PURPOSE. The master terminology document for the project: canonical vocabulary, disambiguation rules, and recorded distinctions. When new material is added, check its terms against this file; when a new collision appears, resolve it here first. Companion documents:
logical_spine.md(the argument the terms serve), the Style Guide inPROJECT_OVERVIEW.md(registers and banned forms), andrename_tier_axis_to_processing_level_PLAN.md(the resolved tier collision, kept as the worked example).Consolidation adopted: June 11, 2026 (third process at spine step 13, deliberately not a master process; spine renumbered, old steps 13–35 now 14–36).
Last checked: June 7, 2026 (full-corpus sweep; constriction/collapse rule adopted; "apertural" ban executed corpus-wide).
1. Canonical vocabulary
Terms original to the project, with one-line definitions and home documents. Definitions here are pointers, not replacements; the home document governs.
| Term | Definition | Home |
|---|---|---|
| The Primary Axiom | The framework's single assumed normative premise: if something matters to someone, that mattering is real and deserves to be taken seriously; equivalently, felt stakes ground reasons. "Consciousness is good" is its slogan form, not a rival formulation. | core_primary_axiom.md; spine step 8 |
| Aperture | A locus where reality is disclosed to something: phenomenal consciousness, named for its structural job rather than its felt quality. | core_aperture_ethics.md; spine step 7 |
| Stake (felt vs. functional) | A condition under which a difference between world-states is a mattering for some system. Felt stakes are registered from the inside and are the only morally relevant kind; functional stakes (a thermostat's) are not. | core_stake_geometry.md |
| Aperturality | The property of being an aperture. The property is "aperturality"; the framework is "aperture ethics." | core_aperture_ethics.md |
| Aperture integrity | The degree to which an aperture is open, clear, undistorted, responsive, and temporally sustained. | core_aperture_ethics.md |
| Constriction / dilation | Episode-scale narrowing or widening of the aperture (see Rule 1). | core_aperture_ethics.md |
| Stake-geometry | The structural shape of how a being is embedded in reality such that the world's states matter for it. | core_stake_geometry.md; spine step 9 |
| The five dimensions | Dimensionality, depth, reach, coherence, responsiveness: the axes of description for a stake-geometry. | core_stake_geometry.md; the five dimension_*.md files |
| Stake-density | The richness of a geometry (how many stakes, held how deeply). Explicitly not intelligence; see spine step 11. | spine step 11; core_stake_geometry.md |
| Collapse / elaboration | Durable structural degradation or enrichment of a stake-geometry: the two master processes (see Rule 1). | spine step 12 |
| Consolidation | Narrowing of dimensionality with depth conserved or concentrated, responsiveness intact, and an endorsement that would survive restoration. Neither collapse nor elaboration; pruning is its deliberate form. | core_stake_geometry.md; spine step 13 |
| Mass / mobility | The mass model's two evaluative invariants: the extensive quantity of a stake-geometry (how much mattering, additive under merging) and its capacity to redistribute. Stake-count is scheme-relative and carries no evaluative weight. | core_mass_model.md |
| Value tiers (Tier 0 to Tier 3) | Sorting of moral content by scope and grounding: private mattering, local agreements, expansion-stable principles, empty cosmic law. | core_tiered_values.md; spine steps 21 to 25 |
| Goods | The stake-objects a geometry holds (loyalty, curiosity, justice). Contents, not values; goods have their own tier sorting. | core_goods.md; spine step 34 |
| Network / recognition | Mutual recognition between apertures is what makes comparison, agreement, and shared values possible; moral progress is network expansion. | core_network_universality.md; spine steps 16 to 20 |
| Processing level | The emotion model's automaticity axis (Higher-order / Voluntary-Stated / Core-Involuntary / Operative-Gut). Renamed from "tier," June 4, 2026. | emotion_data_model.md, Reference Table 3 |
| The five emotion axes | Intensity, granularity, processing level, components, object. | emotion_data_model.md |
| Mood / sentiment | What an emotion becomes when sustained past its episode: object-dissolved (mood) or object-retaining (sentiment). A gain-layer beneath the dimensions, not a sixth dimension. | structure_of_mind/mood.md; spine step 35 |
2. Disambiguation rules
Rule 1 — Constriction/dilation vs. collapse/elaboration (the temporal rule)
Adopted June 7, 2026.
The two pairs are not synonyms. They differ by timescale and by object:
- Constriction and dilation describe the aperture at episode scale: narrowing or widening of openness, clarity, and fidelity that is often reversible. A migraine constricts; a conversation that opens a new interest dilates.
- Collapse and elaboration describe the stake-geometry at structural scale: durable change to the shape of what matters. Depression flattening depth everywhere is collapse; learning to love a person or a discipline is elaboration.
- Collapse is the limit case of constriction: constriction sustained, amplified, or made irreversible. Death is total collapse.
Register handling: the technical corpus uses both pairs, with these meanings, and new material is checked against them. Public-facing writing leads with collapse and elaboration; constriction and dilation appear only occasionally and intentionally.
Note on diagrams: a legend may group the bad-making terms under one color (as framework_overview_spec.md does with "Constriction / Collapse"). The grouping is by direction, not synonymy.
Rule 2 — Tier vs. processing level
Three systems once shared the word "tier." Value tiers and goods tiers keep it; the emotion model's automaticity axis is "processing level." Never write a bare "Tier N" or "Level N": qualify as Tier 1 value, Tier 2 principle, Tier 1 good, and lead with a processing level's name, not its number. Full history and file list: rename_tier_axis_to_processing_level_PLAN.md.
Rule 3 — Tier numbering
Value tiers run 0 through 3, and the set is "the four tiers." Never renumber as 1 through 4.
Rule 4 — Axis vs. dimension
"Axis" belongs to the emotion model (five axes). "Dimension" belongs to stake-geometry (five dimensions). Do not swap them. "Dimensionality" names one member of the five dimensions, not the set.
Rule 5 — Value vs. good
Values are the tier-sorted moral commitments produced by the spine's argument. Goods are the contents a geometry holds: the stake-objects themselves. "Justice" the good (held by the network) is distinct from any value statement about justice.
Rule 6 — Emotion vs. mood vs. sentiment vs. stake-geometry
Four timescales, never collapsed into one another: emotion (episode), mood and sentiment (mesoscale; object dissolved vs. retained), stake-geometry (lifetime structure). Emotions, summed over time and amplitude, are what reshape the geometry (spine step 33).
Rule 7 — Hyphenation of stake-geometry
Hyphenated ("stake-geometry") in all body prose. Unhyphenated "Stake Geometry" is permitted only in display contexts: document titles, headings, and all-caps diagram labels.
Rule 8 — Banned form
"Apertural" is never used. Use the noun as modifier: aperture integrity, aperture ethics, aperture function. See the Style Guide in PROJECT_OVERVIEW.md, which also holds the two-register rule (technical corpus vs. public-facing) governing how all coined terms are introduced.
3. Recorded distinctions
Not collisions, but distinctions the corpus depends on and a new reader (or a new chat) should not blur:
- The axiom vs. its slogan. The canonical statement of the founding axiom is the Primary Axiom sentence: if something matters to someone, that mattering is real and deserves to be taken seriously (equivalently, felt stakes ground reasons). "Consciousness is good" is its slogan form, used only for compression after the canonical form has appeared. The axiom relocates the is/ought gap to one assumed sentence; it does not close it. New material is checked against this: never write that the framework "closes" the gap (spine step 8;
core_primary_axiom.md). - Moral standing vs. culpability. Standing is being owed consideration; culpability is being blameable. A newborn has full standing and zero culpability (spine step 11).
- Gratuitous vs. compensated collapse. A collapse is gratuitous when it neither prevents a worse collapse nor enables a corresponding elaboration. The term is load-bearing: wrongness itself is defined as gratuitous stake-collapse (spine steps 24 and 30;
core_tiered_values.md). - Conscience vs. wrongness. Conscience is a detector; wrongness is gratuitous stake-collapse. The detector is checked against the definition, never the reverse (spine step 30).
- Inner vs. outer "immoral." The value sense (this is bad, available at Tier 0, including self-directed harm) vs. the accountable sense (a wrong against someone with a claim on you, requiring the network) (spine step 30).
- Stake-density vs. IQ. Density tracks mattering, not cognition; reduced cognitive dimensionality is compatible with enormous density (spine step 11; the elitism worry in
publication_strategy.md). - Consolidation vs. collapse. Both reduce breadth; only one is bad-making. A narrowing is consolidation when it carries all three marks: an endorsement that would survive restoration of full responsiveness (an endorsement authored by the narrowed state itself does not count), preserved responsiveness, and conserved depth. Failing any mark, it is collapse. Pruning and the goods-catalogue's Simplicity are deliberate consolidation (spine step 13;
core_stake_geometry.md).