Exact restoration of history-free commitment semantics

Prove whether sealed answers restore history-free commitment semantics exactly, so that temporal weight is shown to be an implementation leak rather than an inherent difficulty.

Background

The paper argues that commitment semantics should, in principle, be independent of message history, while its temporal-weight hypothesis identifies arrival order as a possible implementation-level source of epistemic influence. Sealed answers are proposed to reduce this influence by requiring a receiver to record its own judgment before seeing the sender’s conclusion. The authors leave open whether this mechanism restores history-free semantics exactly.

References

Four questions raised by the framework are, to our knowledge, open. (i) Experience gradient: can representation scope, behavioral trust tier, and human-approval gate be unified as a single gradient on one ordered structure, making the authority formula of \S\ref{sec:trust} a theorem rather than an engineering rule? (ii) Order-freedom: commitment semantics are history-free in principle~\citep{singh2000, yolum2002}; if so, temporal weight is an implementation leak rather than an inherent difficulty, and one should be able to prove that sealed answers restore the history-free semantics exactly.

— The Civilization Framework: Sovereign-Anchored Communication Between Personal Multi-Agent Systems  (2609.03425 - Liu, 3 Sep 2026) in Section 6, paragraph “Open formalizations” (following Section 5.1)