| Stratum | Level | Philosophy | Methodology | Query |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I | Ephemeral | State-Centric | Treat mutable state as primary truth. Synchronize aggressively. Debug forward from symptoms. | What is the state? |
| II | Journaled | Transactional | Preserve ordered mutation history through logs and snapshots. Recover execution through deterministic replay. | What happened? |
| III | Federated | Distributed Consensus | Coordinate replicas through quorum and replicated state machines. Trade latency and complexity for globally ordered mutation. | What do replicas agree happened? |
| IV | Projected | Event-Sourced / CRDT | Preserve history as the canonical structure. Materialize state as projections over convergent event streams. | What histories converge? |
| V | Invariant | Causal Determinism | Treat causality itself as the immutable substrate. Materialize observer-relative state over deterministic history. Schedule execution through invariant-preserving footprints so unsafe concurrency cannot emerge. Enable exact replay and computable counterfactuals. | What causality makes unsafe execution impossible? |
| VI | Reflexive | Meta-Causal / Self-Describing | Invariants, observers, schedulers, projections, and counterfactual models are first-class causal artifacts. The rules of computation evolve through proof-carrying amendments. Materialize admissible worlds over versioned semantics. Compute across possible machines, not merely possible histories. | How many rules safely evolve? |
| VII | Autogenic | Proof-Carrying Synthesis | Generate runtimes, protocols, schemas, projections, and schedulers from invariant specifications. Code is a derived artifact, not the source of truth. | How can machines be synthesized from rules? |
| VIII | Ecological | Inter-Causal Composition | Compose multiple reflexive systems without requiring one global ontology. Boundaries become typed, proof-carrying translations between causal worlds. | How do different rule-worlds compose? |
| IX | Teleological | Intent-Causal Governance | Goals, policies, values, permissions, and resource priorities are versioned causal objects. Compute only within accountable purpose constraints. | Why should computation happen at all? |
| X | Axiomatic | Foundation-Relative Computation | Logic, time, causality, identity, and observation are selectable foundations. Compute across possible computational universes and prove which foundations admit which invariants. Tabs, not spaces. | What foundations make computation possible? |