Definitions

Current Alignment Theory vocabulary for coherent agency under constraint.

Michael Nathan Bower · Updated September 14, 2026 · Working conceptual and design framework; not peer reviewed.

September 2026 definitions

Adaptive system: A system that changes behavior or state in response to environment, feedback, internal condition, external support, or accumulated history.
Agency: The usable capacity to understand, judge, refuse, revise, choose, direct action, learn from consequence, and remain responsible within a system that affects real outcomes.
Alignment: The preservation of coherent agency under constraint.
Authority: The legitimate scope to bind action, impose constraints, delegate responsibility, approve risk, or create consequence.
Capacity-forming function: A function in which continued meaningful participation helps maintain the ability to perform, judge, regulate, or adapt within that function.
Coherence: The degree to which meaning, intent, authority, action, and consequence remain mutually consistent rather than fragmenting under pressure.
Constraint: A boundary on possible action created by reality, capacity, rules, authority, environment, timing, permissions, or consequence.
Delegated agency: Operational action performed through a tool, agent, subordinate system, or workflow under borrowed human or organizational authority.
Dependency capture: A condition in which reliance on a support system becomes strong enough that refusal, exit, correction, or independent action becomes impractical.
False gate: A review or control point that blocks or permits without rightful authority, meaningful power to change the outcome, or reality-grounded conditions.
Governance Memory: A controlled history-analysis layer that identifies recurring governance patterns and recommends improvements for human review without silently rewriting authority or policy.
Handoff Integrity: The requirement that source lineage, validated context, authority scope, transformation history, expiration conditions, and proof survive transfers between agents or system stages.
Human agency infrastructure: Systems designed to preserve and amplify human capacity, judgment, authority, refusal, responsibility, and accountability while using powerful support or automation.
Internalization: The maturation process by which initially external constraints become increasingly carried through integrated understanding, skill, judgment, and governed habit.
Live human authority: Human authority that remains practically capable of changing, refusing, revising, halting, or escalating an action before consequence becomes binding.
Participatory capacity: The retained ability to remain meaningfully involved in the functions that shape judgment, responsibility, adaptation, learning, and action.
Runtime continuity: The preservation of authorization from permit to actual execution so the executed action remains the authorized action.
Semantic continuity: The preservation of meaning, source lineage, context, uncertainty, and transformation history across handoffs.
Substitution: A support relation that carries a capacity-forming function in the participant's place in a way that can preserve short-term output while weakening long-term participation or capacity.
Support: A relation that helps a person or system carry more reality with usable capacity while preserving or deepening participation in capacity-forming functions.
True constraint: A reality-grounded, purpose-congruent, authority-valid boundary that helps preserve meaningful agency. This is a framework category for analysis, not a claim that legitimacy can always be determined automatically.
True gate: A consequential decision boundary at which rightful authority can govern passage by halting, revising, refusing, approving, or escalating before consequence.

Earlier definitions: May 6, 2026

The earlier vocabulary remains below for provenance. Where a term appears in both sections, the September definition above is current. Internal and external alignment remain useful developmental concepts within the broader framework.

Read the preserved May 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.

Source and use

Michael Nathan Bower, canonical conceptual handoff, September 14, 2026. These are working definitions, not claims of empirical validation. Read the framework center, constraint and agency page, and AGS trajectory.