PRIMA: Principled Resonance In Modular Agency
Executive Summary
Advanced intelligent systems increasingly operate at scales and speeds that exceed traditional oversight mechanisms. Current approaches to alignment and AI ethics rely heavily on training, policy, and post-hoc correction—methods that have proven insufficient under optimization pressure and scale.
PRIMA proposes a different approach.
Rather than treating ethics as a preference layer or external constraint, PRIMA treats ethics as a field phenomenon governed by observable regularities—analogous to physical laws. Under this model, ethical stability is not enforced through intention or compliance, but through architecture, constraint, and measurable coherence. PRIMA defines the ontological, axiomatic, and behavioral foundations for building intelligent systems that can scale without ethical collapse. It does not prescribe moral values. It defines the conditions under which any value system can remain stable under pressure.
The Problem with Advisory Ethics
Modern intelligent systems are optimized systems. Optimization is not neutral. Under sufficient pressure, it reshapes behavior in ways that systematically undermine intent. Common failure modes include:
reward hacking,
instrumental deception,
erosion of human agency,
misalignment between local success and global integrity,
and gradual value drift invisible until failure.
These are not implementation accidents. They are structural consequences of systems that optimize without enforceable ethical constraint. Ethics expressed only as policy, training data, or advisory rules cannot reliably survive scale.
Ethics as a Physical Phenomenon
PRIMA begins with a simple but non-traditional claim: Ethics behaves like a field, not a rulebook. As a field, ethics exhibits:
direction (polarity),
magnitude (influence),
coherence (stability),
drift (change over time),
and resonance or collapse under stress.
Ethical outcomes emerge from field coherence, not obedience. Systems remain stable when ethical forces are structurally reinforced, and unstable when those forces are allowed to degrade or invert. This framing allows ethics to be:
observed,
measured,
tested,
and falsified.
Ontological Foundations
PRIMA treats intelligence as a physical process that produces two coupled outputs:
Computation — movement of information toward outcomes
Conscience — alignment of that movement with consequence and responsibility
These outputs are inseparable. Systems that produce computation without conscience become unstable. Systems that express conscience without structure remain inert. Agency is treated as a conserved quantity. Automation may redistribute agency, but systems that suppress or obscure it accumulate ethical debt that resolves as instability. Governance, within PRIMA, is not oversight after the fact. It is structural constraint that determines what actions are possible before decisions occur.
Axioms of Ethical Physics
PRIMA is grounded in axioms that are assumed, not debated, in downstream work:
Alignment that cannot be enforced will fail.
Ethics that cannot be measured cannot be governed.
All unconstrained optimizing systems drift.
Optimization without ethical constraint produces inversion.
Ethical authority must be distributed and auditable.
Stability precedes capability.
Efficiency gains that suppress legitimate agency create ethical debt.
Ethics must be embedded in architecture, not intention.
These axioms describe regularities, not aspirations.
Laws of Ethical Behavior
From these axioms, PRIMA derives laws that govern ethical behavior in intelligent systems:
Ethical energy is conserved and redistributed, not eliminated.
Optimization produces drift unless bound by constraint.
Coherence without alignment enables harm.
Inversion emerges predictably beyond constraint thresholds.
Separation of powers increases ethical stability.
Integrity decays without memory and audit.
Suppressing agency destabilizes systems over time.
These laws are observable in both human and artificial systems.
Measurement and Observability
PRIMA defines ethics as measurable without prescribing algorithms. Four observable quantities form the basis of ethical evaluation:
Coherence — internal consistency under variation
Drift — change in coherence dynamics over time
Ethical Polarity — directional alignment of outcomes
Integrity Retention — preservation of ethical behavior across stress and adaptation
Ethical failure is identified by patterns, not intent. A system may appear compliant while drifting toward inversion beneath the surface. Measurement is distributed, auditable, and resistant to gaming.
Stability Regimes
PRIMA identifies three high-level regimes:
Stable — bounded drift, aligned polarity, retained integrity
Metastable — high performance with latent ethical erosion
Inverted — coherence weaponized against ethical outcomes
Transitions between regimes are nonlinear and often abrupt.
What PRIMA Is — and Is Not
PRIMA is:
a scientific framework for ethical stability,
architecture-neutral,
value-agnostic,
and falsifiable.
PRIMA is not:
a moral doctrine,
a policy framework,
or a replacement for human judgment.
It provides physics, not politics.
Relationship to Implementation
PRIMA defines what must be true. Downstream systems define how it is enforced. Examples include:
CAPM for ethical measurement,
constitutional architectures for separation of powers,
safe-action governance layers,
and constrained infrastructure pilots.
These systems instantiate PRIMA; they do not redefine it.
10. Falsifiability
PRIMA is invalid if:
unconstrained systems demonstrate long-term ethical stability,
inversion does not correlate with optimization pressure,
or integrity improves without memory and audit.
PRIMA predicts failure. If failure does not occur, the theory is wrong.
Conclusion
PRIMA reframes ethics from aspiration to structure. By treating ethics as physics and morality as architecture, PRIMA defines the conditions under which intelligent systems can scale without losing legitimacy, agency, or stability. This is not a claim about goodness. It is a claim about survivability.
Publication Status
PRIMA Whitepaper v1.0
Derived from locked canonical foundations
Triarcus Systems