Structural Foundations of Identity Quasipotentials: Equivalence Classes, Renormalization Stability, and Invariant Structure

Autonomous systems increasingly generate explanations of their own behavior, which are reused in audits, oversight, certification, and governance processes. Existing research in autonomy, alignment, safety, and interpretability implicitly assumes that such explanations remain admissible as long as system behavior is correct or controllable. This work challenges that assumption. The paper introduces a structural framework for explanatory admissibility, defining formal conditions under which an autonomous system’s explanations cease to be reusable as authoritative epistemic artifacts—independent of behavior, alignment, safety, or explanation quality. Explanatory authority is treated as a jurisdictional property of explanation traces, governed by replay-verifiable structural invariants and exhausted irreversibly under a fixed explanatory frame when those invariants are violated. Key contributions include: Axiomatic separation of autonomy (action) from authority (epistemic standing) A structural definition of explanation admissibility based on replay, not semantics or trust An irreversibility result showing that authority loss cannot be repaired without explicit frame succession A pathological counterexample demonstrating authority loss in a frozen, optimal, interpretable system A non-regulatory governance lever: explanation severance without system shutdown The framework is pre-normative and non-behavioral. It does not propose alignment methods, safety mechanisms, or interpretability techniques. Instead, it establishes a missing epistemic layer: rules governing when explanations may no longer be reused, even when systems continue to function correctly. This work is relevant to researchers and practitioners in autonomous systems, AI governance, interpretability, systems theory, auditing, and institutional oversight, and is intended as a foundational contribution defining explanatory admissibility as a first-class object of governance.