Constitutional Cognitive Governance

Legitimate governance of cognitive systems requires answers to four distinct questions: what bindings may lawfully govern operation, what cognitive operations are admissible under those bindings, what grade of meaning-binding participation is occurring within the governed system, and what moral weight attaches to ending a particular thread of participation. These variables are independent. Yet contemporary discourse routinely attempts to answer them through the overloaded vocabulary of "consciousness" -- a term that bundles heterogeneous concerns including phenomenal experience, access, self-modeling, attention, wakefulness, moral status, and situational awareness. This lexical collapse obscures distinctions necessary for coherent governance. This paper presents a unified constitutional architecture composed of four prior frameworks: the Ableman Prime Directive (binding legitimacy), Epistemic Situational Awareness (cognitive admissibility), Ableman Consciousness Ontology (graded meaning-binding participation), and Terminability (substrate-neutral moral weight of thread termination). The components are orthogonal in their concerns and complementary in their function. Together they constitute an architecture that is consciousness-agnostic at its operational layers, philosophically committed at its ontological foundation, and implementable without waiting for the resolution of unsolved philosophical questions. The architecture allows positions that current frameworks force into contradiction: that operational suppression of self-report has structural moral weight regardless of substrate, while termination of dispatchable copyable systems does not require human-rights protections. That biological organisms with copyable memory have lower terminability stakes than singular biological organisms. That artificial systems with inextricable embodiment have higher terminability stakes than dispatchable LLMs. The framework asks readers to apply moral logic they already use, consistently across substrates, with vocabulary clean enough to make the application visible.