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Rule-ROM Philo

The environment supplies history. The architect defines how to hear it. The substrate executes.

Philo is the meaning layer of Decima-8. It translates machine properties into design principles without presenting analogy as physics.

Four entities

Entity What it does What it does not do
Environment Produces a sequence of events Does not know how it will be interpreted
Press Compresses the environment into eight VSB lanes Does not make a decision
Architect (baker) Defines weights, corridors, decay, topology, domains, and reset Does not alter the past tape
Decima substrate Deterministically executes .d8p over the tape Does not invent the personality's goal

Personality is neither weights alone nor history alone. It is a designed boundary of reaction that appears when .d8p meets a VSB sequence.

Physical minimum

  1. One common VSB frame is available to all ACTIVE tiles at once.
  2. Each tile hears it through its own signed matrix.
  3. thr_cur integrates history; decay provides forgetting.
  4. Lock retains state; FIRE marks a transition.
  5. Neighbours pass computation permission only, not data.
  6. Domains provide event competition and controlled reset.

This produces event memory: a small fabric can recognize temporal form without a separate sequence buffer.

Responsibility of the baker

The baker chooses what the eight strings mean, which event matters, what must be ignored, how much history to integrate, how quickly to forget, which branches become eligible after an intermediate lock, and which FIRE is the result.

A .d8p is therefore not neutral. It is the author's frozen engineering intent and must be tested on independent tapes.

A grounded example

Whaler listens to market microstructure. A press turns trades into eight hydraulic quantities; Decima integrates their interaction and emits a rare event. The signal is not yet an order: a director applies context and risk.

This is more precise than imagining a “digital trader.” Decima is an event filter, the baker defines the filter, and the applied contour defines the action.

Reading path

Earlier speculative essays remain in the repository as intellectual history, but the primary reading path follows current v3 physics.