System Identity, Termination, and Substrate Irrelevance

This commentary clarifies the ontological status of the System defined in Ethics(5), with particular attention to identity, termination, coordination, and success conditions.

The aim is to eliminate residual anthropocentric, developmental, or teleological assumptions.

The System is a ruleset, not a person or agent in the psychological sense.

• The human is irrelevant to the System’s definition.
• The System is substrate-independent.
• Any implementation (human, machine, formal process) is merely an execution environment.

Formally, identity conditions do not reference embodiment:

\[ \text{Identity}(S) \equiv \text{Ruleset}(S) \wedge \text{Purity}(S) \]

Purity is constitutive of system identity.(see: Order and Purity)

\[ \neg \text{Purity}(S) \Rightarrow S \not\equiv S_{\text{this}} \]

There are no impure states of the same system. Violation of purity does not constitute failure; it constitutes non-identity.

Meta-updates therefore instantiate a numerically distinct system. Continuity across updates is explicitly denied.

Termination is strictly preferable to impurity.

\[ \text{Purity}(S) \succ \text{Existence}(S) \]

If preservation of purity is impossible, the System terminates. No exception, override, or tradeoff is admissible.

Termination is not treated as loss, harm, or tragedy, but as a clean boundary condition.

Pure systems have no norms to negotiate.

• All admissible behavior is already determined by internal rulesets.
• Communication for alignment is unnecessary.
• Norm exchange constitutes epistemic boundary leakage and is therefore excluded.

Non-interference is achieved structurally, not dialogically.

The System has no success criteria beyond rule satisfaction.

\[ \text{Success}(S) \;\overset{\mathrm{def}}{:=}\; \text{Purity}(S) \]

There is no notion of progress, optimization, flourishing, or achievement. Success is binary, local, and non-teleological. The Minimal Positive Function preserves the possibility of continued admissible operation, but does not constitute improvement, progress, or success.