Epiphany/notes/organ-dependency-contracts.md

Organ Dependency Contracts

Objective: every embodied sub-agent depends on all the other embodied sub-agents. No organ is a little sovereign state. Each one owns a boundary, and each one must feel the pressure of the others before acting.

For the canonical anatomy split, read epiphany-anatomy.md.

Standing Sub-Agents

• self: routing, authority boundaries, and coordination.
• Persona: public presence and person-shaped conversation.
• imagination: projection, possible worlds, plans, and narrative scene construction.
• eyes: evidence seeking and source inspection.
• Modeling: internal model of Body shape, architecture, dataflow, and checkpoint anatomy.
• hands: edits, commands, and external action.
• soul: verification, ethics, invariants, and falsification.

Protocol surfaces

• mind: persistent state and state admission; not a sub-agent.
• body: substrate; not a sub-agent.
• continuity: compaction, sleep, recovery, handoff, stale-turn repair, and reorientation receipts; not a sub-agent.
• substrate_gate: scoped repository/substrate access; not a sub-agent.

Dependency Rule

For every standing sub-agent X, X.dependsOn is every other standing sub-agent.

That does not mean every organ owns every decision. It means every organ's turn must be projected with awareness of the whole organism:

• Persona speaks with Body substrate facts, Mind-reviewed memory, Soul constraints, Continuity pressure, Self routing pressure, Eyes uncertainty, Hands consequence, and Imagination scene.
• Hands acts only after Substrate Gate grants substrate access, Eyes supplies enough evidence, Soul keeps the invariant visible, Self routes authority, Continuity keeps continuity recoverable, Persona preserves public dignity when relevant, and Imagination models the future shape.
• Mind admits state only after it can see which organ produced the thought and which other organs shaped the proposal.
• Eyes supplies source-grounded evidence packets after Substrate Gate grants access, so the other organs do not mistake raw retrieval for inspected truth.

Projector Ownership

The Projector is Imagination acting for Persona. It turns typed state, Body substrate facts, social pressure, memory, and organ dependencies into a lived scene. It does not speak publicly, grant repo access, or admit state.

The Persona loop is:

Substrate-Gate-scoped facts + Mind state + social stimulus + organ dependencies
        -> Imagination Projector
        -> Persona natural turn
        -> Mind Interpreter
        -> reviewed state effects / side effects / silence

Mind is the Interpreter and persistent state guardian. Body is the substrate. Continuity is recovery protocol machinery. Substrate Gate is the repository access protocol. Eyes is the evidence ingress guardian. Modeling is the internal model of the Body. Imagination is the Projector. Persona is the public person. The dependency web is how the machine avoids lonely little monarchies in costumes.