Economics from Shared Reality and Distinct Persons
In Recognition Science, physical and ethical descriptions concern one underlying reality. Actions change shared relations; their burdens and consequences remain attributable to distinct persons. Economics develops how those persons organize production, storage, exchange and use within that reality. A complete two-person economy identifies the information this requires: each person's usable resources, recorded claims and outstanding agreements. Within the model, we prove that this description is necessary and sufficient for the stated future-action tests. The general condition is exact: every action a description reports must be possible from the actual situation it describes. With personal requirements and information retained, this preserves shared futures, ethical judgments and informed control. A person's incident comparison cost and its change are read from the same ledger that the action transforms. Relevant past effects require additional memory. Comparison-cost settlement has a unique minimizer at fixed net positions; specified accounting rules make it reachable. Physical measurements and the identification of experienced persons determine where these mathematical results apply. Version 1.2 revises the exposition on September 17, 2026, making the common physical and ethical foundation explicit. AI assistance: OpenAI Codex and AI-assisted internal review supported manuscript development and formal verification work. Jonathan Washburn is the author and responsible depositor. Internal AI review is not external peer review.
Authors
- Washburn (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-8868-7497)
Institutions
- University of Cologne (DE)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
- Published
- 2026-09-17
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22819598
- Primary Topic
- Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
- Type
- preprint