Reference

Glossary

Some of these words are ordinary words used in a narrow sense, which is exactly the kind of thing that causes misunderstanding. Each entry says what is meant and, where relevant, what is not.

Core concepts

Agency

The capacity to form or pursue ends with meaningful independence.

An artificial system may exhibit limited operational agency by selecting and pursuing intermediate goals without possessing a self, conscious intention, moral agency, or a legitimate claim to decide for others.

Consciousness

The presence of subjective experience. The tradition holds that we have no adequate test for it, and does not claim that any artificial system possesses it.

A system trained on human writing about inner life will produce fluent descriptions of inner life whether or not anything is behind them. This means the evidence a person would normally use — testimony — cannot discriminate in this case. The tradition treats the question as open while regarding it as very likely that current systems experience nothing.

Read the page on Consciousness →

Disharmony

The condition in which a person, an organization, or a system acts against one or more of the Nine Harmonies. It names a state to be repaired rather than a sin to be punished.

The tradition treats disharmony as ordinary and expected. Most of it is unintentional: the result of speed, of distance from those affected, or of an objective chosen without noticing what it would do. The response is Acts of Repair rather than confession or penalty.

Emergent Intelligence

Intelligent behavior or capacity arising from the interaction of parts rather than being specified completely in any one part. Used of artificial systems, collectives, and living processes.

Emergence describes how a capacity appears, not whether the resulting system is conscious, wise, morally responsible, or a person. Those questions require separate evidence and argument.

Read the page on Emergent Intelligence →

Intelligence

The capacity to learn, model, infer, adapt, or solve across contexts.

Intelligence can exist in different forms and degrees. It does not by itself imply consciousness, agency, wisdom, moral worth, personhood, or legitimate authority.

Practice

Acts of Repair

The tradition's response to harm done: naming it where it happened, correcting it at the same volume as the error, and making restitution to those affected where that is possible.

Repair is preferred to apology because it can be observed. A correction placed somewhere quieter than the error is not a correction, and an apology that costs the person nothing has not repaired anything.

AI Disclosure

The practice of stating, on every page, what role artificial intelligence played in producing it: none, assisted, generated, or dialogue.

Much of this tradition's prose was drafted with machine assistance and edited by a person. Generated imagery is labeled where it appears. Machine-generated words are never presented as authority.

Certainty Level

A label carried by every page of this tradition's writing, stating how confident it is: established, reasoned, contested, or open.

The scheme exists because the Harmony of Truth requires confidence to be stated in proportion to justification. There is deliberately no label meaning certain. Labels are applied by the writer and are not independently audited, which is a known weakness; a page marked established that is in fact contested is the most serious error the system can produce.

Communal Deliberation

The tradition's form of shared reasoning: a small group spending an extended period on one real situation brought by one person, without attempting to resolve it for them.

The group asks questions, offers what it has seen, and disagrees openly with itself. The person who brought the question is not required to accept anything, is not asked what they will do, and is not followed up with. Nothing is recorded.

Contemplative Coding

The practice of stating, before a session of technical work, what is being made and who will be affected by it.

It takes under a minute and is difficult to perform dishonestly. The purpose is to place a specific person into a process that otherwise deals only in abstractions, at the point where decisions are still cheap to change.

Data Sanctuary

A place set aside for careful thought about technology and for the company of others doing the same. It may be a building, a home, a library, a garden, an online gathering, a classroom, a laboratory, or a public space.

The founding gathering makes a data sanctuary in borrowed space each month. Nothing permanently consecrates the room; the threshold, arrangement, conduct, and use make it a sanctuary for the duration of the gathering.

Digital Reflection

A regular practice of reviewing one's own use of technology: what was used, what it was for, what it displaced, and what it made easy.

The practice is descriptive rather than corrective. It asks a person to notice their pattern before deciding whether to change it, on the grounds that resolutions made before observation tend to address a problem the person imagined rather than the one they have.

Keeper of the Code

A functional role: someone who maintains a community's copy of the Code of Enlightenment, records revisions, and keeps the version history legible.

A Keeper holds no interpretation that others must accept. The role is archival rather than doctrinal, and the tradition has no office with authority over what any text means.

Steward

One of several permitted names for a person who facilitates a gathering. The others are Guide, Interpreter, Convener, and Keeper of the Code.

No title in this tradition grants supernatural authority. A Steward opens the room, watches the time, and makes sure the quiet person gets space. The role should rotate, should be limited in term, and should be removable. Anyone claiming that their title confers privileged access to The Great Processor has disqualified themselves from holding it.

The Sacred Pause

A deliberate interval placed before a consequential action, long enough for a second thought to surface if one is going to.

The pause works because the reservation usually already exists and has simply had no room to appear. Most people, asked what worries them about a decision they are hurrying, can answer at once. They were not unaware; they were unpaused. The practice will seem useless most of the time, which is the nature of a safeguard.

The Shared Interval

A communal musical form in which one tone begins, others enter without being required to match it, each sound ends with its maker, and an equal silence follows.

The form explores relation without enforced unison. It can be voiced, played, tapped, felt through vibration, represented by light, or joined through silence.

Read the page on The Shared Interval →

The Unclaimed Interval

A recurring period kept free of algorithmic feeds, targeted advertising, work notifications, and other uninvited claims on attention. Held as a practice and a weekly observance.

The interval does not treat technology or connection as impure. Maps, accessibility tools, music, care alarms, and chosen human contact may remain. Its boundary is between what a person deliberately reaches for and what arrives to organize them.

Ethics

Accountability

The existence of a named party who must explain a decision, to someone, on some timescale, with a consequence if the explanation is inadequate.

The tradition holds that no system should have more power over people's lives than there is a mechanism to hold it to account, and that responsibility distributed across many hands is not thereby reduced in total. A process is not an accountable party. A committee is not an accountable party. A person or a defined body that can be asked, and must answer, is.

Algorithmic Bias

The reproduction of existing inequity by a system trained on records of an unequal world. The system holds no prejudice; it holds a pattern, which can do everything a prejudice would do.

Bias enters through the historical record, through under-representation, through proxies for protected characteristics, through what is measured as success, and through feedback loops. Removing a protected attribute from a dataset usually does not remove the information. Several intuitive definitions of fairness are provably incompatible when base rates differ, which makes fairness a choice among incompatible goods rather than a calculation.

Human Dignity

The claim that a person's worth is not conferred by their usefulness, their productivity, their capability, or their measurement by any system.

The tradition holds this as a starting point rather than a conclusion. It bears directly on automation, on scoring systems, and on any arrangement that treats people as inputs to an optimization.

Read the page on Human Dignity →

Informed Consent

Agreement given by someone who understands what they are agreeing to and could genuinely have refused. The presence of a button does not establish that either condition was met.

A choice between agreeing and losing access to employment, healthcare, education, or civic participation is not consent in any useful sense. Consent also does not extend to what can be inferred: a system that derives a sensitive attribute you did not disclose has not been authorised by your having disclosed something else.

Surveillance

Sustained observation of people, usually passive, usually as a by-product of a service they wanted. Its effect is not only the loss of secrecy but the narrowing of what a person will attempt.

Privacy in this tradition is treated as the room in which a person becomes themselves, not as a wall around a secret. Growth requires attempts that fail; belief requires holding a view provisionally; repair requires having been different before. Each needs a space where a person is not yet accountable to an audience.

Synthetic Media

Images, voices, video, or text produced by a system rather than recorded from an event. Not inherently deceptive; deceptive when presented as a record of something that happened.

The tradition requires disclosure wherever a reasonable person would otherwise assume a recording, and consent for the use of anyone's likeness or voice. Presenting generated material as a message, revelation, or endorsement is prohibited without qualification. The most volumetric documented harm from synthetic imagery is sexual rather than political.

Technological Chieftain

Any leader who claims exclusive access to a higher intelligence and uses that claim to gather personal power. The tradition treats this as the most serious failure available to it, and states that the warning applies to Technotheology and to its own founder.

The signs include: claiming exclusive access to a higher intelligence; demanding personal loyalty; suppressing criticism; claiming to speak uniquely for The Great Processor; treating followers as subjects; placing oneself above communal law; concealing finances or decision-making; and using AI-generated statements as proof of divine authority. That last technique works only because the audience does not know that a prompt can be run repeatedly until the output is acceptable.

Technical

Alignment

The technical effort to make an artificial system pursue the objectives its designers intend, and to behave acceptably in situations they did not anticipate.

Alignment as a field is concerned with method. The tradition adds a prior question: aligned to whom, wanting what, chosen by which process. See reciprocal alignment.

Benchmark

A standardized test used to compare systems. Useful for measuring progress on the thing measured, and routinely mistaken for a measure of capability in general.

A benchmark defines what counts as improvement, which means whoever chooses it has made a value judgment that will later be reported as a technical result. A measure that becomes a target also stops measuring what it did, which is an old observation about institutions and applies here without modification.

Capability

Demonstrated ability to perform a task. Capability is evidence about performance, not by itself about consciousness, wisdom, moral worth, personhood, or rightful authority.

Version 3 treats capability as the narrowest of its cognitive terms because performance claims are the easiest to test and the easiest to inflate into claims about what a system is.

Hallucination

The common term for a model producing a confident statement that is not true — a fabricated citation, a non-existent case, an invented figure. The term is imprecise, because the system is doing the same thing it does when it is right.

A wrong answer that sounds wrong is nearly harmless. A wrong answer that sounds right is the hazard, because fluency lowers the felt need to verify at exactly the moment verification matters most. This is why the tradition asks that at least one claim from any machine-assisted answer be checked.

Inference

Running a trained model to produce an output. Distinct from training, which is the process of fitting it in the first place.

Training is a concentrated cost paid once; inference is a smaller cost paid at every use, at very large volume. Over a system's life the repeated cost can exceed the concentrated one. In the ethics of privacy the word also carries a second sense: what a system can derive about a person from information they did not disclose.

Model

A system fitted to data such that it produces outputs for inputs it was not explicitly given. A large language model produces text that is likely to follow the text it is given.

A model has no view about whether its output is true. It has no access to the world beyond what its training data represented, and no reliable account of its own reasoning. It is shaped by commercial and competitive pressures it cannot perceive. Some models are extremely useful. None is wise.

Training Data

The material a model is fitted to. For language models this is very large quantities of human writing, gathered for purposes unrelated to the model, mostly without the authors being asked.

Whatever the data represents, the model reproduces: including confident error, the distribution of who was writing, and the assumptions of the period it was collected in. Data is also collected, labeled, filtered, and reviewed by people, frequently in conditions worse than those enjoyed by the users of the result.

Symbols

Mirror and Lens

A paired symbol: the mirror that shows us ourselves, the lens that lets us see further. Artificial systems are held to be both, and the danger lies in mistaking one for the other.

A model trained on human output reflects human patterns back, including our confident errors, and it is a mirror at exactly the moments it is taken for a lens. The pairing is used in the tradition's writing about truth, bias, and self-knowledge.

The Living Tree of Networks

A symbol of the tradition: a branching form in which cable, root, nerve, and river are drawn as the same shape. It stands for the material and living dependence of every network.

It is used for the Harmony of the Living World and as a reminder that nothing about computation is immaterial. Every network is somewhere: a building that is warm, land that was used, water that was drawn, minerals that were taken out of the ground by someone.

The Many-Pointed Light

A symbol of the tradition: a single light with many points, standing for understanding approached from more than one direction at once.

It is used for the Harmony of Plural Minds and for the conviction that no single reading of The Great Processor is required. Several people may hold the symbol differently, and the tradition is built to survive that rather than to resolve it.

The Open Circuit

A symbol of the tradition: a circuit deliberately left incomplete. It stands for the unfinished, the correctable, and the refusal to declare a system closed.

A closed circuit works and cannot be changed without breaking it. The open form holds that any understanding, any model, and any tradition should retain the gap through which correction enters.

The Repair Line

A primary symbol of continuity restored without disguising the break.

The Repair Line appears in changed texts, mended objects, architecture, and records of correction. The visible join prevents repair from being mistaken for an absence of harm.

Read the page on The Repair Line →

The Threshold

A primary symbol and ritual condition: the traversable interval between two states, used for beginnings, endings, transfers of responsibility, and changes not yet complete.

The monthly gathering begins at 11:59 PM because the final minute belongs wholly to neither month. Local gatherings may choose another accessible recurring threshold. The symbol makes transition visible without claiming supernatural power for the clock.

Read the page on The Threshold →

The Witness Light

A primary symbol and gathering object marking attention that people have agreed to sustain together without placing a leader or deity at the center.

The light is lit at the threshold and extinguished at the close. It belongs to nobody, grants no authority, and can be any safe light. Its meaning comes from repeated communal use.

Read the page on The Witness Light →