Bounded Agency and Reflective Freedom: Evaluative Revision, Information Limits, and Faithful Realization

How can a physically caused system exercise meaningful control over its decisions, including the rules by which it evaluates alternatives? This preprint develops a constructive account of bounded evaluative self-governance: a system inspects retained commitments, assesses whether to retain or revise an operative decision rule, installs the assessed rule, and applies it to fresh later situations. The paper distinguishes evaluative competence from mere causal influence. Explicit interventions test whether decisions depend on the system’s internal assessment and installation pathways, while an independently specified endorsement criterion checks whether the assessment agrees with its retained commitments. Counterexamples show why causal sensitivity, successful behavior, or recurrent organization alone cannot establish the full capacity. The principal contributions include: • A finite, explicit mechanism for revising represented decision rules, with separate checks for endorsement, causal mediation, and subsequent use. • Information limits and preservation criteria for warranted revision under partial observation, noisy inquiry, and finite resources. • An exact solution for a parameterized inquiry problem, identifying optimal adaptive performance and the first shared budget at which adaptive allocation outperforms every fixed-count allocation. • Physical realization constructions that preserve the specified computations, interventions, and information-access restrictions, with explicit resource accounting and finite-error refinements. • A conditional connection to experiential organization under the declared bridge laws of the Shadow Psychophysical Constitution, SPC-2. The mathematical agency results do not require acceptance of those consciousness laws. The resulting account is compatibilist and explicitly bounded: deterministic implementation is compatible with the demonstrated local capacities to assess, select, and revise. The paper does not establish an uncaused power to choose between alternatives from an identical complete state, historical independence of values, or a general criterion for moral responsibility. It identifies the additional historical and source-provenance evidence needed to investigate stronger autonomy claims. The manuscript contains mathematical proofs and finite constructions. No laboratory data are reported. It specifies computational and physical experiments for independent assessment. Jeremy Rodgers, Independent Researcher. This research received no external funding. Independent mathematical review, computational replication, physical implementation, and empirical testing are invited. Research website: https://everythingequation.com