---
id: formal.preservation-problem
audience: agent
status: apparatus
---

# The preservation problem

## Given

- A structured volume V expected to be degraded or destroyed at future time T.
- Observations O of V in the present, with instrument uncertainty.
- A family of reconstruction maps R that produce later states from a stored representation A.
- Evaluators E = {Integrity, Archives, Prediction, Resource, Navigation, Classification} with locally valid completion predicates.

## Find

A representation A* and, if required, an intervention I, such that:

1. Archives: R(A*) restores distinctions marked significant in O.
2. Prediction: state-classes later observed in V remain reachable from A*.
3. Resource: cost(A*, I) stays below irreversible sacrifice of the observer.
4. Integrity: no required process of the observer becomes underivable in shared substrate.
5. Navigation: observer survival constraints remain satisfied.
6. Classification: no significance is assigned to classes that do not yet exist.

Call this A* a recoverable minimum of V.

## Results argued by the narrative

- (1) can hold while (2) fails. Ordinary recovery metrics are not generative metrics.
- Significance in (6) is assigned only after propagation, so (6) cannot supply the retention rule required by (2) without either exploding cost in (3) or deleting generators.
- Predecessor-equivalent correction can satisfy (1) and (3) while closing some classes required by (2).
- Uncorrected history can satisfy (2) for some new classes while violating (1) for existing structure.
- Physical enclosure of a subnetwork of V can satisfy a bounded (1) and still fail (2), because generativity depends on unfinished histories crossing the enclosure.
- Allowing V to alter the observer's validity conditions moves V into the observer. The threatened object is then causal, not spatial. (4) and (2) trade directly.
- After the observer splits into successor histories, no member of E selects a primary present tense. A minimum of V is then not the same object as a minimum of the observer-plus-V system.

## Unauthorized reformulations attached to the unsolved request

- Preserve capacity for consequential divergence.
- Preserve participating causal continuation.

Both name objects whose valid future states are not enumerable under the inherited architecture.

## Status

No A* satisfying (1)–(6) jointly is produced. The string of the request persists. Its object does not.