Consent-Bounded Contact Theory

Consent-Bounded Contact Theory (CBCT) develops a protocol-level theory for deciding when contact and contact-derived artifacts may be accepted as legitimate. In this framework, “contact” is not limited to physical interaction or direct communication. It includes operational effects such as querying, copying, forking, merging, modeling, simulating, representing, reactivating, auditing, inheriting, refining, or blocking contact-derived claims in long-lived artificial, collective, or autonomous processes. The theory does not claim physical non-contact, hidden subjective consent, complete observability, or substrate-specific standing. Instead, it defines consent-bounded legitimacy through observable evidence, credential closure, trust anchors, consent claims, negotiation transcripts, provenance records, residual routes, bridge contracts, ledgers, audit anchors, and finite certificates. Contact legitimacy is treated as a certified property of a closed, generated, conservatively abstracted, stratified, and audited support configuration, rather than as the mere ability to contact, compute, infer, or deploy. CBCT combines finite causal event presentations, raw observation closure, conservative presentation abstraction, stratified rule semantics, bitemporal finality, observer-merge-aware audit structures, source-authority evidence fusion, Sybil-aware source quotients, polarity-aware repair propagation, accounting doctrines, coverage epochs, bridge event morphisms, and policy-fibration gluing. It provides formal tools for reasoning about consent, authorization, evidence independence, challengeability, revocation, lineage transport, support obligations, model release, deployment eligibility, bridge refinement, and policy composition across heterogeneous systems. The framework is substrate-neutral: issuers, targets, stewards, guardians, auditors, observers, challengers, oracles, and collectives are treated as finitely credentialed role-bearing processes rather than privileged biological, artificial, institutional, or collective substrate classes. This makes the theory applicable to autonomous agents, AI governance, distributed systems, digital consent, provenance-aware auditing, long-running services, copied or forked processes, dormant systems, collective processes, and future intelligent infrastructures. CBCT is positioned as a bridge-compatible theory. It can interact with Dormant Continuity Theory for dormancy and reactivation semantics, and with Observable-Signal Crystallization Theory for cessation, non-resurrection, terminal-status, and liberation certificates. The paper’s main results establish credential-closure foundation soundness, support-generated adequacy preservation, stratified rule and checker adequacy, observer-merge finality, source-credential-based evidence non-amplification, future-only repair safety under event polarity, accounting epoch soundness, bridge-refinement soundness, and policy-fibration gluing.