Boundaries of Machine Interpretation

Abstract

Boundaries of Machine Interpretation is a bilingual, versioned authorial statement set by Ivan Kotov. Version 0.2 consolidates six connected formulations: the future as a process; doubt versus numerical uncertainty; forgetting versus data loss; empathy versus optimization; subjective experience versus telemetry; and soul as open-ended self-reflection. The central boundary is methodological: a measurable technical proxy must not be silently promoted into a human, relational, or phenomenal status. A probability distribution does not by itself establish doubt; deletion or retrieval failure is not identical to forgetting; optimization does not constitute empathy or authorize intervention; and successful capture, transmission, or parsing of telemetry proves neither the presence nor the absence of subjective experience. In engineering terms, a confidence score, a deleted database row, a controller action, and a parsed sensor stream remain technical events until separate evidence and authority justify a stronger interpretation. The deposit preserves authoritative statement files, publication translations, canonical precedence, provenance and supersession records, a human-readable PDF, machine-readable JSON and JSON-LD, manifests, and SHA-256 checksums. The designated AUTHORIAL_* and CANONICAL_* files control wording according to CANONICAL_PRECEDENCE; translations and explanatory layers support discovery but do not override those authorities. This work does not claim scientific proof of consciousness, soul, empathy, doubt, or forgetting; does not attribute or deny these states to any particular human, animal, or digital system; and does not treat telemetry, model confidence, storage state, or optimization success as an ontological test.