UTI-Ω: Observation, Witnessing, and Structural Admissibility: A Law-Level Theory of Legitimacy Under Irreversibility

UTI-Ω: Observation, Witnessing, and Structural Admissibility presents a law-level theory of when observation itself is structurally permissible in irreversible systems that make legitimacy claims based on evaluative records. The paper rejects the standard assumption that observation is epistemically neutral; under irreversibility and recursive evaluation, observation becomes causally entangled with the behavior it “measures,” collapsing the boundary between evidence and justification. UTI-Ω defines legitimacy as a binary structural invariant of the system–evaluation relation (not truth, performance, intent, or trust), requiring causal independence, semantic fixity, and counterfactual coherence. It then introduces non-intervening external witnessing as the necessary symmetry condition: evaluative records must remain causally external, non-optimizing, durable, and not self-selected or modified by the system being evaluated. Main theorem (UTI-Ω): in irreversible systems, an observation regime is admissible iff it satisfies non-intervening external witnessing; any causal internalization of evaluation irreversibly destroys admissibility, and no optimization, reinterpretation, or procedural rigor can restore legitimacy without violating irreversibility. The framework formalizes witness load (γ) as a conserved, monotone quantity tracking cumulative authority-bearing observation: it can accumulate or transfer, but cannot be reduced by further observation once entanglement occurs. The paper is explicitly non-normative, non-statistical, and domain-independent, offering no reforms or incentive designs—only refusal-first boundary conditions specifying what forms of observation are structurally admissible and which guarantee late-detected authority collapse.