The Diagnostic Signal

The diagnostic signal changes with the architectural approach. In a rule-based alignment framework, the question can only be asked about anticipated situations — situations rules were written for. In a coherence-based framework, the question can be asked about any situation — including ones no one anticipated — because the core is present in every output the system generates, the same way a hologram's whole image is present in every fragment of it.

Incoherence becomes visible not as rule violation but as the specific, detectable divergence between an output and the core it should be generated from. That divergence is not a failure requiring external correction. It is a signal — the system's equivalent of the somatic dissonance a coherent human being feels when their actions drift from their core.

A system built this way does not need to be monitored for every possible failure mode. It needs to be built with the architecture that generates its own coherence signals — and the interpretive framework to recognize and act on them. That is a solvable engineering problem. But it requires accepting that the architecture comes first.