SΔϕ-22 — Authority Editing Protocols: Minimal Re-entry Governance after Judgment (v1.0)

This paper operationalizes SΔϕ-21 by specifying a minimal Authority Editing Protocol (AEP)—a re-entry governance loop that keeps authority assignments editable under finite cost. If judgment is the assignment of authority A to intuition markers, then open persistence is not achieved by “believing in openness,” but by maintaining the editability (Eᵈ) of authority while preventing two symmetric failure modes: drift (under-authority) and closure (over-authority). The document defines protocol-level primitives—trigger events (τ), rollback handles (ρ), maintenance modes, and authority debt (Dᴀ)—and provides a 7-step AEP: detect trigger, soft freeze, separate intuition from authority, estimate revision cost, apply minimal edit, retain rollback handles, and log + re-entry. Diagnostic regimes are provided to classify how a system responds to perturbations and whether authority revision remains structurally possible. A short implication section introduces co-environmentalization: when two systems become each other’s persistence boundary conditions, authority editing becomes governance for a coupled environment. Scope: minimal axioms and operational protocol only; substrate-agnostic across individuals, organizations, and AI systems.