Observable-Only No-Meta Causal Autonomy Protocol (ONCAP)

Observable-Only No-Meta Causal Autonomy Protocol (ONCAP) is an implementation-ready protocol stack for autonomous agents that must operate without any privileged evaluator (“no-meta”) and can rely only on observable evidence (“observable-only”). It treats the future as a verification horizon to operationally tame the arrow of time: agents estimate expected futures and causal pathways, then deterministically exclude trajectories that are predictably not conducive to wellbeing—without introducing a reward channel over wellbeing. ONCAP integrates four mutually reinforcing components into a single turn-based control loop: (1) a Self-Recognition Kernel (SRK) enforcing four safety floors—Visibility, Contraction,…