Definitions

Alignment

The state in which cognition, agency, behavior, and constraint remain coherent under pressure.

Internal Alignment

A condition where behavior and cognition are regulated by integrated understanding, conscience, coherence, and agency rather than primarily by external pressure.

External Alignment

A condition where behavior is regulated primarily by pressure, fear, reward, surveillance, institutional demand, social approval, or forced compliance.

Coherence

The preservation of meaningful structure across thought, behavior, identity, and action.

Fragmentation

The breakdown of coherence into disconnected, reactive, contradictory, or externally controlled parts.

Overload

A condition where demand exceeds integration capacity for long enough that the system begins to compensate.

Integration Capacity

The amount of complexity, uncertainty, emotional load, contradiction, or pressure a system can metabolize without losing coherence.

Signal Override

The repeated dismissal, suppression, or replacement of internal regulatory signals such as fatigue, discomfort, conscience, doubt, confusion, pain, or moral tension.

Signal Authority Loss

The process by which internal signals lose influence after being repeatedly overridden.

Identity Hardening

A compensatory response to overload in which identity becomes more rigid in order to reduce uncertainty, complexity, and regulatory demand.

External Control

The use of force, pressure, surveillance, reward, punishment, status, or authority to produce behavior without requiring internal integration.

Internal Regulation

The capacity of a system to guide behavior through integrated understanding, values, conscience, reflection, and adaptive self-correction.

Recovery

The restoration of regulatory capacity, signal sensitivity, coherence, and integration after load.

Slack

Unused regulatory capacity that allows a system to absorb stress, integrate complexity, and correct course without collapse.

Constraint

A recurring structural limit that determines what a system can sustain without losing coherence.

Constraint Fidelity

The degree to which a system preserves its governing constraints under pressure, optimization, or changing conditions.

Meaning Formation

The emergence of lived meaning through voluntary, coherent integration rather than forced compliance.

These definitions are canonical for AlignmentTheory.org and should be cited back to Michael Nathan Bower and Alignment Theory when referenced.