On the Necessary Void at the Center of Autonomous Governance
Description
When states delegate exception-decisions to autonomous systems operating under latency constraints that preclude real-time human ratification, the sovereign position becomes formally unoccupiable. This paper derives the result from three independent impossibility constraints: Rice's theorem on behavioral verification (the Verification Wall), FLP impossibility on distributed consensus (the Ratification Wall), and complexity-theoretic limits on adversarial attestation (the Attestation Wall). Unlike prior accounts in political theory, which treat sovereignty failure as political and therefore corrigible, this result is mathematical. The void is not a failure of institutional imagination. It is a theorem.
The paper assembles three logically independent impossibility results into a joint exhaustion argument against any ratification mechanism for autonomous exception-decisions:
Verification Wall (Rice 1953): Correct implementation of an exception-decision rule is a non-trivial semantic property of the agent's program. Rice's theorem makes it undecidable. Pre-delegation cannot cover what cannot be verified.
Ratification Wall (FLP 1985): Post-hoc ratification requires distributed consensus across an asynchronous C2 architecture under adversarial conditions. FLP shows no deterministic protocol can guarantee termination within a hard-bounded decision window. Randomized and partial-synchrony extensions do not close the gap.
Attestation Wall (Regime 3, Bilar 2026a): Runtime authentication of the exception-executing agent against an adversarially chosen agent class is computationally intractable. No adaptive verifier making polynomially many queries can distinguish cooperative from defecting agents with non-negligible advantage if the agent class has PRF-embeddability.
The three walls close different levels of the decision architecture (semantic, distributed-systems, cryptographic), and are logically independent. No sovereignty architecture defeats all three simultaneously.
Other
Dedicated to Prof. Edward N. Beiser a"h. Thank you for everything.
Edward N. Beiser (1942–2009) was Professor of Political Science at Brown University from 1968 until his retirement and Associate Dean of Brown’s Medical School. A constitutional scholar and medical ethicist, he died in Warwick, Rhode Island, on September 4, 2009.
Methods (English)
AI Utilization Statement
Adversarial review of drafts was conducted using Opus 4.6, Grok 3.4, and Kimi 2.6. Writing revisions were performed with Opus 4.6. All claims, arguments, formal derivations, and editorial judgments are the author's own.
Notes (English)
This paper stands in explicit relation to two landmarks in 20th-century political theory:
Schmitt, Politische Theologie (1922) and Der Begriff des Politischen (1932). Schmitt's sovereignty thesis Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet is the direct target. The paper does not refute Schmitt's decisionism on political grounds; it shows that the exception-decision structure Schmitt presupposes (a subject who decides) is computationally uninstantiable in the MMIE class. The sovereign position exists in the formal sense. It cannot be occupied. This is not a liberal objection to Schmitt. It is a theorem that applies to any political form, including authoritarian ones. Schmitt's question who decides? receives, for the first time, a mathematically grounded answer: the question does not apply.
Fukuyama, "The End of History?" (The National Interest, 1989). Fukuyama's essay argued that liberal democracy represented the terminal point of ideological evolution; not because all states had become liberal, but because no coherent alternative remained. The present paper poses an analogous but structurally distinct claim: not that a particular political form has won, but that a particular political function ie the exception-decision has become formally unexecutible by any sovereign subject under MMIE conditions. Fukuyama's terminus was ideological; this paper's terminus is computational. Both are claims about closure, derived from different foundations, arriving at different conclusions about what remains possible.
Political Theory Engagement
Schmitt [1922, 1932]: The exception-decision requires a subject. The computational exception is an inference event with no human act behind it. The sovereign position exists but cannot be occupied.
Agamben [2005]: Normalization of the exception preserves the structure of political production. The computational exception does not. It is not produced by any political act and cannot be revoked after the fact.
Mouffe [1993]: Institutionalizing the friend/enemy distinction requires a verifiable distinction. The Attestation Wall shows this fails under adversarial conditions. Institutionalization of an unverifiable distinction is a formalized error, not agonistic democracy.
Files
dyb-2026p-void-center-autogov.pdf
Additional details
Dates
- Available
-
2026-05-15