soul-frame/research/metrics-scoping-note.md

Empirical/Operational Metrics Scoping Note

Workplan: SOUL-WP-0009-T04, resolved 2026-09-28 Purpose: scope — not build — measurable proxies for the A-axis (B1–B8, autonomous individuality), the B-axis (P1–P12, descriptive personhood), and the continuity profile. Soul Frame is currently qualitative/classificatory; this note identifies which axes are plausibly measurable now with existing instruments vs. which need new ones, so a future workplan can pick this up without re-deriving the landscape.

Method

For each dimension: does an existing measurement tradition already target something close to it, or would Soul Frame need to invent an instrument?

A-axis (autonomous individuality, B1–B8)

Code	Dimension	Plausibly measurable now	Rationale
B1	Individuability	Partial	Individuality/information-theoretic measures (Krakauer et al. 2020, SF-R019–034 cluster) give a graded formal proxy; applying them outside biological systems is untested.
B2	Temporal integrity	Partial	Uptime/session-continuity logs give a crude proxy for artificial systems; no validated cross-substrate metric.
B3	Constitutive integration	No	No existing instrument distinguishes "integrated organization" from "loosely coupled components" quantitatively; closure-of-constraints formalizations (Montévil & Mossio 2015) are the closest theoretical basis but are not operationalized as a measurement protocol.
B4	Self-maintenance participation	Partial	For artificial systems, resource/error-correction telemetry (self-healing, retry, recovery behavior) is a plausible proxy already collected by most production systems — needs mapping, not invention.
B5	Endogenous viability	No	Requires distinguishing internally-driven from externally-propped persistence; heteronomous-individual cases (Terminology.md) are exactly the hard cases this would need to separate, and no metric currently does.
B6	Adaptive regulation	Partial	Control-theoretic and RL literature already measures regulation quality (error minimization, model accuracy) — directly reusable, though not originally framed as a Beinghood metric.
B7	Interactional asymmetry	No	Novel to Soul Frame's framing; no existing instrument.
B8	Identity-preserving transformation	Partial	Overlaps with the continuity profile (see below) — measurable to the extent continuity is measurable.

B-axis (descriptive personhood, P1–P12)

Not itemized in current concept files beyond the "profile, not checklist" framing (concepts/personhood.md, Terminology.md). Scoping finding: before metrics can be scoped per P-code, P1–P12 need to be enumerated with the same specificity B1–B8 already have — this is a prerequisite gap, not a metrics gap. Recommend a follow-up task (not opened here) to write out P1–P12 explicitly in concepts/personhood.md before attempting measurement.

Continuity profile

Dimension	Plausibly measurable now	Rationale
Causal	Yes	Provenance chains, cryptographic attestation, audit logs — mature tooling exists for artificial systems.
Organizational	Partial	Architecture/component-graph diffing can detect discontinuities; no agreed threshold for "still one organization."
Psychological	No	No validated metric for "the same adaptive/modeling process," as opposed to similar outputs.
Autobiographical/narrative	Partial	Memory-store diffing and narrative-consistency NLP metrics exist but measure surface consistency, not the underlying continuity claim.
Normative	No	No existing instrument for "the same locus of commitments/obligations" independent of legal/contractual proxies (which measure something adjacent, not identical).
Relational	Partial	Social-graph and reputation-system metrics are mature for tracking relationships; whether they validly evidence identity continuity (as opposed to just relationship persistence) is unresolved.

Overall scoping conclusion

• Most measurable now: causal continuity, adaptive regulation (B6), self-maintenance telemetry (B4) — existing instruments, direct reuse.
• Needs new instruments: constitutive integration (B3), endogenous viability (B5), interactional asymmetry (B7), psychological continuity, normative continuity.
• Blocked on prior work: B-axis (P1–P12) metrics cannot be scoped until the P-codes are enumerated with B1–B8's level of specificity.

Recommendation: a future workplan (not opened as part of SOUL-WP-0009) should (1) enumerate P1–P12 explicitly, then (2) prioritize instrument development for constitutive integration and psychological continuity — these are cited most often across the thought-experiment catalog (TE-02, TE-04, TE-05, TE-08) and are the two dimensions where "No" above is doing the most argumentative work in the framework.