The General Form of Distortion: An AFI Research Programme for Possibility, Perception and Adaptive Architecture

The Architecture of Freedom Intelligence proposes that intelligence makes real possibilities more accessible and that action can change the possibilities themselves. This paper develops that proposition into a research architecture with separately observable physical capability, perceptual access and retained function. It preserves the five theses as the conceptual starting point while distinguishing definitions, mathematical consequences and empirical hypotheses. We contribute a task-specific definition of normalized distortion; a conditional service model that avoids counting perception twice; and a reproducible synthetic benchmark of a 100-module wall. The benchmark contains 100 fixed physical worlds, eight observation repeats, four sensing policies and exactly 100 paired interventions. At 40 observations, task-focused sensing exposes useful openings that broad sensing misses.