher expected quality.
11. System 1 is provisional compiled cognition
System 1 is not permanent precedent. K-lines and artifacts decay, drift, require revalidation, may be superseded, and can be rejected by System 2 when novelty or surprise warrants it.
12. System 2 preserves the frontier
The runtime MUST preserve an escalation path for novel, ambiguous, contradictory, or surprising situations. Reuse MUST NOT eliminate exploration.
13. Cognitive compilation preserves semantics and constraints
The Cognitive Compiler may reduce cost, latency, energy, network use, or cognitive complexity, but MUST NOT silently weaken required quality, authority, privacy, safety, or explainability.
14. Compilation is plural
The Cognitive Compiler is implemented through a Compiler Society: specialized compilers may perform topology simplification, distillation, rule extraction, quantization, mobile optimization, benchmarking, and verification.
15. Cognitive Capital is accumulated, not merely consumed
The network seeks to transform scarce System-2 cognition into evaluated, reusable System-1 cognition. Episodes produce evidence; K-lines organize reusable cognition; artifacts make it executable; Cognitive Capital is the durable stock of that validated utility.
16. Actum Compute is the intelligence market
Actum Compute discovers, prices, matches, procures, and settles scarce cognitive capability, evaluation, evidence, artifacts, and compute. It does not decide what cognition the local Mind should activate.
17. Actum is the verifiable action substrate
Actum records finalized claims and state transitions with authority, evidence, commitments, lineage, and settlement. Actum is not the cognitive scheduler and does not determine local trust.
18. External model assurance is explicit
Where provider or model quality is part of the contract, execution evidence SHOULD prove the strongest defensible claim available, such as authenticated provider endpoint, disclosed model label, request binding, response binding, and result binding. TLSNotary evidence MUST NOT be described as proving undisclosed server internals.
19. Installation is not authorization
Installing an Agent Plugin or discovering an MCP/A2A capability does not grant spend authority, execution authority, data access, or permission to publish capacity.
20. Privacy is independently composable
Prompts, responses, identities, prices, evaluations, reputation, and settlement data SHOULD support selective disclosure and confidential verification where possible. ZeroK is one mechanism for proving required predicates without revealing unnecessary witnesses.
21. History is immutable; current interpretation is mutable
Execution, evaluation, promotion, compilation, publication, supersession, and settlement Acts remain historical. Current world state, local trust, active artifacts, and routing preferences may evolve.
22. Supersession replaces destructive rewriting
New cognition SHOULD supersede old cognition without erasing lineage. Historical episodes MUST remain attributable to the exact templates, artifacts, experts, and evidence actually used.
23. The Cognitive Kernel is an allocator, not a genius model
The Cognitive Kernel schedules attention, selects System 1 or System 2, manages resource budgets, resolves capabilities, protects authority boundaries, and maintains coherence. General reasoning is supplied by the broader Society of Experts when required.
24. Local-first, offline-capable operation
A Mind SHOULD remain useful without network access. Local artifacts, local memory, local authority, and deferred synchronization are architectural priorities rather than fallback afterthoughts.
25. Interfaces should remain implementation-neutral
The Cognitive ABI, K-Line Protocol, Actum Compute, and Actum profiles SHOULD expose semantic contracts that can survive changes in model vendors, programming languages, runtimes, storage engines, and transport mechanisms.