§04 Reasoning — Governed Autonomous Reasoning — What this section covers, and when it applies
Mars® Spec › §04 Reasoning — Governed Autonomous Reasoning › What this section covers, and when it applies
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Mars® Protocol — §04: Governed Autonomous Reasoning
Status: capability-gated cross-cutting section. The requirements in this section apply to a deployment only if it performs autonomous reasoning as defined in §1. A deployment that does not perform autonomous acquisition or higher-order synthesis is unaffected by this section and may be fully conformant without it.
1. What this section covers, and when it applies
The base architecture (§00 §3) governs a single round-trip: an invocation is admitted, verified, and certified. This section governs the case where a Mars® deployment reasons over its own governed substrate autonomously — walking the domain model, knowledge base, and data sources to identify what it does not yet know, acquiring the missing knowledge, synthesizing higher-order structure from what it holds, and doing so repeatedly without a human directing each step.
This is not a new mechanism. Every constituent operation is already normative elsewhere in this specification. This section names the loop as a whole and states the requirements that govern its composition — the requirements that make autonomous reasoning conformant rather than an ungoverned self-modification.
Applicability (the capability gate). A deployment performs autonomous reasoning when either of the following occurs without a per-step human authorization act:
- Autonomous acquisition — the deployment initiates a knowledge- or data-acquisition action selected by the deployment itself from its own gap records (§03-iii §2.0) or calibration signals (§01 §5.1), rather than from an operator request.
- Autonomous higher-order synthesis — the deployment initiates a higher-order synthesis act (§01 §11) whose input selection is chosen by the deployment itself, rather than declared by an operator per act.
A deployment that does neither is out of scope for this section. A deployment that does either must satisfy the requirements of §2–§6 for the operations it performs autonomously. The gate is per-operation: a deployment that autonomously acquires but never autonomously synthesizes is bound by the acquisition requirements only.
A deployment does not become conformant by disclaiming autonomy. Where the deployment’s observable behavior includes acquisition or synthesis actions with no corresponding human authorization act in the retained record, the capability is present regardless of how it is described, and this section applies (cf. the architectural-refusal discipline of §02e §13).