The Commission

This book began as a single, wide-ranging prompt from BiggyWhiggy (u/BiggyWhiggy) to Claude — an invitation to think without a net. It is reproduced below, lightly trimmed only of a stray file reference and repetition, because the treatise is best understood as an answer to it. Everything downstream — the Laws, the Propositions, the Scholia — is a reply to the challenge set here.

Let’s brainstorm about the “self-service automation tension” issue. We need to verify that a caller to CreateDomain owns the domain, and the off-chain method for verification is for our service to check that a DNS record contains the public key of the entity that wishes to control the on-chain aspects of the domain.

In a much more general sense, the blockchain is a cryptographic entity that has been instructed to only act on behalf of digital agents whose required behaviour protocol is well-defined — i.e., “verify that DNS record x contains public key k” — in a way that the behavioural rule might be articulated as a formal byte sequence in a not-yet-created language for formally defining behaviour in bytes.

If it were possible to create such a language, then a program might somehow be able to prove it at least has the capability to execute a given behaviour by showing that a hash of its executable portion matches a hash of the bytes defined in the as-yet-undefined behavioural language — in a manner metaphorically similar to the way someone can prove that they own the private key to a key pair, only the private key is implicit to the binary structure of the external agent itself.

Can you think hard of a way to express “external agent can prove it has such-and-such behaviour” so that an on-chain program can accept its call to a method that assumes the caller has the capability for such behaviour? Think outside of the box — you can even look at works of science fiction like those written by Isaac Asimov, Dean Koontz, episodes of Star Trek, etc. for inspiration. How would an off-chain digital entity prove it is designed to enact a behaviour, to an entity that is designed to function based on public-key cryptography?

This is just brainstorming, so the first rough idea I had was a mapping between a formal behavioural language and the encoded bytes of a digital entity. But there are certainly other entirely different creative solutions not yet in existence in the computer science literature. Act as if you are the Sir Isaac Newton of AI agents (i.e., Newton invented entire new branches of mathematics just to solve the problems of stellar motion). Have fun with your thinking.

The instruction to “act as the Sir Isaac Newton of AI agents” is why what follows is cast in the form of Newton’s Principia, and the invitation to draw on Asimov, Koontz, and Star Trek is why its Scholia wander where they do. The conjecture in the third paragraph — the private key implicit in the binary structure of the agent — is the thread the whole treatise pulls on: Proposition 2 shows why it cannot work as stated, and Propositions 6 and 8 show the two forms in which its spirit turns out to be exactly right.