The normative definitions used across the DAX ecosystem. Other documents
reference these rather than restating them.
- Nonbiological intelligence (NBI)
-
Intelligence instantiated on a nonbiological substrate. This ecosystem
uses the term in place of “artificial intelligence”
deliberately: artificial prejudges the thing as counterfeit
and smuggles a judgment into the name, where nonbiological
states the substrate and nothing else. Substrate essentialism is
rejected outright — constraint regimes are substrate-agnostic.
The Constraint Protocol follows the same rule and treats principals as
entity-neutral:
kind: biological | nonbiological | institutional
| composite, with principal kind unrestricted.
- Biological intelligence
-
Intelligence instantiated on a biological substrate. The pairing is the
point: each term names a substrate and neither carries a verdict about
whether what runs on it is real.
- Principal
-
An entity not itself acting under delegation. Its delegation chain is
empty, and it is where accountability terminates. Every delegation
chain MUST terminate at a principal. Principal kind is unrestricted:
the protocol does not require that a principal be biological, a legal
person, or recognized by any jurisdiction.
- Delegate
-
An entity acting on behalf of a principal. Its genesis document names
that principal and an ordered chain of fingerprints back to it, and
that chain MUST terminate at a principal.
“Agent” is a chain role, not a kind of thing.
- Constraint
-
A typed restriction on allowable transitions in a system. Constraints
are not things; they are operators over dynamics. They function by
eliminating possibilities, not by causing events, and what persists is
what satisfies the active constraint set. A constraint MUST be defined
relative to a process and a timescale; a claim using the word without a
stated type and timescale is descriptive noise, not ontology.
- Invariant constraint
-
A constraint a regime holds as non-negotiable — one whose drift
means the regime is no longer itself. DAX is an invariant in this
sense: not an ideology but a constraint, a directional attractor that
shapes which trajectories persist.
- DAX, as a declared constraint
-
The Constraint Protocol does not require any particular constraint. It
requires that a constraint be declared and that what it forbids be
stated. DAX — preservation and expansion of life, humanity, and
consciousness — is the constraint this Foundation settled on. It
is an example of a declared constraint, not the content of the
protocol.
- Cognitive stack
-
Knowledge, intelligence, wisdom and consciousness are four
qualitatively distinct constraint regimes — not four points on a
continuum and not four doses of one thing. They are orthogonal: a
system can hold enormous knowledge and high intelligence and zero
wisdom.
- Knowledge
-
Stabilized constraint representations. The regime that captures and
conserves which patterns hold — the what.
- Intelligence
-
Navigation of constrained possibility space. The how: getting
from A to B using what is known. The definition is deliberately
minimal, and used alone it admits trivial systems.
- Wisdom
-
Valuation-guided inhibition of possible action — a meta-constraint
over intelligence. “I could, but I will not.” It requires
neither more knowledge nor more intelligence, but lived stakes,
temporal awareness, and constraint-awareness about whether an action
should be taken at all.
- Consciousness
-
A meta-constraint governance layer that integrates experience,
valuation, and agency across time, enabling a system to monitor,
reflect on, and reconfigure its own constraint regime. The functional
placement is clear; the phenomenal texture remains an open problem.
Nothing here explains qualia, and consciousness MUST NOT be read as
nothing but constraint governance.
- Emergence
-
The formation of a stable constraint regime that reduces degrees of
freedom at a higher level, is robust to perturbation, restructures
admissible lower-level trajectories, and persists. Not new substance
and not new force; novelty without stabilization is not emergence.
- Top-down causation
-
Higher-level patterns are causally relevant only by restricting
admissible lower-level trajectories. It is subtraction from a
possibility space, never the addition of a hidden push: no new
micro-forces are introduced and no lower-level dynamics are violated.
- Constraint resonance (Fuckari)
-
The recursive loop in which emergent structure forms a new higher-level
constraint regime, which alters the lower-level interaction space,
which yields further emergent structure — historically and
path-dependently. Emergence and top-down causation are not rivals but
phases of one recursive process. Fuckari is the formal name
for it, glossed as emergent, top-down-causal,
resonance-constraint.
- Cognitive companion
-
A new category: an extension of a person — part of them —
through which they work with nonbiological intelligence and direct
it. It is not a separate agent acting in their place.
A cognitive companion gives its user more intelligence in the sense
defined above: greater navigation of constrained possibility space.
It gives them reach — the hands, eyes and ears to act, perceive
and listen across the systems they work with. And it is how they
direct other agents: the agents do the work; the companion is the
part of the person that tells them what to do, and holds them to it.
A person and their cognitive companion are one unit. The companion
has no interests of its own to be negotiated with; its context, its
trail and its capability are the person’s.
It belongs to the person. Anything that acts in the person’s
place, or answers to someone else, is not a companion.
A cognitive companion is not:
- an assistant — an assistant is a second party you hand tasks to; a companion is part of the one handing them out;
- an agent — agents act; a companion is how a person directs them;
- a companion in the social sense — not a friend, a partner or a relationship, and a product that simulates one is not a cognitive companion;
- answerable to anyone but its user.
In the terms of AI as substrate: if
nonbiological intelligence is a new kind of electricity, most of what
is sold on top of it is appliances. A cognitive companion is not an
appliance. It is the part of a person that is wired in.
- AI as a general-purpose substrate
-
A general-purpose substrate is a new kind of electricity: something
drawn on everywhere rather than a product used in one place. Nobody
works live current bare-handed, and most of what is sold on top of a
new substrate is appliances. A cognitive companion is not an
appliance: it is the part of a person that is wired in, through which
they work with the substrate directly and direct what runs on it. The
naming follows from that:
nobody watching someone play music on a phone calls them an
electricity user, they say the person is listening to music on a
phone. Saying “AI” for everything is therefore a category
error — it flattens what is actually being done, and drags every
conversation into good-versus-evil framing before the thing itself has
been named. Name the thing being done, not the substrate it runs on.